Today, December 3rd, is the feast day, and has been now for three hundred and fifty six years, of St. Francis Xavier. The sheer quantity of industrial enterprises he engaged for the desire of Christ flounder the ingenuity and captivates the admiration of men. The season has come for a Jesuit commercial. He was a […]
Tag: saints
The Carmelites of Compiègne: Martyrs in the Age of Enlightenment
After her election as Carmelite prioress in 1786, thirty-four-year-old Mother Teresa of St. Augustine learned of a inexplicable paper in the monastery’s archive, dated from the previous century. It recorded the strange occult dream of a partially paralyzed young woman who had lived at the Compiegne monastery for years as a compensate guest. In 1694, […]
Medieval Catholics Saw Nature as a Stepping Stone to God
The medieval era, we are told, was defined by suspicion and discord towards the natural, material world-wide. “In medieval Christian doctrine, ” find academic and columnist Joel Kotkin in his new book The Coming of Neo-Feudalism, “the world we grasp with our abilities is transitory, while the spiritual world is more real …. The emphasis […]
St. Robert Bellarmine, Patron Saint of Catechists
The reading at Mass from the First Letter of St. Paul to Timothy lists the perfections required of a bishop. Among these we find that he should be “temperate, self-controlled, respectable, genial, able to teach.” These attributes, most outstandingly the last, accurately mark the saint whom the Church celebrates today. St. Robert Bellarmine was a […]