Christmas Every Day

Juliana Falconieri, a very, very delicate saint

According to Butler’s Lives of the Saints:

Juliana Falconieri was born in answer to prayer, in 1270. Her father built the splendid church of the Annunziata in Florence, while her uncle, Blessed Alexius, became one of the founders of the Servite Order. Under his care Juliana grew up, as he said, more like an angel than a human being. Such was her modesty that she never used a mirror or gazed upon the face of a man during her whole life. The mere mention of sin made her shudder and tremble, and once hearing a scandal related she fell into a dead swoon. Her devotion to the sorrows of Our Lady drew her to the Servants of Mary; and, at the age of fourteen, she refused an offer of marriage, and received the habit from St. Philip Benizi himself. Her sanctity attracted many novices, for whose direction she was bidden to draw up a rule, and thus with reluctance she became foundress of the “Mantellate.” She was with her children as their servant rather than their mistress, while outside her convent she led a life of apostolic charity, converting sinners, reconciling enemies, and healing the sick by sucking with her own lips their ulcerous sores. She was sometimes rapt for whole days in ecstasy, and her prayers saved the Servite Order when it was in danger of being suppressed. She was visited in her last hour by angels in the form of white doves, and Jesus Himself, as a beautiful child, crowned her with a garland of flowers. She wasted away through a disease of the stomach, which prevented her taking food. She bore her silent agony with constant cheerfulness, grieving only for the privation of Holy Communion. At last, when, in her seventieth year, she had sunk to the point of death, she begged to be allowed once more to see and adore the Blessed Sacrament. It was brought to her cell, and reverently laid on a corporal, which was placed over her heart. At this moment she expired, and the Sacred Host disappeared. After her death the form of the Host was found stamped upon her heart in the exact spot over which the Blessed Sacrament had been placed. Juliana died A. D. 1340.

Juliana’s relics repose in Florence’s Church of San Annunziata.

Joseph of Cupertino, the levitating saint

Giuseppe Maria Desa (1603-63) was a very unpromising recruit to the Catholic clergy in seventeenth-century Italy. He was born to poor parents in a garden shed because his father had been forced to sell their house to settle debts.

As a young shoemaker he tried a number of times to join a monastic order but was rejected because of his low intelligence, clumsiness, and frequents fits of temper and bizarre ecstasy. He served as a helper in the tables of an abbey of Franciscan Conventuals before he was admitted to the order and becoming a priest. Joseph soon attracted attention by levitating during the Mass and by falling into trances at the sound of church bells or hearing a psalm – phenomena that convinced the locals that he was saintly. These levitations had been publicly witnessed — such as when he placed a 36-foot cross atop a church — and attracted amazement from crowds of believers, and suspicion from the Inquisition that he was dabbling in the diabolical arts. His superiors isolated Joseph from the public for years and he died in seclusion. For his patience and humility he was canonized in 1763. He has been declared the patron saint of air travellers, pilots, astronauts, the mentally handicapped, test takers and poor students.

Joseph Butler: “Every thing is what it is, and not another thing.”

On this day Anglican churches honour the memory of Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752), controversialist and philosopher. Born a Presbyterian and thus barred from entering a university or the learned professions, Butler converted to the Church of England in his early twenties and became an Anglican priest. With the help of prominent patrons he rose through a series of lucrative appointments to become the Queen’s chaplain and eventually bishop of Bristol and Durham.

Today Butler is chiefly known as a philosopher, having taken on English heavyweights such as Thomas Hobbes (in his 1729 Fifteen Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel) and John Locke (in his 1736 Analogy of Religion) as well as the proponents of Deism, then very popular amongst English academics. The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy tells us

Overall, Butler’s philosophy is largely defensive. His general strategy is to accept the received systems of morality and religion and, then, defend them against those who think that such systems can be refuted or disregarded. Butler ultimately attempts to naturalize morality and religion, though not in an overly reductive way, by showing that they are essential components of nature and common life. He argues that nature is a moral system to which humans are adapted via conscience. Thus, in denying morality, Butler takes his opponents to be denying our very nature, which is untenable. Given this conception of nature as a moral system and certain proofs of God’s existence, Butler is then in a position to defend religion by addressing objections to it, such as the problem of evil. 

St Boniface

Born about 675 as Wynfrith in Anglo-Saxon England, Boniface was a teacher before entering the priesthood at about age 30. He could have become an abbot in his native country but dedicated himself to taking the gospel to the German-speaking peoples of northwestern Europe, first in Frisia, and then Germany, to which Pope Gregory II (who gave him the Latin name Boniface) appointed him a travelling bishop — the largely pagan territory had not yet developed an ecclesiastical infrastructure.

Working with the tepid support of the Frankish regime, which had designs on expanding into more German lands and which welcomed Christianization of the natives, Boniface preached, set up monasteries, and organized dioceses in these border lands. His most storied exploit was the destruction of a pagan shrine in Hesse by chopping down an oak sacred to Thor. (From this came the spurious tale of his inventing the Christmas tree by giving the Germans a conifer in replacement for the oak.)  He was named archbishop of Germany and later papal legate, high titles which disguised the shaky ground that nascent Christianity occupied on the frontier. In 754 he attempted to evangelize the Frisians but was murdered along with his companions by pirates. Among his relics is a book, “On the Advantage of Death” by St Ambrose, bearing the mark of an axe or sword supposedly used in the massacre.

In the estimation of historian Christopher Dawson, Boniface had a deeper influence on Europe than any other Englishman. Boniface is the patron saint of Germany, brewers, tailors, and file-cutters.

1328

William of Ockham escapes Avignon

The fourteenth century was one of the worst eras in human history. Those hundred years would see the end of the Medieval Warming Period that had brought an increase in agricultural production and population, and the start of the Little Ice Age. With this change in climate would come the massive famine of the Great Hunger and the Great Drowning when an Atlantic gale claimed tens of thousands of lives and the sea swallowed land in the Netherlands. To add to the misery would be the Black Death, six successive waves of the plague that would cut the population of Europe in half by 1400. This demographic disaster provoked peasant and urban rebellions all across Europe. Tragically, the Christian Church was in no shape to respond positively: it too was in a state of corruption and disarray.

One of the problems wracking the church was the question of poverty. In the previous century, two new orders of friars, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, espoused lives of poverty and a close association with the poor. When the papacy began to employ these mendicant brothers as professors in the new universities, as itinerant preachers, and as administrators of the Inquisition, their rejection of material goods proved a hindrance. How could the friars serve the Church and beg for their daily bread at the same time? Calls were made to ease their financial situation; if they could not own property, could they not perhaps enjoy the earnings — the usufruct — from property dedicated to their use? The Franciscans divided over this issue with hard-liners and moderates engaged in heated debate. The traditionalist, or Spritualist, Franciscans argued that “To say or assert that Christ, in showing the way of perfection, and the Apostles, in following that way and setting an example to others who wished to lead the perfect life, possessed nothing either severally or in common, either by right of ownership and dominium or by personal right, we corporately and unanimously declare to be not heretical, but true and catholic.” This position embarrassed the Church, whose rulers were far, far removed from poverty, and the pope in a series of bulls forced the Franciscans to accept ownership of property and declared heretical the notion that Christ and the Apostles had no possessions.

Michael of Cesena, the Franciscan Minister-General and William of Ockham, the English theologian, objected to this line. Ockham called the pope’s thinking “heretical, erroneous, silly, ridiculous, fantastic, insane and defamatory”. Little wonder that they eventually ended up under arrest in Avignon. While they were languishing in durance vile, a quarrel had broken out between the papacy and the King of Germany, Louis the Bavarian. Louis backed the Spiritual Franciscans (in part because Ockham went as far as to deny the papacy any kind of secular overlordship), declared that he had deposed the Avignon Pope John XXII and recognized a Franciscan as his candidate for the papal throne. Taking advantage of this split, Ockham and Cesena escaped from Avignon and made their way to Louis’ court, where an anti-papal coterie argued for a separation of secular and religious powers.

In the short run, the papacy would prevail, but Ockham’s political thought and his philosophical contributions (e.g., “Ockham’s Razor) would endure.

Pope Gregory VII

If saints are to be ranked by the sweetness of their character, Gregory VII, born Hildebrand of Soana (1020-85), must be placed very low on the celestial hierarchy. His belligerence and intolerance led to a clash between papacy and empire that cost many lives and led to centuries of strife.

Born into a peasant family, Hildebrand became a monk. His talents were recognized by a series of papal administrations in the mid-eleventh century, at a time when reforming zeal was sweeping the church. The chief abuse that came under attack was simony, which originally meant the corrupt buying and selling of church offices, but which now came to mean any kind of lay participation in the naming of church officials. For centuries it had been the custom for nobles, kings and emperors to have a hand in the selection of bishops, abbots, and even popes. In many countries, high-ranking clerics were an integral part of the feudal system, owning vast lands, paying feudal dues, and contributing to the provision of knights; for secular rulers to step back from appointing these men was unrealistic. Reforming clergy particularly took aim at rulers investing bishops with the staff and ring of office — thus the name “Investiture Controversy” for this whole collision of world views.

Hildebrand was among the chief supporters of popes who repudiated the role of the Holy Roman Emperor in naming pontiffs. He rose in administrative rank until finally in 1073 he was elected pope, taking the name Gregory VII. He immediately quarrelled with Emperor Henry IV. The young German king had political ambitions in northern Italy which clashed with those of the papacy and he refused to relinquish the power to name church officials. Denunciations were issued from each side, political allies were sought and bribed, apologies were made and retracted, and in 1076 Gregory excommunicated the emperor and declared his throne vacant. This forced Henry to wait in the snow outside the papal castle at Canossa (shown above) for a chance to abjectly debase himself in front of the pope in order to win back admission to the sacraments and to his throne. Once the ban was lifted, however, Henry resumed the fight which continued for the next ten years.

Gregory believed that the papacy was the natural ruler of Christendom and he held a low opinion of secular rulers. His intellectual circle engaged in a pamphlet war against the supporters of kings, probably the first controversy over political theory in western Europe since the fall of Rome. Gregory’s Dictatus papae of 1076 mandated that the princes of the world should kiss the feet of the pope, that the pope could depose emperors, and he could be judged by no man.

Needing a secular ally with an army to repel Henry’s invasion of papal lands, Gregory made an alliance with an unsavoury character, Robert Guiscard, a Norman bandit and adventurer who had made himself ruler of southern Italy. In 1084 Henry succeeded in capturing Rome and crowning a rival pope, forcing Gregory into hiding, but the Germans had to withdraw as the Norman army moved north. Guiscard liberated Gregory and occupied Rome but his troops behaved so badly that they were forced to flee, taking Gregory with them. The next year Gregory died in Salerno. On his tomb are the words: “I have loved justice and hated iniquity; therefore I die in exile.”

325

The Council of Nicaea

Though the very earliest Christian churches had regarded Jesus as divine and the Son of God, it took the Council of Nicaea to define the exact relationship of the Son to the divine Father. In the decade after the legalization of Christianity and imperial favour falling on the Church after centuries of persecution, two major schools of thought emerged on the subject. The first, promulgated by Arius, an Egyptian priest, held that Jesus was a creation of the Father, saying “if the Father begat the Son, he that was begotten had a beginning of existence: and from this it is evident, that there was a time when the Son was not.” Arius cited Scripture in defence of this position, noting that Jesus had stated that he was inferior to the Father (John 14:28) and that Colossians 1:15 had called Jesus “the first-born of all creation.” The second position was that Jesus was of the same essence as the Father — homoousios in Greek — co-equal and co-eternal. The controversy that this debate generated prompted the emperor Constantine to call a conference of bishops from around the empire to settle the issue. They met at Nicaea in Asia Minor (now the Turkish city of Iznik).

The Christological issue was settled decisively against the views of Arius. He and two supporters were condemned and exiled; it was decreed that “if any writing composed by Arius should be found, it should be handed over to the flames, so that not only will the wickedness of his teaching be obliterated, but nothing will be left even to remind anyone of him. And I hereby make a public order, that if someone should be discovered to have hidden a writing composed by Arius, and not to have immediately brought it forward and destroyed it by fire, his penalty shall be death. As soon as he is discovered in this offense, he shall be submitted for capital punishment…”

The Council also came to other decisions. A new approach to computing the date of Easter was arrived at and the schism of Melitius was dealt with. (Meletius differed with most of the Church over readmitting Christians who had apostatized under persecution.) A number of canons, or decrees, were issued prohibiting self-castration and usury as well as matters of church administration. The Council of Nicaea set the example for gatherings of clerics to set guidelines for the Church.

1291 The fall of the last Crusader State in the Holy Land

Pope Urban II in 1095 summoned the kings of Europe to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim occupation. The result was the First Crusade which took advantage of Islamic disunity in the eastern Mediterranean to reconquer lost Christian territory in the Levant, culminating with the capture of Jerusalem in 1099. Most of the victorious western European knights returned home, but many stayed on to establish four crusader states: the County of Edessa, the Principality of Antioch, the County of Tripoli, and the Kingdom of Jerusalem. The were fragile Catholic feudal entities ruling over a mixed population of Orthodox Christians, Armenians, and Muslims, sustained by a trickle of outside immigration and militarily dependent on the fighting monks of the Templar, Hospitaller and Teutonic Orders.

When the quarrelling Muslim powers in the region put aside their differences or were subdued by a stronger Islamic state, things went badly for the crusaders. First under the Seljuq Turks and then under the Egyptian Mamluks, Muslim forces nibbled away at the westerners. First Edessa fell, then Jerusalem, leaving only a narrow strip of coastline under crusader control.

Throughout the thirteenth century pressure on this enclave grew. When Tripoli was taken in 1289, it left only the port of Acre and its environs in the hands of the crusaders. In early April 1291, Muslim armies converged on it from several directions, assembling a massive force with numerous siege engines. The resistance was led by the Templars and the Hospitallers (also called the Knights of St John) who held out for six weeks before the walls were reduced by battering and house-to-house combat took place. On May 18, the city surrendered, effectively ending the crusader presence in the Middle Eastern landmass. The Kingdom of Jerusalem set itself up in Cyprus, the Knights of St John took the island of Rhodes off the Turkish coast, and the Templars would soon be dissolved and murdered by the French King, Philip the Handsome. It was not until 1917 when General Allenby’s British forces took Jerusalem from the Turks that a western army had success in the Holy Land.

St John of Nepomuk

Butler’s Lives of the Saints tells us:

JOHN was born, in answer to prayer, 1330 [or 1345 according to some], of poor parents, at Nepomuc in Bohemia. In gratitude they consecrated him to God; and his holy life as a priest led to his appointment as chaplain to the court of the Emperor Wenceslas, where he converted numbers by his preaching and example. Amongst those who sought his advice was the empress, who suffered much from her husband’s unfounded jealousy. St. John taught her to bear her cross with joy; but her piety only incensed the Emperor, and he tried to extort her confessions from the Saint. He threw St. John into a dungeon, but gained nothing; then, inviting him to his palace, he promised him riches if he would yield, and threatened death if he refused. The Saint was silent. He was racked and burnt with torches; but no words, save Jesus and Mary, fell from his lips. At last set free, he spent his time in preaching, and preparing for the death he knew to be at hand.

On Ascension Eve, May 16, [1393] Wenceslas, after a final and fruitless attempt to move his constancy, ordered him to be cast into the river, and that night the martyr’s hands and feet were bound, and he was thrown from the bridge of Prague. As he died, a heavenly light shining on the water discovered the body, which was buried with the honours due to a Saint. A few years later, Wenceslas was deposed by his own subjects, and died an impenitent and miserable death.

In 1618 the Calvinist and Hussite soldiers of the Protestant Elector Frederick tried repeatedly to demolish the shrine of St. John at Prague. Each attempt was miraculously frustrated; and once the persons engaged in the sacrilege, among whom was an Englishman, were killed on the spot. In 1620 the imperial troops recovered the town by a victory which was ascribed to the Saint’s intercession, as he was seen on the eve of the battle, radiant with glory, guarding the cathedral. When his shrine was opened, three hundred and thirty years after his decease, the flesh had disappeared, and one member alone remained incorrupt, the tongue; thus still, in silence, giving glory to God.

John was canonized in 1729 and is one of the favourite Czech saints. He is the patron of those suffering from untrue calumnies and a protector from floods and drowning.

1917

The first Marian apparition at Fátima.

Of the hundreds of appearances of the Virgin Mary reported to the Church throughout history, only twelve (though some sources say fifteen) are officially recognized by the Vatican. The earliest of these was in Guadalupe, Mexico in 1555 and the most recent was in Rwanda in 1982. One of the most famous of them all and, certainly the most public, was a series of apparitions that occurred in 1917 to three Portuguese peasant children in Fátima.

In the spring of 1916 Lucia dos Santos (age 9) and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto (ages 7 and 6) were herding sheep on a field known as Cova da Iria when they claimed to have been visited three times by an angel who instructed them in prayer and worship. On May 13, 1917 the children were in the same field when they beheld an apparition of a shining lady, whom they identified as the Virgin Mary, in an oak tree. The vision said she had come from heaven and would return in the same place and time on the thirteenth day of the coming months.  During these visits the children were given three secrets. The first was a vision of Hell; the second was a prediction of war; and the third was kept private by Louisa, but was eventually written down and conveyed to the pope.

News of these apparitions leaked out and caused considerable controversy. Crowds gathered at the spot, though they saw, at first, nothing of what the children claimed to see. At one point the three youngsters were arrested and threatened with torture if they did not reveal the secrets, but they resisted. The apparition had promised that at her final visit in October she would produce a miracle that would cause many to believe. On October 13, 1917 before a crowd numbered in the tens of thousands, the sun seemed to behave erratically. In the words of one observer: “Before the astonished eyes of the crowd, whose aspect was biblical as they stood bare-headed, eagerly searching the sky, the sun trembled, made sudden incredible movements outside all cosmic laws – the sun ‘danced’ according to the typical expression of the people.” This “Miracle of the Sun” was widely reported in the media and Fatima became a site of massive pilgrimage.

Both Jacinta and Francisco soon perished in the great influenza epidemic but Louisa became a nun and lived until the ripe old age of 97, dying in 2005. Pope John Paul II credited Our Lady of Fatima for saving him from an assassination attempt. On his pilgrimage to the site, he left the bullet that was extracted from his body and it now rests in the crown of the Virgin’s statue in the chapel. In 2017, Pope Francis announced the canonization of Jacinta and Francisco after miracles had been attributed to their intercession. Lucia is also on the path to sainthood.