While a story like this may thrill and inspire readers today, it was not only hard work, but also a heartache for John Baptist de La Salle. His family never supported his ministry and continually antagonized him. Some who joined with the Brothers of Christian Schools soon dropped out. Others were jealous and considered the new schools a threat to their own security. They forced some of his schools to close, and John Baptist had to work through the courts to get them open again. Other schools had poor leadership and discipline problems.
No one had attempted any work like this in France before John Baptist de La Salle. Since the work lacked official recognition by the Church, and no existing category fit a group of unordained men devoted to teaching the poor, he perceived the necessity of drawing up a Rule similar to those followed at monasteries. He used familiar language to express novel ideas. “The first effect of faith is to attach us strongly to the knowledge, the love, and the imitation of Jesus Christ and to union with him.” All teaching is “for the glory of God, with the intention of pleasing him, through the movement of the Holy Spirit.” The Brothers are “ambassadors of Christ to the young. Teachers must, in St. Paul’s phrase, ‘put on Christ’ so that they can radiate him more effectively.” John Baptist worked on his Rule for twenty-five years, revising it several times. Approval of the rule was granted after his death.
APRIL 8
Julie Billiart (1751–1816)
Overcoming handicaps
Marie Rose Julie Billiart began life in Picardy, France. Her parents had a small shop and did some farming. The family fell into difficult times in 1767, and Julie worked hard to help earn enough for them to survive. Julie was on her way to a religious vocation when a sudden paralysis confined her to bed. Under a doctor’s care, she only became worse, experiencing severe pain. An invalid at thirty, she determined to become a Christian witness even without the ability to move her arms and legs. People came to her for spiritual guidance, and she taught children from her bed.
Caught up in the French Revolution, Julie got into serious trouble by sheltering priests in her home and being a friend of aristocrats. Others had to spirit her away to Compiègne when there were threats made against her life. Impassioned revolutionaries chased Julie from hiding place to hiding place. She asked, “Dear Lord, will you not find a corner in paradise for me? There is no room for me on earth.” Her extreme stress resulted for a while in the loss of her ability to speak.
Following these trying times, her voice gradually returned and she established the Institute of Notre Dame for the education of poor children and the training of female teachers. After being an invalid for twenty-two years, Julie suddenly regained the ability to walk and began long journeys to develop and unite the Institute. She made sweeping changes in nineteenth-century religious life. Sisters needed to have the freedom to leave their enclosures in order to teach the public. Thorough preparation for class became an act of self-discipline. She wrote, “We have the most difficult vocations because we must live an interior life while doing external work.”
On her deathbed in 1816, Julie Billiart asked a Sister to read a favorite page from The Imitation of Christ. ”If you willingly carry the cross, the cross will carry you, and bring you to that desirable place where there will be no end.”
APRIL 9
Waldetrude (d. ca. 688)
Religious in the world
Waldetrude grew up among saints. Her parents, sister, husband, and children are all canonized saints. Waldetrude successfully lived an austere solitary life without enclosure in an abbey. Many turned to her for spiritual direction. Eventually, she founded a convent at Chateaulieu in a part of France that is now inside the boundary of Belgium. Here, she acquired a reputation for charity, healing, and mercy. She died about 688, and her remains are still preserved in a fifteenth-century church built near her convent.
APRIL 10
Magdalen of Canossa (1774–1835)
Helping others
Five-year-old Maddalena Gabriella di Canossa lost her wealthy Italian father and saw her mother run away with another man, leaving five children to care for themselves. Growing up became a misery, complicated by serious illness and an insensitive French governess.
As she approached her twenties, Magdalen began to care for poor girls in her community. Relatives tried to dissuade her, but she replied, “Should the fact that I was born a marquess prevent me from serving Jesus Christ in his poor?” She wanted to reduce the poverty and improve the morals of the people around her. She helped hospital patients and the homebound, gave religious literature to local churches, organized retreats, worked with girls in trouble, and handed out money and food to the poor at her door. In 1808, Magdalen opened a girl’s school in an abandoned monastery. This evolved into the Congregation of the Daughters of Charity.
Magdalen had some mystical experiences that she attempted to describe in her personal Memoirs. Like most other saints, she found that words were inadequate. “I felt at a certain point as if I were enraptured in God. I saw God within me like a luminous sun. This absorption in the Divine Presence made me unable to stay on my feet. I had to lean against something. The strength of heavenly joy was almost suffocating.”
Many of her writings have survived her death.
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Stanislaus Szczepanowsky (ca. 1030–79)
Conflict
Born in Poland, Stanislaus became bishop of Cracow when he was a little over forty. For a while, the new bishop had the support of King Boleslaus II, but they soon had a serious disagreement.
Though the true nature of the argument is now clouded, the king did not behave in the manner Stanislaus demanded. The bishop then excommunicated the sovereign.
Infuriated, King Boleslaus ordered his guards to kill Bishop Stanislaus, who sought refuge in St. Michael’s Chapel. The guards were not willing to violate the sanctity of the chapel, so the angry king himself dashed in and murdered Stanislaus with a sword. The king soon lost his throne, but the Polish people continue to venerate Stanislaus.
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Teresa of Los Andes (1900–20)
Saintly influence
Teresa of Los Andes presents an outstanding example of the influence one saint may have upon another. When, in her mid-teens, Juanita Fernandez Solar read Story of a Soul by Thérèse of Lisieux (October 1), she decided she wanted to become a Carmelite nun. Her diary records her thoughts: “I belong to God. He created me and is my beginning and my end. If I am to become entirely his, I must do his will. If as my Father he knows the present, the past, and the future, why don’t I abandon myself to him with complete confidence? From now on I put myself in your divine hands. Do what you like with me.”
After Juanita read the biographies of Teresa of Avila (October 15) and Elizabeth of the Trinity (November 8), her determination to become a Carmelite increased. At the age of nineteen, she joined the Carmelites at Los Andes, Chile, saying she wanted “to learn how to love and how to suffer.”
The Carmelites at Los Andes lived in extremely primitive conditions. Taking the name of Teresa, she welcomed the strict observance required of her as well as the simplicity of her new life. Love, service, prayer, and suffering dominated her religious thought and activity. In this environment, she felt as though she had found heaven on earth.
She became ill with typhoid fever and died. Today, she is one of South America’s most beloved saints.
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Martin I (d. 655)
Taking a stand
Details regarding the early life of the last pope to suffer martyrdom, Martin I, are lost. We know he became pope in 649 and became embroiled in religious and political controversy.
The controversy involved an early heresy known as “Monothelitism” which held that Christ did not make human choices, but only divine ones. Constans II, the emperor at Constantinople, considered this an excellent doctrine. Martin convened a council in Rome for the purpose of rejecting this false teaching and condemned the emperor’s support of it. The emper
or responded by becoming angry and hostile. In 653, he sent troops to Rome with orders to arrest Martin. Frail because of poor health, Martin did not resist. Soldiers took him to the Aegean island of Naxos, put him in prison, and began to torture him. He commented in a letter to the Church in Rome, “I have not been given water for a bath in forty-seven days. I am frozen through and wasting away with dysentery. The food they give me is inedible. But God sees all things and I trust in him.”
Though Martin was actually condemned to death, the emperor instead exiled him to Crimea, where he died of starvation and abuse.
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Benezet of Avignon (ca. 1163–84)
Divine purpose
We use “bridge builder” as a metaphor for an outstanding mediator or reconciler. Benezet was literally a bridge builder. As a shepherd boy from Savoy, he moved to Avignon, France, around 1178. A visionary figure instructed him to build a bridge over the Rhone River. Like Noah, he had difficulty convincing anyone that such a project was his purpose in life, but Benezet eventually received enough support and assistance to begin construction on the bridge.
Benezet died before the completion of the span, but the work continued until the bridge was finished. Later, a construction crew added a small chapel to the design of the bridge and reburied Benezet’s body inside it. His remains rested quietly there for almost five hundred years. A catastrophic flood in 1669 destroyed the bridge and washed the saint’s coffin downstream. When searchers recovered it, they were startled to see that his body had not decayed. A verse in the sixteenth Psalm that Peter (June 29) quoted in his Pentecost sermon says that God will not allow his holy one to “see corruption.” In the early years of Christianity, an incorrupt body was often a factor in the declaration of sainthood. Modern medicine acknowledges that sometimes a human body will not decompose because its fat becomes wax in response to moisture. Doctors label this tissue phenomenon adipocere.
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Damien de Veuster (1840–89)
Loving service
Faraway places have always chanted a siren song to adventurous people. This is how it was for Damien de Veuster. After hearing about the Hawaiian Islands, he could not rest in Belgium. There were spiritual needs among the residents of those fabled islands, and the twenty-three-year-old priest received permission to sail in 1863. He arrived in Honolulu after a five-month voyage and began a decade of mission work on the island of Maui.
Hawaii had no resistance to European diseases. Smallpox, tuberculosis, measles, and other illnesses took a heavy toll on the resident population. Their numbers were reduced from about three hundred thousand to fifty thousand. While Damien was at work, leprosy broke out. American and British traders were concerned enough about the new epidemic of an incurable disease to persuade local authorities to banish all lepers to the island of Molokai, which soon gained the name “Devil’s Island.”
Medical inspectors and armed soldiers came to Maui with instructions to enforce the removal of lepers. Families turned to Damien for help. They wanted to care for their own at home. Damien attempted to reason with the visiting authorities, but no one would listen to him. The tears and sobs of Hawaiian families torn apart because of an imported disease deeply moved him. Rather than remain on Maui, he volunteered to minister to the lepers at Molokai. Damien understood it would be a one-way trip.
It is not easy for us to imagine life in a nineteenth-century leper colony. Boat crews were too terrified by the disease to actually tie up at a pier. They stopped offshore and made their passengers jump in the water and swim the remaining distance through the pounding surf. Those who survived walked onto the beach of a lawless island of misery and hopelessness. The lepers had to fight to survive, the strong taking advantage of the weak.
There were about eight hundred lepers on Molokai when Damien stepped on shore in 1873. He attempted to bring some order to chaos by organizing many funerals and burials in a place he called a “living cemetery.” He encouraged the lepers to grow gardens in order to improve their meager diet. He engineered an irrigation system, built simple huts and a church, using the assistance of the able-bodied. Visiting doctors would bring medicines, but they would not get near the lepers. Damien tended to the needs of the miserable members of his flock with his own hands. “If I cannot cure them as our Savior did, at least I can comfort them.” He turned a human jungle into a civilized community.
In 1885, Damien recognized the symptoms of leprosy on his own skin. For a quarter of a century, he had ministered quietly without recognition. Now he suddenly became a celebrity. Newspapers and magazines found a sensational story in the brave self-denial of a priest from Belgium. News quickly spread around the world, and Damien became a target for criticism and suspicion as detractors asked what the autocratic leader was doing with the contributions that came to him. He wrote, “If I didn’t have the continual presence of the divine Master in my poor chapel I could not persevere in my decision to share the lot of the lepers.” Robert Louis Stevenson, author of Treasure Island, wrote a powerful defense of Father Damien.
Compassionate people did all they could to help, but it was too late for the leper colony on Molokai. Damien died on April 15, 1889. All of us will die of something. Damien died of love.
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Benedict Joseph Labre (1748–83)
Spiritual seeking
The phrase “a fool for Christ” describes Benedict Joseph Labre, a rare Western example of a religious wanderer. Born in southern France and reared by an uncle who was a priest, he made up his mind by age twelve to give his life to God. The Trappists rejected him when he was eighteen because of his youth. The Carthusians and the Cistercians also refused to accept him. Benedict decided he would let the world be his cloister and began a journey by foot that took him thousands of miles across Europe to shrines and churches.
Benedict continued his not-so-aimless wandering for several years, neglecting to take care of personal hygiene and wearing rags. This naturally caused people to avoid him, providing the privacy he wanted for his prayers. He was never a beggar, so when some well-meaning person insisted on giving Benedict alms, he would look for someone needier and pass it on to them. He accepted food, but usually dined on discarded garbage. Well-read, he possessed a solid foundation of knowledge.
His wanderings eventually brought him to Rome, where he slept in the ruins of the Coliseum where so many Christians were martyred. In daylight, Benedict would visit Rome’s various churches for extended hours of prayer. His health gave way and he collapsed on the steps of the Madonna dei Monti when he was thirty-five. After a few hours resting in a butcher’s house, Benedict died. Children began running through the streets, crying out, “The saint is dead!” His parents learned of his death when they read one of the popular biographies written about the Christian tramp.
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Simeon Barsabae and Companions (d. 341)
Martyrs
Christianity developed out of Judaism, and during the first century after Christ, most of the world did not distinguish between Christian and Jew. Christianity gained independent recognition about the year 100. For the next two hundred years, it became the scapegoat of the Roman Empire, blamed for every political and economic difficulty. The emperor Decius wanted to exterminate all Christians in 250, but his reign ended before he realized his dream.
The most organized and deadly persecution of Christians came under Diocletian, beginning in 303. In 313, an edict of toleration declared Rome’s acceptance of the upstart religion, but serious persecution continued in the Persian Empire until the fifth century. Simeon Barsabae and others were caught in these troubled times.
Simeon was bishop of Seleucia-Ctesiphon in central Mesopotamia when Shah Shapur II reigned supreme. In 340, Shapur closed the churches in his realm and increased taxes on anyone admitting they were Christian. Most of Bishop Simeon’s people were poor, and he refused to collect the penalizing taxes. Simeon was arrested and taken before the Shah, where he stood firm. After Simeon sp
ent a short time in jail, the Shah ordered executions for Simeon and about a hundred other Christians. The trustworthy written record of eyewitnesses of these martyrdoms still exists.
APRIL 18
Alexander of Alexandria (ca. 250–328)
Doctrinal orthodoxy
Anyone who became a bishop in one of the four great cities of the Roman Empire (Rome, Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch) carried the title patriarch. In 451, Jerusalem became the fifth city on the list. A patriarch had spiritual oversight of a large geographical area. Alexander became patriarch of Alexandria in 312.
The job was a headache from the very beginning. Another priest, Arius, wanted the position and became antagonistic when he did not get it. His many vicious accusations against Alexander stung and burned. At this time an emotionally charged debate regarding which date should be observed for celebrating Easter raged in the Church. Another debate began when Bishop Melitus of Lycopolis in Egypt strictly opposed any attempt to restore to full communion those who had fallen away during times of persecution.
In addition to all of this, Arius kept the doctrinal pot boiling with his Arian Controversy, which probably began as a way to discredit a rival but grew to historic proportions and became a turning point in church history. At issue were the person and work of Jesus Christ. Speculative theology may not be a popular sport in the world today, but in the early centuries of Christianity, it was vital.
Arius held that Christ was divine, but something of a lesser God who was not united with the eternal Father. For him, Christ was neither fully God nor fully human, but something in between. Alexander, however, believed this was an entirely unsatisfactory description of the nature of Christ.
Alexander attempted to have a gentleman’s discussion with Arius regarding these things, but Arius remained uncooperative and continued to split the church along these doctrinal lines. As patriarch, Alexander called an official council of about a hundred bishops from Egypt and Libya. This meeting condemned Arius for presenting heretical ideas. Rather than apologizing and changing his thinking, Arius traveled to Jerusalem and persuaded two influential bishops, both named Eusebius, to support his teaching. A series of letters to various leaders resulted in more support for Arius. Alexander wrote letters of his own and garnered about two hundred and fifty signatures for himself from all over the empire. The controversy was no longer a local struggle.
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