A Community of Love, Unity and Service

St. Joseph Calasanctius

Saint Joseph Calasanctius was born in Aragon in 1556 of a noble family, who gave him a veryChristian education. When only five years old, he led a troop of children through the streets tofind the devil and slay him. He became a priest, and was engaged in various reforms when heheard a voice saying, “Go to Rome, Joseph” and had a vision of many children who were beingtaught by him and by a company of Angels. When he reached the Holy City, his heart was movedby the vice and ignorance of the children of the poor, and he saw clearly that ignorance was themother of vice and misery. Sunday catechism lessons were insufficient to remedy the situation. When he could find no collaboration under the existing frameworks, the children’s need masteredhis profound humility, and he undertook to found personally the Order of Clerks Regular of thePious Schools, or the Piarists.

The parish priest of Saint Dorothy’s Church in Trastevere, placed two rooms at his disposition and assisted him in all things. Two other good priests joined the founders, and the school soon had several hundred children. He taught the children catechism, reading, writing and arithmetic,and he himself provided all that was necessary for the program of instruction, receiving nothing inpayment. Other schools were organized elsewhere in Rome, and the holy priest had scholars ofevery rank under his care. Each lesson began with prayer. Every half-hour, piety was renewed byacts of faith, hope, and charity. At the end of the day the children were escorted home by themasters, so as to escape all harm on the way. An annual retreat was given them during the Easterseason. Clement XIII approved the new Congregation, which became an Order with the ordinarythree vows, and in addition a definitive commitment to the instruction of the indigent.

Enemies arose against Saint Joseph, however, from among his own subjects, thus imposing on the Founder the most sorrowful of all crosses, resembling that of the Lord Himself. They accusedhim to the Holy Office, and at the age of eighty-six he was led through the streets to prison. TheOrder was reduced to a simple Congregation under local episcopal authority and was not restoredto its former privileges until after the Saint’s death. Yet he died full of hope. “My work,” he said, “was done solely for the love of God.” Saint Joseph is the first to have given gratuitous instruction to the children of the people. Religion can claim for its own the instruction of the poor, both by birthright and by right of conquest. The body of Saint Joseph Calasanctius reposesin the church of Saint Pantaleon in Rome. He was canonized by Clement XIII in 1767.

St. Augustine

Saint Augustine was born in 354 at Tagaste in Africa. He was brought up in the Christian faith but did not receive baptism, result of the practice, common in the first centuries, of deferring ituntil adulthood. An ambitious schoolboy of brilliant talents and violent passions, he early lostboth his faith and his innocence. He pursued with ardor the study of philosophy. He taughtgrammar, rhetoric and literature for nine years in his native town of Tagaste, and in Carthage. Hepersisted in his irregular life and doctrinal errors until he was thirty-two. Then one day, stung tothe heart by the account of some sudden conversions, he cried out, “The unlearned rise and stormheaven, and we, with all our learning, for lack of courage lie inert!” The great heart of this futurebishop was already evident.

When as a genial student of rhetoric, he was at Milan, where Saint Ambrose was bishop,Augustine tells us later in his autobiography, the Catholic faith of his childhood regainedpossession of his intellect, but he could not as yet resolve to break the chains of bad habit. Hismother helped him to separate from the mother of his son, Adeodatus, who had died as a youngman; and she, after this painful separation, retired for life to a convent, regretting that she hadlong enchained this soul of predilection. Augustine’s mother, Saint Monica, died soon afterwards.

Urged also by a friend who had decided to adopt a celibate life, Saint Augustine took up a book of the Holy Scriptures, and read the Epistles of Saint Paul in a new light. A long and terribleconflict ensued, but with the help of grace the battle was won; he went to consult a priest andreceived baptism, returned to Africa and gave all he had to the poor. At Hippo, where he settled,he was consecrated bishop in 395. For thirty-five years he was the center of ecclesiastical life inAfrica, and the Church’s strongest champion against heresy. His writings, which compose manyvolumes, have been everywhere accepted as a major source of both Christian spirituality andtheological speculation. The great Doctor died, deeply regretted by the entire Christian world, in430.

St. John the Baptist, The Beheading of

Saint John the Baptist was called by God to be the precursor of His divine Son. In order topreserve his innocence spotless, and to improve upon the extraordinary graces which he hadreceived in his earliest infancy, he was directed by the Holy Spirit to lead an austere andcontemplative life in the wilderness. There he devoted himself to the continuous exercise ofdevout prayer and penance.

When Saint John was thirty years old, the faithful minister of the Lord began to discharge his mission. Clothed with the garments of penance, he announced to all men the obligation weighingupon them of washing away their iniquities with the tears of sincere compunction. He proclaimedthe Messiah, who was of his own age but whom he had never seen, when one day Jesus came tobe baptized by him in the Jordan. Saint John was received by the poor folk as the true herald ofthe Most High God, and his voice was, as it were, a trumpet sounding from heaven to summon allmen to avert the divine judgments. Souls were exhorted by him to prepare themselves to reap thebenefit of the mercy offered them.

When the tetrarch Herod Antipas, in defiance of all laws divine and human, married Herodias, the wife of his brother Philip who was yet living, Saint John the Baptist boldly reprimanded thetetrarch and his accomplice for so scandalous an adultery. Herod, motivated by his lust and hisanger, cast the Saint into prison. About a year after Saint John had been made a prisoner, Herodgave a splendid entertainment to the official world of Galilee. Salome, a daughter of Herodias byher lawful husband, pleased Herod by her dancing, to the point that he made her the foolishpromise of granting whatever she might ask. Salome consulted with her mother as to what to ask,and that immoral woman instructed her daughter to demand the death of John the Baptist, andthat the head of the prisoner should be immediately brought to her on a platter. This barbaricrequest startled the tyrant himself; but governed by human respect he assented and sent a soldierof his guard to behead the Saint in prison. Thus died the great forerunner of our blessed Saviour,some two years after his entrance upon his public ministry, and a year before the death of the Onehe announced.

St. Fiaker

Saint Fiaker was the eldest son of Eugene IV, king of Scotland, born in the early sixth century heir to the throne of Scotland. He was educated under the care of a bishop of eminent sanctity,Conan, Bishop of Soder or the Western Islands.

Considering all worldly advantages as dross, the young prince, accompanied by his sister, left country and friends when in the flower of his age, and sailed to France. The prince intended toseek a solitude to which they might retire and devote themselves to God, unknown to the rest ofthe world. Divine Providence conducted them to Saint Faro, Bishop of Meaux, eminent for hissanctity. When Saint Fiaker addressed himself to him, the prelate, charmed with the marks ofextraordinary virtue and abilities which he discerned in this stranger, gave him a solitary dwellingin a forest called Breuil, two leagues from Meaux. He placed the princess Sira in the Faremoutiermonastery for women, of which his own sister was Abbess, and in that convent the youngChristian found the enduring peace of Christ.

The holy anchorite Fiaker cleared the ground of trees and briers, made himself a cell andcultivated a small garden. He built an oratory in honor of the Blessed Virgin, where he spent thegreater part of the days and nights in devout prayer, laboring also with his own hands for hissubsistence. The life he led was very austere, and only necessity or charity ever interrupted hisexercises of prayer and heavenly contemplation.

Many resorted to him for advice, and the poor sought relief at his door. Saint Chillen, or Kilian, an Irishman of high birth, on his return from Rome visited Saint Fiaker, who was his kinsman. After spending some time under his discipline, this other budding Saint was directed by Fiaker’sadvice and with the authority of the bishops, to preach in the nearby dioceses as well as in that ofSaint Faro. This commission he executed with admirable sanctity and fruit, and his relics werelater placed in the same coffer as those of his eminent relative, the saintly hermit. Saint Fiakerdied in the year 670, on the 30^th of August; he is the patron of gardeners.

St. Rose of Lima

This lovely flower of sanctity, the first canonized Saint of the New World, was born at Lima,Peru, in 1586. She was christened Isabel, but the beauty of her infant face earned for her the titleof Rose, which she thereafter bore. As a child still in the cradle, her silence during a painfulsurgical operation seemed to foretell the thirst for suffering which would consume her heart.

At an early age she engaged herself as a servant to support her impoverished parents, then worked day and night. In spite of hardships and austerities her beauty ripened with increasing age, andshe was openly much admired. Fearing vanity would enter her heart, she cut off her hair, blisteredher face with pepper and her hands with lime. She never left the interior of her parents’ house inCanta, for four years, not even to walk in an inviting garden just beyond its walls. She finallyobtained her parents’ permission to be enrolled in the Third Order of Saint Dominic; from herchildhood she had taken Saint Catherine of Siena as her model, and she then redoubled herpenance. The Blessed Sacrament seemed virtually her only food. Her love for it was intense. Her fasting was near miraculous; during Lent in particular, she denied herself her former singlepiece of bread each day, to consume only a few orange seeds. Her disciplines were of an almostincredible severity, and her hair shirt reached from her shoulders to her wrists and knees; notsatisfied with its rudeness, she armed it with iron nails.

The cell of Saint Rose was a garden hut, her couch a box of broken tiles. Concealed by her veil, a silver crown armed with ninety sharp points encircled her head. More than once, when sheshuddered at the prospect of a night of torture, a voice said, “My cross was yet more painful.” The demon tormented her for fifteen years with insupportable temptations; but God sustained Hisspouse against them, though she would gladly have died rather than live any longer in theirclutches. When a Dutch fleet prepared to attack the city of Lima, Rose took her place before thetabernacle, and wept because she felt unworthy to die in its defense, as she hoped she might; theenemy weighed anchor soon afterwards and departed without attempting a siege. All of SaintRose’s sufferings were offered for the conversion of sinners, and the thought of the multitudes inhell was ever before her soul. She died in 1617, at the age of thirty-one.

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