Mary the Mother of Jesus
  Et álibi aliórum plurimórum sanctórum Mártyrum et Confessórum, atque sanctárum Vírginum.
And elsewhere in divers places, many other holy martyrs, confessors, and holy virgins.
Пресвятая Богородице спаси нас! Santíssima Mãe de Deus, salva-nos!
RDeo grátias. R.  Thanks be to God.

Have a heart and zeal to save the poor and release the oppressed.

May we grow in joy, knowing we serve a living God.
 
 
15 Promises of the Virgin Mary to those who recite the Rosary

Mary’s faith unties the knot of sin
Mary’s faith unties the knot of sin. What does that mean? The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council took up a phrase of Saint Irenaeus, who states that “the knot of Eve’s disobedience was untied by the obedience of Mary; what the virgin Eve bound by her unbelief, the Virgin Mary loosened by her faith” (Adversus Haereses, III, 22, 4).

The “knot” of disobedience, the “knot” of unbelief. When children disobey their parents, we can say that a little “knot” is created. This happens if the child acts with an awareness of what he or she is doing, especially if there is a lie involved. At that moment, they break trust with their parents. You know how frequently this happens!
Then the relationship with their parents needs to be purified of this fault; the child has to ask forgiveness so that harmony and trust can be restored. Something of the same sort happens in our relationship with God.
When we do not listen to him, when we do not follow his will, we do concrete things that demonstrate our lack of trust in him – for that is what sin is – and a kind of knot is created deep within us. These knots take away our peace and serenity.

… But we know one thing: nothing is impossible for God’s mercy! Even the most tangled knots are loosened by his grace. And Mary, whose “yes” opened the door for God to undo the knot of the ancient disobedience, is the Mother who patiently and lovingly brings us to God, so that he can untangle the knots of our soul by his fatherly mercy.

   
ABORTION IS A MORAL OUTRAGE
Marian spirituality: all are invited.
 40daysforlife.com
September 30
420 ST JEROME, DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH JEROME (EUSEBIUS HIERONYMUS SOPHRONIUS) Born at Stridon, Hungary Doctors of the Church (Lat. Doctores Ecclesiae) --
Certain ecclesiastical writers have received this title
on account of the great advantage the whole Church has derived from their doctrine.

In the Western church 4 eminent Fathers of the Church attained this honour
Early Middle Ages: St. Gregory the Great, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome.

In the Eastern Church three Doctors were pre-eminent: St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, and St. Gregory Nazianzen.


Six to Be Canonized on Feast of Christ the King Nov 23 2014

CAUSES OF SAINTS

Our Bartholomew Family Prayer List
Joyful Mystery on Monday Saturday   Glorius Mystery on Sunday Wednesday
  
Sorrowful Mystery on Friday Tuesday   Luminous Mystery on Thursday Veterens of War

Acts of the Apostles

Nine First Fridays Devotion to the Sacred Heart From the writings of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque
How do I start the Five First Saturdays?
Mary Mother of GOD 15 Promises of the Virgin Mary to those who recite the Rosary

Acts of the Apostles
The way to Heaven is strait and narrow: they who wish to arrive at that place of bliss by walking
in the paths of pleasure shall be disappointed; and therefore few reach it, because few are willing to use violence
to themselves in resisting temptations. -- St Alphonsus de Liguori


September 30 – Saint John Paul II brings a gold rose to Our Lady of Knock, Queen of Ireland (1979)
One and a half million pilgrims visit the shrine of Knock every year 
 Knock is one of the most important places of Catholic pilgrimages in Ireland today.
On August 21, 1879, the Virgin Mary, Saint Joseph and Saint John the Evangelist appeared on the south gable of Knock's church. This apparition was witnessed by 15 people of all ages.
Saint John Paul II's personal pilgrimage there in 1979 inspired even greater an interest in this holy place.
Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta visited the shrine in June 1993. One and a half million pilgrims go there every year. 
www.cartemarialedumonde.org

  173 Sophia mother of the virgin-martyrs Faith, Hope and Charity
  286 Sts. Victor and Ursus Theban Legion
      Antoninus soldier Theban Legion blood in phial miraculou
 
330 ST GREGORY THE ENLIGHTENER, Bishop OF ASHTISHAT
  362 Leopardus servant/slave in the household of Julian the Apostate
  420 ST JEROME, DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH JEROME (EUSEBIUS HIERONYMUS SOPHRONIUS) Born at Stridon, Hungary
7th v. St. Enghenedl Born in Wales
  610 Midan (Nidan) saint on Anglesey in Wales

  653 ST HONORIUS, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY
  869 Tancred, Torthred and Tova
1082 ST SIMON OF CREPY helped reconcile kings and subjects; great negotiator for Pope St Gregory VII
<1572 Romæ natális sancti Francísci Bórgiæ, Sacerdótis et Confessóris; qui Præpósitus Generális fuit Societátis Jesu, ac vitæ asperitáte, oratiónis dono, abdicátis sæculi et recusátis Ecclésiæ dignitátibus, vir memorábilis éxstitit.  Ipsíus autem festum sexto Idus Octóbris celebrátur.
Quarto Nonas Januárii 1873 Lexóvii, in Gállia, item natális sanctæ Terésiæ a Jesu Infánte, ex Ordine Carmelitárum Excalceatórum; quam, vitæ innocéntia et simplicitáte claríssimam, Pius Undécimus, Póntifex Máximus, sanctárum Vírginum albo adscrípsit, peculiárem ómnium Missiónum Patrónam declarávit, ejúsque festum quinto Nonas Octóbris recoléndum esse decrévit.
Doctors of the Church (Lat. Doctores Ecclesiae) --
Certain ecclesiastical writers have received this title
on account of the great advantage the whole Church has derived from their doctrine.

In the Western church 4 eminent Fathers of the Church attained this honour
Early Middle Ages: St. Gregory the Great, St. Ambrose, St. Augustine, and St. Jerome.
Jerome was a strong, outspoken man.
He had the virtues and unpleasant fruits of being a fearless critic and all the usual moral problems of a man.
He was, as someone has said, no admirer of moderation whether in virtue or against evil.
He was swift to anger, but also swift to feel remorse, even more severe on his own shortcomings than those of others.
A pope is said to have remarked, on seeing a picture of Jerome striking his breast with a stone,
"You do well to carry that stone, for without it the Church would never have canonized you"

The "four Doctors" became a commonplace among the Scholastics, and a decree of Boniface VIII (1298) ordering their feasts to be kept as doubles in the whole Church contained in his 6th book Decretals (cap. "Gloriosus", de relique. et vener. sanctorum, in Sexto, III, 22).
In the Eastern Church three Doctors were pre-eminent:
St. John Chrysostom, St. Basil, and St. Gregory Nazianzen.
The Earth Yielded Its Fruit  September 30 - Saint Jerome (d. 420)
"Let all the nations celebrate God: the earth has yielded its fruit," say the Scriptures. But first, the earth gave its flower. It is written in the Song of Songs: "I am the flower of the fields, the lily of the valley."
The flower afterwards became fruit, so that we may eat it, so that we may eat its flesh. Do you want to know what the fruit is? The Virgin, born of a virgin; the Lord, of the handmaid; God, of man; the Son, of the mother; the fruit, of the earth.

In Béthlehem Judæ deposítio sancti Hierónymi Presbyteri, Confessóris et Ecclésiæ Doctóris, qui, ómnium stúdia litterárum adéptus ac probatórum Monachórum imitátor factus, multa hæresum monstra gládio suæ doctrínæ confódit; demum, cum ad decrépitam usque vixísset ætátem, in pace quiévit, sepultúsque est ad Præsépe Dómini.  Ejus corpus, póstea Romam delátum, in Basílica sanctæ Maríæ Majóris cónditum fuit.
    In Bethlehem of Juda, the death of St. Jerome, priest and doctor of the Church.  Excelling in all kinds of learning, he imitated the life of the most approved monks, and disposed of many monstrous heresies with the sword of his doctrine.  Having at length reached a very advanced age, he rested in peace and was buried near the manger of our Lord.  His body was afterwards transferred to Rome, and placed in the basilica of St. Mary Major.

173 Sophia mother of the virgin-martyrs Faith, Hope and Charity
who were martyred in Rome under Hadrian. Three days later, while praying at their tomb, Sophia also reposed, martyred in her soul.
Antoninus soldier Theban Legion blood in phial miraculous 3rd cent  
martyred on the banks of the Trebbia near Piacenza in Italy. His blood, kept in a phial, has the same miraculous properties as that of St Januarius.
286 Sts. Victor and Ursus Theban Legion  
Two martyrs who were associated with the Theban Legion.
362 Leopardus servant/slave in the household of Julian the Apostate
His martyrdom probably took place in Rome.
7th v. St. Enghenedl
Welsh saint venerated in a church in Anglesey, Wales.

330 ST GREGORY THE ENLIGHTENER, Bishop OF ASHTISHAT 

THE Christian faith was first preached in Armenia during the second or third century, probably by missionaries from Syria and Persia, but the local beliefs concerning this first evangelization are different and contradictory. These worth­less legends give the credit for it to the apostles SS Bartholomew and Thaddeus, and together with Thaddeus have appropriated the story of King Abgar the Black and the likeness of our Lord, which really belongs to Edessa and St Addai.

Never­theless, the Armenians also venerate St Gregory of Ashtishat as the apostle who brought the light of the gospel to their country, whence he is named “the Il­luminator” or “ Enlightener “ and regarded as their principal national saint and patron. He was born in the third century, at a time when the Persians had invaded Armenia. His origin and even nationality are uncertain.
    According to unreliable Armenian tradition he was a son of that Parthian Anak who murdered King Khosrov I of Armenia. When the dying Khosrov ordered the extermination of Anak’s family, the baby Gregory was smuggled away by a merchant of Varlarshapat to Caesarea in Cappadocia. Here certainly he was baptized, and in due course married and had two sons, St Aristakes and St Vardanes. Tiridates, a son of King Khosrov, who had been in exile among the Romans, returned with an army and regained his father’s throne. Gregory was given a place at the court of Tiridates (an unlikely thing if he were really a son of his father’s murderer), but soon incurred the displeasure of the king by the encouragement he gave to the Armenian Christians and by his zeal in making converts. Active persecution began, and Gregory himself suffered greatly. But eventually he triumphed. Tiridates himself was converted (he is venerated as a saint), and while Christians in the Empire were suffering under the persecution of Diocletian, Christianity was proclaimed the official religion of Armenia, which thus became—superficially—the first Christian state in the world’s history.

St Gregory went to Caesarea and there was consecrated bishop by the metro­politan Leontius. He established his, see at Ashtishat and then set himself with the aid of Greek and Syrian missionaries to organize his church, instruct the new converts, and win over waverers. To recruit a clergy he took a number of youths, instructed them in the Holy Scriptures and Christian morality, and taught them Greek and Syriac; but the episcopate became hereditary, and the chief bishop of Armenia was a direct descendant of St Gregory for a century after.

“ Invincibly did our Illuminator carry the life-giving name of Jesus from end to end of the land, in all seasons and weathers, untiring and earnest in the duties of an evangelist, repelling adversaries, preaching before chieftains and nobles, and enlightening every soul which by the new birth of baptism was made a child of God. To show forth the glory of Christ he rescued prisoners and captives and those oppressed by tyrants he destroyed unjust contracts and liabilities he comforted by his words many who were afflicted or living in fear, putting before them the hope of the glory of God and planting our Lord Jesus Christ in their souls so that they became truly glad.”

Gregory sent his son St Aristakes to represent him at the first ecumenical council at Nicaea, and when Gregory read the acta of that assembly he is said to have exclaimed: “As for us, we praise Him who was before time, worshipping the Holy Trinity and the one Godhead of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, now and throughout all ages.” Whether or no St Gregory actually made use of these words, they are still repeated by the celebrant in the Armenian eucharistic liturgy when the deacon has recited the conciliar anathema after the creed. Shortly after Gregory consecrated Aristakes to succeed him, and himself retired to a hermitage on Mount Manyea in the province of Taron. In the following year he was found dead by a shepherd and was buried at Thortan.

The above particulars of this saint are all quite uncertain, but if authentic information is scarce legends are not wanting, which are set out at length in a history written by one who called himself Agathangelus and averred that he was secretary to King Tiridates. Actually it was not composed earlier than the second half of the fifth century. According to this work, Gregory first got into trouble with Tiridates for refusing to lay a garland of flowers on the image of the goddess Anahit in her temple at Ashtishat. When he could by no means persuade him to this act of worship, Tiridates had him tortured in twelve different ways, ways of a cruel ingenuity differing considerably from those usually recorded of martyrs under the Romans. Gregory was then thrown into a noisome pit, stinking with corpses, filth and vermin, where he was left and forgotten for fifteen years. But he was kept alive by the ministrations of a kindly widow. After the martyrdom of St Rhipsime (September 29), King Tiridates was turned into a wild boar, roaming about the woods with others of his kind, and it was revealed in a vision to his sister that he would be restored to his natural shape only by the prayers of Gregory. Whereupon the pit was searched, he was found and released from confinement, and at once healed the king who in repentance and gratitude was baptized with his wife and sister. Gregory then fasted without food, prayed, and preached for seventy days, and had a vision at Varlarshapat near Mount Ararat in which our Lord came down from Heaven and showed him that He wanted the chief cathedral-church of Armenia to be built there where he was. Which was done and the place called Etshmiadzin, which means “the Only-begotten has descended”; but the story of the vision was probably really invented to bolster up the claim of the Armenian church to be independent of Caesarea. Each of these marvels, namely, the Twelve Torments, the Casting into the Pit, the Release from the Pit, and the Vision, is commemorated by a separate feast among the Armenians, who keep other feasts of St Gregory as well. He is sometimes erroneously venerated as a martyr, e.g. among the Greeks. Devotion to St Gregory is found in southern Italy, where Armenian “colonists” introduced it. A church in Naples indeed claims some of his relics, but it is most doubtful that they ever left Armenia. The saint is commemorated in the canon of the Armenian Mass.

Those who are not specialists in oriental languages have to be content, in the case of Armenian and Georgian saints, to consult second-hand sources. Even the Bollandists in the eighteenth century (Acta Sanctorum, September, vol. viii) had to do the best they could with the aid of a Greek version or abridgement by the Metaphrast of the unreliable and often fabulous Armenian narrative attributed to Agathangelus. The genuine Armenian Agathangelus, if he ever existed, cannot be traced, but we possess an Arabic version of an earlier stage in the development of the pseudo-Agathangelus. This is in a letter, c, 714, of the Arabian bishop George to the priest Joshua. See von Ryssel, Ein Brief Georgs an den Presb. Joshua (1883); A. von Gutschmid, Kleine Schriften, vol. iii (1892), pp. 339—420 Geizer in the Berichte of the Sächsischen Gesellschaft, 1895, pp. 109—174; P. Peeters in the Analecta Bollandiana, vol. xxvi (1932), pp. 117—120 and vol. 1(1932), pp. 3—58; G. Garitte in Documents pour l’etude do livre d’Agathange, Studi e testi, no. cxxvii (1946) includes an unpublished Greek text of Agathangelus from which the Arabic is derived. See also a long article by Fr Paul Peeters in Analecta Bollandiana, vol. lx (1942), apropos the marble calendar of Naples; the notice in the Bollandist commentary on the Mart. Rom. (1940), pp. 426—427; S. Weber, Die Katholische Kirche in Armenien (1903), pp. 115 Seq.; F. Tournebize, Histoire...de l’Arménie (1901), pp. 423 seq.; and L. Duchesne, Histoire ancienne de l’Église, vol. iii (191,), pp. 528—536.

420 ST JEROME, DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH JEROME (EUSEBIUS HIERONYMUS SOPHRONIUS)

The father of the Church most learned in the Sacred Scriptures, was born about the year 342 at Stridon, a small town upon the confines of Pannonia, Dalmatia and Italy, near Aquileia.
    His father took great care to have his son instructed in religion and in the first principles of letters at home and afterwards sent him to Rome. Jerome had there for tutor the famous pagan grammarian Donatus. He became master of the Latin and Greek tongues (his native language was the Illyrian), read the best writers in both languages with great application, and made progress in oratory; but being left without a guide under the discipline of a heathen master he forgot some of the true piety which had been instilled into him in his childhood. Jerome went out of this school free indeed from gross vices, but unhappily a stranger to a Christian spirit and enslaved to vanity and other weaknesses, as he afterward confessed and bitterly lamented. On the other band he was baptized at Rome (he was a catechumen till he was at least eighteen) and he himself tells us that “it was my custom on Sundays to visit, with friends of my own age and tastes, the tombs of the martyrs and apostles, going down into those subterranean galleries whose walls on either side preserve the relics of the dead.” After some three years in Rome he determined to travel in order to improve his studies and, with his friend Bonosus, he went to Trier. Here it was that the religious spirit with which he was so deeply imbued was awakened, and his heart was entirely converted to God.

In 370 Jerome settled down for a time at Aquileia, where the bishop, St Valerian, had attracted so many good men that its clergy were famous all over the Western church. With many of these St Jerome became friendly, and their names appear in his writings. Among them were St Chromatius, then a priest, who succeeded Valerian; his two brothers, the deacons Jovinian and Eusebius; St Heliodorus and his nephew Nepotian; and, above all, Rufinus, first the bosom friend and then the bitter opponent of Jerome. Already he was beginning to make enemies and provoke strong opposition, and after two or three years an unspecified conflict broke up the group, and Jerome decided to withdraw into some distant country. Bonosus, who had been the companion of his studies and his travels from childhood, went to live on a desert island in the Adriatic. Jerome himself happened to meet a well-known priest of Antioch, Evagrius, at Aquileia, which turned his mind towards the East. With his friends Innocent, Heliodorus and Hylas (a freed slave of St Melania) he determined to go thither.

St Jerome arrived in Antioch in 374 and made some stay there. Innocent and Hylas were struck down by illness and died, and Jerome too sickened. In a letter to St Eustochium he relates that in the heat of fever he fell into a delirium in which he seemed to himself to be arraigned before the judgment-seat of Christ. Being asked who he was, he answered that he was a Christian. “Thou liest ‘, was the reply, “Thou art a Ciceronian: for where thy treasure is, there is thy heart also.” This experience had a deep effect on him which was deepened by his meeting with St Malchus, whose strange story is related herein under October 21. As a result, St Jerome withdrew into the wilderness of Chalcis, a barren land to the south-east of Antioch, where he spent four years alone. He suffered much from ill health, and even more from strong temptations of the flesh.

“In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert“, he wrote years afterwards to St Eustochium, “burnt up with the heat of the scorching sun so that it frightens even the monks that inhabit it, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome...In this exile and prison to which for the fear of Hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts, I many times imagined myself witnessing the dancing of the Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them. My face was pallid with fasting, yet my will felt the assaults of desire: in my cold body and in my parched-up flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was able to live. Alone with this enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and I tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks. I am not ashamed to disclose my temptations, but I grieve that lam not now what I then was. I often joined night to day crying and beating my breast till calm returned.” Thus does God allow His servants to be from time to time severely tried; but the ordinary life of St Jerome was doubtless quiet, regular and undisturbed. To forestall and ward off the insurgence of the flesh he added to his corporal austerities a new study, which he hoped would fix his rambling imagination and give him the victory over himself. This was to learn Hebrew. “When my soul was on fire with bad thoughts,” says he writing to the monk Rusticus in 411, “as a last resource I became a scholar to a monk who had been a Jew, to learn of him the Hebrew alphabet; and, from the judicious rules of Quintilian, the copious flowing eloquence of Cicero, the grave style of Fronto, and the smoothness of Pliny, I turned to this language of hissing and broken-winded words. What labour it cost me, what difficulties I went through, how often I despaired and left off, and how I began again to learn, both I myself who felt the burden can witness, and they also who lived with me. And I thank our Lord, that I now gather such sweet fruit from the bitter sowing of those studies.” However, he still continued to read the pagan classics from time to time.

The church of Antioch was at this time disturbed by doctrinal and disciplinary disputes. The monks of the desert of Chalcis vehemently took sides in these disputes and wanted St Jerome to do the same and to pronounce on the matters at issue. He preferred to stand aloof and be left to himself, but he wrote two letters to consult St Damasus, who had been raised to the papal chair in 366, what course he ought to steer. In the first he says:
 “I am joined in communion with your holiness, that is, with the chair of Peter; upon that rock I know the Church is built. Whoever eats the Lamb outside of that house is a profane person. Whoever is not in the ark shall perish in the flood. I do not know Vitalis I disown Mele­tius;
Paulinus * {* Rival claimants to the see of Antioch.} is a stranger to me. Whoever gathers not with you, scatters; he who is not Christ’s belongs to Antichrist...Order me, if you please, what I should do.”

Not receiving a speedy answer he soon after sent another letter on the same subject. The answer of Damasus is not extant: but it is certain that he and the West acknowledged Paulinus as bishop of Antioch, and St Jerome received from his hands the order of priesthood when he finally left the desert of Chalcis. Jerome had no wish to be ordained (he never celebrated the holy Sacrifice), and he only consented on the condition that he should not be obliged to serve that or any other church by his ministry: his vocation was to be a monk or recluse.
Soon after he went to Constantinople, there to study the Holy Scriptures under St Gregory Nazianzen. In several parts of his works Jerome mentions with satis­faction and gratitude the honour and happiness of having had so great a master in expounding the divine writings. Upon St Gregory’s leaving Constantinople in 382, St Jerome went to Rome with Paulinus of Antioch and St Epiphanius to attend a council which St Damasus held about the schism at Antioch. When the council was over, Pope Damasus detained him and employed him as his secretary; Jerome, indeed, claimed that he spoke through the mouth of Damasus.

At the pope’s request he made a revision, in accordance with the Greek text, of the Latin version of the gospels, which had been disfigured by “false transcription, by clumsy correction, and by careless interpolations, and a first revision of the Latin psalter.

Side by side with this official activity he was engaged in fostering and directing the marvelous flowering of asceticism which was taking place among some of the noble ladies of Rome. Among them are several of the most famous names of Christian antiquity: such were St Marcella, who is referred to herein under January 31, with her sister St Asella and their mother, St Albina; St Lea; St Melania the Elder, the first one of them to go to the Holy Land; St Fabiola (December 27); and St Paula (January 26) with her daughters St Blesilla and St Eustochium (September 28).
   But when St Damasus died in 384, and his pro­tection was consequently withdrawn from his secretary, St Jerome found himself in a very difficult position. in the preceding two years, while impressing all Rome by his personal holiness, learning and honesty, he had also contrived to get himself widely disliked; on the one hand by pagans and men of evil life whom he had fiercely condemned and on the other by people of good will who were offended by the saint’s harsh outspokenness and sarcastic wit. When he wrote in defence of the fashionable young widow, Blesilla, who had suddenly renounced the world,

he was witheringly satirical of pagan society and worldly life, and opposed to her lowliness the conduct of those who paint their cheeks with rouge and their eyelids with antimony; whose plastered faces, too white for those of human beings, look like idols, and if in a moment of forgetfulness they shed a tear it makes a furrow where it rolls down the painted cheek; they to whom years do not bring the gravity of age, who load their heads with other people’s hair, enamel a lost youth upon the wrinkles of age, and affect a maidenly timidity in the midst of a troop of grandchildren.”

In the letter on virginity which he wrote to St Eustochium he was no less scathing at the expense of Christian society, and made a particular attack on certain of the clergy. “All their anxiety is about their clothes. You would take them for bridegrooms rather than for clerics; all they think about is to know the names and houses and doings of rich ladies; and he proceeds to describe a particular individual, who hates fasting, looks forward to the smell of his meals, and has a barbarous and froward tongue. Jerome wrote to St Marcella of a certain man who wrongly supposed that he was an object of attack: “I amuse myself by laughing at the grubs, the owls and the crocodiles, and he takes all that I say to himself...Let me give him some advice. If he will only conceal his nose and keep his tongue still he may be taken to be both handsome and learned.”

It cannot be matter of surprise that, however justified his indignation was, his manner of expressing it aroused resentment, ills own reputation was attacked with similar vigour; even his simplicity, his walk and smile, the expression of his countenance were found fault with. Neither did the severe virtue of the ladies that were under his direction nor the reservedness of his own behaviour protect him from calumny: scandalous gossip was circulated about his relations with St Paula. He was properly indignant and decided to return to the East, there to seek a quiet retreat. He embarked at Porto in August 385. Before he left he wrote a fine apologia, in the form of a letter to St Asella. “Salute Paula and Eustochium, it concluded, “mine in Christ whether the world wills it or no... say to them, we shall all stand before the judgment seat of Christ, and there it shall be seen in what spirit each has lived.”

At Antioch nine months later he was joined by Paula, Eustochium and the other Roman religious women who had resolved to exile themselves with him in the Holy Land. Soon after arriving at Jerusalem they went to Egypt, to consult with the monks of Nitria, as well as with Didymus, a famous blind teacher in the school of Alexandria.

With the help of Paula’s generosity a monastery for men was built near the basilica of the Nativity at Bethlehem, together with buildings for three com­munities of women. St Jerome himself lived and worked in a large rock-hewn cell near to our Saviour’s birthplace, and opened a free school, as well as a hospice, “so that, as St Paula said, “should Mary and Joseph again visit Bethlehem there would be a place for them to lodge in. Here at last were some years of peace.

The illustrious Gauls congregate here, and no sooner has the Briton, so remote from our world, made some progress in religion than he leaves his early-setting sun to seek a land which he knows only by reputation and from the Scriptures. And what of the Armenians, the Persians, the peoples of India and Ethiopia, of Egypt, of Pontus, Cappadocia, Syria and Mesopotamia?...They throng here and set us the example of every virtue. The languages differ but the religion is the same; there are as many different choirs singing the psalms as there are nations...Here bread, and vegetables grown with our own hands, and milk, country fare, afford us plain and healthy food. In summer the trees give us shade. In autumn the air is cool and the fallen leaves restful. In spring our psalmody is sweeter for the singing of the birds. We do not lack wood when winter snow and cold are upon us. Let Rome keep its crowds, let its arenas run with blood, its circuses go mad, its theatres wallow in sensuality and, not to forget our friends, let the senate of ladies receive their daily visits.”

But Jerome could not stand aside and be mute when Christian truth was threatened.
He had at Rome composed his book against Helvidius on the perpetual virginity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Helvidius having maintained that Mary had other children, by St Joseph, after the birth of Christ. This and certain asso­ciated errors were again put forward by one Jovinian. St Paula’s son-in-law, St Pammachius, and other laymen were scandalized at his new doctrines, and sent his writings to St Jerome who in 393 wrote two books against Jovinian. In the first he shows the excellence of virginity embraced for the sake of virtue, which had been denied by Jovinian, and in the second confutes his other errors, This treatise was written in Jerome’s characteristically strong style and certain expres­sions in it seemed to some persons in Rome harsh and derogatory from the honour due to matrimony; St Pammachius informed St Jerome of the offence which he and many others took at them. Thereupon Jerome wrote his Apology to Pam­machius, sometimes called his third book against Jovinian, in a tone that can hardly have given his critics satisfaction.
   A few years later he had to turn his attention to Vigilantius—
Dormantius, sleepy, he calls him—a Gallo-Roman priest who both decried celibacy and condemned the veneration of relics, calling those who paid it idolaters and worshippers of ashes. St Jerome in his answer said:
We do not worship the relics of the martyrs but we honour them that we may worship Him whose martyrs they are. We honour the servants that the respect which is paid to them may be reflected back on the Lord.” He vindicates the honour paid to martyrs from idolatry because no Christian ever worshipped them as gods, and in order to show that the saints pray for us he says: If the apostles and martyrs while still living upon earth can pray for other men, how much more may they do it after their victories ? Have they less power now they are with Jesus Christ?

He defends the monastic state, and says that a monk seeks security by flying occasions and dangers because he mistrusts his own weakness and knows that there is no safety if a man sleeps near a serpent.
St Jerome often speaks of the saints in Heaven praying for us. Thus he entreated Heliodorus to pray for him when he should be in glory, and told St Paula, upon the death of her daughter Blesilla, “She now prays to the Lord for you, and obtains for me the pardon of my sins
. But the general tone of his reply to Vigilantius is even more vehement than that to Jovinian.

From 395 to 400 St Jerome was engaged in a war against Origenism, which unhappily involved a breach of his twenty-five years friendship with Rufinus. Years before he had written to him the doubtful statement that “friendship which can perish has never been a true one, as Shakespeare would write twelve hundred years later:
                        Love is not love
                   Which alters when it alteration finds
                   Or bends with the remover to remove

And now his affection for Rufinus was to succumb to his zeal for truth. Few writers made more use of Origen’s works and no one seemed a greater admirer of his erudition than St Jerome; but finding in the East that some had been seduced into grievous errors by the authority of his name and some of his writings he joined St Epiphanius in warmly opposing the spreading evil.

 Rufinus, who then lived in a monastery at Jerusalem, had translated many of Origen’s works into Latin and was an enthusiastic upholder of his authority: though it does not appear that he had any intention of upholding those heresies which are undoubtedly contained, at least materially, in Origen’s writings.
St Augustine was not the least of the good men who were distressed by the resulting quarrel, which, however, he the more easily understood because he himself became involved in a long controversy with St Jerome arising out of the exegesis of the second chapter of St Paul’s epistle to the Galatians. By his first letters he had unintentionally provoked Jerome, and had to use considerable charitable tact to soothe his easily wounded susceptibilities. St Jerome wrote in 416 “I never spared heretics and have always done my utmost that the enemies of the Church should be also my enemies”; but it seems that sometimes he unwarrantably assumed that those who differed from himself were necessarily the Church’s enemies. He was no admirer of moderation whether in virtue or against evil. He was swift to anger, but also swift to remorse, even more severe on his own shortcomings than on those of others. There is a story told that Pope Sixtus V, looking at a picture of the saint which represented him in the act of striking his breast with a stone, said: “You do well to carry that stone, for without it the Church would never have canonized you.”

   But his denunciations and controversies, necessary as most of them were, are the less important part of his activities.  Nothing has rendered the name of St Jerome so famous as his critical labors on the Holy Scriptures.
    For this the Church acknowledges him to have been raised by God through a special providence, and she styles him the greatest of all her doctors in expounding the divine word. Pope Clement VIII did not scruple to call him a man divinely assisted in translating the Bible. He was furnished with the greatest helps for such an undertaking, living many years upon the spot where the remains of ancient places, names, customs which were still recent, and other circumstances set before his eyes a clearer representation of many things recorded in holy writ than it is possible to have at a greater distance of place and time. Greek and Aramaic were then living languages, and Hebrew, though it had ceased to be such from the time of the captivity, was not less understood and spoken among the doctors of the law.
   It was thought that he could not be further instructed in the knowledge of Hebrew, but this was not his own judgment of the matter and he applied again to a famous Jewish master, called Bar Ananias, who came to teach him in the night-time, lest the Jews should know it.
    Above other conditions it is necessary that an interpreter of the Bible be a man of prayer and sincere piety. This alone can obtain light and help from Heaven, give to the mind a turn and temper which are necessary for being admitted into the sanctuary of the divine wisdom, and furnish the key. Jerome was prepared by a great purity of heart and a life spent in penance and contempla­tion before he was called by God to this undertaking. We have seen that while in Rome under Pope St Damasus he had revised the gospels and the psalms in the Old Latin version, followed by the rest of the New Testament. His new translation from the Hebrew of most of the books of the Old Testament was the work of his years of retreat at Bethlehem, which he undertook at the earnest entreaties of many devout and illustrious friends, and in view of the preference of the original to any version however venerable. He did not translate the books in order, but began by the books of Kings, and took the rest in hand at different times.
   The only parts of the Latin Bible called the Vulgate which were not either translated or worked over by St Jerome are the books of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch and the two books of Macchabees. The psalms he revised again, with the aid of Origen’s Hexapla and the Hebrew text, and this is the version included in the Vulgate and used in the Divine Office.* {*Since 1945 there is an alternative Latin version for this purpose, made principally from the Hebrew Masoretic text.}

   The first revision, called the Roman Psalter, is still used for the invitatory psalm at Matins and throughout the Missal, and for the Divine Office in St Peter’s at Rome, St Mark’s at Venice, and in the Milanese rite. St Jerome’s Vulgate was declared by the Council of Trent to be the authentic or authoritative Latin biblical text of the Catholic Church, without thereby implying any preference of this version above the original text or above versions in other languages.
In 1907 Pope Pius X entrusted to the monks of St Benedict the duty of restoring so far as possible St Jerome’s text of the Vulgate, which during fifteen centuries of use has become considerably modified and corrupted. The version of the Bible ordinarily used by English-speaking Catholics is the translation of the Vulgate made at Rheims and Douay towards the end of the sixteenth century, as revised by Bishop Challoner in the eighteenth; and the English version officially made by Monsignor Ronald Knox was also from the Vulgate.

  In the year 404 a great blow fell on St Jerome in the death of St Paula and a few years later in the sacking of Rome by Alaric many refugees fled into the East, and he wrote of them:

“Who would have believed that the daughters of that mighty city would one day be wandering as servants and slaves on the shores of Egypt and Africa? That Bethlehem would daily receive noble Romans, dis­tinguished ladies brought up in wealth and now reduced to beggary? I cannot help them all, but I grieve and weep with them, and, completely given up to the duties which charity imposes on me, I have put aside my commentary on Ezekiel and almost all study. For to-day we must translate the words of the Scriptures into deeds, and instead of speaking saintly words we must act them.

  Again towards the end of his life he was obliged to interrupt his studies by an incursion of barbarians, and some time after by the violence and persecution of the Pelagians who sent a troop of ruffians to Bethlehem to assault the monks and nuns who lived there under the direction of St Jerome, who had opposed them. Some were beaten, and a deacon was killed, and they set fire to the monasteries.

   In the following year St Eustochium died and Jerome himself soon followed her: worn out with penance and work, his sight and voice failing, his body like a shadow, he died peacefully on September 30, 420. He was buried under the church of the Nativity close to Paula and Eustochium, but his body was removed long after and now lies somewhere in St Mary Major’s at Rome.

He is often represented in art habited as a cardinal, because of the services he discharged for Pope St Damasus, and also with a lion from whose paw he was said to have drawn a thorn. This story has been transferred to him from the legend of St Gerasimus, but a lion is a far from inapt emblem of this fearless and fierce defender of the faith.

During recent years much advance has been made in the study of the life of St Jerome. Of special value is the volume Miscellanea Geronimiana which was published at Rome in 1920 to do honour to the fifteenth centenary of his death. In this a number of eminent scholars, including Duchesne, Batiffol, Lanzoni, Zeiller and Bulic, contribute studies on moot points of particular interest in connection with the saint. Then in 1922 appeared the best modern life, that of F. Cavallera, Saint Jérome, sa vie et son oeuvre (1922, a vols.), though the criticisms of Father Peeters in Analacta Bollandiana, vol. xlii, pp. 180—184, claim careful attention. At an earlier date we have the discovery by G. Morin of Jerome’s Commentarioli and Tractatus on the psalms, with other finds (see his Etudes, textes, decouvertes, pp. 17—25). Further, a very full article on St Jerome by H. Leclercq figures in DAC., vol. vii, cc. 2235— 2304; and another by J. Forget in DTC., vol. viii (1924), cc. 894—983. In the eighteenth century we have the painstaking labors of Vallarsi, and of the Bollandists (September, vol. viii). The early accounts of St Jerome, with the exception perhaps of the chronicle of Marcellinus (edited by Mommsen in MGH, Auctores antiquissimi, vol. ii, pp. 47 seq.),do not offer much of value. Jerome’s correspondence and works must always remain the principal source for a study of his life. See also P. Monceaux, St Jerome the Early Years: (1935); J. Duff, Letters of St Jerome (1942); A. Penna, S. Girolamo (1949) P. Antin, Essai sur S. Jérôme (1951); and A Monument to St Jerome (1952), essays ed. by F. X. Murphy.

St. Jerome, who was born Eusebius Hieronymous Sophronius, was the most learned of the Fathers of the Western Church. He was at a small town at the head of the Adriatic, near the episcopal city of Aquileia. His father, a Christian, took care that his son was well instructed at home, then sent him to Rome, where the young man's teachers were the famous pagan grammarian Donatus and Victorinus, a Christian rhetorician.
Jerome's native tongue was the Illyrian dialect, but at Rome he became fluent in Latin and Greek, and read the literatures of those languages with great pleasure.
His aptitude for oratory was such that he may have considered law as a career. He acquired many worldly ideas, made little effort to check his pleasure-loving instincts, and lost much of the piety that had been instilled in him at home. Yet in spite of the pagan and hedonistic influences around him, Jerome was baptized by Pope Liberius in 360. He tells us that "it was my custom on Sundays to visit, with friends of my own age and tastes, the tombs of the martyrs and Apostles, going down into those subterranean galleries whose walls on both sides preserve the relics of the dead." Here he enjoyed deciphering the inscriptions.

After three years at Rome, Jerome's intellectual curiosity led him to explore other parts of the world. He visited his home and then, accompanied by his boyhood friend Bonosus, went to Aquileia, where he made friends among the monks of the monastery there, notably Rufinus. Then, still accompanied by Bonosus, he traveled to Treves, in Gaul. He now renounced all secular pursuits to dedicate himself wholeheartedly to God.
Eager to build up a religious library, the young scholar copied out St. Hilary's books on and his Commentaries on the Psalms, and got together other literary and religious treasures. He returned to Stridonius, and later settled in Aquileia. The bishop had cleared the church there of the plague of Arianism and had drawn to it many eminent men.  Among those with whom Jerome formed friendships were Chromatius (later canonized), to whom Jerome dedicated several of his works, Heliodorus (also to become a saint), and his nephew Nepotian.  The famous theologian Rufinus, at first his close friend, afterward became his bitter opponent.  By nature an irascible man with a sharp tongue, Jerome made enemies as well as friends. He spent some years in scholarly studies in Aquileia, then, in search of more perfect solitude, he turned towards the East. With his friends, Innocent, Heliodorus, and Hylas, a freed slave, he started overland for Syria. On the way they visited Athens, Bithynia, Galatia, Pontus, Cappadocia, and Cilicia.

The party arrived at Antioch about the year 373. There Jerome at first attended the lectures of the famous Apollinaris, bishop of Laodicea, who had not yet put forward his heresy1 With his companions he left the city for the desert of Chalcis, about fifty miles southeast of Antioch. Innocent and Hylas soon died there, and Heliodorus left to return to the West, but Jerome stayed for four years, which were passed in study and in the practice of austerity. He had many attacks of illness but suffered still more from temptation. In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert, he wrote years afterwards to his friend Eustochium, burnt up with the heat of the sun, so scorching that it frightens even the monks who live there, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome.... In this exile and prison to which through fear of Hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, with no other company but scorpions and wild beasts, I many times imagined myself watching the dancing of Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them. My face was pallid with fasting, yet my will felt the assaults of desire. In my cold body and my parched flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was still able to live. Alone with the enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks. I am not ashamed to disclose my temptations, though I grieve that I am not now what I then was.

Jerome added to these trials the study of Hebrew, a discipline which he hoped would help him in winning a victory over himself. When my soul was on fire with wicked thoughts, he wrote in 411, as a last resort, I became a pupil to a monk who had been a Jew, in order to learn the Hebrew alphabet.
  From the judicious precepts of Quintilian, the rich and fluent eloquence of Cicero, the graver style of Fronto, and the smoothness of Pliny, I turned to this language of hissing and broken-winded words. What labor it cost me, what difficulties I went through, how often I despaired and abandoned it and began again to learn, both I, who felt the burden, and they who lived with me, can bear witness. I thank our Lord that I now gather such sweet fruit from the bitter sowing of those studies.

He continued to read the pagan classics for pleasure until a vivid dream turned him from them, at least for a time. In a letter he describes how, during an illness, he dreamed he was standing before the tribunal of Christ. Thou a Christian? said the judge skeptically. Thou art a Ciceronian. Where thy treasure is, there thy heart is also.
     The church at Antioch was greatly disturbed at this time by party and doctrinal disputes. The anchorites in the desert took sides, and called on Jerome, the most learned of them, to give his opinions on the subjects at issue. He wrote for guidance to Pope Damasus at Rome. Failing to receive an answer, he wrote again. On one side, the Arian fury rages, supported by the secular power; on the other side, the Church (at Antioch) is being divided into three parts, and each would draw me to itself. No reply from Damasus is extant; but we know that Jerome acknowledged Paulinus, leader of one party, as bishop of Antioch, and that when he left the desert of Chalcis, he received from Paulinus' hands his ordination as priest. Jerome consented to ordination only on condition that he should not be obliged to serve in any church, knowing that his true vocation was to be a monk and recluse.

About 380 Jerome went to Constantinople to study the Scriptures under the Greek, Gregory of Nazianzus, then bishop of that city. Two years later he went back to Rome with Paulinus of Antioch to attend a council which Pope Damasus was holding to deal with the Antioch schism. Appointed secretary of the council, Jerome acquitted himself so well that, when it was over, Damasus kept him there as his own secretary. At the Pope's request he prepared a revised text, based on the Greek, of the Latin New Testament, the current version of which had been disfigured by wrong copying, clumsy correction, and careless interpolations. He also revised the Latin psalter. That the prestige of Rome and its power to arbitrate between disputants, East as well as West, was recognized as never before at this time, was due in some measure at least to Jerome's diligence and ability. Along with his official duties he was fostering a new movement of Christian asceticism among a group of noble Roman ladies. Several of them were to be canonized, including Albina and her daughters Marcella and Asella, Melania the Elder, who was the first of them to go to the Holy Land, and Paula, with her daughters, Blesilla and Eustochium. The tie between Jerome and the three last-mentioned women was especially close, and to them he addressed many of his famous letters.

When Pope Damasus died in 384, he was succeeded by Siricius, who was less friendly to Jerome. While serving Damasus, Jerome had impressed all by his personal holiness, learning, and integrity. But he had also managed to get himself widely disliked by pagans and evil-doers whom he had condemned, and also by people of taste and tolerance, many of them Christians, who were offended by his biting sarcasm and a certain ruthlessness in attack. An example of his style is the harsh diatribe against the artifices of worldly women, who paint their cheeks with rouge and their eyelids with antimony, whose plastered faces, too white for human beings, look like idols; and if in a moment of forgetfulness they shed a tear it makes a furrow where it rolls down the painted cheek; women to whom years do not bring the gravity of age, who load their heads with other people's hair, enamel a lost youth upon the wrinkles of age, and affect a maidenly timidity in the midst of a troop of grand children. In a letter to Eustochium he writes with scorn of certain members of the Roman clergy. All their anxiety is about their clothes.... You would take them for bridegrooms rather than for clerics; all they think about is knowing the names and houses and doings of rich ladies.

Although Jerome's indignation was usually justified, his manner of expressing it-both verbally and in letters-aroused resentment. His own reputation was attacked; his bluntness, his walk, and even his smile were criticized. And neither the virtue of the ladies under his direction nor his own scrupulous behavior towards them was any protection from scandalous gossip. Affronted at the calumnies that were circulated, Jerome decided to return to the East. Taking with him his brother Paulinian and some others, he embarked in August, 385. At Cyprus, on the way, he was received with joy by Bishop Epiphanius, and at Antioch also he conferred with leading churchmen. It was here, probably, that he was joined by the widow Paula and some other ladies who had left Rome with the aim of settling in the Holy Land.

With what remained of Jerome's own patrimony and with financial help from Paula, a monastery for men was built near the basilica of the Nativity at Bethlehem, and also houses for three communities of women. Paula became head of one of these, and after her death was succeeded by her daughter Eustochium. Jerome himself lived and worked in a large cave near the Saviour's birthplace. He opened a free school there and also a hospice for pilgrims, so that, as Paula said, should Mary and Joseph visit Bethlehem again, they would have a place to stay. Now at last Jerome began to enjoy some years of peaceful activity. He gives us a wonderful description of this fruitful, harmonious, Palestinian life, and its attraction for all manner of men.
Illustrious Gauls congregate here, and no sooner has the Briton, so remote from our world, arrived at religion than he leaves his early-setting sun to seek a land which he knows only by reputation and from the Scriptures. Then the Armenians, the Persians, the peoples of India and Ethiopia, of Egypt, and of Pontus, Cappadocia, Syria, and Mesopotamia!... They come in throngs and set us examples of every virtue. The languages differ but the religion is the same; as many different choirs chant the psalms as there are nations.... Here bread and herbs, planted with our own hands, and milk, all country fare, furnish us plain and healthy food. In summer the trees give us shade. In autumn the air is cool and the falling leaves restful. In spring our psalmody is sweeter for the singing of the birds. We have plenty of wood when winter snow and cold are upon us. Let Rome keep its crowds, let its arenas run with blood, its circuses go mad, its theaters wallow in sensuality...
From 395 to 400 Jerome was engaged in a war against Origenism, which unhappily created a breach in his long friendship with Rufinus. Finding that some Eastern monks had been led into error by the authority of Rufinus' name and learning, Jerome attacked him. Rufinus, then living in a monastery at Jerusalem, had translated many of Origen's works into Latin and was an enthusiastic upholder of his scholarship, though it does not appear that he meant to defend the heresies in Origen's writings. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, was one of the churchmen greatly distressed by the quarrel between Jerome and Rufinus, and became unwillingly involved in a controversy with Jerome.

Jerome's passionate controversies were the least important part of his activities. What has made his name so famous was his critical labor on the text of the Scriptures. The Church regards him as the greatest of all the doctors in clarifying the Divine Word. He had the best available aids for such an undertaking, living where the remains of Biblical places, names, and customs all combined to give him a more vivid view than he could have had at a greater distance. To continue his study of Hebrew he hired a famous Jewish scholar, Bar Ananias, who came to teach him by night, lest other Jews should learn of it. As a man of prayer and purity of heart whose life had been mainly spent in study, penance, and contemplation, Jerome was prepared to be a sensitive interpreter of spiritual things.

We have seen that already while at Rome he had made a revision of the current Latin New Testament, and of the Psalms. Now he undertook to translate most of the books of the Old Testament directly from the Hebrew. The friends and scholars who urged him to this task realized the superiority of a version made directly from the original to any second-hand version, however venerable. It was needed too for argument with the Jews, who recognized no other text as authentic but their own. He began with the Books of Kings, and went on with the rest at different times. When he found that the Book of Tobias and part of Daniel had been composed in Chaldaic, he set himself to learn that difficult language also. More than once he was tempted to give up the whole wearisome task, but a certain scholarly tenacity of purpose kept him at it. The only parts of the Latin Bible, now known as the Vulgate, which were not either translated or worked over by him are the Books of Wisdom, Ecclesiasticus, Baruch, and the two Books of the Maccabees.3 He revised the Psalms once again, with the aid of Origen's ,4 and the Hebrew text. This last is the version included now in the Vulgate and used generally in the Divine Office; his first revision, known as the Roman Psalter, is still used for the opening psalm at Matins and throughout the Missal, and for the Divine Office in the cathedrals of St. Peter at Rome and St. Mark at Venice, and in the Milanese rite.

In the sixteenth century the great Council of Trent pronounced Jerome's Vulgate the authentic and authoritative Latin text of the Catholic Church, without, however, thereby implying a preference for it above the original text or above versions in other languages. In 1907 Pope Pius X entrusted to the Benedictine Order the office of restoring as far as possible the correct text of St. Jerome's Vulgate, which during fifteen centuries of use had naturally become altered in many places. The Bible now ordinarily used by English-speaking Catholics is a translation of the Vulgate, made at Rheims and Douay towards the end of the sixteenth century, and revised by Bishop Challoner in the eighteenth. The Confraternity Edition of the New Testament appearing in 1950 represents a complete revision.

A heavy blow came to Jerome in 404 when his staunch friend, the saintly Paula, died. Six years later he was stunned by news of the sacking of Rome by Alaric the Goth. Of the refugees who fled from Rome to the East at this time he wrote: "Who would have believed that the daughters of that mighty city would one day be wandering as servants and slaves on the shores of Egypt and Africa, or that Bethlehem would daily receive noble Romans, distinguished ladies, brought up in wealth and now reduced to beggary? I cannot help them all, but I grieve and weep with them, and am completely absorbed in the duties which charity imposes on me. I have put aside my commentary on Ezekiel and almost all study. For today we must translate the precepts of the Scriptures into deeds; instead of speaking saintly words, we must act them." A few years later his work was again interrupted by raids of barbarians pushing north through Egypt into Palestine, and later still by a violent onset of Pelagian heretics, who, relying on the protection of Bishop John of Jerusalem, sent a troop of ruffians to Bethlehem to disperse the monks and nuns living there under the direction of Jerome, who had been opposing Pelagianism5 with his customary truculence. Some of the monks were beaten, a deacon was killed, and monasteries were set on fire. Jerome had to go into hiding for a time.

The following year Paula's daughter Eustochium died. The aged Jerome soon fell ill, and after lingering for two years succumbed. Worn with penance and excessive labor, his sight and voice almost gone, his body like a shadow, he died peacefully on September 30, 420, and was buried under the church of the Nativity at Bethlehem. In the thirteenth century his body was translated and now lies somewhere in the Sistine Chapel of the basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore at Rome. The Church owes much to St. Jerome. While his great work was the Vulgate, his achievements in other fields are valuable; to him we owe the distinction between canonical and apocryphal writings; he was a pioneer in the field of Biblical archeology, his commentaries are important; his letters, published in three volumes, are one of our best sources of knowledge of the times.

St. Jerome has been a popular subject with artists, who have pictured him in the desert, as a scholar in his study, and sometimes in the robes of a cardinal, because of his services for Pope Damasus; often too he is shown with a lion, from whose paw, according to legend, he once drew a thorn. Actually this story was transferred to him from the tradition of St. Gerasimus, but a lion is not an inappropriate symbol for so fearless a champion of the faith.

St. Jerome and the Lion
In Vita Divi Hieronymi (Migne. P.L., XXII, c. 209ff.) as translated by Helen Waddell in Beasts and Saints (NY: Henry Holt and Co., 1934), you will find the reason St. Jerome is generally pictured with a lion.  One evening at dusk St. Jerome sat with his fellow monk in his monastery in Jerusalem listening to the lesson of the day, when a mighty lion came in limping on three paws, holding the fourth caught up. Imagine the chaos that followed as the monks tripped over one another trying to get away. But Jerome went out to meet him as one greets an incoming guest.  Of course, the lion couldn't speak, since it's not in their nature, but offered the good father his wounded paw. Jerome examined it and called his brethren to bathe it. When it was clean Jerome noticed that the paw had been pierced by thorns. After he applied a salve, the wound quickly healed.

The gentle ministrations had tamed the lion, who now went in and out of the cloister as peaceably as any domestic animal. Of this Jerome said, "Bring your minds to bear upon this, my brethren: what, I ask you, can we find for this lion to do in the way of useful and suitable work, that will not be burdensome to him, and that he can efficiently accomplish? For I believe of a surety that it was not so much for the healing of his paw that God sent him hither, since He could have cured him without us, as to show us that He is anxious to provide marvellous well for our necessity."

The brothers thought that the lion should be tasked with accompanying and protecting the donkey that carried the firewood for the monastery. And so that was the lion's charge. And thus it was for a long time; the lion would guard the donkey as he went to and fro. One day, however, the lion grew tired and fell asleep as the donkey grazed and some Egyptian oil merchants espied the untended donkey and led him away.  The lion eventually awoke and went in search of the donkey. With increasing anxiety he hunted for the donkey all day. At even fall, hopeless, he returned and stood at the monastery gate. Conscious of guilt, he no longer walked in pride as he did usually with the donkey. When Jerome and the monks saw him, they concluded his guilt grew from having allowed his savage nature to overtake his gentleness; that he had killed the donkey. So, they refused to feed him and sent him away to finish eating his kill.  And yet there was some doubt as to whether he had committed the crime, so the monks went in search of the donkey's carcass and couldn't find it anywhere, nor any sign of violence. The monks reported to Jerome, who said, "I entreat you, brethren, that although you have suffered the loss of the ass, do not nevertheless nag at him or make him wretched. Treat him as before, and offer him his food: and let him take the donkey's place, and make a light harness for him so that he can drag home the branches that have fallen in the wood." And so it happened.

The lion regularly did his appointed task. Yet the lion still sought some understanding of the fate of his former companion. One day he climbed a hill and looked down upon the highway, where he saw men coming with laden camels, and in front of them walked a donkey. He stepped out to meet them. He saw it was his friend and began to roar, charging at the merchants without doing them harm. Frightened, they ran away as fast as they could, leaving the donkey and their packed camels behind them. 
The lion led the animals back to the monastery. When the monks saw this odd sight--a donkey leading a parade with the lion in the vanguard and the camels in between--they ran to get Jerome. The saint had the gates opened then said, "Take their loads off these our guests, the camels, I mean, and the donkey, and bathe their feet and give them fodder, and wait to see what God is minded to show His servants."

When he instructions were carried out, the lion began to roam once again through the cloister as he used to do, flattening myself against the feet of each group of brothers and wagging his tail, as though to ask forgiveness for the crime that he had never committed. The brothers, full of remorse for their calumny would say to one another, "Behold our trusty shepherd whom so short a while ago we were upbraiding for a greedy ruffian, and God has deigned to send him to us with such a resounding miracle, to clear his character!"

Meanwhile, Jerome, aware of things to come, said, "Be prepared, my brethren, in all things that are requisite for refreshment: so that those who are about to be our guests may be received, as is fitting, without embarassment."
So the brothers prepared for the arrival of other guests, just as the merchants arrived a the gate. They were welcomed; however, they entered blushing, and protrated themselves at Jerome's feet, entreating forgiveness for their fault. 'Gently raising them up, he admonished them to enjoy their own with thanksgiving, but not to encroach on others' goods: and in short to live cautiously, as ever in the presence of God.' Then he offered them refreshment before they left with their camels.

The merchants offered the monks half the oil carried by their camels to fill the lamps in the church and for the needs of the monks, "because we know and are sure that it was rather to be of service to you than for our own profit that we went down into Egypt to bargain there."
Jerome responded, "This that you ask is indeed not right, for it would seem a great hardship that we who ought to have compassionon others and relieve their necessities by our own giving, should bear so heavy on you, taking your property away from you when we are not in need of it."

To which they answered, "Neither this food, nor any of our own property do we touch, unless you first command that what we ask shall be done. And so, as we have said, do you now accept half of the oil that the camels have brought: and we pledge ourselves and our heirs to give to you and those that come after you the measure of oil which is called a hin in each succeeding year."
And so Jerome accepted. The merchants for their part accepted the refreshments and a blessing, and returned rejoicing to the own people.

Waddell says that the manuscript that records this story dates no earlier than the 10th or 11th century, and may well result from a confusion between the irasible St. Jerome (Hieronymus) and the more genial St. Gerasimus, who lived a little further up the Jordan River. St. Gerasimus's lion and donkey are less sophisticated than those in this later story. Though St. Jerome is generally remembered as a curmudgeon, he did have those who loved him and saw a gentler side.

September 30, 2006 St. Jerome (345-420)
Most of the saints are remembered for some outstanding virtue or devotion which they practiced, but Jerome is remembered too frequently for his bad temper! It is true that he had a very bad temper and could use a vitriolic pen, but his love for God and his Son Jesus Christ was extraordinarily intense; anyone who taught error was an enemy of God and truth, and St. Jerome went after him or her with his mighty and sometimes sarcastic pen.
He was above all a Scripture scholar, translating most of the Old Testament from the Hebrew. He also wrote commentaries which are a great source of scriptural inspiration for us today. He was an avid student, a thorough scholar, a prodigious letter-writer and a consultant to monk, bishop and pope. St. Augustine said of him, "What Jerome is ignorant of, no mortal has ever known."
St. Jerome is particularly important for having made a translation of the Bible which came to be called the Vulgate. It is not the most critical edition of the Bible, but its acceptance by the Church was fortunate. As a modern scholar says, "No man before Jerome or among his contemporaries and very few men for many centuries afterwards were so well qualified to do the work." The Council of Trent called for a new and corrected edition of the Vulgate, and declared it the authentic text to be used in the Church.
In order to be able to do such work, Jerome prepared himself well. He was a master of Latin, Greek, Hebrew and Chaldaic. He began his studies at his birthplace, Stridon in Dalmatia (in the former Yugoslavia). After his preliminary education he went to Rome, the center of learning at that time, and thence to Trier, Germany, where the scholar was very much in evidence. He spent several years in each place, trying always to find the very best teachers.
After these preparatory studies he traveled extensively in Palestine, marking each spot of Christ's life with an outpouring of devotion. Mystic that he was, he spent five years in the desert of Chalcis so that he might give himself up to prayer, penance and study. Finally he settled in Bethlehem, where he lived in the cave believed to have been the birthplace of Christ. On September 30 in the year 420, Jerome died in Bethlehem. The remains of his body now lie buried in the Basilica of St. Mary Major in Rome.
Comment: Jerome was a strong, outspoken man. He had the virtues and the unpleasant fruits of being a fearless critic and all the usual moral problems of a man. He was, as someone has said, no admirer of moderation whether in virtue or against evil. He was swift to anger, but also swift to feel remorse, even more severe on his own shortcomings than on those of others. A pope is said to have remarked, on seeing a picture of Jerome striking his breast with a stone, "You do well to carry that stone, for without it the Church would never have canonized you" (Butler's Lives of the Saints).
Quote:   "In the remotest part of a wild and stony desert, burnt up with the heat of the scorching sun so that it frightens even the monks that inhabit it, I seemed to myself to be in the midst of the delights and crowds of Rome. In this exile and prison to which for the fear of hell I had voluntarily condemned myself, I many times imagined myself witnessing the dancing of the Roman maidens as if I had been in the midst of them: In my cold body and in my parched-up flesh, which seemed dead before its death, passion was able to live. Alone with this enemy, I threw myself in spirit at the feet of Jesus, watering them with my tears, and I tamed my flesh by fasting whole weeks. I am not ashamed to disclose my temptations, but I grieve that I am not now what I then was" ("Letter to St. Eustochium").
420 St. Gregory the Enlightener the apostle of Armenia
Armenia was the first country to adopt Christianity as its official religion. Many Armenians already practised the faith in the late third century, even before the conversion of the country at the start of the next century by St Gregory the Enlightener, so called because he brought the ‘light’ of Christianity to the Armenian people.
He is of unknown origins, but unreliable tradition has him the son of Anak, a Parthian who murdered King Khosrov I of Armenia when Gregory was a baby. The infant Gregory was smuggled to Caesarea to escape the dying Khosrov's order to murder the entire family, was baptized, married, and had two sons. When King Khosrov's son, Tiridates, regained his father's throne, Gregory was permitted to return, but he incurred the King's displeasure by his support of the Armenian Christians and his conversion activities. In time, Tiridates was converted to Christianity by Gregory and proclaimed Christianity the official religion of Armenia.
Gregory was consecrated bishop of Ashtishat, set about organizing the Church in Armenia and building a native clergy, and worked untiringly to evangelize the Armenians. Curiously enough, he set into motion the process that was to make his See a hereditary episcopate when he consecrated his son Aristakes to succeed him. He then retired to a hermitage on Mount Manyea in Taron and remained there until his death.
Many extravagant legends and miracles were attributed to him, many of which are celebrated as feasts by the Armenians. He is considered the apostle of Armenia.
Armenia, of Saint Gregory, called the Illuminator, bishop, who after great hardships withdrew to a cave near where the branches of the Euphrates come together and there died in peace. He is considered the apostle of the Armenians.
610 St. Midan Saint of Anglesey
sometimes called Nidan. He was an evangelist of that region of Wales. Other details of his life no longer exist.

653 ST HONORIUS, ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY 653 Honorius of Canterbury Born in Rome
he succeeded St Justus as fifth Archbishop of Canterbury in England (627). He was consecrated bishop at Lincoln by St Paulinus and himself consecrated St Felix for East Anglia and St Ithamar, the first English bishop, for Rochester.

This apostolic man was a Roman by birth, and a monk by profession. St Gregory the Great, from the experience which he had of his virtue and skill in sacred learning, made choice of him for one of the missionaries which he sent to convert the English, though whether he was of St Augustine’s original company or came over with the second hand in 601 is not known. Upon the death of St Justus in 627 St Honorius was chosen archbishop of Canterbury. He was consecrated at Lincoln by St Paulinus, Bishop of York, and received the pallium sent by Pope Honorius I together with a letter, in which his Holiness ordained that whenever either the see of Canter­bury or York should become vacant, the other bishop should ordain the person that should be duty elected, “because of the long distance of sea and land that lies between us and you. And to confirm this delegation of the patriarchal power of consecrating all bishops under him, a pallium was sent also to the bishop of York.

The new archbishop saw with joy the faith of Christ extending daily in many different parts of this island and the spirit of the gospel taking root in the hearts of many servants of God. His own zeal and example contributed to so great an increase throughout an episcopate of some twenty-five years. One of the first and most important of his acts was to consecrate the Burgundian St Felix as bishop of Dunwich and send him on his mission to convert the East Angles. After King Edwin was slain in battle and Cadwallon of Wales, “more cruel than any pagan” says St Bede, “and resolved to cut off every Englishman in Britain, ravaged Northumbria, St Paulinus fled with Queen Ethelburga and was given shelter by St Honorius, who appointed him to the vacant see of Rochester. When Paulinus died there in 644 Honorius consecrated in his place St Ithamar, a man of Kent, the first English bishop. St Honorius died on September 30, 653, and was buried in the abbey-church of 55. Peter and Paul at Canterbury. He is named in the Roman Martyrology and commemorated in the dioceses of Southwark and Nottingham.

For all this see Bede, Eccles. Hist., bks ii and iii, with Plummer’s notes.

Laurus (Lery) 7th cent Born in Wales
he went to Brittany and founded the monastery later called after him, Saint-Léry, on the River Doneff.
869 Tancred, Torthred and Tova
Two hermits and an anchoress martyred by the Danes at Thorney in England.

1082 ST SIMON OF CRÉPY helped reconcile kings and subjects; great negotiator for Pope St Gregory VII

  SIMON, Count of Crépy in Valois, was a relative of Matilda, wife of William the Conqueror, in whose court he was brought up. He was favored by William and fought against Philip I of France to keep the Vexin for Normandy, but he desired to be a monk, moved thereto, it is said, by the sight of the decomposing body of his father that he was taking from Montdidier to be buried at Crépy. There is a story told of his persuading his fiancée, a daughter of Hildebert, Count of Auvergne, to be a nun, and of a romantic flight from their respective homes just before the wedding. But Simon’s intention was frustrated for a time by King William, who wished him to marry his daughter Adela. He was afraid directly to refuse his powerful benefactor, and went off to Rome on the pretext of finding out if the projected marriage were lawful, as the lady was his kinswoman. On the way he went to the abbey of Saint-Claude at Condat in the Jura, and there received the habit.

Like other royal monks his superiors and relatives to use his influence to bring about reconciliations and restorations of rights called him on. St Hugh of Cluny sent him to the king of France to recover lands that had been taken from his monastery, and he intervened in the troubles between William the Conqueror and his sons. When Pope St Gregory VII, in view of his conflict with the emperor, determined to come to terms with Robert Guiscard and his Normans in Italy, he sent for St Simon to help him in the negotiations. These were brought to a successful conclusion at Aquino in 1080, and the pope kept Simon by his side.

He died in Rome shortly afterwards, receiving the last sacraments from the hands of St Gregory himself.

Many of Simon’s contemporaries have sung his praises. Bd Urban II compiled a eulogistic epitaph for his tomb, and Guibert de Nogent, who denounced so uncompromisingly the corruption of the age, wrote enthusiastically of the good example set by Simon. These and many other testimonies have been collected in the Acta Sanctorum, September, vol. viii, together with a separate biography, anonymous but written not long after his death. See also G. Corblet, Hagiographie d’Amiens, vol. iii, pp. 491—519.

1572 Romæ natális sancti Francísci Bórgiæ, Sacerdótis et Confessóris; qui Præpósitus Generális fuit Societátis Jesu, ac vitæ asperitáte, oratiónis dono, abdicátis sæculi et recusátis Ecclésiæ dignitátibus, vir memorábilis éxstitit.  Ipsíus autem festum sexto Idus Octóbris celebrátur.
    At Rome, the birthday of St. Francis Borgia, priest and confessor.  He was the General of the Society of Jesus, and is memorable for his mortification, gift of prayer, the forsaking of the world, and the refusal of ecclesiastical dignities.  His feast is observed on the 10th of October.

Quarto Nonas Januárii 1873 Lexóvii, in Gállia, item natális sanctæ Terésiæ a Jesu Infánte, ex Ordine Carmelitárum Excalceatórum; quam, vitæ innocéntia et simplicitáte claríssimam, Pius Undécimus, Póntifex Máximus, sanctárum Vírginum albo adscrípsit, peculiárem ómnium Missiónum Patrónam declarávit, ejúsque festum quinto Nonas Octóbris recoléndum esse decrévit.
    At Lisieux in France, the birthday of St. Theresa of the Child Jesus, of the Order of Discalced Carmelites.  Seeing her to be most wonderful for her innocence of life and simplicity, Pope Pius XI placed her name among the holy virgins and appointed her as special patron before God of all missions, decreeing that her feast should be observed on the 3rd of October.



THE PSALTER OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY PSALM 81

Lady, my heart hath not been exalted: nor have mine eyes been lifted up.

The Lord hath blessed thee in His power: who by thee hath reduced to naught our enemies.

Blessed be He who hath sanctified thee: and who hath brought thee forth pure from thy mother's womb.

Blessed be He who hath overshadowed thee: and by His grace hath given thee fecundity.

Bless us, O Lady, and strengthen us in thy grace: that by thee we may be presented before the sight of the Lord.


For thy spirit is kind: thy grace fills the whole world.

Thunder, ye heavens, from above, and give praise to her: glorify her, ye earth, with all the dwellers therein.


Rejoice, ye Heavens, and be glad, O Earth: because Mary will console her servants and will have mercy on her poor.

Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost as it was in the beginning and will always be.

God loves variety. He doesn't mass-produce his saints. Every saint is unique, for each is the result of a new idea.  As the liturgy says: Non est inventus similis illis--there are no two exactly alike. It is we with our lack of imagination, who paint the same haloes on all the saints. Dear Lord, grant us a spirit that is not bound by our own ideas and preferences.  Grant that we may be able to appreciate in others what we lack in ourselves.
O Lord, grant that we may understand that every saint must be a unique praise of Your glory. Catholic saints are holy people and human people who lived extraordinary lives.  Each saint the Church honors responded to God's invitation to use his or her unique gifts.   God calls each one of us to be a saint in order to get into heavenonly saints are allowed into heaven. The more "extravagant" graces are bestowed NOT for the benefit of the recipients so much as FOR the benefit of others.
There are over 10,000 named saints beati  from history
 and Roman Martyology Orthodox sources

Patron_Saints.html  Widowed_Saints htmIndulgences The Catholic Church in China
LINKS: Marian Shrines  
India Marian Shrine Lourdes of the East   Lourdes 1858  China Marian shrines 1995
Kenya national Marian shrine  Loreto, Italy  Marian Apparitions (over 2000Quang Tri Vietnam La Vang 1798
 
Links to Related MarianWebsites  Angels and Archangels  Saints Visions of Heaven and Hell

Widowed Saints  html
Doctors_of_the_Church   Acts_Of_The_Apostles  Roman Catholic Popes  Purgatory  UniateChalcedon

Mary the Mother of Jesus Miracles_BLay Saints  Miraculous_IconMiraculous_Medal_Novena Patron Saints
Miracles by Century 100   200   300   400   500   600   700    800   900   1000    1100   1200   1300   1400  1500  1600  1700  1800  1900 2000
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1100   1200   1300   1400  1500  1600  1700  1800   1900 Lay Saints

The great psalm of the Passion, Chapter 22, whose first verse “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Jesus pronounced on the cross, ended with the vision: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations shall worship before him
For kingship belongs to the LORD, the ruler over the nations. All who sleep in the earth will bow low before God; All who have gone down into the dust will kneel in homage. And I will live for the LORD; my descendants will serve you. The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have brought.
Pope Benedict XVI to The Catholic Church In China {whole article here} 2000 years of the Catholic Church in China
The saints “a cloud of witnesses over our head”, showing us life of Christian perfection is possible.

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Saint Frances Xavier Seelos  Practical Guide to Holiness
1. Go to Mass with deepest devotion. 2. Spend a half hour to reflect upon your main failing & make resolutions to avoid it.
3. Do daily spiritual reading for at least 15 minutes, if a half hour is not possible.  4. Say the rosary every day.
5. Also daily, if at all possible, visit the Blessed Sacrament; toward evening, meditate on the Passion of Christ for a half hour, 6.  Conclude the day with evening prayer & an examination of conscience over all the faults & sins of the day.
7.  Every month make a review of the month in confession.
8. Choose a special patron every month & imitate that patron in some special virtue.
9. Precede every great feast with a novena that is nine days of devotion. 10. Try to begin & end every activity with a Hail Mary

My God, I believe, I adore, I trust and I love Thee.  I beg pardon for those who do not believe, do not adore, do not
O most Holy trinity, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, I adore Thee profoundly.  I offer Thee the most precious Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ, present in all the Tabernacles of the world, in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges and indifference by which He is offended, and by the infite merits of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.  I beg the conversion of poor sinners,  Fatima Prayer, Angel of Peace
The voice of the Father is heard, the Son enters the water, and the Holy Spirit appears in the form of a dove.
THE spirit and example of the world imperceptibly instil the error into the minds of many that there is a kind of middle way of going to Heaven; and so, because the world does not live up to the gospel, they bring the gospel down to the level of the world. It is not by this example that we are to measure the Christian rule, but words and life of Christ. All His followers are commanded to labour to become perfect even as our heavenly Father is perfect, and to bear His image in our hearts that we may be His children. We are obliged by the gospel to die to ourselves by fighting self-love in our hearts, by the mastery of our passions, by taking on the spirit of our Lord.
   These are the conditions under which Christ makes His promises and numbers us among His children, as is manifest from His words which the apostles have left us in their inspired writings. Here is no distinction made or foreseen between the apostles or clergy or religious and secular persons. The former, indeed, take upon themselves certain stricter obligations, as a means of accomplishing these ends more perfectly; but the law of holiness and of disengagement of the heart from the world is general and binds all the followers of Christ.
God loves variety. He doesn't mass-produce his saints. Every saint is unique each the result of a new idea.
As the liturgy says: Non est inventus similis illis--there are no two exactly alike.
It is we with our lack of imagination, who paint the same haloes on all the saints.

Dear Lord, grant us a spirit not bound by our own ideas and preferences.
 
Grant that we may be able to appreciate in others what we lack in ourselves.

O Lord, grant that we may understand that every saint must be a unique praise of Your glory.
 
Catholic saints are holy people and human people who lived extraordinary lives.
Each saint the Church honors responded to God's invitation to use his or her unique gifts.
The 15 Promises of the Virgin Mary to those who recite the Rosary ) Revealed to St. Dominic and Blessed Alan)
1.    Whoever shall faithfully serve me by the recitation of the Rosary, shall receive signal graces. 2.    I promise my special protection and the greatest graces to all those who shall recite the Rosary. 3.    The Rosary shall be a powerful armor against hell, it will destroy vice, decrease sin, and defeat heresies. 4.    It will cause virtue and good works to flourish; it will obtain for souls the abundant mercy of God; it will withdraw the hearts of people from the love of the world and its vanities, and will lift them to the desire of eternal things.  Oh, that soul would sanctify them by this means.  5.    The soul that recommends itself to me by the recitation of the Rosary shall not perish. 6.    Whoever shall recite the Rosary devoutly, applying themselves to the consideration of its Sacred Mysteries shall never be conquered by misfortune.  God will not chastise them in His justice, they shall not perish by an unprovided death; if they be just, they shall remain in the grace of God, and become worthy of eternal life. 7.    Whoever shall have a true devotion for the Rosary shall not die without the Sacraments of the Church. 8.    Those who are faithful to recite the Rosary shall have during their life and at their death the light of God and the plentitude of His graces; at the moment of death they shall participate in the merits of the Saints in Paradise. 9.    I shall deliver from purgatory those who have been devoted to the Rosary. 10.    The faithful children of the Rosary shall merit a high degree of glory in Heaven.  11.    You shall obtain all you ask of me by the recitation of the Rosary. 12.    I shall aid all those who propagate the Holy Rosary in their necessities. 13.    I have obtained from my Divine Son that all the advocates of the Rosary shall have for intercessors the entire celestial court during their life and at the hour of death. 14.    All who recite the Rosary are my children, and brothers and sisters of my only Son, Jesus Christ. 15.    Devotion to my Rosary is a great sign of predestination.
His Holiness Aram I, current (2013) Catholicos of Cilicia of Armenians, whose See is located in Lebanese town of Antelias. The Catholicosate was founded in Sis, capital of Cilicia, in the year 1441 following the move of the Catholicosate of All Armenians back to its original See of Etchmiadzin in Armenia. The Catholicosate of Cilicia enjoyed local jurisdiction, though spiritually subject to the authority of Etchmiadzin. In 1921 the See was transferred to Aleppo in Syria, and in 1930 to Antelias.
Its jurisdiction currently extends to Syria, Cyprus, Iran and Greece.
Aramaic dialect of Edessa, now known as Syriac
The exact date of the introduction of Christianity into Edessa {Armenian Ourhaï in Arabic Er Roha, commonly Orfa or Urfa, its present name} is not known. It is certain, however, that the Christian community was at first made up from the Jewish population of the city. According to an ancient legend, King Abgar V, Ushana, was converted by Addai, who was one of the seventy-two disciples. In fact, however, the first King of Edessa to embrace the Christian Faith was Abgar IX (c. 206) becoming official kingdom religion.
Christian council held at Edessa early as 197 (Eusebius, Hist. Ecc7V,xxiii).
In 201 the city was devastated by a great flood, and the Christian church was destroyed (“Chronicon Edessenum”, ad. an. 201).
In 232 the relics of the Apostle St. Thomas were brought from India, on which occasion his Syriac Acts were written.

Under Roman domination martyrs suffered at Edessa: Sts. Scharbîl and Barsamya, under Decius; Sts. Gûrja, Schâmôna, Habib, and others under Diocletian.
 
In the meanwhile Christian priests from Edessa evangelized Eastern Mesopotamia and Persia, established the first Churches in the kingdom of the Sassanides.  Atillâtiâ, Bishop of Edessa, assisted at the Council of Nicæa (325). The “Peregrinatio Silviæ” (or Etheriæ) (ed. Gamurrini, Rome, 1887, 62 sqq.) gives an account of the many sanctuaries at Edessa about 388.
Although Hebrew had been the language of the ancient Israelite kingdom, after their return from Exile the Jews turned more and more to Aramaic, using it for parts of the books of Ezra and Daniel in the Bible. By the time of Jesus, Aramaic was the main language of Palestine, and quite a number of texts from the Dead Sea Scrolls are also written in Aramaic.
Aramaic continued to be an important language for Jews, alongside Hebrew, and parts of the Talmud are written in it.
After Arab conquests of the seventh century, Arabic quickly replaced Aramaic as the main language of those who converted to Islam, although in out of the way places, Aramaic continued as a vernacular language of Muslims.
Aramaic, however, enjoyed its greatest success in Christianity. Although the New Testament wins written in Greek, Christianity had come into existence in an Aramaic-speaking milieu, and it was the Aramaic dialect of Edessa, now known as Syriac, that became the literary language of a large number of Christians living in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire and in the Persian Empire, further east. Over the course of the centuries the influence of the Syriac Churches spread eastwards to China (in Xian, in western China, a Chinese-Syriac inscription dated 781 is still to be seen); to southern India where the state of Kerala can boast more Christians of Syriac liturgical tradition than anywhere else in the world.

680 Shiite saint Imam Hussein, grandson of Islam's Prophet Muhammad Known as Ashoura and observed by Shiites across the world, the 10th day of the lunar Muslim month of Muharram: the anniversary of the 7th century death in battle of one of Shiite Islam's most beloved saints.  Imam Hussein died in the 680 A.D. battle fought on the plains outside Karbala, a city in modern Iraq that's home to the saint's shrine.  The battle over a dispute about the leadership of the Muslim faith following Muhammad's death in 632 A.D. It is the defining event in Islam's split into Sunni and Shiite branches.  The occasion is the source of an enduring moral lesson. "He sacrificed his blood to teach us not to give in to corruption, coercion, or use of force and to seek honor and justice."  According to Shiite beliefs, Hussein and companions were denied water by enemies who controlled the nearby Euphrates.  Streets get partially covered with blood from slaughter of hundreds of cows and sheep. Volunteers cook the meat and feed it to the poor.  Hussein's martyrdom recounted through a rich body of prose, poetry and song remains an inspirational example of sacrifice to many Shiites, 10 percent of the world's estimated 1.3 billion Muslims.
Meeting of the Saints  walis (saints of Allah)
Great men covet to embrace martyrdom for a cause and principle.
So was the case with Hazrat Ali. He could have made a compromise with the evil forces of his time and, as a result, could have led a very comfortable, easy and luxurious life.  But he was not a person who would succumb to such temptations. His upbringing, his education and his training in the lap of the holy Prophet made him refuse such an offer.
Rabia Al-Basri (717–801 C.E.) She was first to set forth the doctrine of mystical love and who is widely considered to be the most important of the early Sufi poets. An elderly Shia pointed out that during his pre-Partition childhood it was quite common to find pictures and portraits of Shia icons in Imambaras across the country.
Shah Abdul Latif: The Exalted Sufi Master born 1690 in a Syed family; died 1754. In ancient times, Sindh housed the exemplary Indus Valley Civilisation with Moenjo Daro as its capital, and now, it is the land of a culture which evolved from the teachings of eminent Sufi saints. Pakistan is home to the mortal remains of many Sufi saints, the exalted among them being Shah Abdul Latif Bhittai, a practitioner of the real Islam, philosopher, poet, musicologist and preacher. He presented his teaching through poetry and music - both instruments sublime - and commands a very large following, not only among Muslims but also among Hindus and Christians. Sindh culture: The Shah is synonymous with Sindh. He is the very fountainhead of Sindh's culture. His message remains as fresh as that of any present day poet, and the people of Sindh find solace from his writings. He did indeed think for Sindh. One of his prayers, in exquisite Sindhi, translates thus: “Oh God, may ever You on Sindh bestow abundance rare! Beloved! All the world let share Thy grace, and fruitful be.”
Shia Ali al-Hadi, died 868 and son Hassan al-Askari 874. These saints are the 10th and 11th of Shia's 12 most revered Imams. Baba Farid Sufi 1398 miracle, Qutbuddin Bakhtiar Kaki renowned Muslim Sufi saint scholar miracles 569 A.H. [1173 C.E.] hermit gave to poor, Khwaja Moinuddin Chishti greatest mystic of his time born 533 Hijri (1138-39 A.D.), Hazrat Ghuas-e Azam, Hazrat Bu Ali Sharif, and Hazrat Nizamuddin Aulia Sufi Saint Hazrath Khwaja Syed Mohammed Badshah Quadri Chisty Yamani Quadeer (RA)
1236-1325 welcomed people of all faiths & all walks of life.
801 Rabi'a al-'Adawiyya Sufi One of the most famous Islamic mystics
(b. 717). This 8th century saint was an early Sufi who had a profound influence on later Sufis, who in turn deeply influenced the European mystical love and troubadour traditions.  Rabi'a was a woman of Basra, a seaport in southern Iraq.  She was born around 717 and died in 801 (185-186).  Her biographer, the great medieval poet Attar, tells us that she was "on fire with love and longing" and that men accepted her "as a second spotless Mary" (186).  She was, he continues, “an unquestioned authority to her contemporaries" (218).
Rabi'a began her ascetic life in a small desert cell near Basra, where she lost herself in prayer and went straight to God for teaching.  As far as is known, she never studied under any master or spiritual director.  She was one of the first of the Sufis to teach that Love alone was the guide on the mystic path (222).  A later Sufi taught that there were two classes of "true believers": one class sought a master as an intermediary between them and God -- unless they could see the footsteps of the Prophet on the path before them, they would not accept the path as valid.  The second class “...did not look before them for the footprint of any of God's creatures, for they had removed all thought of what He had created from their hearts, and concerned themselves solely with God. (218)
Rabi'a was of this second kind.  She felt no reverence even for the House of God in Mecca:  "It is the Lord of the house Whom I need; what have I to do with the house?" (219) One lovely spring morning a friend asked her to come outside to see the works of God.  She replied, "Come you inside that you may behold their Maker.  Contemplation of the Maker has turned me aside from what He has made" (219).  During an illness, a friend asked this woman if she desired anything.
"...[H]ow can you ask me such a question as 'What do I desire?'  I swear by the glory of God that for twelve years I have desired fresh dates, and you know that in Basra dates are plentiful, and I have not yet tasted them.  I am a servant (of God), and what has a servant to do with desire?" (162)
When a male friend once suggested she should pray for relief from a debilitating illness, she said,
"O Sufyan, do you not know Who it is that wills this suffering for me?  Is it not God Who wills it?  When you know this, why do you bid me ask for what is contrary to His will?  It is not  well to oppose one's Beloved." (221)
She was an ascetic.  It was her custom to pray all night, sleep briefly just before dawn, and then rise again just as dawn "tinged the sky with gold" (187).  She lived in celibacy and poverty, having renounced the world.  A friend visited her in old age and found that all she owned were a reed mat, screen, a pottery jug, and a bed of felt which doubled as her prayer-rug (186), for where she prayed all night, she also slept briefly in the pre-dawn chill.  Once her friends offered to get her a servant; she replied,
"I should be ashamed to ask for the things of this world from Him to Whom the world belongs, and how should I ask for them from those to whom it does not belong?"  (186-7)
A wealthy merchant once wanted to give her a purse of gold.  She refused it, saying that God, who sustains even those who dishonor Him, would surely sustain her, "whose soul is overflowing with love" for Him.  And she added an ethical concern as well:
"...How should I take the wealth of someone of whom I do not know whether he acquired it lawfully or not?" (187)
She taught that repentance was a gift from God because no one could repent unless God had already accepted him and given him this gift of repentance.  She taught that sinners must fear the punishment they deserved for their sins, but she also offered such sinners far more hope of Paradise than most other ascetics did.  For herself, she held to a higher ideal, worshipping God neither from fear of Hell nor from hope of Paradise, for she saw such self-interest as unworthy of God's servants; emotions like fear and hope were like veils -- i.e., hindrances to the vision of God Himself.  The story is told that once a number of Sufis saw her hurrying on her way with water in one hand and a burning torch in the other.  When they asked her to explain, she said:
"I am going to light a fire in Paradise and to pour water on to Hell, so that both veils may vanish altogether from before the pilgrims and their purpose may be sure..." (187-188)
She was once asked where she came from.  "From that other world," she said.  "And where are you going?" she was asked.  "To that other world," she replied (219).  She taught that the spirit originated with God in "that other world" and had to return to Him in the end.  Yet if the soul were sufficiently purified, even on earth, it could look upon God unveiled in all His glory and unite with him in love.  In this quest, logic and reason were powerless.  Instead, she speaks of the "eye" of her heart which alone could apprehend Him and His mysteries (220).
Above all, she was a lover, a bhakti, like one of Krishna’s Goptis in the Hindu tradition.  Her hours of prayer were not so much devoted to intercession as to communion with her Beloved.  Through this communion, she could discover His will for her.  Many of her prayers have come down to us:
       "I have made Thee the Companion of my heart,
        But my body is available for those who seek its company,
        And my body is friendly towards its guests,
        But the Beloved of my heart is the Guest of my soul."  [224]

To Save A Life is Earthly; Saving A Soul is Eternal Donation by mail, please send check or money order to:
Eternal Word Television Network 5817 Old Leeds Rd. Irondale, AL 35210  USA
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Mother Angelica saving souls is this beautiful womans journey  Shrine_of_The_Most_Blessed_Sacrament
Colombia was among the countries Mother Angelica visited. 
In Bogotá, a Salesian priest - Father Juan Pablo Rodriguez - brought Mother and the nuns to the Sanctuary of the Divine Infant Jesus to attend Mass.  After Mass, Father Juan Pablo took them into a small Shrine which housed the miraculous statue of the Child Jesus. Mother Angelica stood praying at the side of the statue when suddenly the miraculous image came alive and turned towards her.  Then the Child Jesus spoke with the voice of a young boy:  “Build Me a Temple and I will help those who help you.” 

Thus began a great adventure that would eventually result in the Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament, a Temple dedicated to the Divine Child Jesus, a place of refuge for all. Use this link to read a remarkable story about
The Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament
Father Reardon, Editor of The Catholic Bulletin for 14 years Lover of the poor; A very Holy Man of God.
Monsignor Reardon Protonotarius Apostolicus
 
Pastor 42 years BASILICA OF SAINT MARY Minneapolis MN
America's First Basilica Largest Nave in the World
August 7, 1907-ground broke for the foundation
by Archbishop Ireland-laying cornerstone May 31, 1908
James M. Reardon Publication History of Basilica of Saint Mary 1600-1932
James M. Reardon Publication  History of the Basilica of Saint Mary 1955 {update}

Brief History of our Beloved Holy Priest Here and his published books of Catholic History in North America
Reardon, J.M. Archbishop Ireland; Prelate, Patriot, Publicist, 1838-1918.
A Memoir (St. Paul; 1919); George Anthony Belcourt Pioneer Catholic Missionary of the Northwest 1803-1874 (1955);
The Catholic Church IN THE DIOCESE OF ST. PAUL from earliest origin to centennial achievement
1362-1950 (1952);

The Church of Saint Mary of Saint Paul 1875-1922;
  (1932)
The Vikings in the American Heartland;
The Catholic Total Abstinence Society in Minnesota;
James Michael Reardon Born in Nova Scotia, 1872;  Priest, ordained by Bishop Ireland;
Member -- St. Paul Seminary faculty.
Affiliations and Indulgence Litany of Loretto in Stained glass windows here.  Nave Sacristy and Residence Here
Sanctuary
spaces between them filled with grilles of hand-forged wrought iron the
life of our Blessed Lady After the crucifixon
Apostle statues Replicas of those in St John Lateran--Christendom's earliest Basilica.
Ordered by Rome's first Christian Emperor, Constantine the Great, Popes' cathedral and official residence first millennium of Christian history.

The only replicas ever made:  in order from west to east {1932}.
Every Christian must be a living book wherein one can read the teaching of the gospel
 
It Makes No Sense
Not To Believe In GOD
THE BLESSED MOTHER AND ISLAM By Father John Corapi
  June 19, Trinity Sunday, 1991: Ordained Catholic Priest under Pope John Paul II;
then 2,000,000 miles delivering the Gospel to millions, and continues to do so.
By Father John Corapi
THE BLESSED MOTHER AND ISLAM By Father John Corapi
  June 19, Trinity Sunday, 1991: Ordained Catholic Priest under Pope John Paul II;
then 2,000,000 miles delivering the Gospel to millions, and continues to do so.
By Father John Corapi
Among the most important titles we have in the Catholic Church for the Blessed Virgin Mary are Our Lady of Victory and Our Lady of the Rosary. These titles can be traced back to one of the most decisive times in the history of the world and Christendom. The Battle of Lepanto took place on October 7 (date of feast of Our Lady of Rosary), 1571. This proved to be the most crucial battle for the Christian forces against the radical Muslim navy of Turkey. Pope Pius V led a procession around St. Peter’s Square in Vatican City praying the Rosary. He showed true pastoral leadership in recognizing the danger posed to Christendom by the radical Muslim forces, and in using the means necessary to defeat it. Spiritual battles require spiritual weapons, and this more than anything was a battle that had its origins in the spiritual order—a true battle between good and evil.

Today we have a similar spiritual battle in progress—a battle between the forces of good and evil, light and darkness, truth and lies, life and death. If we do not soon stop the genocide of abortion in the United States, we shall run the course of all those that prove by their actions that they are enemies of God—total collapse, economic, social, and national. The moral demise of a nation results in the ultimate demise of a nation. God is not a disinterested spectator to the affairs of man. Life begins at conception. This is an unalterable formal teaching of the Catholic Church. If you do not accept this you are a heretic in plain English. A single abortion is homicide. The more than 48,000,000 abortions since Roe v. Wade in the United States constitute genocide by definition. The group singled out for death—unwanted, unborn children.

No other issue, not all other issues taken together, can constitute a proportionate reason for voting for candidates that intend to preserve and defend this holocaust of innocent human life that is abortion.

As we watch the spectacle of the world seeming to self-destruct before our eyes, we can’t help but be saddened and even frightened by so much evil run rampant. Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, Somalia, North Korea—It is all a disaster of epic proportions displayed in living color on our television screens.  These are not ordinary times and this is not business as usual. We are at a crossroads in human history and the time for Catholics and all Christians to act is now. All evil can ultimately be traced to its origin, which is moral evil. All of the political action, peace talks, international peacekeeping forces, etc. will avail nothing if the underlying sickness is not addressed. This is sin. One person at a time hearts and minds must be moved from evil to good, from lies to truth, from violence to peace.
Islam, an Arabic word that has often been defined as “to make peace,” seems like a living contradiction today. Islam is a religion of peace.  As we celebrate the birthday of Our Lady, I am proposing that each one of us pray the Rosary for peace. Prayer is what must precede all other activity if that activity is to have any chance of success. Pray for peace, pray the Rosary every day without fail.  There is a great love for Mary among Muslim people. It is not a coincidence that a little village named Fatima is where God chose to have His Mother appear in the twentieth century. Our Lady’s name appears no less than thirty times in the Koran. No other woman’s name is mentioned, not even that of Mohammed’s daughter, Fatima. In the Koran Our Lady is described as “Virgin, ever Virgin.”

Archbishop Fulton Sheen prophetically spoke of the resurgence of Islam in our day. He said it would be through the Blessed Virgin Mary that Islam would be converted. We must pray for this to happen quickly if we are to avert a horrible time of suffering for this poor, sinful world. Turn to our Mother in this time of great peril. Pray the Rosary every day. Then, and only then will there be peace, when the hearts and minds of men are changed from the inside.
Talk is weak. Prayer is strong. Pray!  God bless you, Father John Corapi

Father Corapi's Biography

Father John Corapi is what has commonly been called a late vocation. In other words, he came to the priesthood other than a young man. He was 44 years old when he was ordained. From small town boy to the Vietnam era US Army, from successful businessman in Las Vegas and Hollywood to drug addicted and homeless, to religious life and ordination to the priesthood by Pope John Paul II, to a life as a preacher of the Gospel who has reached millions with the simple message that God's Name is Mercy!

Father Corapi's academic credentials are quite extensive. He received a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Pace University in the seventies. Then as an older man returned to the university classrooms in preparation for his life as a priest and preacher. He received all of his academic credentials for the Church with honors: a Masters degree in Sacred Scripture from Holy Apostles Seminary and Bachelor, Licentiate, and Doctorate degrees in dogmatic theology from the University of Navarre in Spain.

Father John Corapi goes to the heart of the contemporary world's many woes and wars, whether the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Somalia, or the Congo, or the natural disasters that seem to be increasing every year, the moral and spiritual war is at the basis of everything. “Our battle is not against human forces,” St. Paul asserts, “but against principalities and powers, against the world rulers of this present darkness...” (Ephesians 6:12). 
The “War to end all wars” is the moral and spiritual combat that rages in the hearts and minds of human beings. The outcome of that  unseen fight largely determines how the battle in the realm of the seen unfolds.  The title talk, “With the Moon Under Her Feet,” is taken from the twelfth chapter of the Book of Revelation, and deals with the current threat to the world from radical Islam, and the Blessed Virgin Mary's role in the ultimate victory that will result in the conversion of Islam. Few Catholics are aware of the connection between Islam, Fatima, and Guadalupe. Presented in Father Corapi's straight-forward style, you will be both inspired and educated by him.

About Father John Corapi.
Father Corapi is a Catholic priest .
The pillars of father's preaching are basically:
Love for and a relationship with the Blessed Virgin Mary 
Leading a vibrant and loving relationship with Jesus Christ
Great love and reverence for the Most Holy Eucharist from Holy Mass to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament
An uncompromising love for and obedience to the Holy Father and the teaching of the Magisterium of the Church


God Bless you on your journey Father John Corapi


Records on life of Father Flanagan, founder of Boys Town, presented at Vatican
Jul 23, 2019 - 03:01 am .- The cause for canonization of Servant of God Edward Flanagan, the priest who founded Nebraska's Boys Town community for orphans and other boys, advanced Monday with the presentation of a summary of records on his life.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen to be beatified
Jul 6, 2019 - 04:00 am .- Pope Francis approved the miracle attributed to Archbishop Fulton Sheen Friday, making possible the American television catechist's beatification.

Brooklyn diocese advances sainthood cause of local priest
Jun 25, 2019 - 03:01 am .- The Bishop of Brooklyn accepted last week the findings of a nine-year diocesan investigation into the life of Monsignor Bernard John Quinn, known for fighting bigotry and serving the African American population, as part of his cause for canonization.

Fr. Augustus Tolton, former African American slave, advances toward sainthood
Jun 12, 2019 - 05:03 am .- Fr. Augustus Tolton advanced along the path to sainthood Wednesday, making the runaway slave-turned-priest one step closer to being the first black American saint.

Pope Francis will beatify these martyred Greek-Catholic bishops in Romania
May 30, 2019 - 03:01 pm .- On Sunday in Blaj, Pope Francis will beatify seven Greek-Catholic bishops of Romania who were killed by the communist regime between 1950 and 1970.
 
Woman who served Brazil’s poorest to be canonized
May 14, 2019 - 06:53 am .- Pope Francis Tuesday gave his approval for eight sainthood causes to proceed, including that of Bl. Dulce Lopes Pontes, a 20th-century religious sister who served Brazil’s poor.

Seven 20th-century Romanian bishops declared martyrs
Mar 19, 2019 - 12:01 pm .- Pope Francis declared Tuesday the martyrdom of seven Greek-Catholic bishops killed by the communist regime in Romania in the mid-20th century.

Pope advances sainthood causes of 17 women
Jan 15, 2019 - 11:12 am .- Pope Francis approved Tuesday the next step in the canonization causes of 17 women from four countries, including the martyrdom of 14 religious sisters killed in Spain at the start of the Spanish Civil War.
 
Nineteen Algerian martyrs beatified
Dec 10, 2018 - 03:08 pm .- Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in Algeria between 1994 and 1996, were beatified Saturday during a Mass in Oran.

The Algerian martyrs shed their blood for Christ, pope says
Dec 7, 2018 - 10:02 am .- Ahead of the beatification Saturday of Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in Algeria between 1994 and 1996, Pope Francis said martyrs have a special place in the Church.
Algerian martyrs are models for the Church, archbishop says
Nov 16, 2018 - 03:01 am .- Archbishop Paul Desfarges of Algiers has said that Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in Algeria between 1994 and 1996, are “models for our lives as disciples today and tomorrow.”
 
Francesco Spinelli to be canonized after healing of a newborn in DR Congo
Oct 9, 2018 - 05:01 pm .- Among those being canonized on Sunday are Fr. Franceso Spinelli, a diocesan priest through whose intercession a newborn was saved from death in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Algerian martyrs to be beatified in December
Sep 14, 2018 - 06:01 pm .- The Algerian bishops' conference has announced that the beatification of Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in the country between 1994 and 1996, will be held Dec. 8.

Now a cardinal, Giovanni Angelo Becciu heads to congregation for saints' causes
Jun 28, 2018 - 11:41 am .- Newly-minted Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu will resign from his post as substitute of the Secretariat of State tomorrow, in anticipation of his appointment as prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints later this summer.

Pope Francis creates new path to beatification under ‘offering of life’
Jul 11, 2017 - 06:22 am .- On Tuesday Pope Francis declared a new category of Christian life suitable for consideration of beatification called “offering of life” – in which a person has died prematurely through an offering of their life for love of God and neighbor.
 
Twentieth century Polish nurse among causes advancing toward sainthood
Jul 7, 2017 - 06:14 am .- Pope Francis on Friday approved a miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable Hanna Chrzanowska, a Polish nurse and nursing instructor who died from cancer in 1973, paving the way for her beatification.
 
Sainthood causes advance, including layman who resisted fascism
Jun 17, 2017 - 09:22 am .- Pope Francis on Friday recognized the heroic virtue of six persons on the path to canonization, as well as the martyrdom of an Italian man who died from injuries of a beating he received while imprisoned in a concentration camp for resisting fascism.
 
Solanus Casey, Cardinal Van Thuan among those advanced toward sainthood
May 4, 2017 - 10:47 am .- Pope Francis on Thursday approved decrees of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints advancing the causes for canonization of 12 individuals, including the American-born Capuchin Solanus Casey and the Vietnamese cardinal Francis Xavier Nguen Van Thuan.
 
Pope clears way for canonization of Fatima visionaries
Mar 23, 2017 - 06:44 am .- On Thursday Pope Francis approved the second and final miracle needed to canonize Blessed Francisco and Jacinta Marto, two of the shepherd children who witnessed the Fatima Marian apparitions.
Surgeon and father among sainthood causes moving forward
Feb 27, 2017 - 11:03 am .- Pope Francis recognized on Monday the heroic virtue of eight persons on the path to canonization, including an Italian surgeon and father of eight who suffered from several painful diseases throughout his life.

Records on life of Father Flanagan, founder of Boys Town, presented at Vatican
Jul 23, 2019 - 03:01 am .- The cause for canonization of Servant of God Edward Flanagan, the priest who founded Nebraska's Boys Town community for orphans and other boys, advanced Monday with the presentation of a summary of records on his life.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen to be beatified
Jul 6, 2019 - 04:00 am .- Pope Francis approved the miracle attributed to Archbishop Fulton Sheen Friday, making possible the American television catechist's beatification.

Brooklyn diocese advances sainthood cause of local priest
Jun 25, 2019 - 03:01 am .- The Bishop of Brooklyn accepted last week the findings of a nine-year diocesan investigation into the life of Monsignor Bernard John Quinn, known for fighting bigotry and serving the African American population, as part of his cause for canonization.

Fr. Augustus Tolton, former African American slave, advances toward sainthood
Jun 12, 2019 - 05:03 am .- Fr. Augustus Tolton advanced along the path to sainthood Wednesday, making the runaway slave-turned-priest one step closer to being the first black American saint.

Pope Francis will beatify these martyred Greek-Catholic bishops in Romania
May 30, 2019 - 03:01 pm .- On Sunday in Blaj, Pope Francis will beatify seven Greek-Catholic bishops of Romania who were killed by the communist regime between 1950 and 1970.
 
Woman who served Brazil’s poorest to be canonized
May 14, 2019 - 06:53 am .- Pope Francis Tuesday gave his approval for eight sainthood causes to proceed, including that of Bl. Dulce Lopes Pontes, a 20th-century religious sister who served Brazil’s poor.

Seven 20th-century Romanian bishops declared martyrs
Mar 19, 2019 - 12:01 pm .- Pope Francis declared Tuesday the martyrdom of seven Greek-Catholic bishops killed by the communist regime in Romania in the mid-20th century.

Pope advances sainthood causes of 17 women
Jan 15, 2019 - 11:12 am .- Pope Francis approved Tuesday the next step in the canonization causes of 17 women from four countries, including the martyrdom of 14 religious sisters killed in Spain at the start of the Spanish Civil War.
 
Nineteen Algerian martyrs beatified
Dec 10, 2018 - 03:08 pm .- Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in Algeria between 1994 and 1996, were beatified Saturday during a Mass in Oran.

The Algerian martyrs shed their blood for Christ, pope says
Dec 7, 2018 - 10:02 am .- Ahead of the beatification Saturday of Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in Algeria between 1994 and 1996, Pope Francis said martyrs have a special place in the Church.
Algerian martyrs are models for the Church, archbishop says
Nov 16, 2018 - 03:01 am .- Archbishop Paul Desfarges of Algiers has said that Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in Algeria between 1994 and 1996, are “models for our lives as disciples today and tomorrow.”
 
Francesco Spinelli to be canonized after healing of a newborn in DR Congo
Oct 9, 2018 - 05:01 pm .- Among those being canonized on Sunday are Fr. Franceso Spinelli, a diocesan priest through whose intercession a newborn was saved from death in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Algerian martyrs to be beatified in December
Sep 14, 2018 - 06:01 pm .- The Algerian bishops' conference has announced that the beatification of Bishop Pierre Claverie and his 18 companions, who were martyred in the country between 1994 and 1996, will be held Dec. 8.

Now a cardinal, Giovanni Angelo Becciu heads to congregation for saints' causes
Jun 28, 2018 - 11:41 am .- Newly-minted Cardinal Giovanni Angelo Becciu will resign from his post as substitute of the Secretariat of State tomorrow, in anticipation of his appointment as prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints later this summer.

Pope Francis creates new path to beatification under ‘offering of life’
Jul 11, 2017 - 06:22 am .- On Tuesday Pope Francis declared a new category of Christian life suitable for consideration of beatification called “offering of life” – in which a person has died prematurely through an offering of their life for love of God and neighbor.
 
Twentieth century Polish nurse among causes advancing toward sainthood
Jul 7, 2017 - 06:14 am .- Pope Francis on Friday approved a miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable Hanna Chrzanowska, a Polish nurse and nursing instructor who died from cancer in 1973, paving the way for her beatification.
 
Sainthood causes advance, including layman who resisted fascism
Jun 17, 2017 - 09:22 am .- Pope Francis on Friday recognized the heroic virtue of six persons on the path to canonization, as well as the martyrdom of an Italian man who died from injuries of a beating he received while imprisoned in a concentration camp for resisting fascism.
 
Solanus Casey, Cardinal Van Thuan among those advanced toward sainthood
May 4, 2017 - 10:47 am .- Pope Francis on Thursday approved decrees of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints advancing the causes for canonization of 12 individuals, including the American-born Capuchin Solanus Casey and the Vietnamese cardinal Francis Xavier Nguen Van Thuan.
 
Pope clears way for canonization of Fatima visionaries
Mar 23, 2017 - 06:44 am .- On Thursday Pope Francis approved the second and final miracle needed to canonize Blessed Francisco and Jacinta Marto, two of the shepherd children who witnessed the Fatima Marian apparitions.
Surgeon and father among sainthood causes moving forward
Feb 27, 2017 - 11:03 am .- Pope Francis recognized on Monday the heroic virtue of eight persons on the path to canonization, including an Italian surgeon and father of eight who suffered from several painful diseases throughout his life.

8 Martyrs Move Closer to Sainthood 8 July, 2016
Posted by ZENIT Staff on 8 July, 2016

The angel appears to Saint Monica
This morning, Pope Francis received Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Cardinal Angelo Amato. During the audience, he authorized the promulgation of decrees concerning the following causes:

***
MIRACLES:
Miracle attributed to the intercession of the Venerable Servant of God Luis Antonio Rosa Ormières, priest and founder of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Guardian Angel; born July 4, 1809 and died on Jan. 16, 1890
MARTYRDOM:
Servants of God Antonio Arribas Hortigüela and 6 Companions, Missionaries of the Sacred Heart; killed in hatred of the Faith, Sept. 29, 1936
Servant of God Josef Mayr-Nusser, a layman; killed in hatred of the Faith, Feb. 24, 1945
HEROIC VIRTUE:

Servant of God Alfonse Gallegos of the Order of Augustinian Recollects, Titular Bishop of Sasabe, auxiliary of Sacramento; born Feb. 20, 1931 and died Oct. 6, 1991
Servant of God Rafael Sánchez García, diocesan priest; born June 14, 1911 and died on Aug. 8, 1973
Servant of God Andrés García Acosta, professed layman of the Order of Friars Minor; born Jan. 10, 1800 and died Jan. 14, 1853
Servant of God Joseph Marchetti, professed priest of the Congregation of the Missionaries of St. Charles; born Oct. 3, 1869 and died Dec. 14, 1896
Servant of God Giacomo Viale, professed priest of the Order of Friars Minor, pastor of Bordighera; born Feb. 28, 1830 and died April 16, 1912
Servant of God Maria Pia of the Cross (née Maddalena Notari), foundress of the Congregation of Crucified Sisters Adorers of the Eucharist; born Dec. 2, 1847 and died on July 1, 1919
Sunday, November 23 2014 Six to Be Canonized on Feast of Christ the King.

On the List Are Lay Founder of a Hospital and Eastern Catholic Religious
VATICAN CITY, June 12, 2014 (Zenit.org) - Today, the Vatican announced that during the celebration of the feast of Christ the King on Sunday, November 23, an ordinary public consistory will be held for the canonization of the following six blesseds, who include a lay founder of a hospital for the poor, founders of religious orders, and two members of the Syro-Malabar Catholic Church, an Eastern Catholic Church in full communion with the Holy See:
-Giovanni Antonio Farina (1803-1888), an Italian bishop who founded the Institute of the Sisters Teachers of Saint Dorothy, Daughters of the Sacred Hearts
-Kuriakose Elias Chavara (1805-1871), a Syro-Malabar priest in India who founded the Carmelites of Mary Immaculate
-Ludovico of Casoria (1814-1885), an Italian Franciscan priest who founded the Gray Sisters of St. Elizabeth
-Nicola Saggio (Nicola da Longobardi, 1650-1709), an Italian oblate of the Order of Minims
-Euphrasia Eluvathingal (1877-1952), an Indian Carmelite of the Syro-Malabar Church
-Amato Ronconi (1238-1304), an Italian, Third Order Franciscan who founded a hospital for poor pilgrims

CAUSES OF SAINTS July 2015.
Pope Recognizes Heroic Virtues of Ukrainian Archbishop
Recognition Brings Metropolitan Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky Closer to Beatification
By Junno Arocho Esteves Rome, July 17, 2015 (ZENIT.org)
Pope Francis recognized the heroic virtues of Ukrainian Greek Catholic Archbishop Andrey Sheptytsky. According to a communique released by the Holy See Press Office, the Holy Father met this morning with Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints.

The Pope also recognized the heroic virtues of several religious/lay men and women from Italy, Spain, France & Mexico.
Metropolitan Andrey Sheptytsky is considered to be one of the most influential 20th century figures in the history of the Ukrainian Church.
Enthroned as Metropolitan of Lviv in 1901, Archbishop Sheptytsky was arrested shortly after the outbreak of World War I in 1914 by the Russians. After his imprisonment in several prisons in Russia and the Ukraine, the Archbishop was released in 1918.

The Ukrainian Greek Catholic prelate was also an ardent supporter of the Jewish community in Ukraine, going so far as to learn Hebrew to better communicate with them. He also was a vocal protestor against atrocities committed by the Nazis, evidenced in his pastoral letter, "Thou Shalt Not Kill." He was also known to harbor thousands of Jews in his residence and in Greek Catholic monasteries.
Following his death in 1944, his cause for canonization was opened in 1958.
* * *
The Holy Father authorized the Congregation to promulgate the following decrees regarding the heroic virtues of:
- Servant of God Andrey Sheptytsky, O.S.B.M., major archbishop of Leopolis of the Ukrainians, metropolitan of Halyc (1865-1944);
- Servant of God Giuseppe Carraro, Bishop of Verona, Italy (1899-1980);
- Servant of God Agustin Ramirez Barba, Mexican diocesan priest and founder of the Servants of the Lord of Mercy (1881-1967);
- Servant of God Simpliciano della Nativita (ne Aniello Francesco Saverio Maresca), Italian professed priest of the Order of Friars Minor, founder of the Franciscan Sisters of the Sacred Hearts (1827-1898);
- Servant of God Maria del Refugio Aguilar y Torres del Cancino, Mexican founder of the Mercedarian Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament (1866-1937);
- Servant of God Marie-Charlotte Dupouy Bordes (Marie-Teresa), French professed religious of the Society of the Religious of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary (1873-1953);
- Servant of God Elisa Miceli, Italian founder of the Rural Catechist Sisters of the Sacred Heart (1904-1976);
- Servant of God Isabel Mendez Herrero (Isabel of Mary Immaculate), Spanish professed nun of the Servants of St. Joseph (1924-1953)
October 01, 2015 Vatican City, Pope Authorizes following Decrees
(ZENIT.org) By Staff Reporter
Polish Layperson Recognized as Servant of God
Pope Authorizes Decrees
Pope Francis on Wednesday authorised the Congregation for Saints' Causes to promulgate the following decrees:

MARTYRDOM
- Servant of God Valentin Palencia Marquina, Spanish diocesan priest, killed in hatred of the faith in Suances, Spain in 1937;

HEROIC VIRTUES
- Servant of God Giovanni Folci, Italian diocesan priest and founder of the Opera Divin Prigioniero (1890-1963);
- Servant of God Franciszek Blachnicki, Polish diocesan priest (1921-1987);
- Servant of God Jose Rivera Ramirez, Spanish diocesan priest (1925-1991);
- Servant of God Juan Manuel Martín del Campo, Mexican diocesan priest (1917-1996);
- Servant of God Antonio Filomeno Maria Losito, Italian professed priest of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer (1838-1917);
- Servant of God Maria Benedetta Giuseppa Frey (nee Ersilia Penelope), Italian professed nun of the Cistercian Order (1836-1913);
- Servant of God Hanna Chrzanowska, Polish layperson, Oblate of the Ursulines of St. Benedict (1902-1973).
March 06 2016 MIRACLES authorised the Congregation to promulgate the following decrees:
Pope Francis received in a private audience Cardinal Angelo Amato, prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, during which he authorised the Congregation to promulgate the following decrees:
MIRACLES

– Blessed Manuel González García, bishop of Palencia, Spain, founder of the Eucharistic Missionaries of Nazareth (1877-1940);
– Blessed Elisabeth of the Trinity (née Elisabeth Catez), French professed religious of the Order of Discalced Carmelites (1880-1906);
– Venerable Servant of God Marie-Eugène of the Child Jesus (né Henri Grialou), French professed priest of the Order of Discalced Carmelites, founder of the Secular Institute “Notre-Dame de Vie” (1894-1967);
– Venerable Servant of God María Antonia of St. Joseph (née María Antonio de Paz y Figueroa), Argentine founder of the Beaterio of the Spiritual Exercise of Buenos Aires (1730-1799);
HEROIC VIRTUE

– Servant of God Stefano Ferrando, Italian professed priest of the Salesians, bishop of Shillong, India, founder of the Congregation of Missionary Sisters of Mary Help of Christians (1895-1978);
– Servant of God Enrico Battista Stanislao Verjus, Italian professed priest of the Missionaries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, coadjutor of the apostolic vicariate of New Guinea (1860-1892);
– Servant of God Giovanni Battista Quilici, Italian diocesan priest, founder of the Congregation of the Daughters of the Crucified (1791-1844);
– Servant of God Bernardo Mattio, Italian diocesan priest (1845-1914);
– Servant of God Quirico Pignalberi, Italian professed priest of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual (1891-1982);
– Servant of God Teodora Campostrini, Italian founder of the Minim Sisters of Charity of Our Lady of Sorrows (1788-1860);
– Servant of God Bianca Piccolomini Clementini, Italian founder of the Company of St. Angela Merici di Siena (1875-1959);
– Servant of God María Nieves of the Holy Family (née María Nieves Sánchez y Fernández), Spanish professed religious of the Daughters of Mary of the Pious Schools (1900-1978).

April 26 2016 MIRACLES authorised the Congregation to promulgate the following decrees:
Here is the full list of decrees approved by the Pope:

MIRACLES
– Blessed Alfonso Maria Fusco, diocesan priest and founder of the Congregation of the Sisters of St. John the Baptist (1839-1910);
– Venerable Servant of God John Sullivan, professed priest of the Society of Jesus (1861-1933);
MARTYRDOM
– Servants of God Nikolle Vinçenc Prennushi, O.F.M., archbishop of Durres, Albania, and 37 companions killed between 1945 and 1974;
– Servants of God José Antón Gómez and three companions of the Benedictines of Madrid, Spain, killed 1936;
HEROIC VIRTUES
– Servant of God Thomas Choe Yang-Eop, diocesan priest (1821-1861);
– Servant of God Sosio Del Prete (né Vincenzo), professed priest of the Order of Friars Minor, founder of the Congregation of the Little Servants of Christ the King (1885-1952);
– Servant of God Wenanty Katarzyniec (né Jósef), professed priest of the Order of Friars Minor Conventual (1889-1921);
– Servant of God Maria Consiglia of the Holy Spirity (née Emilia Paqualina Addatis), founder of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Addolorata, Servants of Mary (1845-1900);
– Servant of God Maria of the Incarnation (née Caterina Carrasco Tenorio), founder of the Congregation of the Franciscan Tertiary Sisters of the Flock of Mary (1840-1917);
– Servant of God , founder of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Family of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (1851-1923);
– Servant of God Ilia Corsaro, founder of the Congregation of the Little Missionaries of the Eucharist (1897-1977);
– Servant of God Maria Montserrat Grases García, layperson of the Personal Prelature of the Holy Cross and Opus Dei (1941-1959).
LINKS:
Marian Apparitions (over 2000)  India Marian Shrine Lourdes of the East   Lourdes Feb 11- July 16, Loreto, Italy 1858 
China
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