Monday, June 23, 2008

A trio of feast days

I wish I'd remembered to post this sooner, but I didn't.

Three awesome saints have had their feast days over the past three days: St. Aloysius Gonzaga on June 21, St. Thomas More on June 22 and St. John Fisher today on June 23. I'm fond of St. Aloysius Gonzaga because he was a Jesuit, a contemporary and a protégé of St. Charles Borromeo, Bishop of Milan, who was so instrumental in helping the English Jesuit missionaries to travel incognito into England during the English Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. These men, along with St. Francis de Sales, were some of the leading lights of that period in history.

Sts. Thomas More and John Fisher were both Catholics who were martyred by King Henry VIII. They remained strong in the face of opposition, facing death with courage and even humor. "See me safely up," St. Thomas More reportedly said to the officials who presided over his beheading in London on July 6, 1535. "Coming down, I can shift for myself."

Happy feast days, beloved saints!

2 comments:

Kayte said...

I have a first degree relic of St. Charles B. if you want to see it sometime. It is my safety deposit box, so just let me know. A tiny tiny piece of a leg bone.

That's probably what has kept me out of prison.

Shelley said...

Oh, my heavens! I would love to see the relic and hear the story of how you came by it.

Kevin and Lori have a relic of the True Cross in a very, very old reliquary that came from a church in France. Kevin rescued in on E-BAY, which just turns my heart upside down.