All Saints III

But these were men of mercy, whose righteous deeds have not been forgotten; their prosperity will remain with their descendants, and their inheritance to their children’s children. Their descendants stand by the covenants; their children also, for their sake. Their posterity will continue for ever, and their glory will not be blotted out.

Mariam Thresia Chiramel Mankidiyan

Born in the little village of Puthenchira in Kerala, Thresia was devoted to penance from an early age. She felt very strongly that she was called to some such life, but it took her many years to find the life for which she was seeking. She tried doing it alone, and found that it wasn't practicable. She gathered a group of friends and tried to start a spiritual retreat, and the retreat building burned down. The bishop suggested that she join a religious congregation instead, and she looked into the Franciscan Clarists, and found that it was not at all a good fit. She tried to join the Carmelites, and that didn't work, either. And finally in 1913, she tried to set up another religious house of her own, a small, unambitious affair, and the Congregation of the Holy Family was founded. Her spiritual life was equally complicated. In 1904, she had a vision of the Virgin Mary, and from then on called herself Mariam in honor of the Virgin. She then is said to have suffered a series of demonic attacks, which required formal exorcism; that problem over, she devoted her life to prayer and began to develop stigmata, which she tried to hide. In 1826, her leg was severely wounded and she could not get treatment quickly enough; the wound became septic, and she died on June 8, which would become her feast day. She was beatified by John Paul II in 2000 and canonized by Francis in 2019.

Gregory II and Gregory III

Gregorius Sabellus was a Roman who early in life became a significant figure at the papal court, where he ended up having several important roles, including treasurer and the head of the Vatican library. When Pope Constantine was summoned to Constantinople by the Emperor Justinian in 711, he went along as papal secretary and played a significant role in the negotiations over whether Rome would accept the canons of what was known as the Council in Trullo. After Constantine's death, he was elected Pope Gregory II. He would have a remarkably busy pontificate. He turned his family estate into a monastery, St. Agatha in Suburra. He found himself in an on-again, off-again battle with Monothelitism almost immediately. He rebuilt Monte Cassino, which had been severely damaged by a Lombard attack. He had to deal repeatedly with the restless and unruly Lombards. He began to have problems with the Byzantine Emperor, Leo III the Isaurian, in 722, when Leo attempted to tax lands that the popes were using to support Rome; in response Gregory raised the Roman populace and had the Imperial governor thrown out of the city. The Emperor in response tried to have him assassinated in 725, but the conspiracy was uncovered and the conspirators executed. And then in 726, Leo began actively advocating Iconoclasm. Leo was not in a position to enforce his decrees in the West, but Gregory lost no time in denouncing them, and because of this, much of the Western Roman Empire was encouraged into revolt against Leo, including the important Exarchate of Ravenna, of which Rome was a part. (Gregory, however, dissuaded the armies of Ravenna from marching on Constantinople.) In 727, Gregory held a synod condemning iconoclasm and sent copies to Leo. In response, Leo appointed a new Exarch of Ravenna, Eutychius, whose first act was to try to assassinate Gregory (it failed) and who then tried to pull together an alliance with several Lombard Dukes to march on Rome (the Lombards wouldn't have known iconoclasm from an icicle, so they didn't know what to make of this and were reluctant to provide him any help). Finally Eutychius managed to get King Liutprand of the Lombards to form a military alliance, but his attempt to use the alliance against Rome failed when Gregory convinced Liutprand to go back to Pavia. Gregory in turn supported St. Germanus when he was the beleaguered, and later exiled, Patriarch of Constantinople. The further missionary activities of his pontificate were also extensive. He sent missionaries to Bavaria; one of his achievements would be to force St. Corbinian (who wanted just to be a monk) to become bishop of Freising. He supported St. Boniface's missionary work in Germany (and actually gave him the name 'Boniface'; the monk's name had originally been Winfrid). Gregory died in 731; his feast day is February 11 or February 13, depending on the calendar.

When Gregory II, Gregory III was almost immediately elected. He was a member of a Syrian family, for which reason he was sometimes called Gregorius Syrus. At the time, it had been custom for the Pope to wait on formal consecration as Pope until certification from the Exarch of Ravenna was received. The Exarch did so, but if he thought that Gregory III was going to change the policy of Gregory II, he was mistaken; Gregory III immediately began his opposition to the iconoclastic policies of the Emperor and called a synod to condemn iconoclasm. Leo retaliated by trying to invade (his fleet was broken up by a storm) and then by appropriating the papal territories in Sicily and Calabria. He continued Gregory II's missionary policies, supporting St. Boniface and St. Willibald. His major challenge, however, was King Liutprand, who had captured Ravenna from the Byzantines in 738 (which ironically, yet perhaps fittingly, had been possible because Emperor Leo had divided the papal lands in retaliation for papal opposition to iconoclasm) and saw an opportunity to consolidate control throughout Italy; he now only had scattered Lombard Dukes and the Pope as his major rivals. By supporting various rebellions, Gregory managed to hold him off a while, but Liutprand was not to be deterred. Gregory attempted to get help from Charles Martel, but nothing came of it, and Gregory ran out of options and time. He died in 741. His successor, Pope St. Zacharius, was fortunately a clever diplomat who was able to make peace with Liutprand. Gregory III's feast day is December 10.

Katarina Ulfsdotter

The daughter of St. Birgitta of Sweden and Ulf Gudmarsson, Katarina was married to Lord Eggert Lydersson van Kyren at an early age. She convinced him to make it a Josephite, i.e., unconsummated, marriage, and the two instead devoted themselves to charity and religious devotion. In 1350, she accompanied her mother on pilgrimmage to Rome; St. Bridget was trying to get the rules of her new order approved. It was a long and trying process to get that permission, and the Pope was also not in Rome at the time, because it was the time of the Avignon papacy, so all communication ended up being quite indirect. While in Rome, she helped her mother do charitable works for the people of Rome and pray regularly for the return of the Pope to his proper see, and the visit to Rome became a relatively permanent thing, punctuated only by the occasional pilgrimage. Catherine herself seems to have not liked Rome; she hated the weather. When St. Bridget died, St. Catherine took the body back to Sweden and spent some years carrying forward her mother's work by becoming abbess of Vadstena Abbey. When the inquiry for her mother's canonization began to pick up, St. Catherine returned to Rome to assist in it; there she seems to have met St. Catherine of Siena, and they became good friends, and pooled their efforts in attempting to convince the Pope to return to Rome. She returned to Vadstena in 1381 and died the next year. When St. Bridget was formally canonized by the Pope in 1391, St. Catherine of Vadstena seems to have quietly been placed in the Roman Martyrology for March 24, and there she has been ever since, a quieter and more self-effacing reflection of her more widely venerated mother.

Marko Stjepan Krizin, István Pongrácz, and Melchior Grodziecki

Born in Križevci in the Kingdom of Croatia, St. Marko Krizin was a Jesuit who was living a fairly ordinary life until in 1619 he was sent to look after the affairs of the Benedictine Abbey of Széplak. The abbey was near Kassa, in Hungary (Košice in modern-day Slovakia). It was a tumultuous time for the area, which was seeing an uprising of Calvinists against Catholics, led by Gabor Bethlen, Prince of Transylvania. While in the area of Kassa, Marko met István Pongrácz and Melchior Grodziecki, who were also fairly ordinary Jesuit priests living fairly ordinary lives before coming to Kassa. Kassa was then a significant Calvinist stronghold with a government appointed by Catholics, and when a rumor went around the city that the Catholics in Kassa had been involved in schemes of arson, the equivalent in that time of what a terrorist activity would be in ours, the whole city went into a state of high tension, worsened by a siege against the city by a Calvinist army. The city's mercenary defenders betrayed the city government and delivered the city to the besiegers. Marko and two other Jesuit priests were arrested by the Calvinist army and were held for three days without food or water while the new Calvinist city government had a heated debate over whether all the Catholics of Kassa should be executed or just the Catholic priests. Moderation won out, I suppose we could say, and the city chose to execute only the priests. The priests were promised leniency if he would become a Calvinist, but they refused and were beheaded on September 7, 1619. Catholic Hungary was outraged by the execution, and became even more so when the decision was made not to give them a Christian burial. (The authorities eventually relented on the burial, but only after some months had passed.) The Košice martyrs were beatified in 1905 by Pius X and canonized in 1995 by John Paul II. They all share September 7 as their feast day.

Amandus and Bavo of Ghent

Amandus was a young man from a noble family who, against his family's wishes, became a monk, almost a hermit. He spent some time following a strict rule, but then went on pilgrimage with a protege who, being from a wealthy family, was having second thoughts about the monastic life. The pilgrimage would change the course of his life, because he was soon made a missionary bishop and went on mission to Ghent and Flanders, preaching the gospel to the largely pagan folk there. While he was engaged in a large-scale project of creating monasteries throughout Ghent, he met a young and very wild nobleman named Allowin, also known as Bavo, who was son of St. Itta of Metz and Pippin of Landen, the Mayor of the Palace (and who himself is on some local calendars of saints). But Bavo one day heard a sermon by St. Amand on the vanity of the material life, and was utterly astounded by it. He returned home, distributed much of his wealth to the poor, donated his land to Amand for a monastery, and became a monk himself. Amand continued his missionary work, helped now by Bavo. On one of these trips, though, Bavo met a man who had been captured by Bavo in his soldiering days and sold into slavery, and thereafter devoted his life to the severest forms of eremitic penance for the misdeeds of his former life. He eventually died, with St. Amand at his bedside, and his feast day is October 1. Amand eventually made a very unsuccessful missionary trip to Slovakia, and on his return holding a number of councils for the Pope. He helped St. Itta and her daughter, Bavo's sister, St. Gertrude of Nivelles, to establish the monastery of Nivelles, and then made his way to Basque country to evangelize the people there. Amand died at the age of ninety, famous across Europe for his hospitality, and his feast is February 6.

Zhang Huailu

In early 1900 at the age of 57, Huailu Zhang became interested in Christianity and began to attend catechism classes. It was not a good time to be Christian and his family protested vehemently, but he insisted on continuing. He had considerable difficulty with the classes; he could not read, and found the prayers complicated and hard to remember. That same year, a major uprising occurred in China, the Boxer Rebellion; the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fists, better known as the Boxers, began a reign of terror in the attempt to stamp any and all foreign influence, of which the Christian missions were a very prominent example. Some local thugs went through the more Christian communities of the area, demanding protection money, or else they would report the locations and identities of Chinese Christians. Mr. Zhang paid the protection money, but the thugs reported everybody anyway. When the Boxers came, instead of trying to hide or lie, he boldly said that he was a Christian and made the sign of the Cross, the prayer he could most easily remember. He was executed. Beatified by Pius XII and canonized by Benedixt XVI, he is commemorated with the other Holy Chinese Martyrs on July 9.

Colette of Corbie

Nicole Boellet was born in Corbie, France, in 1381. According to stories told, her parents had always wanted a child, but they never had one and were beginning to get on in years, so they prayed to St. Nicholas to intercede for them, and Nicole, named after the saint, was born to her mother when her mother was sixty years old. Nicole became Nicolette, which became Colette, and thus she got the name by which she is known. Her parents died when she was 18 years old, and she is said to have tried both the Beguines and the Benedictines, and found neither of them suitable for her. Finally she joined the Third Order of Saint Francis, and started living as a hermit; while she was living this life, though, she began to have visions that she interpreted as suggesting that she was called to contribute to and reform the Second Order of St. Francis, returning it to the Franciscan emphasis on poverty. In 1406, she decided to take action, and turned to the pope. This was the time of the Western Schism, so there was considerable confusion over who was pope. Pope Innocent VII was the pope in Rome, but Colette was a Frenchwomen, and the French generally supported the claims of the antipope, Benedict XIII in Avignon. So Colette went to Benedict XIII to get permission to join the Order of the Poor Clares. Benedict XIII must have been quite impressed by her, because he put his full backing behind her, helping her to found new monasteries and to create a reform branch of the Poor Clares, who today are known as the Colettine Poor Clares. With his support, and later the support of others, especially her confessor, Bl. Henry of Beaume, she ended up founding eighteen monasteries, all devoted to the strictest interpretation of the Franciscan vow of poverty. The Avignon schism was healed in 1429, when Benedict XIII's successor, Clement VIII, abdicated in favor of the Roman pope, Martin V. Colette herself died in 1447. She was beatified in 1740 by Pope Clement XII and canonized in 1807 by Pius VII. Her feast is March 6.

Alphonsus Rodriguez

Alfonso Rodriguez was the son of a wool merchant. At the age of 14, he left school to help his mother with the business when his father died; he eventually married a woman named Maria Suarez and had three children; but his wife and his three children all died, one by one, from various causes. The Rodriguez family had long had an association with the Jesuits -- St. Peter Faber had given Alfonso his First Communion -- so when Rodriguez began considering the possibility of entering a religious order or society, the Jesuits were an obvious choice. However, because he had spent all of his life working, he did not have the education required for life with the Jesuits. He tried to make it up by enrolling in school at the age of 39, but it was too much for him. He was very well liked by the Jesuits, though, and he was allowed to become a lay brother the next year. He was sent to the college of Montesión at Majorca, where he became the porter. And he would be doorkeeper there for 46 years, admitting guests, handling luggage, delivering messages, and performing errands; it is said that his guideline for doing it was to assume, whenever the doorbell rang, that Christ had come to the door. He was also often asked to give the dinner sermon. As he grew older, he had increasing physical difficulties, probably not helped by his intensive mortifications, and in the last few years of his life he began to lose his memory. He died October 31, 1617. He was beatified by Leo XII and canonized by Leo XIII in 1888; his feast day is October 30.

Marie-Margeuerite d'Youville

Marie-Marguerite Dufrost de Lajemmerais was born in Varennes, Quebec, in 1701. The family was poor, and its social standing collapsed when Marguerite's mother married an Irish doctor. In 1722, Marguerite was married to a trapper and bootlegger, François d'Youville; they had six children by the time François died in 1730. A few years after, she got together with a few other women to devote themselves to providing homes for the poor of Montreal. In many ways, it did not go well; the group was mocked throughout the overly snobbish Montreal for their oddity and for Marguerite's past association with the disreputable François, and given the nickname Les Grises, which literally means 'The Grey Women' but in the slang of the day also meant 'The Drunks'. But the women persevered, and became a formal religious order, the Order of Sisters of Charity of Montreal, which became widely known as the Grey Nuns. In 1747, the Grey Nuns received a charter to run the General Hospital of Montreal, which had been on the verge of bankruptcy. D'Youville died in 1771. She was beatified by John XXIII and canonized by John Paul II, the first native-born Canadian to be canonized. Her feast is Oxtober 16.

Anthony of the Caves

Born in Lyubech in the Principality of Chernigov in Kievan Rus, Anthony made his way early in life to the Esphigmenou Monastery on Mount Athos. There he spent some years as a cave-dwelling hermit, but in his late twenties, the abbot sent him back to Kiev to establish monasteries there. He established several, but in 1015, the death of Vladimir the Great plunged Kiev into civil war, and he returned to Mount Athos until it was over. He did go back, and this time spent most of his time again as a cave-dwelling hermit. Slowly a number of others began to join him, and thus the first community began in the monastic community of the Far Caves, perhaps the most influential community in Kievan monasticism. He died in 1073, and his feast is celebrated in the Roman Martyrology on May 7.

Teresa of Calcutta

Anjezë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu was born to an Albanian family in Skopje in 1910. She had a desire to be a religious missionary from a very early age and to this end joined the Sisters of Loreto in 1928, with whom she began to learn English, and was sent to India in 1929. After her formal vows, she began teaching school in Calcutta and was greatly disturbed at the severe poverty of the city, which she saw during the Bengal famine and the 1946 Calcutta Killings. It was shortly after the Killings that she had what she would call the 'call within the call', and determined to leave the convent to live among the poor. In 1948 she began wearing the white sari with blue border and started a number of projects; she was soon joined by other women, and the Missionaries of Charity were born, receiving formal recognition by the Holy See in 1950. In 1952 she founded one of her most famous ventures, Kalighat, the Home of the Pure Heart, as a hospice to care for the dying with respect. The sisters also formed hospices for lepers and orphanages. Soon the Missionaries were also expanding outside of India. When she was featured in a documentary by Malcolm Muggeridge in 1969, she became recognizable all over the world. She received a vast number of awards, and was able to use this as a basis for fundraising for the Missionaries of Charity; she was so good at this, in fact, that it became a common complaint of the sort of critics who tend to complain when nuns are good at raising money for projects. Teresa herself, however, was not finding life easy; she was repeatedly plagued by a feeling of isolation from God in a spiritual aridity that lasted, with only a few brief pauses, for nearly fifty years. Beginning in 1983, with a heart attack, she began to have serious health problems, including another heart attack in 1989 and a broken collarbone in 1996. In 1996 she became one of the eight people who have been honored by the United States with honorary citizenship, one of its highest honors for non-citizens, and one of the only two to receive it while still alive (the other being Winston Churchill). She died September 5, 1997. She was beatified in 2003 by John Paul II and canonized in 2016 by Francis.



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2019 All Saints Post, Part II
Bartolomeu dos Mártires, Manuel Moralez, Apollonius the Apologist, Henry II the Exuberant and Cunigunde of Luxembourg, Ramon Nonat, Francis Xavier Cabrini, Juliana of Liège, Aelia Pulcheria, John Henry Newman, Anna Schäffer, Ivo of Chartres, Paul I of Constantinople

2019 All Saints Post, Part I
Matteo Correa Magallanes, Nicholas Owen, Knud IV and Knud Lavard, Mariana de Jesús de Paredes, Joseph Vaz, Zdislava Berka, Caterina Fieschi Adorno, Pietro I Orseolo, Ðaminh Hà Trọng Mậu, Jeanne-Françoise Frémiot de Chantal, Stephen Min Kŭk-ka, Rabanus Maurus Magnentius

2018 All Saints Post
Gianna Beretta Molla, Margaret of Scotland, Yu Tae-chol Peter, Justa and Rufina of Seville, Giuseppe Moscati, Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghaţţas, Salomone Leclerq, Arnulf of Metz, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, Frumentius of Tyre, Jeanne Jugan, Joseph Zhang Dapeng, Maroun and Abraham of Harran, Magnus Erlendsson, Callixtus I, Hippolytus, Urban I, Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Jean de Brébeuf

2017 All Saints Post
John Ogilvie, Leo IV, Andrew Stratelates and the 2593 Martyrs, Theodore the Studite, The Martyrs of Gorkum, Margaret Ward and John Roche, Mesrop Mashtots, José María Robles Hurtado, Genevieve of Paris, Pedro Calungsod, Isaac of Nineveh, George Preca, Denis Ssebuggwawo Wasswa, Anthony of Padua

2016 All Saints Post
Theodore of Tarsus, Nilus the Younger, Anne Line, Mark Ji Tianxiang, Maria Elisabetta Hesselbad, Sergius of Radonezh, Anna Pak Agi, Jeanne de Valois, Vigilius of Trent, Claudian, Magorian, Sisinnius, Martyrius, Alexander, Euphrasia Eluvathingal, José Sanchez del Rio, Andrew Kaggwa, Roberto Bellarmino

2015 All Saints Post
Margaret Clitherow, Kaleb Elasbaan of Axum, Louis Martin and Marie-Azélie Guérin Martin, Gertrude of Nivelles, Pius V, Clare and Agnes of Assisi, Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Scholastica, Vinh Sơn Phạm Hiếu Liêm, Thorlak Thorhallson, John Damascene

2014 All Saints Post
Marie Guyart, Alphonsa Muttathupadathu, John Neumann, Hildegard von Bingen, Pedro de San José Betancurt, Benedict the Moor

2013 All Saints Post
María Guadalupe García Zavala, Antonio Primaldi, Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini, Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse and Augustine Zhao Rong, Josephine Margaret Bakhita, John Chrysostom

2012 All Saints Post
Jadwiga of Poland, Kateri Tekakwitha, André Bessette, Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès, Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga

2011 All Saints Post
Bonifacia Rodríguez de Castro, Celestine V, Olga of Kiev, Cyril of Jerusalem, Joseph Mukasa and Charles Lwanga

2010 All Saints Post
Moses the Black of Ethiopia, Micae Hồ Đình Hy, Katherine Mary Drexel, Robert Southwell, Lojze Grozde, Andrew Kim Tae Gon

All Saints II

After this I looked, and there before me was a great multitude that no one could count, from every nation, tribe, people and language, standing before the throne and before the Lamb. They were wearing white robes and were holding palm branches in their hands. And they cried out in a loud voice: "Salvation belongs to our God, who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb."

Bartolomeu dos Mártires

Born Bartolomeu Fernandes in Portugal in 1541, Bartholomew joined the Order of Preachers and became a teacher. His teaching career led him to be chosen as the tutor of the son of Luis of Portugal; this in turn led to his being installed, against his will, as Archbishop of Braga in 1559. When the Council of Trent resumed in 1561, the new Archbishop attended and took an active part. At the conclusion of the Council, he devoted the rest of his career as Archbishop to implementing the Tridentine reforms. He repeatedly requested permission from the Pope to resign his see, which was finally granted in 1582, and lived until 1590 in retirement punctuated by occasional teaching. While his cause for canonization began early, it proceeded slowly; he was finally beatified by St. John Paul II in 2001, and canonized by Francis in July of 2019. His feast day is July 18.

Manuel Moralez

Manuel Moralez wanted to be a priest, and even began attending seminary for it, but it turned out to be impractical; his family was very poor, and events forced him to drop out so that he could take care of them. Instead he became a baker, married, and had three children. He became very active in lay Catholic life, which was quite important under the increasingly anti-clerical government of Mexico: in the Unión Catolica Obrera, a Catholic trade union; in Catholic Action; in the Liga Nacional Defensora de la Libertad Religiosa, a Catholic civil rights organization devoted to nonviolent resistance to anti-clerical actions by the government. He eventually became president of these last, and it would lead to his arrest by Mexican soldiers in 1926. He was, with several other leaders of the organization, beaten and tortured, and then loaded into a car with the ostensible purpose of taking them to see the authorities. The soldiers never brought him before any authorities, however; instead, they stopped in the middle of nowhere and executed them all on August 15, 1926. He was beatified and canonized by St. John Paul II, and he is celebrated on both the anniversary of his death and with the other martyrs of the Cristero War on May 21.

Apollonius the Apologist

We only have fragmentary indications of the life of St. Apollonius of Rome, but the sources are consistent in treating him as an eminent Roman, philosophically trained, at least of a senatorial family and probably himself a Roman senator. A family slave denounced him to the Praetorian Prefect as Christian; brought before the Senate, instead of trying to prove that he was not Christian, he read a prepared defense of the Christian faith. He was executed. Because he was often confused with other saints of similar name -- Apollonius of Alexandria, Apollinaris Claudius, Apollonius the Companion of Valentine -- it is difficult to say more with any definiteness, but his current feast day is April 21, the traditional day of his execution in A.D. 185.

Henry II the Exuberant and Cunigunde of Luxembourg

Born to Henry II of Bavaria and Gisela of Burgundy, Henry had an odd but quiet early life; his father (also known as Henry the Wrangler) had repeatedly rebelled against the Holy Roman Emperors, and young Henry spent much of his youth practically raised by bishops, especially St. Wolfgang of Regensburg. He became Henry IV of Bavaria when his father died; the 'IV' is probably because his father, who had lost Bavaria and then had it restored, was probably being counted at the time as both the II and III. Shortly afterward he made a very good marriage with St. Cunigunde of Luxembourg, who was the daughter of Siegfried I of Luxembourg and Hedwig of Nordgau. It is said that St. Cunigunde had wanted to become a nun and before their marriage they both agreed that they would remain virgins, but it's unclear whether this was the truth or just a later interpretation of why the couple remained childless. Between the two of them, the couple controlled a territory of decent size and a wide range of allies. The result was that Henry was a serious contender for Holy Roman Emperor when Otto the Red died. Serious, but far from definitive. To try to force the matter, Henry tried to compel the bishops keeping the imperial regalia to turn them over to him, but failed to get any result from this, and having difficulty getting the nobles who attended Otto's funeral to support him, declared himself King of Germany, and when crowned took the name Henry II. He then managed to negotiate an alliance with the Duke of Saxony to consolidate his position, and Cunigunde was crowned Queen of Germany in 1002. Needless to say, Henry's position was highly controverted, and the two spent an active number of years consolidating Henry's rule, with Cunigunde taking part in Imperial councils and representing her husband when necessary, since Henry spent a great deal of time attempting to legitimize his claim by traveling and meeting people, donating to the Church and building monasteries, and the like, not to mention strategizing the various wars to bring other nobles of the Empire into line. All of this German uproar led to Italy declaring independence, so Henry next had to invade Italy. He finally managed to reconquer it in 1004, and had himself crowned King of Italy. Instead of going to Rome to be crowned Emperor, however, he returned home, probably because he didn't think he could get the support of the Pope. But there was plenty else to do, as Poland began to revolt. The Polish Wars would last for quite some time. But in 1012 the newly elected Pope Benedict VIII was forced to flee Rome due to the politically backed antipope, Gregory VI; he appealed to Henry, and Henry, having just concluded a peace treaty with Poland, responded by a full-scale invasion of Italy. Benedict was restored and Henry and Cunigunde were crowned Emperor and Empress by him in 1014. Tensions with Poland flared up again, so they returned home, but hardly had Henry managed to establish another peace treaty with Poland when Italy was invaded by the Byzantine Empire in 1018. Pope Benedict VIII regarded the threat as so serious, he left Rome to visit Henry personally, and Henry invaded Italy yet again. The Byzantines were a harder foe to handle, however, and he did little more than limit the scope of their conquest. Henry died on July 13, 1024, having returned from Italy to celebrate Easter, and Cunigunde ruled the Empire as Regent for several months until the nobles finally elected Conrad II to the throne. Then she retired, as she had often wanted to do, to Kaufungen Abbey, where she lived the rest of her life as a nun tending the sick and spending her hours in prayer. She died in 1040. Henry II was canonized in 1147 by Pope Eugenius III, and Cunigunde was canonized in 1200 by Pope Innocent III; his feast is July 13 and hers is March 3.

Ramon Nonat

St. Ramon is said to have received his unusual epithet, Nonnatus, Unborn, because his mother died before she could give birth to him, and he had to be removed from her womb. He eventually joined the Royal, Celestial and Military Order of Our Lady of Mercy and the Redemption of the Captives, more commonly known as the Mercedarians, under the influence of its founder, St. Peter Nolasco. As the name suggests, one of the orders major missions was to ransom captives and slaves whose families could not ransom them, and they are unusual in that they take a vow to give up their lives, if necessary, to do so. Ramon was active in this part of the order's mission, and ransomed hundreds of prisoners in his lifetime. At one point, he negotiated an exchange in Tunis in which he gave himself up as a hostage in return for the lives of nearly thirty others; he was tortured until his order was eventually able to ransom him. Legend holds that they drilled hole in his lips and padlocked them so that he would stop preaching, so iconography and devotions to him often involve locks. He died in Cardona at the end of August in 1240. He was canonized by Alexander VII in 1657, and his feast day is August 31.

Francis Xavier Cabrini

Francesca Saverio Cabrini was born in Sant'Angelo Lodigiano in the empire of Austria to a family of cherry tree farmers. She was in poor health for much of her life; she thought she had a religious calling, but she had difficulty finding any order that would take her because of her health problems. So she simply devoted herself to living a religious life, and eventually others joined her. They founded in 1880 the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She was particularly interested in missionary work, and requested permission to engage in a mission of China. The Pope suggested that she instead go to the United States, which was dealing, not always successfully, with an influx of Italian immigrants. So to New York with her fellow sisters she went in 1889, and it was very difficult because the archbishop and diocese was not very friendly to them. However, the archbishop did give them permission to found an orphanage, where she also started organizing catechism and other classes for Italian immigrants. This led to the further foundation of orphanages, schools, and hospitals, often operating on shoestring budgets but supplying services for the immigrant population that were otherwise hard for them to obtain. Others would follow throughout the United States, and Francis Cabrini was naturalized as a U.S. citizen in 1909. She died in 1917. She was beatified by Pius XI and canonized by Pius XII. Her feast in the Roman Martyrology is December 22, but on November 13 in the U.S. calendar.

Juliana of Liège

Born in the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, in modern-day Belgium, Juliana joined the Premonstratensian Order as a teenager and worked for many years helping to attend lepers. At the age of sixteen, while engaged in devotion to the Eucharist, Juliana had a vision, one that she would have many times to come. The vision was of a large and brightly shining moon with a dark and shadowy band on it. After some time, considering that the moon reflects the light of the sun, she concluded that the moon represented the life of the Church on earth, especially the liturgical year, and that the shadow-band indicated that something was missing from the Church's liturgical commemoration of the life of Christ: a feast dedicated specifically to Christ's Body and Blood. She did not at the time see what she could possibly do about this, and so she did not get any further than telling some of her fellow sisters about it. In 1225, however, she became prioress, and discussed the vision with her confessor, John of Lausanne, who was intrigued and who consulted a number of theologians about the matter. Unanimously, the theologians he talked to said that such a feast would certainly be consistent with the faith and devotional life of the Church and would probably be a good idea. Together John and Juliana composed a draft version of an office for such a feast. Here and there people would celebrate it. Meanwhile, Juliana was accused of embezzlement of monastic funds; she was eventually cleared of all charges, but she continued to have difficulty, because Liège was a key diocese in the struggle between the Pope and the Emperor, and therefore her fortunes largely depended on who had the upper hand at any given moment. She eventually left to live in seclusion with the Cistercians and died in 1258. In 1264, Urban IV instituted the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, with the official office being composed by St. Thomas Aquinas. There was some local devotion to Juliana in Belgium, but she was not raised to the universal calendar until 1869. Her feast is April 6.

Aelia Pulcheria

Pulcheria was born to high things, being the daughter of Emperor Arcadius and his wife, Aelia Eudoxia; her younger brother Theodosius II would later become Emperor at the age of seven. At first, the Empire was run by the Praetorian Prefects, but when Pulcheria came of age at fifteen, she decided that she and her brother could handle matters, and had Theodosius dismiss the Prefect and name Pulcheria his guardian. Pulcheria was proclaimed Augusta, and at the time she took a vow of virginity; under her hand, the palace became a place of prayer and a source of charity. And Pulcheria herself worked hard for many years to teach Theodosius what he would need to be a good Emperor. She did not, however, get along with Theodosius's wife, Aelia Eudocia, who was an active supporter of a number of heresies, and left court for some time. Pulcheria was an opponent of both Monophysitism and Nestorianism, and regarded by partisans of both as one of the major formidable obstacles to be overcome; the Nestorians at one point attempted, with little success, to launch a smear campaign against her. But Pulcheria triumphed, and the victory of orthodoxy at the Council of Ephesus should arguably be seen as a joint victory between her and St. Cyril. When Theodosius died in 450, however, she returned to court, and took hold of the imperial power. The Senate, however, was opposed to a woman being sole ruler of the Empire; they forced her to marry, but she chose a relative unknown, Marcian, and only did so on condition that she could maintain her vow of virginity. (It turned out to be a reasonably good match; Marcian was quite competent and with Pulcheria's backing was able to become one of the most effective Byzantine Emperors.) Marcian and Pulcheria called the Council of Chalcedon in 451. She died in 453. Without any doubt, she was one of the great pillars of orthodoxy; while not directly involved in theological dispute, she furthered orthodox doctrine through her endowment of churches to the Theotokos and support of the Ecumenical Councils, and she blocked attempts by Monophysites and Nestorians to use Imperial power in their favor. Her feast is September 10.

John Henry Newman

Born in 1801 in London, John Henry Newman attended the University of Oxford and became an Anglican clergyman, eventually becoming the vicar of St. Mary's University Church. He would be actively involved in the Oxford Movement, a movement in the Church of England to restore much of the pre-Reformation doctrine and devotion of England and to resist what they perceived as a tendency to treat the Church of England as a purely national affair subordinate to Parliament and its politics. As one of the more articulate leaders of the movement, Newman became a center of controversy, and he eventually concluded that his attempt to maintain the view of the Church of England as a reasonable middle road between Reformation Protestantism and Catholicism was untenable. He was received into the Catholic Church in 1845, being ordained as a priest and joining the Congregation of the Oratory of Saint Philip Neri shortly afterward; he founded a chapter of the Oratory at Birmingham. When Pope Pius IX restored the Catholic hierarchy of England in 1850, he became a major defender of Catholics. In 1879, he was made Cardinal, but accepted the red hat only on the conditions that he not be made a bishop and that he not have to leave his work at Birmingham. He died in August 1890. He was beatified by Benedict XVI in 2010 and canonized by Francis in 2019. His feast day is October 9, the day of his reception into the Catholic Church.

Anna Schäffer

Anna Schäffer was born in Bavaria in 1882 to an extremely poor family; starting at the age of fourteen, she began working as a maid to help her family eat. When she was sixteen, she had a vision in which Christ told her that she would suffer. While working in a laundery in 1901, she slipped into a vat of boiling water, severely burning her legs, and despite efforts of doctors, losing the use of them entirely. The damaged nerve endings caused her constant trouble, and made it very difficult to sleep for more than short periods of time. Since she could not move from her bed, the Eucharist was brought to her daily by the local abbott, and she spent her days praying, writing reflections in her notebook, and knitting for her friends. Impressed by her patience and gentleness toward others, many people in the area began coming to visit her regularly. She developed stigmata somewhere around 1910, which she attempted to hide, and occasionally had ecstatic visions. In 1925 she developed colon cancer, and her paralysis began to affect her spine, making it very difficult to move or even speak at all. On October 5 of that year, having taken communion, she suddenly said, "Jesus, I live for you!" In five minutes she was dead. Her grave became a regular pilgrimage site for people with problems to pray, and a very large number of stories about miracles taking place after prayer at her grave have collected over the years. She was canonized by Benedict XVI, and her feast day is October 5.

Ivo of Chartres

We now little about the first part of his life, but Ivo, or Yves, is said to have been a fellow student under Lanfranc with St. Anselm in Bec, where he is thought to have spent some of his early years. He eventually became abbot of St. Quentin at Beauvais, which under his administration became a widely respected school for theology. Ivo himself became recognized as one of the foremost canonists of his day, and after about twenty years at St. Quentin was appointed Bishop of Chartres. It was not an easy see to receive; it had a reputation for simony, his predecessor had been deposed despite powerful friends, and as a respected canonist in an influential see, he was always in the midst of conflict between the Church and the secular government. This latter led to his being imprisoned for some time when he refused to support King Philip I's desire to set aside his wife, Bertha of Holland. His feast is May 23.

Paul I of Constantinople

Paul was elected to the see of Constantinople in 337; it was not an enviable time to be Patriarch of Constantinople. The Emperor Constantius, an Arian sympathizer, was later furious that he was not consulted on the choice (he had been away at war with Persia); he had him banished almost immediately. He made his way to Rome, where it is said he met St. Athanasius, who was in his second exile at the time, and where Pope St. Julius took their side in the dispute. Paul eventually got his see back in 341, but the Arians elected their own anti-patriarch; the city devolved into riots of one side against the other, and Constantius, who had been away again, had him exiled again. Constantius's Western co-emperor, his brother Constans, eventually wrote Constantius demanding that Paul be restored to his see, which Constantius reluctantly did to avoid having to fight a civil war as well as all the border wars he was having to fight already. When Constans died in 350, however, St. Paul was exiled for a third time. While in exile this time, he was assassinated. A very unhappy career, but he was steadfast through it. His feast day is November 6.

Another All Saints post will be up later today.

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2019 All Saints Post, Part I
Matteo Correa Magallanes, Nicholas Owen, Knud IV and Knud Lavard, Mariana de Jesús de Paredes, Joseph Vaz, Zdislava Berka, Caterina Fieschi Adorno, Pietro I Orseolo, Ðaminh Hà Trọng Mậu, Jeanne-Françoise Frémiot de Chantal, Stephen Min Kŭk-ka, Rabanus Maurus Magnentius

2018 All Saints Post
Gianna Beretta Molla, Margaret of Scotland, Yu Tae-chol Peter, Justa and Rufina of Seville, Giuseppe Moscati, Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghaţţas, Salomone Leclerq, Arnulf of Metz, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, Frumentius of Tyre, Jeanne Jugan, Joseph Zhang Dapeng, Maroun and Abraham of Harran, Magnus Erlendsson, Callixtus I, Hippolytus, Urban I, Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Jean de Brébeuf

2017 All Saints Post
John Ogilvie, Leo IV, Andrew Stratelates and the 2593 Martyrs, Theodore the Studite, The Martyrs of Gorkum, Margaret Ward and John Roche, Mesrop Mashtots, José María Robles Hurtado, Genevieve of Paris, Pedro Calungsod, Isaac of Nineveh, George Preca, Denis Ssebuggwawo Wasswa, Anthony of Padua

2016 All Saints Post
Theodore of Tarsus, Nilus the Younger, Anne Line, Mark Ji Tianxiang, Maria Elisabetta Hesselbad, Sergius of Radonezh, Anna Pak Agi, Jeanne de Valois, Vigilius of Trent, Claudian, Magorian, Sisinnius, Martyrius, Alexander, Euphrasia Eluvathingal, José Sanchez del Rio, Andrew Kaggwa, Roberto Bellarmino

2015 All Saints Post
Margaret Clitherow, Kaleb Elasbaan of Axum, Louis Martin and Marie-Azélie Guérin Martin, Gertrude of Nivelles, Pius V, Clare and Agnes of Assisi, Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Scholastica, Vinh Sơn Phạm Hiếu Liêm, Thorlak Thorhallson, John Damascene

2014 All Saints Post
Marie Guyart, Alphonsa Muttathupadathu, John Neumann, Hildegard von Bingen, Pedro de San José Betancurt, Benedict the Moor

2013 All Saints Post
María Guadalupe García Zavala, Antonio Primaldi, Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini, Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse and Augustine Zhao Rong, Josephine Margaret Bakhita, John Chrysostom

2012 All Saints Post
Jadwiga of Poland, Kateri Tekakwitha, André Bessette, Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès, Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga

2011 All Saints Post
Bonifacia Rodríguez de Castro, Celestine V, Olga of Kiev, Cyril of Jerusalem, Joseph Mukasa and Charles Lwanga

2010 All Saints Post
Moses the Black of Ethiopia, Micae Hồ Đình Hy, Katherine Mary Drexel, Robert Southwell, Lojze Grozde, Andrew Kim Tae Gon

All Saints I

Since we are surrounded by such a great cloud of witnesses, let us throw off every encumbrance and the sin that so easily entangles, and let us run with endurance the race set out for us.

Mateo Correa Magallanes

Mateo Correa lived most of his life in the Mexican state of Zacatecas. For most of that he was a quiet parish priest assigned to small and quiet parishes. But it was a time of tumult for the Church in Mexico. In 1917, Mexico had in the aftermath of the Mexican Revolution implemented a secularist constitution, and Article 130 was explicit in requiring state control of churches: churches had to be registered with the government, to become a priest or minister was to give up rights that were standard for other citizens, and the like. At first, this was enforced with a very light hand, as less strict prior attempts at a secularist constitution had usually been. But under the administration of President Plutarco Elias Calles, this changed; Calles concluded that the Catholic Church was beginning to push back in ways significant enough that a very strict enforcement of the secularist provisions was required, and this is what he implemented in 1926. Peaceful resistance to the regime began occasionally to flare up, and then a full-scale revolution broke out, which is known as the Cristero War. The Cristeros were fighting at a considerable disadvantage, but they were not completely without resources. The Knights of Columbus had begun to become popular in certain parts of Mexico (Fr. Correa himself was a member), and they provided a network that kept the Cristeros from completely being overwhelmed. In 1927, still early in the war, Fr. Correa was arrested from the government as he went to attend a dying invalid, on charges of participating in the revolution, although it's likely that he was not himself directly involved. He was kept in a prison camp for some days, during which he heard the confessions of his fellow-prisoners. He was brought before General Ortiz, who demanded that the priest tell him what had been confessed by one of the men. When Fr. Correa refused to violate the seal of the confessional, the General had a gun put to his head, threatening to kill him then and there. However, when he continued to refuse, he was put before a firing range and shot, on February 6, 1927. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II on May 21, 2000, and May 21 is his feast day.

Nicholas Owen

Born into a Catholic family in Oxford in the 1560s, Nicholas Owen grew up learning the family trade, which was carpentry. Throughout his early life, the strictures imposed by Queen Elizabeth I against Catholics became increasingly heavy, and young Nicholas Owen became involved in helping priests who were evading the law. He served for a time as St. Edmund Campion's servant, eventually being thrown into prison for a while for protesting Campion's own imprisonment. Afterward, he began working with Fr. Henry Garnet, and began the work for which he has become most famous: constructing cleverly designed priest-holes in Catholic houses where priests could be hidden from authorities trying to find them. It was a truly extraordinary task. Not only did it require considerable skill and ingenuity of mind to find ways to hide rooms so that they could not easily be discovered from the outside, the work required such immense secrecy that Owen often had to do it entirely by himself. This was not a small matter, since Owen was very short, lame, and suffered from a hernia, and the work, which usually had to be done as quietly as possible in a single night, was gruelingly hard labor. But he did it, and he did it all for free. The quality of his work was unmatched, and his trade as a carpenter meant that he could move around the country fairly freely. He is generally thought to have been the person who was behind Fr. John Gerard's famous escape in 1597 from the Tower of London; they had both been arrested in 1594, but Owen had been set free because he gave up no useful information in torture and the authorities immediately involved didn't realize how important the physically unimpressive carpenter actually was. Owen was arrested again in 1606 in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot; he deliberately put himself in the way of being arrested in an attempt to protect Fr. Garnet from being arrested by distracting the authorities. The distraction attempt did not work, and this time the authorities knew what a catch he was. He was tortured for information, but died during torture from complications arising from his hernia. He was canonized as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

Knud IV and Knud Lavard

Knud, or Canute, was born into the royal family of Denmark in the eleventh century, being the Grandnephew of Canute the Great. After his older brother Harald died, he became King Knud IV. He was an extraordinarily active person, and from the very beginning of his reign began a massive set of projects, most of which he successfully carried out. One of his major projects as strengthening the position of the Church: holy days were treated as holidays througout the Kingdom, he gave massive financial support to church-building, founded a cathedral school, and made tithing a legal requirement. Part of the reason for this was piety, but another reason for it was that the Kingdom required something capable of unifying it to a greater degree than anyone had managed before. We can see the same motivation in some of his other projects, many of which involved limiting the power of nobles to act unaccountably and protecting peasants and merchants from coercion. These efforts, which involved changes to longstanding customs, made him quite unpopular, and sometimes unpopular with people he was trying to protect. One of his failed projects was the attempt to mount an invasion of England in imitation of his great-uncle; the increase of other military threats made it risky, forcing delays, and during one of these delays a peasant rebellion broke out. Canute was caught off guard and was eventually trapped in a church in Odense; the rebels stormed the church and Canute was slain before the altar as he prayed. His general piety was well known, however, and vast numbers of Danes were shocked at what was not only regicide but desecration of a church, and veneration began almost immediately. When a serious famine struck during the reign of his successor, it was seen as an act of divine justice, and the veneration spread. He was raised to the universal calendar by Pope Paschal II in 1101, and his feast day is July 10. He is often, however, confused and conflated with his nephew, St. Canute Lavard, who has a wider devotion, and so he is in some places commemorated on the popular Scandinavian holiday of St. Knud's Day, January 7, which is in reality the feast of St. Canute Lavard.

The son of King Eric I of Denmark, Knud (or Canute) Lavard was made Jarl of Schleswig by his uncle, King Niels of Denmark, in order to try to handle the complicated border disputes that had begun to arise there between Denmark, the Holy Roman Empire, and various minor local powers. He was very successful, and, being an active admirer of the Germannic chivalric culture of the Holy Roman Empire, eventually became a Holy Roman vassal and the Duke of Holstein, while retaining his Danish position as well. He was very popular but his dual political situation made other nobles very suspicious of his loyalties. When Emperor Lothair III actively rewarded Canute Lavard with a considerable boost in power and lands, his uncle King Niels and his cousin Magnus reacted by killing him in an ambush in Haraldsted Forest in 1131. As Canute Lavard had been a major candidate for the Danish throne, the murder tied up the Danish nobles in various civil wars for some years after. He was canonized by Pope Alexander III in 1169.

Mariana de Jesús de Paredes

Mariana was born, the youngest of eight children, to an aristocratic family in Quito, Ecuador, in 1618, but she was orphaned at a young age. She was raised by an older sister and her husband, and had a quiet and prayerful life. Her sister and brother-in-law encouraged her to become a nun, but something about the suggestion did not seem right to Mariana, and instead she chose to live in relative seclusion in her sister's house, fasting and engaging in bodily mortifications, as well as supporting the local Jesuits in various ways. According to the Franciscans of the time, she became a Third Order Franciscan, but some of the evidence suggests that she may have not become one officially, but may have simply adopted the vestments and some of the practices as being appropriate to her way of life. She developed a reputation for fasting so severely that she was sustained only by the Eucharist, and also for having prophetic visions of the future. During the terrible 1645 earthquake, she offered herself in prayer as a sacrificial victim on behalf of the people of Quito, and died shortly thereafter; many people attributed their survival of the earthquake to her prayers. She was beatified in 1853 by Bl. Pius IX and canonized in 1950 by Pius XII; her feast day is May 26.

Joseph Vaz

Joseph Vaz was born in Goa, India, in 1651 and became a priest in the Archdiocese of Goa in 1676. At some point, Joseph conceived the plan of becoming a missionary to Sri Lanka. Goa was part of Portuguese India, and under the Padroado agreement between Portugal and the Holy See, certain things that would normally be given to the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith were given instead to the Portuguese; this was apparently to make things easier, but in fact the agreement caused more problems than it ever solved. As time had gone on, disputes had arisen about what the borders and limitations of the agreement were, with the result that there was a major jurisdictional dispute between the Padroado authorities and the Propaganda over the territory of Kanara. For this reason, it was decided to send Vaz there instead. It was a mess of a situation; the Catholics in the territory were essentially split between the Padroado Catholics and the Propaganda Catholics, with both sides excommunicating each other on the assumption that they were the rightful Catholic authorities in the area. When Vaz arrived, he noted that the whole matter was an occasion of scandal, leading many who might otherwise have become Catholic to avoid such a contentious group of people. Vaz arranged to meet the leader of the Propaganda Catholics, Thomas De Castro, and, having ascertained that De Castro had legitimate documentation from the Pope, arranged an agreement in which Vaz recognized De Castro's authority but was still allowed to function as a representative of the Padroado. He spent much of his time building churches and schools, but his major contribution was the development of confraternities to help deal with the massive shortage of priests that had occurred as Catholics were converted at a faster rate than priests could be provided; the confraternities would worship on their own at small shrines, to which priests would visit on special occasions. So it went for a few years, but he eventually returned to Goa, where he spent his time preaching and developing the local Oratorian community. In 1686 he was finally given permission to head a mission to Sri Lanka. Sri Lanka at the time was controlled by the Dutch, who had outlawed Catholicism, so he traveled incognito in the garb of a Buddhist monk, carefully connecting to the pockets of Catholic communities that were already there. He eventually settled in the independent kingdom of Kandy, where the kings became favorably disposed to him and actively protected him. He would die there on January 16, 1711. He became known as the Apostle of Ceylon; he was beatified by St. John Paul II in 1995 and canonized by Francis in 2015.

Zdislava Berka

A Moravian from Křižanov in the modern Czech Republic, Zdislava was, despite wanting to be a nun or hermit, married off to Lord Havel of Markvartice, a wealthy Bohemian, with whom she lived at Lemberk Castle. She became a Dominican tertiary and continued trying to live an ascetic life as a married woman, and particularly to engage in charitable activities toward those in need. There were many in need throughout the land in her day. The Mongols under Subutai began invading Central Europe in 1240. Poland, Hungary, and smaller Carpathian territories were hit with devastating attacks; people fled in vast numbers, often able to take only what they could carry and having no likely hope of ever returning to their homes. Zdislava opened the castle doors to these desperate refugees. This caused some tension with her husband for a while, but it is said that once he checked in on a beggar she had admitted and discovered on the bed not the beggar but a crucifix. Chastened by this, he helped Zdislava to found a Dominican convent, which she supported the rest of her life. She died in her early 30s in 1252, was beatified by Pius X in 1907, and was canonized in 1995 by John Paul II. Her feast day is January 4.

Caterina Fieschi Adorno

Born in Genoa in 1447, Caterina married Giuliano Adorno, probably in the very Italian attempt to quell a feud that had arisen between the two families. They were not a good match for each other; Adorno was unfaithful, very bad with money, violent of temper, and thus having all the three of the kinds of worldliness that are the worst possible traits for a husband to have. Her life a considerable misery, she reached a point at which she began praying to God to make her terribly ill. Then one day, on March 22, 1473, while giving her confession, she had a mystical experience, one that shook her to her core; in fact, she was so astounded by it that she left the confessional without having completed her confession. From that point on, she became actively devoted to a life of prayer, and began actively assisting the sick at the hospital in Genoa. Her husband, who had reduced them to poverty by his bad spending habits, eventually began helping her there and praying as well. Through the hospital, whose treasurer she had become, she met Father Marabotti, who began collecting a memoir of her spiritual experiences. At this time she might have also begun the work for which she is best known, the highly influential Treatise on Purgatory. She died in 1510, was beatified by Clement X in 1675, and was canonized by Clement XII in 1735. Her feast is September 15.

Pietro I Orseolo

The Orseolo family was one of the most powerful families in Venice. In 976, the Doge, Pietro IV Candiano was killed in a revolution. Pietro was elected his successor; it was widely thought at the time that he was one of the instigators of the revolution, and it is likely true that he was at least associated with it in some capacity. In any case, Orseolo turned out to have considerable administrative and financial talent, to the general benefit of Venice. He helped to settle things down by generosity to victims of the revolution, and, as St. Mark's Basilica had been damaged by revolutionary fighting, he paid for its restoration out of his own pocket. Then suddenly, in 978, he disappeared from Venice. He had left -- apparently without letting anyone know, including his own family -- on a mission with St. Romuald to join the abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa as a Benedictine monk. He spent years of ascetic discipline there, and eventually founded a hermitage in the nearby forest, where he died. He was locally recognized as a saint, as well as by the Camaldolese order founded by St. Romuald, and this was confirmed by Pope Clement XII in 1731. His feast day is January 10.

Ðaminh Hà Trọng Mậu

Born in 1794 in Phu-Nai, where French missionaries had first brought the gospel to Vietnam, St. Dominic Mau entered the Dominican order in 1829, just as persecution of Catholics was heating up under the emperor, Minh Mạng, he held his flock together through that persecution, then through the less severe persecution under Minh Mạng's son, Thiệu Trị. When the next emperor, Tự Đức, took the throne, the persecution heated up again, and in August of 1858, Fr. Mậu was arrested. He was kept in prison for some time and regularly tortured in the hopes that he would recant, until on November 5, 1558, he was beheaded with twenty-one other Catholics. He was canonized in 1988 by St. John Paul II, and is celebrated on November 24 among the Holy Vietnamese Martyrs.

Jeanne-Françoise Frémiot de Chantal

Born in Dijon, France, in 1572, Jeanne-Françoise, or Jane Francis as she is often known in English, was the daughter of a member of the Parliament of Burgundy. Since her mother died when she was very young, her father was the primary influence on her early years, and he went through great trouble to ensure that she grew up happy, devout, and well-educated. She married the Baron de Chantal, but he was killed in a hunting accident in 1601. Jane Francis was suddenly the sole manager of the Baron's estate and sole provider for four children. As it turned out, despite the difficult transition that often happened when a widow took over her husband's estates and creditors came calling, she was excellent at it, showing an extraordinary talent for finances and a capacity for negotiating even with difficult people. She continued for some time in this state of life, taking a vow of chastity and donating generously to the poor out of her thriving accounts, but she led her life with a resentment that she could not erase against the man who had accidentally killed her husband. Then one day she heard a sermon by St. Francis de Sales and it changed her attitude and her life. She took Francis as a spiritual director, and eventually founded the Congregation of the Visitation, whose existence was formalized in 1610. The idea behind the Congregation was a new one. Unlike most female religious orders and societies, which had restrictions on who could join, in order to keep the order sustainable, the Congregation of the Visitation was open to all women, even the sickly, the dying, and the very old. It was also not cloistered. The idea, suitable to Jeanne-François's talents, was to be actually active in the world. This received a great deal of protest and pushback, and eventually St. Francis and St. Jane Francis were required to transform the Congregation of the Visitation into a more standard style of cloistered religious order. Even so, the Congregation thrived, and the fact that it was headed by a woman of known practical ability was a significant factor, since women with financial and other difficulties would come to St. Jeanne-Françoise for advice, and the quality of the advice spread the name of the community widely. St. Francis de Sales eventually died, and Jane Francis took on a new spiritual director, St. Vincent de Paul, and the community continued to thrive. She died in 1641, was beatified by Benedict XIV in 1747, and was canonized by Clement XIII in 1767. Her feast day has jumped around quite a bit; currently it is August 12.

Stephen Min Kŭk-ka

Stephen's mother died in childbirth, so he was raised by his father and brothers. They family was not originally Christian, instead participating in local pagan traditions. Eventually all of the men in the family converted to Catholicism, however, Stephen among them. He did not have a particularly happy life; not only did he never know his mother, but his first wife would die shortly after their marriage, and his second wife would die some time after the birth of their daughter, who also died, leaving him alone. At this juncture he decided to become a catechist, which was a dangerous ministry at the time, putting a layperson at the forefront of evangelism in a period when the Korean government was cracking down on the spread of religions. He was very successful, converting many people, which inevitably meant that he came to the attention of the government and was arrested. They attempted, with torture, to get him to deny his faith, but he refused, until they got tired of trying to break him and strangled him to death in 1840 at the age of 53. His feast day is January 20; he is also celebrated with the Holy Korean Martyrs on September 20.

Rabanus Maurus Magnentius

From a noble family in Mainz, Rabanus (Rhabanus, Hrabanus) had one of the finest educations of his day, studying under Alcuin. It was Alcuin who, recognizing his excellence as a student, gave him the nickname Maurus, after St. Benedict's disciple, St. Maurus. He was put in charge of the abbey school at Fulda, which under his care soon became a major educational institution. After he was ordained a priest, he seems to have had a falling out with the abbot, and disappears for a short while, returning on the historical scene when the new abbot was chosen. After that abbot's death, Rabanus himself became abbot, an office he performed well, but which he did not like because it took away time from study. He eventually resigned, but a few years after was elected the Archbishop of Mainz, which see he occupied until his death in 856. He is generally thought to be the author of the hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus", and after that is probably most famous today for his highly sophisticated image poems. He also, however, had a massive influence on the commentary tradition in the West, and between that and the influence of his students has often been referred to by the title, 'Instructor of Germany'. While he is not on the universal calendar, he is listed as a saint in the Roman Martyrology for February 4. He was, as Pope Benedict XVI noted, all at once an "exegete, philosopher, poet, pastor and man of God."

An image poem by Rabanus:



And the hymn associated with him:




This is the tenth year for All Saints posts; to celebrate, there will be two more All Saints posts later today.

*****

2018 All Saints Post
Gianna Beretta Molla, Margaret of Scotland, Yu Tae-chol Peter, Justa and Rufina of Seville, Giuseppe Moscati, Kazimierz Jagiellończyk, Marie-Alphonsine Danil Ghaţţas, Salomone Leclerq, Arnulf of Metz, Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez, Frumentius of Tyre, Jeanne Jugan, Joseph Zhang Dapeng, Maroun and Abraham of Harran, Magnus Erlendsson, Callixtus I, Hippolytus, Urban I, Pontian, Anterus, Fabian, Jean de Brébeuf

2017 All Saints Post
John Ogilvie, Leo IV, Andrew Stratelates and the 2593 Martyrs, Theodore the Studite, The Martyrs of Gorkum, Margaret Ward and John Roche, Mesrop Mashtots, José María Robles Hurtado, Genevieve of Paris, Pedro Calungsod, Isaac of Nineveh, George Preca, Denis Ssebuggwawo Wasswa, Anthony of Padua

2016 All Saints Post
Theodore of Tarsus, Nilus the Younger, Anne Line, Mark Ji Tianxiang, Maria Elisabetta Hesselbad, Sergius of Radonezh, Anna Pak Agi, Jeanne de Valois, Vigilius of Trent, Claudian, Magorian, Sisinnius, Martyrius, Alexander, Euphrasia Eluvathingal, José Sanchez del Rio, Andrew Kaggwa, Roberto Bellarmino

2015 All Saints Post
Margaret Clitherow, Kaleb Elasbaan of Axum, Louis Martin and Marie-Azélie Guérin Martin, Gertrude of Nivelles, Pius V, Clare and Agnes of Assisi, Kuriakose Elias Chavara, Scholastica, Vinh Sơn Phạm Hiếu Liêm, Thorlak Thorhallson, John Damascene

2014 All Saints Post
Marie Guyart, Alphonsa Muttathupadathu, John Neumann, Hildegard von Bingen, Pedro de San José Betancurt, Benedict the Moor

2013 All Saints Post
María Guadalupe García Zavala, Antonio Primaldi, Nimatullah Kassab Al-Hardini, Gabriel-Taurin Dufresse and Augustine Zhao Rong, Josephine Margaret Bakhita, John Chrysostom

2012 All Saints Post
Jadwiga of Poland, Kateri Tekakwitha, André Bessette, Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayès, Alberto Hurtado Cruchaga

2011 All Saints Post
Bonifacia Rodríguez de Castro, Celestine V, Olga of Kiev, Cyril of Jerusalem, Joseph Mukasa and Charles Lwanga

2010 All Saints Post
Moses the Black of Ethiopia, Micae Hồ Đình Hy, Katherine Mary Drexel, Robert Southwell, Lojze Grozde, Andrew Kim Tae Gon

Radio Greats: Fugue in C Minor (Suspense)

Lucille Fletcher, one of the greatest scriptwriters of the twentieth century, wrote a number of scripts for the radio series titan, Suspense. Her most famous is "Sorry, Wrong Number", but "Fugue in C Minor" is excellent as well. Fletcher was a music librarian for some time, and her first husband was an orchestral composer, so this music-themed horror story does much more than use music as a bit of dressing; "Fugue in C Minor" integrates its music and sound to create an odd but absolutely unforgettable story.

And everything else comes together for the episode, which first aired June 1, 1944. The soundwork is excellent; this is a story very much meant to be heard. The pipe organ itself basically functions as a character in the story. Theodore Evans is played by no less than Vincent Price, and it's a role that gives him room for his full range of acting. Ida Lupino plays Amanda Peabody. Evans's children are well done, and it's handled in such a way that their contribution straddles the line between creepy and sympathetic.

It's a popular episode. You can find it uploaded many times on YouTube:



You can also find it at Internet Archive (number 84).

Evening Note for Wednesday, October 30

Thought for the Evening: The Dignity of Plants

A few years back, there was discussion centered on Switzerland about the dignity of plants. A provision had been added to the Swiss Federal Constitution requiring that the Confederation legislate on use of reproductive and genetic material in such a way as to take into account the dignity of living beings, and the Swiss Federal Ethics Committee on Non-Human Biotechnology looked into the question of how the dignity of plants as living things should play a role in reasoning about these matters. The way the Committee understood dignity was as indicating that something is morally considerable for its own sake.

It's not very difficult to argue that plants should have moral consideration for their own sake; strict Kantians wouldn't accept, but most people are already committed to ideas that require that plants have dignity in this minimal sense. We can make perfect sense of the idea that plants have their own interests, for instance; these interests may not be conscious, but we can clearly identify things as benefiting and harming plants on their own terms. Unsurprisingly, though, the Committee had some difficulty coming up with definite ways in which the dignity of plants could be harmed, and (since the constitutional provision only requires that the dignity of living things be taken into account, not that it be treated as a fundamental value the way the constitution treats human dignity) an even harder time coming up with ways in which that dignity could be so harmed as to be definitely unacceptable in a law concerned with reproductive or genetic material. One possible case they suggested was when a plant's reproductive ability is so harmed that they couldn't reproduce, but as was pointed out in response, large numbers of plants are actually bred specifically for this, like seedless fruits.

I think a complication is that people tend to assume that dignity immediately gives obligations. This is so in the Kantian account of dignity, for instance. But understanding dignity as being 'worth moral consideration for its own sake', there is no obvious reason why you would treat dignity as having such a close relationship with obligation. Indeed, it makes sense only to consider there to be any obligation when, in some way, the goods of the plant being considered are common good in need of protection. But you can still hold that the goods of a plant are genuine goods, so it's better to give them some thought than none at all. The dignity of plants would not impose any definite obligation, but it need not be the less real for all that, and it would make some courses of action better than others in some way, even if not in every way.

On this ground, I think the Committee's suggestion makes a certain kind of sense. We don't have an obligation to grapes to ensure the integrity of their reproductive systems. But it's still the case that being able to reproduce is part of the good of a plant, and it's still the case that it's a good worth taking into account. Obviously we made seedless grapes, stunting the growth of their seeds, because there are other goods being considered. But one could argue that it would be best to do this in a way that doesn't harm their reproductive ability, if such a way is possible. Some fruits, like tomatoes and pineapples, are effectively seedless as long as they are not pollinated; such seedlessness is obviously not a problem. Other kinds of seedless fruits, like seedless watermelons, are actually grown from seeds, because they are always hybrids, and so are the sterile mules of the plant kingdom; this particular plant won't have fully developed seeds, but it would naturally occur in nature and its reproduction is not dependent on us. Seedless grapes are not in either of these groups; their reproduction depends entirely on us, because to multiply they must be grafted into other plants. Their reproduction is artificial. One could very reasonably say that this is not ideal for the grapes, and one could very reasonably say that, knowing this, we should put some thought into whether it is better to impose such a non-ideal situation on grapes. Again, it's not an obligation; it's just that, because it's non-ideal for the grapes, it's better think about whether it's really worth imposing it on them before you do it.

Of course, what would go for plants would go a fortiori for animals and a fortiorior* (if you will tolerate the barbarism) for humans. Obviously, humans do have a dignity that imposes obligations, but it's clear that they have this dignity in a weaker non-obligation-imposing sense, as well, and that even when all obligations are met, there can be courses of action that are better or less good due to it.

---
* We definitely need a word for 'a fortiori to an even greater degree'.


Various Links of Interest

* Kirk Kanzelberger, Reality and the Meaning of Evil

* Timothy O'Malley, What's Next After Catholic Colleges Decline?

* Philip Christman, David Bentley Hart Reviews the New Kanye. This parody is absolutely spot on.

* Ken White looks at common mistakes made in discussing free speech in the American legal context. (Short answer: if it's not directly obscenity, defamation, fraud, or incitement, it's definitely included under freedom of speech, and even those exceptional categories are very narrowly understood, so something might count colloquially but still fall under freedom of speech.)

* Candace Vogler, A Spiritual Autobiography

* David Novak, Does Natural Law Need Theology? at First Things.

* Russell Blackford, Science Fiction as a Lens into Future War. I'm not sure how much it tells us about future war, but it's an interesting look at how science fiction handles the topic.

* Cyrus Zargar, Storytelling and the Pursuit of Virtue in Islam

* James Franklin, Discrete and continuous: A fundamental dichotomy in mathematics (PDF)

* Vincenzo & Iacona, The evidential conditional (PDF)

Currently Reading

H. P. Lovecraft, The Whisperer in the Dark
Michael Gregorio, Critique of Criminal Reason
Isaac Asimov, Second Foundation
Douglas Walton, Informal Logic: A Pragmatic Approach
Fred Kaplan, John Quincy Adams: American Visionary

Bitter the Pain and Long the Years

A Ballad of Hallowe'en
by Theodosia Garrison

All night the wild wind on the heath
Whistled its song of vague alarms;
All night in some mad dance of death
The poplars tossed their naked arms.

Mignon Isa hath left her bed
And bared her shoulders to the blast;
The long procession of the dead
Stared at her as it passed.

"Oh, there, methinks, my mother smiled,
And there my father walks forlorn,
And there the little nameless child
That was the parish scorn.

"And there my olden comrades move,
And there my sister smiles apart,
But nowhere is the fair, false love
That bent and broke my heart.

"Oh, false in life, oh, false in death,
Wherever thy mad spirit be,
Could it not come this night," she saith,
"To keep a tryst with me!"

Mignon Isa hath turned alone,
Bitter the pain and long the years;
The moonlight on the cold gravestone
Was warmer than her tears.

All night the wild wind on the heath
Whistled its song of vague alarms;
All night in some mad dance of death
The poplars tossed their naked arms.

Where Love and Slumber Are the Same

October
by Clark Ashton Smith

The blood of wounded love is on your leaves, October,
And in your seaward wind the sigh of love foredone:
Though I should fold them round me, cerement-like and sober,
In all your mist and rain is no oblivion,
Where memory clings the closer for the perished sun.
The blood of wounded love is on your leaves, October.

By you I am betrayed to all my memories,
Autumn, whose cleaving colors are a fallen sword!
Your distant vales are blue as Aidenn, yet no ease
I find therein, but pain against my coming stored:
Autumn, whose heart is one with all lost things adored,
By you I am betrayed to all my memories.

I would the mounded snow of mountains hyperborean
Were heaped upon your latest ember, quenching it!
In some tremendous world of ice, or world marmorean,
I would entomb for aye my fevers infinite:—
Yea, well it were to lie in frozen sleep unlit
Beneath the mounded snow of mountains hyperborean.

Ah, that my love and all your leaves, on Lethe drifting
Were borne, and cast upon the secret isles of sleep,
Where love and slumber are the same, and suns unlifting
And gods and men go down to quaff the dreamless deep:
Autumn, I would that thou and I were one in sleep,
With this my love and all your leaves on Lethe drifting.

A Bit on Journalistic Ethics

Neil Levy has a post on journalistic ethics that I think makes a common mistake that philosophers tend to make when talking about professional ethics, one that is common because it is easy to make, but which I think also can create severe misunderstandings. The mistake is, I think, a failure to recognize that practical ethics in a profession arises out of the practice of the profession, and not (directly) out of abstract principle.

Levy argues that the journalistic principle of giving people an opportunity to comment on a story about them is problematic:

Asking for comment leads to us being swamped in a deluge of bullshit (both in the technical sense of information delivered without a concern for truth and in the colloquial sense). At best, the responses provide free advertising for the political party (that’s why the media advisors distributed the talking points). At worst, the comments add nothing. Of course, sometimes a politician answers a question. Sometimes they provide useful and honest information. But this is rare enough that these few occasions are easily outweighed by the opportunity costs entailed (all that time that might have been devoted to something worthwhile), not to mention the costs of providing free advertising to those in power.

Levy comes so very close to grasping the essential point in the last sentence, and yet falls short. Getting something substantive this way is indeed rare, yes; it is tedious and takes a great deal of time, yes; it is something that is often used by clever politicians to get free column-inches, yes. Veteran journalists know this infinitely better than Levy does -- it is they who often find it fruitless, and it is they who have to spend the time on it. So the question of importance here is: Why then do they do it?

News journalism is not a matter of shouting from a soapbox or lecturing from a lectern; it is a matter of being an intermediary between the public and goings-on. It is a rhetorical field -- you are presenting ideas in a way suitable to an audience -- but it is a rhetoric not based on pathos or logos but ethos, and since the public in general doesn't know most journalists from Adam, it is often a matter of showing people that you are doing your due diligence. Levy has a highly romanticized view of journalism -- the only end that he explicitly identifies is "holding the powerful to account", which I imagine most journalists would agree is an end, but which most journalists are not going to be able to do anything about most of the time; it's an extraordinary end, not an ordinary one. Most of journalism (like most professions) is quite tedious; it's going through the steps you have to go through to show that you didn't deliberately ignore something that could conceivably have been important. It's the same reason why academics are so often expected to cite: academics cite, of course, when building on other people's ideas directly, but they also cite to show that they are not ignorant of some relevant argument, or that they have read the relevant background, or that they have recognized that someone might be interested in a bit more than they themselves argue. Journalists get comment for the same kinds of reasons: to show that they didn't just ignore it, that they weren't being sloppy but actually took the time to check, that they knew some in the audience would be wondering what the response would be, that they are not propagandistic hacks pushing an angle but actually work to find out if there's any countervailing evidence, regardless of their personal biases. In short, they do it to be professional, and that you are professional is something you have to show people; you can't always just let it be assumed.

And I suspect very much that most journalists recognize that if they took Levy's advice, they can't have Levy on speed dial to get his assessment of each case, so they would be doing it entirely by judgment call, and there would come along a time when they would not be getting responses that someone like Levy would think they absolutely needed to get, and all the rest of the time they would be attacked by people with politics different from Levy's for not doing, and maybe they would even miss that very occasional moment when something spectacular slips out or something new comes to light. The most practical way of going about it is just to do it always, show that you are doing it always, and when the tedious comment-harvesting comes up with something, you can do something with it because you've shown the world that you're a solid journalist who takes the trouble to do things like that. Academics could make their arguments just fine reading whatever's relevant but only citing what they directly use; but the whole point of a lot of citation is to make sure people know that you've been reading whatever's relevant, because that's inevitably something that people are going to raise questions about. So with journalists.

I also think Levy underestimates the difficulty of "holding the powerful to account" as a journalist if you don't have some kind of access to the powerful to keep pressing them on things, and how quickly access can dry up if people think you are selectively failing to report what they want to say. When you get recommendations like, "Politicians should not be given the opportunity to appear on flagship programs until they agree to answer questions (perhaps interviews should end with the first refusal to answer, as judged by the journalist, and refusals should result in bans for an extended period of time)", it's somewhat mind-boggling that Levy doesn't consider the ways this could turn out to be a disaster for the journalists involved, as word spread that its journalists were trying to intimidate politicians into giving the kinds of answers that the journalists had already determined to be acceptable. You can (maybe) get away with that in a niche program, or in a bit of tabloid journalism; but mainstream journalism gets its respectability from its access, and its access from at least usually giving the appearance of letting people say their piece.

Sad-Hearted Songsters that No Sun Beguiles

An October Day
by Julia Stockton Dinsmore

To the far hills the veil of mist still clings
Though the high sun soars to a summer sky;
Frightened by last night's chill, there flutter by
Belated butterflies with yellow wings;
The daring spider's glistening slack-rope swings
From weed to bush; in golden bower nigh
A bird bound southward, lingering, loath to fly,
Snatches of his forgotten love-song sings.
The chirping things of summer's loss complain
In querulous chorus linked with long refrain,
Sad-hearted songsters that no sun beguiles
To blest forgetfulness of frost's keen pain;
While the doomed primrose still unconscious smiles,
And dazzled violets look for Spring again.

Things Unseen Forever Fleeting

Despair
by H. P. Lovecraft

O’er the midnight moorlands crying,
Thro’ the cypress forests sighing,
In the night-wind madly flying,
Hellish forms with streaming hair;
In the barren branches creaking,
By the stagnant swamp-pools speaking,
Past the shore-cliffs ever shrieking;
Damn’d daemons of despair.

Once, I think I half remember,
Ere the grey skies of November
Quench’d my youth’s aspiring ember,
Liv’d there such a thing as bliss;
Skies that now are dark were beaming,
Gold and azure, splendid seeming
Till I learn’d it all was dreaming—
Deadly drowsiness of Dis.

But the stream of Time, swift flowing,
Brings the torment of half-knowing—
Dimly rushing, blindly going
Past the never-trodden lea;
And the voyager, repining,
Sees the wicked death-fires shining,
Hears the wicked petrel’s whining
As he helpless drifts to sea.

Evil wings in ether beating;
Vultures at the spirit eating;
Things unseen forever fleeting
Black against the leering sky.
Ghastly shades of bygone gladness,
Clawing fiends of future sadness,
Mingle in a cloud of madness
Ever on the soul to lie.

Thus the living, lone and sobbing,
In the throes of anguish throbbing,
With the loathsome Furies robbing
Night and noon of peace and rest.
But beyond the groans and grating
Of abhorrent Life, is waiting
Sweet Oblivion, culminating
All the years of fruitless quest.

'Twas What We All Must Bear

The Robe
by Hannah Gould

'Twas not the robe of state,
Which the high and the haughty wear,
That my busy hand, as the lamp burnt late,
Was hastening to prepare.

It had no clasp of gold,
No diamond's dazzling blaze
For the festive board; nor the graceful fold
To float in the dance's maze.

'Twas not to wrap the breast,
With gladness light and warm,
For the bride's attire—for the joyous guest;
Nor to clothe the sufferer's form.

'Twas not the garb of woe
To conceal an aching heart,
When our eyes with bitter tears o'erflow,
And our dearest ones depart.

'Twas what we all must bear
To the cold, the lonely bed!
'Twas the spotless uniform they wear
In the chambers of the dead!

I saw a fair, young maid
In the snowy vesture drest;
So pure, she looked as one arrayed
For the mansions of the blest.

A smile had left its trace
On her lip, at the parting-breath,
And the beauty in that lovely face
Was fixed with the seal of death!