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!)
R.  Deo grátias. R.  Thanks be to God.
April is dedicated to devotion of the Holy Eucharist and to the Holy Spirit.
2023
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For the Son of man ... will repay every man for what he has done.

The saints are a “cloud of witnesses over our head”,
 showing us life of Christian perfection is possible.
anselm_of_mantua
 40 Days for Life
We are the defenders of true freedom.
  May our witness unveil the deception of the "pro-choice" slogan.
  Campaign saves lives Shawn Carney Campaign Director www.40daysforlife.com , 
Please help save the unborn they are the future for the world

 It is a great poverty that a child must die so that you may live as you wish -- Mother Teresa
 Saving babies, healing moms and dads, 'The Gospel of Life'

April 21 – Our Lady of the Slap on the Cheek (Italy, 1200) - Saint Anselm of Canterbury
 
"Recite the Rosary every day for bishops and priests"
 
In 1973, Sister Agnes Katsuto Sasagawa received three important messages from Our Lady in Akita, Japan.

In his pastoral letter of April 22, 1984, Bishop John Shojiro Ito, Bishop of Niigata (a coastal town of Honshu, Japan’s main island), officially recognized the supernatural character of the apparitions. The messages certainly contain a stern warning, but at the same time convey the Virgin Mary’s maternal love. These are her words:
"Recite the Rosary everyday for bishops and priests. The action of the devil is seeping also into the Church—who is the prey of internal divisions—cardinals will oppose other cardinals, bishops will oppose bishops; altars and churches will be ransacked. The Church will be full of those who accept compromise. Many priests and religious, seduced by the temptations of the devil, will renounce their vows and leave their holy vocation to serve the Lord. The devil will especially hunt down the Father’s consecrated souls. The loss of so many souls is the cause of my Sorrow."
Father Joseph-Marie Jacq, MEP (Society of Foreign Missions of Paris)
In J’ai vu pleurer ma Mère à Akita, Lourdes, Ed. Hovine.
 
CAUSES OF SAINTS April 

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 .

April 21 – St Anselm, Doctor of the Church,
laid the groundwork for the development of the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception in the West.

Scapular of Mount Carmel  “Mary’s Habit” April 21 - Saint Anselm
 A man walked to the altar and fired point blank 
A French priest set off to celebrate Holy Mass in a church at a Marian shrine. On the way there he realized that he had forgotten to put on his scapular. Although he was already far from his home, he returned without hesitating to go get “Mary’s habit,” since he did not want to celebrate Mass without it.
During the Holy Sacrifice, a young man walked up to the altar and took out a pistol. He fired point blank at the priest. However, to everyone's amazement, the priest continued to say Mass, as if nothing happened.
Their first thought was that the bullet had providentially missed its target.
But that was not the case: the priest found the bullet inexplicably stuck in his scapular of Mount Carmel.
That flimsy piece of cloth had acted as a breastplate for a soldier of Jesus Christ!
At various times in history, many soldiers have received the same favor from Heaven, when the enemy’s lethal bullet was stopped in the scapular they were wearing, saving their lives.
In Le scapulaire du Mont-Carmel, Editions Traditions Monastiques, March 1997

The Virgin Mary knew with certainty that the Resurrection would take place (II)
The Virgin Mary rose to her feet and said: “These passages that speak of the time of my Son's Resurrection suffice…” then she looked out the window and saw that the dawn was beginning to break. She rejoiced and thought: “My Son is about to rise from the dead.” Then, kneeling down, she prayed: “Awake, stand before me and look; and you, Lord God Sabaoth, awake!”
And at that moment, Christ sent the Angel Gabriel to her, saying: “You who announced to my Mother the Incarnation of the Word, go tell her the news of his Resurrection." Immediately, the Angel flew to the Virgin and told her: “Queen of Heaven, rejoice, for he whom you did merit to bear in your womb has risen as he foretold.” And Christ greeted his Mother, saying, “Peace be with you…”
And Mary said to her Son: “Until now, my Son, I kept the Sabbath on Saturday, to honor the holy rest after the Creation of the world; now I will keep it on Sunday, in memory of your Resurrection, rest, and glory.” And Christ approved her words.
 St Vincent Ferrier, O.P., Spanish Priest, also known as the Angel of the Last Judgment
The Resurrection and the Trinity (La résurrection et la trinité) peresdeleglise.free.fr

I have many distractions, but as soon as I am aware of them, I pray for those people, the thought of whom is diverting my attention. In this way they reap the benefit of my distractions. -- St. Therese of Lisieux

April 21 - OUR LADY OF THE SLAP (Italy, 1200)
Mary is a Woman who Loves (II) Benedict XVI Deus est caritas # 4
The Magnificat - a portrait, so to speak, of her soul - is entirely woven from threads of Holy Scripture, threads drawn from the Word of God. Here we see how completely at home Mary is with the Word of God, with ease she moves in and out of it. She speaks and thinks with the Word of God; the Word of God becomes her word, and her word issues from the Word of God. Here we see how her thoughts are attuned to the thoughts of God, how her will is one with the will of God. Since Mary is completely imbued with the Word of God, she is able to become the Mother of the Word Incarnate.
  160 The Holy Martyrs Theodore, his mother Philippa, Dioscorus, Socrates and Dionysius
 302 St.  Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus Martyrs spectators who witnessed sufferings of the Holy Great Martyr George
(April 23).  His faith, valor and miracles caused them to believe in Christ
  303 St. Apollo & Companions Martyrs Nicomedíæ sanctórum Mártyrum Apóllinis, Isácii et Codráti
  305 Hieromartyr Januarius Bishop of Beneventum deacons Proculus, Sossius and Faustus, Desiderius the Reader,
        Eutychius and Acution
 341 Simeon Barsabae B and 1000 Companions martyred in Persia under King Shapur MM (RM)
       St. Arator priest Martyr with Fortunatus, Felix, Silvius, and in Alexandria, Egypt
       Antiochíæ sancti Anastásii Sinaítæ Epíscopi.    At Antioch, St. Anastasius the Sinaite, bishop.
 434 St. Maximian Patriarch of Constantinople priest
 582 Cyprian of Brescia B (AC)
 599 St. Anastasius XI Antioch Patriarch learning holiness comforting afflicted; observed perpetual silence except for
charity
 630 Beuno of Wales founder  Abbot (AC)
 678 Anastasius the Sinaite hermit on Mount Sinai left ascetical and theological writings of considerable value (RM)
721-724 Malrubius priest Abbot austere monastic life known for piety learning miracles M (AC)
 750 St. Frodulphus Benedictine monk hermit
       St. Beuno effective preacher evangelized North Wales
1109 Anselm of Canterbury Doctor of the Church OSB B Cur Deus Homo, the most famous treatise on the Incarnation ever written
1158 Blessed Walter of Mondsee in Upper Austria OSB Abbot
1163 Blessed Fastred of Cambron abbot-founder of Cambron obligation to poverty OSB Cist. Abbot (AC)
1466 Blessed Bartholomew of Cervere PhD. precocious solemnity pious converted many heretics worked steadfastly to eradicate heresy OP M (AC)
1894 St. Conrad of Parzham Franciscan mystic lay brother Marian devotions gift of prophecy read people’s hearts
If We Ignore the Mother, We Can't See the Child (I) April 21 - Our Lady of the Slap (Italy, 1200)
     At the time of the Annunciation, the angel Gabriel prophesied that all generations would call Mary blessed. In our generation, we need to fulfill that prophesy. We need to call her blessed. We need to honor her again, because God did.
   Jesus himself, as a faithful Jew, kept the Fourth Commandment and honored His mother. Since Christ is our brother, she is our mother too. Indeed, at the end of John's Gospel, Jesus named her as the mother of all of us beloved disciples. So we too have a duty to honor her. If we look back into the biblical history of ancient Israel, we discover that the Chosen People always paid homage not only to their king, but also to the mother of the king.
The gebirah, the queen mother, loomed large in the affections of Israelites.
   In Matthew's Gospel especially, we find Jesus portrayed as the royal Son of David and Mary as the queen mother. The Wise Men, for example, traveled far to find the Child King with his mother.
   We find the mother of the Son of David portrayed in a similar way in the Book of Revelation, Chapter 12.
There she is shown to be crowned with 12 stars, for the 12 tribes of Israel. The New Testament writers, you see, were careful to show us Mary's important place in the kingdom, and how we should love and honor her.
Excerpt from Scott Hahn,
If We Ignore the Mother, We Can't See the Child, Zenit, Dec. 25, 2002.
See: http://www.mariedenazareth.com/2470.0.html?&L=1
"O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire Thee with our whole heart;
that, so desiring, we may seek, and, seeking, find Thee;
and so finding Thee, may love Thee; and loving Thee may hate those sins from which Thou hast redeemed Amen." Saint Anselm; Anselm countered rudeness with gentleness, hatred with clarity, anger with an unchangeable patience
Mary's Divine Motherhood
Called in the Gospel "the Mother of Jesus," Mary is acclaimed by Elizabeth, at the prompting of the Spirit and even before the birth of her son, as "the Mother of my Lord" (Lk 1:43; Jn 2:1; 19:25; cf. Mt 13:55; et al.). In fact, the One whom she conceived as man by the Holy Spirit, who truly became her Son according to the flesh, was none other than the Father's eternal Son, the second person of the Holy Trinity.
Hence the Church confesses that Mary is truly "Mother of God" (Theotokos).
Catechism of the Catholic Church 495, quoting the Council of Ephesus (431): DS 251.
"All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord;
and all the families of the nations shall worship before him" (Psalm 21:28)
160 The Holy Martyrs Theodore, his mother Philippa, Dioscorus, Socrates and Dionysius
They suffered during the reign of the emperor Antoninus Pius (138-161) in Perge, Pamphylia. When they were conscripting robust and healthy young men for military service, then they led the youth Theodore and the others to the military commander Theodotus.  The military commander ordered the youth to offer sacrifice to idols, but the martyr submitted neither to persuasion nor threats. Then the military commander had him placed on a red-hot plate and poured liquid tar on him. Suddenly, there was an earthquake, and a torrent of water gushed forth from the ground and extinguished the fire.  The martyr Theodore remained unharmed, and gave praise to God.
The commander ascribed his deliverance to sorcery, so St Theodore suggested that he test the power of his gods by putting the pagan priest Dioscorus through the same trials.

The commander told Dioscorus to lie upon the red-hot plate, and call on the help of Zeus. St Dioscorus replied that he believed in Christ, and he was prepared to throw the idol of Zeus into the fire. Again the military commander commanded him to get on the heated plate. St Dioscorus fell at the knees of St Theodore, asking that he pray for him. Then he got onto the plate, crying out: "I thank You, Lord Jesus Christ, that You have numbered me among Your servants. Accept my soul in peace." Then he died, having been delivered from terrible torment.
They continued to torture St Theodore. They tied him to wild horses, which began to run. But at the city walls the horses fell down and collapsed, and the martyr Theodore remained unharmed.
Two soldiers, Socrates and Dionysius, saw how a fiery chariot came down from the heavens to St Theodore, on which the martyr was carried off.

The astonished soldiers shouted: "Great is the God of the Christians!" They seized them and on the next day threw them into a fiery furnace with the martyr Theodore.
But a heavenly dew cooled the furnace, and the saints remained alive.

In the morning, the military commander ordered soldiers to look upon the burned bodies of the martyrs. The soldiers returned and reported that the three youths were unharmed. St Theodore's mother, Philippa, encouraged the martyrs in their act.
The military commander told St Philippa to save her son, by urging him to offer sacrifice to the idols. St Philippa said that when her son was born it was revealed to her that he would be crucified for Christ. Hearing this, the military commander commanded them to crucify St Theodore, and to cut off the heads of the other martyrs.
St Theodore hung on the cross for three days, offering prayers to God until he finally died.
isaac_appolos
303 St.  Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus Martyrs spectators who witnessed sufferings of the Holy Great Martyr George (April 23).  Quadratus of Nicomedia
His faith, valor and miracles  caused them to believe in Christ

Nicomedíæ sanctórum Mártyrum Apóllinis, Isácii et Codráti; e quibus, sub Diocletiáno Imperatóre, últimus cápite plexus, et, paucis post illum diébus, duo primi in vínculis fame confécti, martyrii corónam meruérunt.

At Nicomedia, the holy martyrs Apollo, Isacius, and Codratus, who suffered under the Emperor Diocletian.  The last of these was slain by the sword, and a few days later the other two died from starvation in prison, meriting also the crown of martyrdom

The Holy Martyrs Isaac, Apollos and Quadratus were pagans who served at the court of the emperor Diocletian (284-305).
They were among the spectators who witnessed the sufferings of the Holy Great Martyr George (April 23). His faith, valor and miracles caused them to believe in Christ. The saints openly declared themselves Christians, and reproached the emperor for his impiety and cruelty. They were sentenced to death. The martyr Quadratus was beheaded with a sword, and the martyrs Apollos and Isaac perished by starvation (+ 303).
Apollo, Isacius & Crotates (Codratus) MM (RM) Died c. 302. This trio of servants of Alexandra, wife of Diocletian, died for the faith. Crotates was beheaded and the other two starved to death in prison (Benedictines).
305 Hieromartyr Januarius Bishop of Beneventum deacons Proculus, Sossius and Faustus, Desiderius the Reader, Eutychius and Acution
They suffered martyrdom for Christ about the year 305 during the persecution ordered by the emperor Diocletian (284-305).

They arrested St Januarius and led him to trial before Menignus, the governor of Campagna (central Italy). Because of his firm confession of Christianity, they threw the saint into a red-hot furnace. But like the Babylonian youths, he came out unharmed. Then at Menignus's command, they stretched him out on a bench and beat him with iron rods until his bones were exposed.

In the crowd were Deacon Faustus and the Reader Desiderius, who wept at the sight of their bishop's suffering. The pagans surmised that they were Christians, and threw them into prison with the hieromartyr Januarius, in the city of Puteolum. At this prison were two deacons who had been jailed for confessing Christ: Sts Sossius and Proculus, and also two laymen, Sts Eutychius and Acution.

On the following morning they led out all the martyrs into the circus to be torn to pieces by wild beasts, but the beasts would not touch them. Menignus claimed that all the miracles were due to sorcery on the part of the Christians, and immediately he became blinded and cried out for help. The gentle hieromartyr Januarius prayed for his healing, and Menignus recovered his sight. The torturer's blindness of soul, however, was not healed. He accused the Christians of sorcery, and ordered the martyrs beheaded before the walls of the city (+ 305).
   Christians from surrounding cities took up the bodies of the holy martyrs for burial, and those of each city took one, in order to have an intercessor before God. The inhabitants of Neapolis (Naples) took the body of the hieromartyr Januarius. With the body, they also collected his dried blood.
   Since the fifteenth century, the blood liquifies when the container is placed near another relic, believed to be the martyr's head. Many miracles proceeded from the relics of the hieromartyr Januarius. During an eruption of Vesuvius around 431, the inhabitants of the city prayed to St Januarius to help them. The lava stopped, and did not reach the city.
341 Simeon Barsabae & and 1000 Companions martyred in Persia under King Shapur MM (RM)
In Pérside natális sancti Simeónis, Epíscopi Seleucíæ et Ctesiphóntis, qui, jubénte Rege Persárum Sápore, comprehénsus ferróque onústus, iníquis tribunálibus exhíbitus, et, cum Solem ipsum adoráre nollet et de Jesu Christo voce líbera et constantíssima testarétur, primum carceráli ergástulo, cum áliis centum (ex quibus álii Epíscopi, álii erant Presbyteri, álii diversórum órdinum Clérici), longo témpore macerátus est.  Deínde, cum Usthazánes, Regis nutrítius, qui ante jam lapsus a fide, sed per eum ad pæniténtiam fúerat revocátus, martyrium constánter subiísset, postrídie, qui erat ánnuus Domínicæ passiónis dies, ómnibus ante Simeónis óculos, qui unumquémque eórum strénue exhortabátur, gládio jugulátis, novíssime et ipse decollátus est.  Passi sunt étiam cum ipso claríssimi viri Abdéchalas et Ananías, qui ejus erant Presbyteri, Pusícius quoque, Præféctus artíficum Regis, eo quod Ananíam titubántem corroborásset, ídeo, collo circa téndinem perforáto et lingua exínde extrácta, crudéli morte occúbuit; post quem et fília cruciátibus ac demum ense decollátus est.
    In Persia, the birthday of St. Simeon, bishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon.  He was arrested by order of Sapor, king of Persia, loaded with irons, and presented to the iniquitous tribunals.  As he refused to adore the sun, and openly and constantly bore testimony to Jesus Christ, he was confined for a long time in a dungeon with one hundred other confessors, some of whom were bishops. others priests, others clerics of various ranks.  Afterwards, Usthazanes, the king's foster-father, who had been converted from apostasy by Simeon, endured martyrdom with great constancy.  The day after, which was the anniversary of our Lord's Passion, the companions of Simeon whom he had feelingly exhorted, were beheaded before his eyes, after which he met the same fate.  With him suffered also several distinguished men: Abdechalas and Ananias, his priests, with Pusicius, the head of the royal workmen.  This last having encouraged Ananias, who seemed to falter, died a cruel death, having his tongue drawn out through a perforation made in his neck.  After him, his daughter, who was a consecrated virgin, was put to death.

341 SS. SIMEON BARSABAE, Bishop Of Seleucia-Ctesiphon, And Companions, Martyrs
PERHAPS the longest individual notice which occurs in the Roman Martyrology is that devoted to a group of Persian martyrs on this day. It runs as follows: “In Persia the birthday of St Simeon, Bishop of Seleucia and Ctesiphon, who was taken by command of Sapor, King of the Persians, loaded with chains, and brought before iniquitous tribunals. As he refused to worship the sun, and bore testimony to Jesus Christ with clear and constant voice, he was first of all kept for a long time in prison with a hundred others, whereof some were bishops, others priests, others clerics of divers ranks; then when Usthazanes, the king’s tutor, who some time before had lapsed from the faith, but whom the bishop had recalled to repentance, had suffered martyrdom with constancy, on the next day, which was the anniversary of the Lord’s passion, the others were all beheaded before the eyes of Simeon, who meanwhile zealously exhorted each of them; and lastly he himself was beheaded. With him there suffered moreover the men of renown Abdechalas and Ananias, his priests; Pusicius also, the overseer of the king’s workmen, fell by a cruel death, because he had sttengthened Ananias when he was wavering, wherefore his neck was severed and his tongue removed; and after him his daughter also was slain who was a holy virgin.”
A hardly less lengthy eulogy is accorded on the next day to another group of Persian martyrs. St Simeon, called Barsabae, i.e. son of the fuller, is mentioned in the first place among the martyrs in the little supplement annexed to the Syriac “Breviarium” of 412 under the heading “The Names of our Masters the Confessors, Bishops of Persia”. There can be no question as to the reality and the cruelty of the persecution which was renewed by Sapor II in 340 or 341, for we hear much about it in Sozomen and other authorities.
The best text of the Passion of St Simeon Barsabae is probably that edited by M. Kmosko in vol. ii o. Patrologia Syriaca, pp. 661—690. The document had been published long ago by E. Assemani in his Acta martyrum orientalium, and there is also an Armenian translation. As has been pointed out by Fr Peeters in the Analecta Bollandiana (vol. xxix, pp. 151—156, and vol. xliii, pp. 264—268) as well as in the Acta Sanctorum, November, vol. iv, pp. 419—421, several interesting problems arise out of these acts. In particular the name which appears in the Roman Martyrology as Usthazanes and in the Syriac as Guhistazad is probably identical with the name Azadas which figures in the list of Persian martyrs on the next day. A French translation of the acts is printed in Dom Leclercq’s Les Martyrs, vol. iii, pp. 145—162.

Died at Ctesiphon, Persia. One of the longest entries in the Roman Martyrology is devoted to Saint Simeon and his companions, who were martyred in Persia during the extremely cruel and violent persecution of Christians under King Shapur. Simeon was appointed metropolitan of Persia (Seleucia and Ctesiphon) by the Council of Nicaea.
He was accused by Shapur of treasonable correspondence with the Christian Roman emperor, Constantius II, and of other offenses. He was ordered to conform to the Zoroastrian religion and worship the sun.

He protested his loyalty to the crown, but refused to apostatize: "The sun," he said, "went into mourning when its Creator and Master died on the cross." For refusing Simeon was tortured and imprisoned.
On Good Friday, Simeon was forced to witness the beheading of some 100 of his flock, including Abdechalas (priest), Ananias (priest), Usthazanes (the king's tutor and repentant apostate), Pusicius (oversee of the king's workmen who had encouraged Ananias), and others. Then, he himself was beheaded. Some time later Simeon's sister, Saint Pherbutha (Tarbula), a dedicated virgin, was charged with witchcraft. She, her sister, and another woman were sawn to death.
Simeon's successors in the see of Seleucia-Ctesiphon--Saint Shahdost and Saint Barba'shmin--were both martyred.
Thereafter, the see was vacant for nearly 40 years. Thousands of Christians perished and many fled abroad during the persecution (Attwater, Attwater2, Benedictines, Delaney, Encyclopedia).
St. Arator priest Martyr with Fortunatus, Felix, Silvius, and in Alexandria, Egypt
Alexandríæ sanctórum Mártyrum Aratóris Presbyteri, Fortunáti, Felícis, Sílvii et Vitális, qui in cárcere quievérunt.
    At Alexandria, the holy martyrs Arátor, a priest, Fortunatus, Felix, Silvius, and Vitalis, who all died in prison.
He and his companions were martyred in an early persecution and were listed in the Roman Martyrology.

Arator, Fortunatus, Felix, Silvius, & Vitalis MM (RM). Saint Arator was a priest in Alexandria, Egypt, put to death with 4 others in one of the earlier persecutions. No particulars are now extant (Benedictines).
Nicomedíæ sanctórum Mártyrum Apóllinis, Isácii et Codráti; e quibus, sub Diocletiáno Imperatóre, últimus cápite plexus, et, paucis post illum diébus, duo primi in vínculis fame confécti, martyrii corónam meruérunt.
    At Nicomedia, the holy martyrs Apollo, Isacius, and Codratus, who suffered under the Emperor Diocletian.  The last of these was slain by the sword, and a few days later the other two died from starvation in prison, meriting also the crown of martyrdom.
434 St. Maximian Patriarch of Constantinople priest
Patriarch of Constantinople. He was a Roman priest and a friend of Pope Celestine I, who esteemed him.
Saint Maximian, Patriarch of Constantinople, was born in Rome from wealthy and pious parents. Upon receiving his inheritance, he provided tombs to bury those who led holy lives.

St Maximian was a plain man and he preferred to live far from worldly vanity. Because of his pure and virtuous life, Patriarch Sisinius of Constantinople (426-427) ordained him presbyter.

When the heretic Nestorius (428-431) was deposed as Patriarch of Constantinople, St Maximian replaced him on the patriarchal throne on October 25, 431, during the reign of the holy emperor Theodosius the Younger (408-450). 

The holy Patriarch Maximian died peacefully on April 12, 434, on Great and Holy Thursday.
582 Cyprian of Brescia B (AC)
The relics of Bishop Cyprian of Brescia, Lombardy, Italy, are enshrined in the church of San Pietro in Oliveto at Brescia (Benedictines).
599 St. Anastasius XI Antioch Patriarch learning holiness comforting afflicted observed perpetual silence except for charity Antiochíæ sancti Anastásii Epíscopi.  At Antioch, St. Anastasius, bishop.

598 ST. ANASTASIUS I, PATRIARCH OF ANTIOCH
From Lives of Saintes by Alban Butler

Whom Nicephorus and many moderns confound with the Sinaite, (which last certainly lived sixty years after the death of the patriarch,) was a man of singular learning and piety. When any persons in his company spoke of temporal affairs, he seemed to have neither ears to hear, nor tongue to give any answer, observing a perpetual silence, as Evagrius reports of him, except when charity or necessity compelled him to speak. He had an extraordinary talent in comforting the afflicted.   He vigorously opposed the heresy when the emperor Justinian maintained in his dotage, that the body of Christ, during his mortal life, was not liable to corruption and pain and wrote upon that subject with propriety, elegance, and choice of sentiments. The emperor resolved to banish him, but was prevented by death.  However, his successor, Justin the Younger, a man corrupted in his morals, expelled him from his see which he recovered again twenty-three years after, in 593. He held it five years longer, and, dying in 598, left us several letters and very pious sermons.  See Henschenius, t. 2, Apr. p.853; Evagr Hist. 1. 4, c. 38, 39, &c.

610 ST. ANASTASIUS, SURNAMED THE YOUNGER,
PATRIARCH OF ANTIOCH,
Who succeeded the above-mentioned in 610 He was slain by the Jews, in sedition, on the 21st of December, and in the Roman Martyrology is honored on that day as a martyr.



599 ST ANASTASIUS I, PATRIARCH OF ANTIOCH
ST ANASTASIUS I was a man of much learning and piety. According to Evagrius he was little given to speech, and when people discussed temporal affairs in his presence he seemed to have neither ears to bear nor tongue to make answer; yet he had a great gift for comforting the afflicted.
Anastasius was banished from his see for twenty-three years for opposing erroneous teaching that had the support of the Emperors Justinian I and Justin II, but was restored by the Emperor Maurice at the instance of his friend and correspondent Pope St Gregory I. Several of the bishop’s letters and sermons have survived.
This Anastasius is often confused (e.g., apparently, in the Roman Martyrology) with St Anastasius the Sinaite, who was a hermit on Mount Sinai a century later. He was afterwards called the “New Moses”, and some of his writings against Monophysism and other works are extant. He died C. 700.
Most of what is known concerning the Patriarch Anastasius is recorded by Evagrius and Theophanes. For both saints see the Acta Sanctorum, April, vol. ii, DCB., vol. i, DTC., vol. i, and DHG., vol. ii.
Distinguished for his learning and holiness. Anastasius opposed Emperor Justinian, who was issuing imperial documents about the faith. Justinian commanded that Anastasius be exiled but died before the sentence could be carried out by the court. Justin II, who succeeded his uncle Justinian, exiled Anastasius five years later. In 593 Anastasius was restored to his see by Pope St. Gregory the Great.

Anastasius I of Antioch B (RM) Died 599. This patriarch of Antioch is often confused with his namesake, "the Sinaite." Anastasius, a man of singular learning and piety, believed in total detachment from the temporal world. Evagrius (Eccl. Hist., 1.4, c. 38, 39) reports that he observed perpetual silence except when charity or necessity compelled him to speak. Anastasius was particularly adept at comforting the afflicted.

One would think that a man who did not speak would not get into trouble. Nevertheless, he was a resolute opponent of the imperial politico-theological rule. He vigorously opposed Emperor Justinian's heretical insistence that Jesus, during his mortal life, suffered no pain, i.e., that Christ simply appeared to be a man. For his opposition, Anastasius was threatened with deposition by Justinian, and actually banished from his see for 23 years by Justin II. Anastasius was finally restored to Antioch by Saint Gregory the Great and Emperor Maurice, but died five years later leaving us a legacy of several letters and pious sermons (Benedictines, Husenbeth).
630 Beuno of Wales founder  Abbot (AC)
640 ST BEUNO, ABBOT

From the Lives of Saintes by Alban Butler
ST. BEUNO, OR BEUNOR, ABBOT OF CLYNNOG, IN CAENARVONSHIRE, C.
He was a native of Powis-land,* and son of Beugi, or, as the Welsh write it, Hywgi, grandson to the prince of Powis-land, or at least part of it called Glewisig.   For the sake of his education he was sent into Arvon, the territory opposite to Anglesey, from which island it is separated by the river, or rather arm of the sea, called Menai. This country was also called Snowdon forest, from its hills, the highest in Britain, which derive their name from the snow which covers them, being called in Welsh, Craig Eriry, words of the same import with their English name Snowdon. These mountains afford such an impregnable retreat, and so much good pasture, that the usual style of the sovereigns was, Princes of North-Wales, and Lords of Snowdon.
   Sejont, called by the Romans Segontium, was the capital city, situated on the river Sejont.  Its ruins are still visible near the town and castle of Caernarvon, (or city of Arvon,) built by Edward I, on the mouth of the river, at the great ferry over to Anglesey. That island had been, under the pagan Britons, the chief seat of the Druids, and was afterwards illustrious for many holy monks and hermits. On the coast opposite to this island, in the county of Caernarvon, stood three great monasteries that of Clynnog Fawr, near Sejont, or Caernarvon that of Conway on the extremity of this county towards Denbighshire, on the river Conway which separates the two counties from which it is called Aberconway that is mouth of the Conway. It was the burying-place of the princes of North-Wales. Edward I. built there a strong castle and town facing Beaumaris, the capital of Anglesey, though the passage here is much broader than from Caernarvon.  Bangor, or Banchor, i. e. White Choir, or Place of the Choir, was on the same coast, in the midway between Caernarvon and Aberconway. This monastery and bishopric were founded by St. Daniel, about the year 525. The very town was formerly called Bangor Fawr or the Great Bangor: but the monastery and city were destroyed by the Danes; and, though the bishopric still subsists, the town is scarce better than a village. St. Bueno seems to have had his education in the monastery of Bangor. He afterwards became the father and founder of several great nurseries of saints.  Two monasteries he built in the isle of Anglesey, Aberffraw and Trefdraeth of both which churches he is to this day titular saint. On the continent, he founded Clynnog, or Clynnoc fechan, i.e. Little Clynnog; and Clynnog Fawr, or Vawr, i.e. Great Clynnog. This last was situated near the river Sejont, and the present Caernarvon. Cadvan was at that time king of North-Wales, and had lately gained a great victory over Ethelred, king of the pagan English Saxons of Northumberland, who had barbarously massacred the poor monks of Bangor, in the year 607, or somewhat later.  St. Beuno made the king a present of a golden scepter, and the prince assigned a spot to build his monastery upon, near Fynnon Beuno, or Beuno's well, in the parish of Llanwunda, of which he is titular saint.  But when he was beginning to lay the foundation, a certain woman came to him with a child in her arms, saying, that the ground was this infant's inheritance.   The holy man, much troubled hereat, took the woman with him to the king, who kept his court at Caer Sejont, and told him, with a great deal of zeal and concern, that he could not devote to God another's patrimony. The king refusing to pay any regard to his remonstrance, the saint went away. But one Gwyddeiant, cousin-german to the king, immediately went after him, and bestowed on him the township of Clynnog-Fawr, his undoubted patrimony, where Beuno built his church about the year 616.  King Cadvan died about that time; but his son and successor Cadwallon surpassed him in his liberality to the saint and his monastery. It is related, among other miracles, that when a certain man had lost his eyebrow by some hurt, St. Beuno healed it by applying the iron point of his staff: and that from this circumstance a church four miles from Clynnog, perhaps built by the person so healed, retains to this day the name of Llanael hayarn,, i.e. church of the iron brow: though popular tradition is not perhaps a sufficient evidence of such a miracle; and some other circumstance might give occasion to the name. Some further account of St. Beuno will be given in the life of St. Wenefride. The year of his death is nowhere recorded. He is commemorated on the 14th of January and 21st of April. And on Trinity Sunday great numbers resort to the wakes at Clynnog, and formerly brought offerings to the church.
   This monastery passed afterwards into the hands of Benedictines of the congregation of Clugni whence it had the name of Clynnog, or Clunnoe, being formerly known only by that of its founder. The church, built of beautiful stone, is so large and magnificent as to remain to this day the greatest ornament and wonder of the whole country, especially Saint Beuno's chapel, which is joined to the church by a portico.  In this chapel, the fine painted or stained glass in the large windows is much effaced and destroyed, except a large figure of our blessed Saviour extended on the cross.  Opposite to this crucifix, about three yards from the east window, is Saint Beuno's tomb, raised above the ground and covered with a large stone, upon which people still lay sick children, in hopes of being cured. This great building though very strong, is in danger of decaying for want of revenues to keep it in repair.  Those of the monastery were chiefly settled on the Principal of Jesus College in Oxford, except what was reserved for the maintenance of a vicar to serve the parish. Some still bring offerings of some little piece of silver, or chiefly of lambs, which are sold by the churchwardens, and the money put into St. Beuno's box, to be employed in repairing the chapel.
   From an ancient custom, farmers in that country continue to print on the foreheads of their sheep what they call St. Beuno's mark. Mr. Robert Vaughan of Hengwrt, the great Welsh antiquarian, has given us an ample list of benefactions bestowed upon Clynnoc, by princes and others. On St. Beuno see his MS. life, Howel's History of Wales, pp. 11 and 12, and a long, curious letter, concerning him and this church, which the compiler received from the Rev, Mr. Farrington the ingenious vicar of Clynnog-Fawr, or Vawr, as the Welsh adjective Mawr, great, is written in several parts of Wales.


As in the case of so many of the Celtic saints, the Life of Beuno is a fantastic narrative which merits no confidence. At the very beginning an angel comes to announce to his parents, who had long given up any hope of offspring, that a son is to be born to them. The boy grows up, quits them to be educated in a monastery, and then founds a community himself. But one would judge from the confused record presented to us that he was never long resident in any one place. He moves about and obtains grants of land, upon which he builds churches or founds monasteries. He is thus brought into relation with such prominent figures in Welsh history as Iddon ab Ynyr Gwent and Cadwallon.
    The most famous incident in the legend is the restoration of St Winifred after her head had been cut off by Caradoc. But this marvel does not stand alone. There are two other occasions on which it is narrated that the dead were brought back to life again by the prayers of the saint.
    There can, however, be no doubt that the example and the energetic preaching of St Beuno made a deep impression upon his countrymen in North Wales. He was especially honoured at Clynnog Fawr, where he is believed to have founded some sort of monastery, and which seems most probably to have been the place of his burial. For centuries afterwards, practices, sometimes of a more or less superstitious nature, survived in districts where St Beuno’s memory was still revered, Lambs and calves bearing a particular mark were given to the saint’s representatives and then redeemed for a price; so that an informer writing in the days of Queen Elizabeth complains that people were very eager to buy these beasts because, as they held, “Beyno his cattell prosper marvellous well”. Even two centuries later this still went on, and the money so realized was put by the church-wardens into a great chest, called “Cyff Beuno”, for charitable uses. At the same period (c. 1770) Pennant records how people venerated what was believed to be St Beuno’s tomb at Clynnog Fawr. “It was customary”, he says, “to cover it with rushes and leave on it till morning sick children, after making them first undergo ablution in the neighbouring holy well; and I myself once saw on it a feather bed, on which a poor paralytic from Merionethshire had lain the whole night, after undergoing the same ceremony.” In excavations carried out at Clynnog shortly before 1914, an ancient square-headed oblong chamber was discovered with walls three feet thick, and we are told that this probably was “a specimen of the earliest type of tiny basilica such as might well have been erected in the seventh century”. St Beuno’s feast is kept in the diocese of Menevia.
We have a Welsh life of St Beuno, the earliest copy of which dates only from 1346. The translation of this by A. W. Wade-Evans, printed in the Archaeologia Cambrensis, vol. lxxxv (1930), pp. 315—341, with the notes appended, is the most valuable contribution which has been made to St Beuno’s history. The Welsh text is printed in Mr Wade-Evans’s Vitae Sanctorum Brittaniae (1944), and see his Welsh Christian Origins (1934), pp. 170—176. See also J. H. Pollen in The Month, vol lxxx (1894), pp. 235—247; LBS., vol. i, pp. 208—221; and Analecta Bollandiana, vol. lxix, pp. 428—431.

(also known as Beunor) he has another feast on January 14. There is evidence that Beuno was a Welsh man of importance, founder of several monasteries. His story that has been handed down to us is a legend written in 1346, but it may contain elements of truth. According to the legend, Beuno was the son of Beugi (Hywgi) and grandson of a Welsh prince. He was educated in Herefordshire, perhaps at Bangor Abbey, near which there is still a village called Llanfeuno. Beuno was the uncle of Saint Winifred, who was restored to life after her suitor severed her head.

The legend says that Cadvan was king of North Wales, and had recently been victorious over King Ethelred of Northumberland, who, about 607, had massacred the monks of Bangor. Saint Beuno gave the king a golden sceptre, and the prince in turn assigned a spot for Beuno's monastery near Fynnon Beuno (Beuno's Well), in the parish of Llanwunda, of which he is titular saint. But as he was laying the foundation, a woman came to him with a child in her arms, saying that the ground was this infant's inheritance. Troubled by this, the holy man took the woman with him to the king and told him that he could not devote to God another's patrimony. The king refused to pay any attention to his remonstrances. So the saint left. But Gwyddeiant, the king's cousin, immediately went after him, and bestowed on him the township of Clynnog Fawr, his undoubted patrimony, where Beuno built his church about the year 616. King Cadvan died about that time; but his son and successor Cadwallon surpassed him in his liberality to the saint and his monastery.

It is related, among other miracles, that when a certain man had lost his eyebrow by some hurt, Saint Beuno healed it by applying the iron point of his staff: and that from this circumstance a church four miles from Clynnog, perhaps built by the person so healed, retains to this day the name of Llanael Hayarn, i.e., church of the iron brow.

His name is particularly associated with Clynnog in Caernarvonshire, where he may well have had a small monastery. There are many other foundations (including Aberffraw and Trefdraeth on Anglesey Island), both in central East Wales and in Clwyd, dedicated to him that may have be established by his disciples. Clynnog Fawr later passed into the hands of Benedictines of the congregation of Cluny (Clugni), from which it gets its name; previously it was named after its founder.

Beuno died and was buried at Clynnog Fawr, where a stone oratory was built over his tomb. Later his relics were translated to a new church (Eglwys y Bedd), where miracles were reported. The beautiful stone church is large and magnificent as is Saint Beuno's chapel, which is joined to the church by a portico. In this chapel, the fine painted or stained glass in the large windows is much effaced and destroyed, except a large figure of our blessed Savior extended on the cross. Opposite this crucifix, about three yards from the east window, is Saint Beuno's tomb, raised above the ground, and covered with a large stone, upon which people still lay sick children, in hopes of being cured.

Beuno's cultus survived the Reformation. During the reign of Elizabeth I, there were complaints that lambs and calves were offered at his tomb and later brought back because Beuno's cattle "prospered marvelous well." Sick people were still brought to the supposed grave towards the end of the 18th century, where they bathed in his holy well and spent the night in his tomb. The ruins of his primitive oratory were excavated in 1914. In our age, Beuno's memory has been revived by the Jesuits' establishment of Saint Beuno's College in northern Wales (Attwater, Benedictines, Encyclopedia, Farmer, Gill, Husenbeth). In art, Beuno is shown restoring his niece's head (Roeder). He is chiefly venerated at Clynnog (Roeder).
678 Anastasius the Sinaite hermit on Mount Sinai left ascetical and theological writings of considerable value (RM)

A Palestinian hermit on Mount Sinai, Anastasius participated in all the Christological controversies of his time, in Syria, Egypt, and elsewhere. He has left ascetical and theological writings of considerable value (Attwater2, Benedictines, Encyclopedia).
700 St. Anastasius the Sinaite Abbot He wrote "The Guide" faith defender  He was a Greek writer born in Alexandria. The abbot of the monastery of Mount Sinai, he was called "the New Moses" because of his outstanding attacks on the various groups trying to influence the Church. He wrote "The Guide", a book defending the faith. This work remained popular for centuries.
721-724 Malrubius priest Abbot austere monastic life known for piety learning miracles M (AC)
722 ST MALRUBIUS, OR MAELRUBHA, ABBOT
LIKE so many other saints who laboured in Scotland, St Maelrubha was by birth an Irishman, and it was at St Comgall’s monastery of Bangor in County Down that he became a monk. When twenty-nine years of age he went to Scotland, spending some time, it is said, at Iona before proceeding to the mainland. At Applecross in Ross he established a mission station with a church and monastery, and this became his headquarters for the rest of his life.
    He preached the gospel zealously to the Picts, extending his labours even to Skye, where his memory was long honoured. The whole coast between Applecross and Loch Broom came to regard Maelrubha as its patron saint, and the great impression made by his austerity and teaching is clear from the number of places which are called after him, such as Maree, Mulruby, Mary, Mury, Murray, Summuruff, Summereve. The beautiful island of Eilean Maree in Loch Maree upon which he built a church contains a spring, known as St Maelrubha’s well, which was famous until quite recent times for its healing properties, especially in cases of insanity.
    For fifty-one years the holy man ruled as abbot of Applecross, dying at the age of eighty a death which was probably a natural one, though some accounts call him a martyr. A hillock called Claodh Maree at Applecross is pointed out as his grave. His feast is observed in the diocese of Aberdeen.
See Forbes, KSS., pp. 382—383 Reeves in Proceedings of Soc. Antiquaries, Scotland, vol. iii (1861), pp. 258 seq.; and O’Hanlon, LIS., vol. iv, pp. 255 seq.; and also W. J. Watson, History of the Celtic Place-Names of Scotland (1926), passim.
(also known as Maelrubha) Descended from the princely line of Niall, Saint Malrubius was a member of Saint Comgall's glorious company at Bangor Abbey, where he was ordained to the priesthood. He migrated to Scotland to spread the Gospel among the Picts much as Saint Columba did in the 6th century. There he led an austere monastic life and was known for his piety, learning, and miracles.

He founded a church at Applecross in County Ross on the Isle of Skye from which he led a revival of the Celtic Church. It is said that, at the age of 80, he was massacred by Norwegian pirates whom he tried to evangelize. According to legend, the parish church at Urquhart is said to have been the site of the chapel built over the site of his execution. A six-mile area around his burial mound outside Applecross, Cloadh Maree, was accorded all the rights and privileges of a sanctuary.

Place names throughout the western highlands, particularly between Loch Carron and Loch Broom, note Malrubius as titular patron. Twenty-one known parishes were dedicated to Malrubius under names such as Maree, Mulruby, Mary, Murry, Summuruff, and Summereve. He is invoked for the cure of insanity, because so many were healed at his holy well and spring near his cemetery and oratory on Inis Maree in Loch Maree. Malrubius is venerated especially in Aberdeen and Connaught (Attwater2, Benedictines, Coulson, D'Arcy, Husenbeth, Montague, Montalembert, Moran, Mould, Simpson, Skene).
750 St. Frodulphus Benedictine monk hermit
also listed as Frou. He was a disciple of St. Madericus (700) and be­came a monk at Autun, France. The Saracen invasion compelled him to flee to Barjon, on the Cote d’ Or.

Frodulphus of Barjon, OSB Hermit (AC) (also known as Frou) Died at Barjon, c. 750. Frodulphus, disciple of Saint Medericus (Morry or Merry), became a monk at Saint Martin's in Autun, from which he was driven by the Saracen invasion. Thereafter, he settled in Barjon, Côte d'Or.
He is buried next to Saint Merry in Paris (Benedictines, Encyclopedia).
St. Beuno effective preacher evangelized North Wales
Beuno's untrustworthy legend has him a monk in Wales who founded his own community and performed numerous miracles, among them, restoring St. Winifred's head after she was beheaded.
However, he does seem to have been an effective preacher who evangelized much of North Wales and founded a monastery at Clynnog Fawr (Carnavonshire) .
1109 Anselm of Canterbury Doctor of the Church OSB B Doctor of the Church by Pope Clement XI in 1720 (RM)
Cantuáriæ, in Anglia, sancti Ansélmi Epíscopi, Confessóris et Ecclésiæ Doctóris, sanctitáte et doctrína conspícui.
    At Canterbury, England, St. Anselm, bishop, confessor, and doctor of the Church, renowned for sanctity and learning.

APRIL XXI. ST. ANSELM,
ARCHBISHOP OF CANTERBURY.
From Lives of Saintes by Alban Butler
From his life, written by Eadmer his disciple in two books also the same author's history of Novelties In six books from the years 1086 to 1122 and a poem on the miracles of St Anselm  probably by the by the same writer published by Martenne, Ampliss.  Collection t.6. p. 983 987.  The principal memorials relating to St. Anselm are collected in the Benediction edition of his works; from which a short abstract is here given. See Gallia Christ. Nova. T.11 p. 223; Ceillier, t. 21, p. 267
                                  A. D. 1109.
If the Norman conquerors stripped the English nation of its liberty, and many temporal advantages, it must be owned that by their valor they raised the reputation of its arms, and deprived their own country of its greatest men, both in church and state, with whom they adorned this kingdom: of which this great doctor, and his master, Lanfranc, are instances.  St. Anselm was born of noble parents, at Aoust, in Piedmont, about the year 1033. His pious mother took care to give him an early tincture of piety, and the impressions her instructions made upon him were as lasting as his life.  At the age of fifteen, desirous of serving God in the monastic state, he petitioned abbot to admit him into his house: but was refused out of apprehension of his father's displeasure.   Neglecting, during the course of his studies, to cultivate the divine seed in his heart, he lost this inclination, and, his mother being dead, he fell into tepidity; and, without being sensible of the fatal tendency of vanity and pleasure, began to walk in the broad way of the world: so dangerous a thing is it to neglect the inspirations of grace!  The saint, in his genuine meditations, expresses the deepest sentiments of compunctions for these disorders, which his perfect spirit of penance exceedingly exaggerated to him, and which, like another David, he never ceased most bitterly to bewail to the end of his days.  The ill-usage he met with from his father, induced him, after his mother's death, to leave his own country, where he had made a successful beginning in his studies; and, after a diligent application to them for three yours in Burgundy, (then a distinct government,) and in France, invited by the great fame of Lanfranc, prior of Bec in Normandy, under the abbot Herluin, he went thither and became his scholars  On his father’s death, Anselm advised with, him about the state of life he was to embrace; as whether he should live upon his estate to employ its produce in alms, or should renounce it at once and embrace a monastic and eremitical life. Lanfranc, feeling an overbearing affection for so promising a disciple, durst not advises him in his vocation, fearing the bias of his own inclination; but he sent him to Maurillus, the holy archbishop of Rouen.   By him Anselm, after he had laid open to him his interior, was determined to enter the monastic state at Bec and accordingly became a member of that house, at the age of twenty-seven, in 1060, under the abbot Herluin. 

Three years after, Lanfranc was made abbot of St. Stephen's, at Caen, and Anselm prior of Bec.   At this promotion several of the monk, murmured on account of his youth; but, by patience and sweetness, he won the affections of them all and by little condescension’s at first so worked upon an irregular young monk, called Osbern, as to perfect his conversion, and make him one of the most fervent.  He had indeed so great a knowledge of the hearts and passions of men, that he seemed to read there interior in their actions; by which he discovered the sources of virtues and vices, and knew how to adapt to each proper advice and instructions; which were rendered most powerful by the mildness and charity with which he applied them.   And in regard to the management and tutoring of youth, he looked upon excessive severity as highly pernicious. Eadmer has recorded a conversation he had on this subject with a neighboring abbot, who, by conformity to our saint's practice and advice in this regard, experienced that success in his labors which he had till then aspired to in vain, by harshness and severity.
 St. Anselm applied himself diligently to the study of every part of theology, by the dear light of scripture and tradition.  While he was prior at Bec, he wrote his Monologium, so called, because in this work he speaks alone explaining the metaphysical proofs of the existence and nature of God Also his Proslogium, or contemplation of God's attributes, in which he addresses his discourse to God, or himself. The Meditations, commonly called the Manual of St. Austin, are chiefly extracted out of this book.  It was censured by a neighboring monk, which occasioned the saint's Apology.  These and other the like works, show the author to have excelled in metaphysics all the doctors of the church since St. Austin.  He likewise wrote, while prior, On Truth, On Freewill, and On the Fall of the Devil, or, On the Origin of Evil: also his Grammarian, which is, in reality, a treatise on Dialectics, or the art of reasoning.  Anselm’s reputation drew to Bec great numbers from all the neighboring kingdoms.   Herluin dying in 1078, he was chosen abbot of Bec, being forty five years old, of which he had been prior fifteen.  The abbey of Bec being possessed at that time of some lands in England, this obliged the abbot to make his appearance there in person, at certain times.  This occasioned our saint's first journeys thither, which his tender regard for his old friend Lanfranc, at that time archbishop of Canterbury, made the more agreeable.   He was received with great honor and esteem by all ranks of people, both in church and state; and there was no one who did not think it a real misfortune, if he had not been able to serve him in something or other. King William himself, whose title of Conqueror rendered him haughty and inaccessible to his subjects was so affable to the good abbot of Bec, that he seemed to be another man in his presence.  The saint, on his side, was all to all, by courtesy and charity, that he might find occasions of giving everyone some suitable instructions to promote their salvation; which were so much the more effectual, as he communicated them, not as some do with the dictatorial air of a master, but in a simple familiar manner, or by indirect, though sensible examples. In the year 1092, Hugh, the great earl of Chester, by three pressing messages entreated Anselm to come again into England, to assist him, then dangerously sick, and to give his advice about the foundation of a monastery which that nobleman had undertaken at St. Wereburge's church at Chester.   A report that he would be made archbishop of Canterbury, in the room of Lanfranc, deceased, made him stand off for sometime; but he could not forsake his old friend in his distress, and at last came over.  He found him recovered, but the affairs of his own abbey, and of that which the earl was erecting, detained him five months in England.  The metropolitan see of Canterbury had been vacant ever since the death of Lanfranc, in 1089.  The sacrilegious and tyrannical king, William Rufus, who succeeded his father in 1087, by an injustice unknown till his time, usurped the revenues of vacant benefices, and deferred his permission, or Conge’d'elre, in order to the filling the episcopal sees, that he might the longer enjoy their income.   Having thus seized into his hands the revenues of the archbishopric, he reduced the monks of Canterbury to a scanty allowance: oppressing them moreover by his officers with continual insults, threats, and vexatious. He had been, much solicited, by the most virtuous among the nobility, to supply the see of Canterbury, in particular, with a person proper for that station; but continued deal to all their remonstrance’s, and answered them at Christmas, 1093, that neither Anselm nor any other should have that bishopric while he lived; and this he swore to by the holy face of Lucca, meaning a great crucifix in the cathedral of that city, held in singular veneration, his usual oath.
  He was seized soon after with a violent fit of sickness, which in a few days brought him to extremity. He was then at Gloucester, and seeing himself in this condition, signed a proclamation which was published, to release all those that had been taken prisoners in the field, to discharge his debts owing to the crown, and to grant a general pardon: promising likewise to govern according to law, and to punish the instruments of injustice with exemplary severity.  He moreover nominated Anselm to the see of Canterbury, at which all were extremely satisfied but the good abbot himself, who made all the decent opposition imaginable; alleging his age, his want of health and vigor enough tot so weighty a charge, his unfitness for the management of public and secular affairs, which he had always declined to the best of his power.  The king was extremely concerned at his opposition, and asked lam why he endeavored to ruin him in the other world, being convinced that he should lose his soul in case he died before the archbishopric was filled.  The king was seconded by the bishops and others present, who not only told him they were scandalized at his refusal, but added, that, if he persisted in it, all the grievance of the church and nation would be placed to his account.  Thereupon they forced a pastoral staff into his hands, in the king's presence, carried him into the church, and sung Te Deum on the occasion.  This was on the 6th of March, 1093. He still declined the charge, till the king had promised him the restitution of all the lands that were in the possession of that see in Lanfranc's time.
Anselm also insisted that he should acknowledge Urban II for lawful pope. Things being thus adjusted, Anselm was consecrated with great solemnity on the 4th of December, 1093.
 Anselm had not been long in possession of the see of Canterbury, when the king, intending to wrest the duchy of Normandy out of the hands of his brother Robert, made large demands on his subjects for supplies.  On this occasion, not content with the five hundred pounds (a very large sum in those days) offered him by the archbishop, the king insisted, at the instigation of some of his courtiers, on a thousand, for his nomination to the archbishopric, which Anselm constantly refused to pay: pressing him also to fill vacant abbeys, and to consent that the bishops should hold councils as formerly, and be allowed by canons to repress crimes and abuses, which were multiplied, and passed into custom, for want of such a remedy, especially incestuous marriages and other abominable debaucheries. The king was extremely provoked, and declared no one should extort from him his abbeys any more than his crown.  And from that day he sought to deprive Anselm of his see.  William, bishop of Durham, and the other prelates, acquiesced readily in the king's orders, by which he forbade them to obey him as their primate, or treat him as archbishop, alleging for reason that he obeyed pope Urban, during the schism, whom the English nation had not acknowledged.
The king, having brought over most of the bishops to his measures, applied to the temporal nobility, and bid them disclaim the archbishop: but they resolutely answered, that since he was their archbishop, and had a right to superintend the affairs of religion, it was not in their power to disengage themselves from his authority, especially as there was no crime or misdemeanor proved against him. King William then, by his ambassador, acknowledged Urban for true pope, and promised him a yearly pension from England, if he would depose Anselm; but the legate, whom his holiness sent, told the king that it was what could not be done.  St. Anselm wrote to the pope to thank him for the pall he had sent him by that legate, complaining of the affliction in which he lived under a burden to heavy for him to bear, and regretting the tranquility of his solitude which he had lost.
Finding the king always seeking occasions to oppress his church, unless he fed him with its treasures, which he regarded as the patrimony of the poor, (though he readily furnished his contingent in money and troops to his expeditions and so all public burdens,) the holy prelate earnestly desired to leave England, that he might apply, in person, to the pope for his counsel and assistance.
     The king refused him twice: and, on his applying to him a third time, he assured the saint that, if he left that kingdom, he would seize upon the whole revenue of the see of Canterbury and that he should be evermore be acknowledged metropolitan. But the saint, being persuaded he could not in conscience abide any longer in the realm, to be a witness of the oppression of the church, and not have it in his power to remedy it, set out from Canterbury in October, 1097, in the habit of a pilgrim took shipping at Dover, and landed at Witsan having with him two monks, Eadmer, who wrote ins Life and Baldwin. He made some stay at Cluni with St. Hugh, the abbot, and at Lyons with time with the good archbishop Hugh.
          It not being safe travelling any further towards home at that time, on account of the antipope's party inlying in the way; and Anselm falling sick soon after, this made it necessary for him to stay longer at Lyons than he had designed.   However he left that city the March following, in 1098, on the pope's invitation. And was honorably received by him.  His holiness, having heard his cause, assurered him of his protection, and wrote to the king of England for his reestablishment in his rights and possessions.  Anselm also wrote to the king at the same time; and, after ten days' stay in the pope's palace retired to The Monastery of St. Savior in Calabria the air of Rome not agreeing with his health.  Here he finished his work entitled Why God was made Man in two books, showing, against infidels, the wisdom, justice, and expediency of the mystery of the incarnation for man's redemption.     He had begun this work in England, where he also wrote his book On the Faith of the Trinity and Incarnation, dedicated to pope Urban II., in which he refuted Roselyn, the master, Peter Abelard who maintained an erroneous position in regard to the Trinity. Anselm, charmed with the sweets of his retirement, trod despairing of doing any good at Canterbury, hearing by new instances that the king was still governed by his passions, in open defiance to justice and religion, earnestly entreated the pope, whom he met at Aversa, to discharge him of his bishopric believing he might he more serviceable to the world in a private station. The pope would by no means consent, but charged him upon his obedience not to quit his station: adding that it was not the part of a plan of piety and courage to he frighten from his post purely by the dint of brow beating and threats, that being all the harm he had hitherto received. Anselm in reply, that he is-as not afraid of suffering, or even losing his life in the cause of God but that he saw there was nothing to be done in a country where justice was so overruled as it was in England. However, Anselm submitted and in the meantime returned to his retirement, which was a cell called Slavin, situated on a mountain, depending on the monastery of St. Saviour.  That he might live in the obedience of the pope in the merit of obecience, he prevailed with the pope to appoint the monk Eadmer his inseparable companion, to be his superior, nor did he do the least thing without his leave.
  The Pope having called a counsel at Bari which was to meet at in October, 1098 in order to a reconciliation of the Greeks with the Catholic Church ordered the saint to be present at it.  It consisted of one hundred and twenty-three bishops -     The Greeks having proposed the question about the Holy Ghost whether if was from the Father only, or from  the father and the Son; the disputation being protracted, the pope called aloud for Anselm, saving, Anselm in our faith God and our master, where are you?" and causing him to sit next to him, told him that, the present occasioning required his learning and elocution to defend the church against her enemies, and thought God had brought him thither for that purpose.  Anselm spoke to the point with so much learning, judgment, and penetration, that he silenced the Greeks, and gave such a general satisfaction, that all persons   joined in pronouncing anathema against those that should afterwards deny the procession of the Holy Ghost from both the Father and the Son.  This affair being at an end, the proceedings of the king of England fell next trailer debate.  And on this occasion arose simony, his oppressions of the church, his persecution of Anselm, and his incorrigibleness, after frequent admonitions, wore so strongly represented, that the pope, at the instance of the council, was just going to pronounce him excommunicated. Anselm had hitherto been silent, but at this he rose up, and casting himself on his knees before the pope, entreated Him to stop the censure.  And now the council, who had admired our saint for his parts and learning, were further charmed with him on account of his humane and Christian disposition, in behalf of one that had used him so roughly.  The saint's petition in behalf of his sovereign was granted; and, on the council breaking up, the pope and Anselm returned to Rome.  The pope, however, sent to the king a threat of excommunication, to be issued in a council to be shortly held at Rome, unless he made satisfaction: but the king, by his ambassador, obtained a long delay.
      Anselm stayed some time at Rome with the pope, who always placed him next in rank to himself. All persons, even the schematics, loved and honored him, and he assisted with distinction at the council of Rome, held after Easter, in 1099.  Immediately after the Roman council he returned to Lyons, where he was entertained by the archbishop Hugh with all the cordiality and regard imaginable; but saw no hopes of recovering his see so long as King William lived. Here he wrote his book, On the Conception of the Virgin, and On Original Sin, resolving many questions relating to that sin.  The archbishop of Lyons gave him in all functions the precedence, and all thought themselves happy who could receive any sacrament from his hands.   Upon the death of Urban II, he wrote an account of his case to his successor, Pascal II.  King William Rufus being snatched away by sudden death, without the sacraments, on the 24 of August, 1100, St. Anselm, who was then in the abbey of Chaize-Dieu, in Auvergne, lamented bitterly his unhappy end, and made haste to England, whither he was invited by king Henry 1.
   He landed at Dover on the 23d of September, and was received with great joy and extraordinary respect.  And having in a few days recovered the fatigue of his journey, he went to wait on the king, who received lam very graciously.  But this harmony was of no long continuance.  The new king required of Anselm to be reinvested by him, and do the customary homage of his predecessors for his see; but the saint absolutely refused to comply, and made a report of the proceedings of the late synod at Rome, in which the laity that gave investitures for abbeys or cathedrals were excommunicated; and those that received such investitures wore put under the same censure.     But this not satisfying the king, it was agreed between them to consult the pope upon the subject. The court in the meantime was very much alarmed at the preparations making by the king's elder brother, Robert, duke of Normandy; who, being returned from the holy war in Palestine, claimed the crown of England, and threatened to invade the land.    The nobles, though they had sworn allegiance to Henry, were ready enough to join him; and, on his landing with a formidable army at Portsmouth, several declared for the duke.    The king being in great danger of losing his crown was very liberal in promises to Anselm on this occasion; assuring him that he would henceforward leave the business of religion wholly to him, and be always governed by the advice and orders of the apostolic see.  Anselm omitted nothing on his side to prevent a revolt from the king.  Not content with sending his quota of armed men, but strongly represented to the disaffected nobles the heinousness of their crime of perjury, and that they ought rather lose their lives than break through their oaths, and in their sworn allegiance to their prince.
He also published an excommunication against Robert, as an invader, who thereupon came to an accommodation with Henry, and left England. And thus, as Eadmer relates, the archbishop, strengthening the king's party, kept the crown upon his head. Amidst his troubles and public distractions, he retired often in the day to his devotions, and watched long in them in the night.  At his locals, and at all times, he conversed interiorly in heaven. One day, as he was riding to his manor of Herse, a hare, pursued by the dogs, ran under his horse for refuge: at which the saint stopped, and the hounds stood at bay.   The hunters laughed, but the saint said, weeping, “This hare puts me in mind of a poor sinner just upon the point of departing this life, surrounded with devils, waiting to carry away their prey."  The hare going off, he forbade her to be pursued, and was obeyed, not a hound stirring after her. In like manner, every object served to raise his mind to God, with whom he always conversed in his heart, and, in the midst of noise and tumult, he enjoyed the tranquility of holy contemplation; so strongly was his soul sequester from, and raised above the world.
  King Henry, though so much indebted to Anselm, still persisted in his claim of the right of giving the investitures of remunerences.   Anselm, in 1102, held a national council in St. Peter's church at Westminster, in which, among other things, it was forbid to sell men like cattle, which had till then been practiced in England and many canons relating to discipline were drawn up. He persisted to refuse to ordain bishops, named by the king, without a canonical election.   The contest became every day more serious. At last, the king and nobles persuaded Anselm to go in person, and consult the pope about the matter: the king also sent a deputy to his holiness. The saint embarked on the 27th of April, in 1103.   Pope Paschal II Condemned the king's pretensions to the investitures, arid excommunicated those who should receive church dignities from him.   St. Anselm being advanced, on his return to England, as far as Lyons, received there an intimation of an order from king Henry, forbidding him to proceed on his journey home, unless he would conform to his will. He therefore remained at Lyons, where he was much honored by his old friend, the archbishop Hugh.   From thence he retired to his abbey of Bec, where he received from the pope a commission to judge the cause of the archbishop of Rouen, accused of several crimes.   He was also allowed to receive into communion such as had accepted investitures from the crown, which, though still disallowed of, the bishop’s and abbots were so far dispensed with as to do homage for their temporalities.   The king was so pleased with this condescension of the pope that he sent immediately to Bec, to invite St. Anselm home in the most obliging manner, but a grievous sickness detained him.    The king coming over into Normandy in 1106, articles of agreement were drawn up between him and the archbishop, at Bec, pursuant to the letter St. Anselm had received from Rome a few months before: and the pope very readily confirmed the agreement. In this expedition, Henry defeated his brother Robert, and sent him prisoner into England, where he died.  St. Anselm hereupon returned to England, in 1106, and was received by the queen Maud who came to meet him, and by the whole kingdom of England, as it were, in triumph:

The last years of his life, his health was entirely broken.  Having for six months labored under a hectic decay, with an entire loss of appetite under which disorder he would be carried every day to assist at holy mass he happily expired, laid on sackcloth and ashes, at Canterbury, on the 21st of April, 1109, in the sixteenth year of his episcopal dignity, and of his age the seventy-sixth, he was buried in his cathedral.  By a decree of Clernent XI, 1720, he is honored among the doctors of the church.  We have authentic accounts of many miracles wrought by this saint in the histories of Eadmer and others.

  St. Anselm had a most lively faith of all the mysteries and great truths of our holy religion; and by the purity of his heart, and an interior divine light, he discovered great secrets in the Holy Scriptures, and had a wonderful talent in explaining difficulties which occur in them. His hope for heavenly things gave him a wonderful contempt and disgust of the vanities of the world, and he could truly say with the apostle, he was crucified to the world, and all its desires.  By a habitual mortification of his appetite in eating and drinking, he seemed to have lost all relish in the nourishment which he took.   His fortitude was such, that no human respects, or other considerations, could ever turn him out of the way of justice and truth; and his charity for his neighbor seemed confined by no bounds;  his words, his writings, his whole life breathed forth this heavenly fire.
    He seemed to live, says his faithful disciple and historian, not for himself, but for others or rather so much the more for himself by how much the more proftable his life was to his neighbors, and faithful to his God.       The divine love and law were the continual subjects of his meditations day and night.    He had a singular devotion to the passion of our Lord, and to his Virgin mother.  Her image at Bec, before which, at her altar, he daily made long prayers while he lived in that monastery, is religiously kept in the new sumptuous church.   His horror of the least sin is not to be expressed.
  In his Proslogium, meditations, and other ascetic works, the most heroic and inflamed sentiments of all these virtues, especially of compunction, fear of the divine judgments, and charity, are expressed in that language of the heart which is peculiar to the saints.


Born in Aosta, Piedmont, Italy, c. 1033; died at Canterbury, England, on Holy Wednesday, April 21, ; canonized and included among the Doctors of the Church by Pope Clement XI in 1720.
1109 ST ANSELM, Archbishop of Canterbury And Doctor Of The Church
IF the Norman invaders deprived the English nation of its liberty and of many temporal advantages, it must be owned that they brought into it some of its greatest leaders in church and state. Amongst these must be numbered the two archbishops of Canterbury, Lanfranc and his immediate successor.
    St Anselm was born at Aosta in Piedmont about the year 1033. He wished to enter a monastery when he was fifteen years old, but the abbot to whom he applied refused to accept him, apprehending his father’s displeasure. The desire which had been thus thwarted left him for a time, he grew careless about religion, and lived a worldly, if not dissipated, life, of which in after years he never ceased to repent.
There was no sympathy between him and his father, who by his harshness practically drove him from home, after his mother’s death, to prosecute his studies in Burgundy. Three years later he went to Bec in Normandy attracted by the fame of its great abbot Lanfranc, whose pupil, disciple and friend he became, and also a monk at Bec at the age of twenty-seven in 1060.
He had only been a religious for three years when Lanfranc was appointed abbot of St Stephen’s at Caen, and he himself was elected prior of Bec. At this promotion several of the monks murmured on account of his youth; but his patience and gentleness won the allegiance of all, including his bitterest opponent, an undisciplined young man called Osbern whom he gradually led on to strictness of life and whom he nursed with the utmost tenderness in his last illness.
    An original and independent thinker, endowed with profound learning, St Anselm was the greatest theologian of his age and the “father of Scholasticism” as a metaphysician he surpassed all Christian doctors since the days of St Augustine. Whilst still prior of Bec, he wrote his Monologium, in which he gave metaphysical proofs of the existence and nature of God, his Proslogium, or contemplation of God’s attributes, as well as treatises on truth, on freewill, on the origin of evil, and a work on the art of reasoning.
    With regard to the training of the young, he held quite modern views.
To a neighbouring abbot, who was lamenting the poor success which attended his educational efforts, he said:
“ If you planted a tree in your garden, and bound it on all sides, so that it could not spread out its branches, what kind of a tree would it prove when in after years you gave it room to spread ? Would it not be useless, with its boughs all twisted and tangled?  But that is how you treat your boys...cramping them with fears and blows, debarring them also from the enjoyment of any freedom.”
In 1078, after he had been prior for fifteen years, Anselm was chosen abbot of Bec. This entailed occasional visits to England, where the abbey possessed property and where his friend Lanfranc was now archbishop of Canterbury. Eadmer, an English monk, from that time forward his devoted disciple and afterwards his biographer, says that he had a method of his own of giving very simple instructions, pointed with homely illustrations, which even the simplest could understand.
    Anselm was in England in 1092, three years after Lanfranc’s death, when the see of Canterbury was being kept vacant for the sake of its revenues by King William Rufus, who in reply to all requests to appoint Anselm swore “By the Holy Face of Lucca”—his favourite oath—that neither Anselm nor anyone else should be archbishop of Canterbury as long as he himself lived. He was, however, induced to change his mind by a sudden illness that brought him to death’s door. Stricken with fear, he promised that in future he would govern according to law and nominated Anselm to the archbishopric. The good abbot pleaded his age, ill-health and unfitness for the management of public affairs; but the bishops and others present forced the pastoral staff into his hand and bore him away to the church where they sang a Te Deum.
    But the heart of Rufus, though temporarily softened by the fear of death, had not really changed. The new archbishop had not long been installed when the king, with a view to wresting the duchy of Normandy out of his brother Robert’s hands, began to make large demands for supplies. Not content with Anselm’s offer of five hundred marks (a large sum in those days) the monarch required him to pay a thousand, as the price of his nomination to the see. St Anselm absolutely refused to comply. Moreover, he did not hesitate to urge the king to fill the vacant abbeys and to sanction the convening of those synods whose office it was to repress abuses among clergy and laity. The king angrily replied that his abbeys were no more to be extorted from him than his crown, and from that moment he sought to deprive Anselm of his see. He succeeded in detaching from their obedience a number of time-serving bishops, but when he bade the barons disavow the action of the primate he was met with a blank refusal. An attempt to persuade Pope Urban II to depose the saint was equally futile. The very legate who was charged to tell William that his desire could not be granted brought the pallium which rendered Anselm’s position unassailable.
   
    Finding that King William was determined on every possible occasion to oppress the Church unless the clergy would yield to his will, St Anselm sought permission to leave the country that he might consult the Holy See. Twice he was met with refusal, but eventually he was told by the monarch that he might depart if he liked, but that if he did so his revenues would be confiscated and he would never be allowed to return. Nevertheless he set out from Canterbury in October 1097, accompanied by Eadmer and another monk called Baldwin.
On his way, he stayed first with St Hugh, abbot of Cluny, and then with another Hugh, archbishop of Lyons. Upon his arrival in Rome, he laid his case before the pope, who not only assured him of his protection, but wrote to the English king to demand Anselms re-establishment in his rights and possessions. It was while the archbishop was staying in a Campanian monastery, whither he had betaken himself from Rome for the benefit of his health, that he completed his famous book, Cur Deus Homo, the most famous treatise on the Incarnation ever written.
    Despairing of doing any good at Canterbury, and convinced that he could serve God better in a private capacity, he asked the pope to relieve him of his office, but his request was refused, although, as it was obviously impossible for him to return to England at the moment, he was allowed to remain in his Campanian retreat. While there Anselm attended the Council of Bari in 1098, to deal with the difficulties raised by the Greeks in regard to the procession of the Holy Ghost, and distinguished himself by his dealing with the difficulties of the Italo-Greek bishops on the matter of the Filioque. The council proceeded to denounce the king of England for his simony, his oppression of the Church, his persecution of Anselm and his personal depravity. A solemn anathema was only prevented by the entreaties of the archbishop, who persuaded Pope Urban to confine himself to a threat of excommunication.

The death of William Rufus put an end to St Anselm’s exile, and he came back to England amid the rejoicings of king and people. The harmony did not last long. Difficulties arose as soon as Henry I wanted Anselm to be reinvested by him and to make the customary homage for his see. This was contrary to the enactments of a Roman synod in 1099 which had forbidden lay investiture in respect of cathedrals and abbeys, and the archbishop refused.
    But at this time great apprehension was being felt at the threatened invasion of England by Robert of Normandy, whom many of the barons were not indisposed to support. Eager to have the Church on his side, Henry made lavish promises of future obedience to the Holy See, whilst Anselm did his utmost to prevent a rebellion. Although, as Eadmer points out, Henry owed the retention of his crown in no small measure to St Anselm, yet, as soon as all danger of invasion was passed, he renewed his claim to the right of investiture. The archbishop, on the other hand, absolutely declined to consecrate bishops nominated by the king unless they were canonically elected; and the divergence grew daily more acute. At last Anselm was persuaded to go in person to lay the questions before the pope, Henry at the same time sending a deputy to state its own case.
     After due consideration Paschal II confirmed his predecessor’s decisions, and Henry thereupon sent word to St Anselm forbidding his return if he continued recalcitrant, and pronouncing the confiscation of his revenues. Eventually the rumour that St Anselm was about to excommunicate him seems thoroughly to have alarmed the English monarch, and at a meeting in Normandy some sort of reconciliation took place. Afterwards in England at a royal council the king renounced the right of investiture to bishoprics or abbeys, whilst Anselm, with the pope’s consent, agreed that English bishops should be free to do homage for their temporal possessions. The pact thus made was loyally kept by King Henry, who came to regard the saint with such confidence that he made him regent during an absence in Normandy in 1108. Anselm’s health, however, had long been failing— he was by this time an old man—and he died the following year, 1109, amongst the monks of Canterbury.

His was a character of singular charm. It was conspicuous for a sympathy and sincerity which won him the affection of men of all classes and nationalities.. His care extended to the very poorest of his people. He was one of the first to stand forward as an opponent of the slave trade. When in 1102 he held a national council at Westminster, primarily for settling ecclesiastical affairs, the archbishop obtained the passing of a resolution to prohibit the practice of selling men like cattle. St Anselm was in 1720 declared a doctor of the Church, though never formally canonized.
    In Dante’s Paradiso we find him among the spirits of light and power in the sphere of the sun, next to St John Chrysostom. Eadmer tells a story of him coming upon a boy who had tied a thread to a bird’s leg and was jerking it back when it tried to fly. Anselm indignantly snapped the thread and, “ecce filum rumpitur, avis avolat, puer plorat, pater exsultat”—“ the bird flies away, the boy howls, and the father rejoices”.
The body of the great archbishop is believed still to be in the cathedral church at Canterbury, in the chapel known as St Anselm’s, on the south-east side of the high altar.
For our knowledge of the religious and personal character of St Anselm we are almost entirely indebted to the Historia Novorum and the Vita Anselmi of Eadmer (the best text is that edited in the Rolls Series by Martin Rule), and to the saint’s own most attractive letters (edited originally by Dom Gerberon and reprinted in Migne, PL., vols. clviii and clix). A full life of St Anselm in two volumes was published by Martin Rule in 1883, and there are other slighter sketches both in English and in French, such as J. Clayton’s (1933) and Cochin in “Les Saints” series. From a non-Catholic standpoint the sympathetic volume by Dean Church (1873), may be commended. For a bibliography of the many studies devoted to St Anselm from a literary, philosophical and theological point of view, see DTC., vol. i, and the Lexikon fur Theologie und Kirche, vol. i, cc. 467—468. A definitive edition of the saint’s opera omnia has been completed by Br Francis Schmitt, OFM., in 6 volumes, and Dom A. Stolz has made an excellent study of Anselm’s thought (Munich, 1937). Fr Ragey’s Histoire de S. Anselme (2 vols., 1892) must be used with caution.
"O Lord our God, grant us grace to desire Thee with our whole heart; that, so desiring, we may seek, and, seeking, find Thee; and so finding Thee, may love Thee; and loving Thee, may hate those sins from which Thou hast redeemed. Amen."--Saint Anselm
In the days of the Normans, when the roads of Europe were crowded with pilgrims and when monasteries rose on every hand, a band of wandering Italian scholars from Lombardy under the leadership of Blessed Abbot Lanfranc of Bec, afterwards archbishop of Canterbury, found their way to Avranches in Normandy where they founded the most famous school in Christendom. Among these scholars and by far the most distinguished was Anselm of Aosta, whose youth had been spent in the green Alpine valleys and clear mountain air.
Anselm was a poet and a dreamer, who carried always about him something of the grandeur of his native hills. It seemed that Anselm's native intelligence might have died on the vine had he continued his education at home, but he was allowed to study later at the abbey at Aosta, where he flowered.

This first phase of his monastic education was to instill into his life an indelible fragrance. Anselm prayed and sought God on the summit of the mountains that surrounded the city of Aosta. Already his whole personality was formed: a seeker always in search of God, posing questions to which only the faith gives answers and clarifying his faith through a mind that was ceaselessly avid for new insights.
At age 15, Anselm wished to enter a monastery, but his father Gondulf, a Lombard nobleman, disapproved and prevented it. (His mother, Ermenberge, was related to the marquis of Turin and the House of Savoy.) Anselm fell gravely ill as a result. Then, unable to fulfill his dream and without spiritual support after the death of his mother, Anselm turned to the worldly which his father introduced to him.  After his complete victory, Gondulf should have been satisfied. But life defies all hopes. Instead, Gondulf developed a tenacious hatred of his son, who had been progressing along the path on which his father had set him. It was this situation that Anselm left with his home in 1056 to study in Burgundy.

While studying in Burgundy under the abbot Blessed Herluin, he became a disciple of the then prior Lanfranc and became a monk at Bec in 1060. Despite his youth (age 30), succeeded Lanfranc as prior only three years later when Lanfranc was elected abbot of Saint Stephen's in Caen. It must have been hard for one so young and inexperienced in religious life to rule his elders.
But Anselm countered rudeness with gentleness, hatred with clarity, anger with an unchangeable patience.

He also had a keen and original mind. In 1078, upon the death of Herluin, founder of the abbey, the monks chose Anselm to succeed him. Anselm's marvelous erudition, his eminent virtue, and, above all, his gentleness and goodness conferred a striking prestige on him, so that many foreign monks came to place themselves under his direction. This was the origin of a vast correspondence that has been handed down to us, in which Anselm shows himself open to all needs, responds to all questions, understands all concerns.
He instructed, corrected, reformed, and proposed using all means, the exact conception of monastic life which he never ceased to live at its deepest level.

The position of abbot required him to travel often to England to inspect abbey property there. In 1092, the English clergy, who had come to know him over the years, nominated Anselm to succeed Lanfranc, who had died three years earlier, in the see of Canterbury. At first, Anselm, busy with his studies and absorbed in the writing of theology, resisted the call, until he was dragged to the sick-bed of the king at Gloucester, and the pastoral staff was forced into his unwilling hand.

To the astonishment of the King William II (William Rufus), he met his match in Anselm. When Anselm finally left Bec in 1093 and arrived again in England, they king refused to allow Anselm to call the needed synods. Anselm also was confronted with a demand for a gift to the royal exchequer of 500 pounds for the king's approval of his nomination. Anselm rejected the request and rounded on the king. "Treat me as a free man," he said, "and I devote myself and all that I have to your service; but if you treat me as a slave, you shall have neither me nor mine." This resulted in Anselm's banishment from court. While some bishops supported the king, barons rallied to Anselm's cause. He left the country, and was not recalled until the following reign.

During this period Anselm retired to a mountain village where he spent the time happily in writing his great work on the Atonement, Cur Deus homo?, an attempt to explain why God had been obliged to become man in Jesus. Anselm argued that if God had merely forgiven men's sins, His mercy would have conflicted with the demands of justice. To reconcile mercy and justice an offering was needed greater than men's disobedience. Only God could make such an offering, argued Anselm, but only man ought to. Therefore, only a God-made-man could and should make it--as Jesus did on the Cross.

In 1097, Anselm travelled to Rome, where Pope Urban I upheld Anselm's nomination, refused Anselm's offered resignation, and ordered King William II to permit Anselm's return and yield back confiscated Church property.

At the pope's request, Anselm was present at the Council of Bari in 1098 and defended the filioque, the controversial doctrine on the procession of the Holy Spirit. He was instrumental in resolving the doubts of the Greek bishops in southern Italy about this issue.

At an Easter conference the indignation of Christendom was expressed at his enforced exile: "One is sitting among us from the ends of the earth, in modest silence, still and meek. But his silence is a loud cry. This one man has come here in his cruel wrongs to ask for the judgment and equity of the Apostolic See. And this is the second year, and what help has he found? If you do not all know what I mean, it is Anselm, Archbishop of England." And with these words, the bishop of Lucca, who was the speaker, struck his staff violently on the floor.

Anselm returned to Canterbury in 1100 at the request of King Henry II, successor to William Rufus, landing at Dover five months later. Almost immediately the king and Anselm were at odds over lay investiture--the new king demanded his re-induction as archbishop, but Anselm boldly refused. Anselm returned to Rome in 1103, where he confronted the pope on this issue. Pope Paschal II supported Anselm's refusal of lay investiture of bishops to King Henry. Nevertheless, Anselm remained in Rome until about 1106 or 1107.

A compromise was struck when Henry renounced his right to the investiture of bishops and abbots and Anselm agreed to pay homage to the king for temporal possessions. The reconciliation lasted for the rest of Anselm's life. The king grew to trust Anselm so much that he made him regent while he was away in Normandy in 1108.

In 1102, at a national council in Westminster, Anselm vigorously denounced slavery in emulation of Saint Wulfstan. As a pastor he encouraged the ordination of native Englishmen among his clergy, for whom he enforced celibacy; and he restored to the calendar the names of some of the English saints that he predecessor Lanfranc had removed.

Anselm stands out as a link between Saint Augustine of Hippo and Saint Thomas Aquinas and is called the 'father of Scholasticism.' He preferred to defend the faith by intellectual reason rather than scriptural arguments.

As the first to successfully incorporate the rationalism of Aristotlelian dialectics into theology, Anselm wrote on the existence of God in Monologium and Proslogium (deduces God's existence from man's notion of a perfect being, which influenced later great thinkers such as Duns Scotus, Descartes, and Hegel). His Cur Deus homo? was the most prominent treatise on the Atonement and Incarnation ever written. Other writings include De fide Trinitatis, De conceptu de virginali, Liber apologeticus pro insipiente, De veritate, letters, prayers, and meditations.

Anselm also rediscovered the precious maternal influence, lost since childhood, with her whom Jesus has given us for a mother. She inspired his most beautiful prayers. She gave him the soul of a child. She guided him in his constant search for God. One might think of Anselm as an old, dried up theologian. But that would be an error. Anselm's intellectual rigor was softened by the sensitivity of his mind and the generosity of his heart. He wrote, "I want to understand something of the truth which my heart believes and loves. I do not seek thus to understand in order to believe, but I believe in order that I may understand."

Anselm was one of the most human of saint and balanced of monks. Perhaps his early wanderings helped to form him so. Even after nine centuries, the charm of his personality still radiates. He himself was aware of the attraction that he held over those around him. He recognized it without any evasiveness: "All the good people who have known me have loved me, and all the more so when they knew me at close hand."

As a statesman he was deficient: the monastery, not the court, was where he was comfortable. Many incidents recorded of his life testify to the attractiveness of his personal character. In the Paradiso (canto XII), Dante mentions him among the spirits of light and power in the Sphere of the Sun.

Thus Anselm, the man who never wished to be archbishop and who refused it at first with clenched hands, secured the freedom of the Church against lawless tyranny and secular obstruction in a despotic age. As a statesman and scholar, by his courage and patience, and in grace and piety, he was the outstanding ecclesiastic of his day. His biography was written by his own secretary, the monk Eadmer of Christ Church, Canterbury, who recorded Anselm's life in meticulous detail (Attwater, Benedictines, Bentley, Church, Encyclopedia, Gill, Southern, White).

In art, Anselm is depicted as an archbishop or a Benedictine monk, (1) admonishing an evildoer; (2) with Our Lady or Virgin and Child appearing to him; (3) with a ship; or (4) exorcising a monk (Roeder, White). He is venerated at Aosta and Turin (Roeder).
1158 Blessed Walter of Mondsee in Upper Austria OSB Abbot (AC)
Abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Mondsee in Upper Austria (Benedictines).
1163 Blessed Fastred of Cambron abbot-founder of Cambron obligation to poverty OSB Cist. Abbot (AC)
Œttingæ Véteris, in Bavária, sancti Conrádi a Parzham, Confessóris, Ordinis Minórum Capuccinórum, caritáte et oratióne insígnis; quem, miráculis clarum, Pius Papa Undécimus Sanctórum número adscrípsit.
    At Wertingen in Bavaria, St. Conrad of Parzham, confessor, of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, outstanding both for prayer and for love of neighbour.  Being renowned for miracles, Pope Pius XI enrolled him among the number of the saints.
 (also known as Fastrede de Cavamiez) Born in Hainault; Fastred de Cavamiez was received into the Cistercians by Saint Bernard (1153 Dr of the Church). In 1148, he was dispatched with a colony of monks to be abbot-founder of Cambron in Cambrai diocese. In 1157, he became abbot of Clairvaux and, in 1162, of Cîteaux itself. Nevertheless, he never released himself from the obligations of poverty (Attwater2, Benedictines, Encyclopedia).
1466 Blessed Bartholomew of Cervere PhD. precocious solemnity pious converted many heretics worked steadfastly to eradicate heresy OP M (AC)
Born at Savigliano, Italy, in 1420; died at Cervere, Piedmont, 1466; beatified by Pope Pius IX in 1853.
In the venerable tradition of death in the cause of truth, Blessed Bartholomew of Cerverio was the fourth Dominican inquisitor to win his crown in the Piedmont--the stronghold of the Catharists, who had taken the lives of Saint Peter of Verona, Blessed Peter de'Ruffi, and Blessed Anthony of Pavonio.
Even in his early years Bartholomew displayed a precocious solemnity and piety. He entered the Order of Preachers in Savigliano and progressed rapidly in his studies. On May 8, 1452, Bartholomew received his licentiate, doctorate, and master's degree from the University of Turin; the only time in the history of the university that anyone had acquired three degrees in one day.
Bartholomew taught for a year at the university, then was made prior of his monastery. In his short apostolate of 12 years, he converted many heretics and worked steadfastly to eradicate heresy. He was appointed inquisitor in Piedmont, which made it clear to him that a martyr's death was marked out for him. Being a Dominican in Lombardy was a dangerous business, at best; to be appointed inquisitor meant that the heretics were given a target for their hatred.
In many ways the murder of Bartholomew and his companions repeats the martyrdom of Peter of Verona. Bartholomew knew beforehand that he was to die, and he made a general confession before starting out on his last trip. He remarked to his confessor, "They will call me Bartholomew of Cerverio, though I have never set foot there. Today I go there as inquisitor, and there I must die."
On the road to Cerverio in the diocese of Fossano, he and his party were attacked by five heretics. His companions were wounded, but escaped. Bartholomew died, riddled with dagger wounds, before they could get help.
Some people of Savigliano saw a bright light in the sky over Cerverio and surmised what had happened. They went out and brought home the relics, marveling that, despite all the wounds, the martyr had not bled. Laying him down in the church of the Dominicans, they saw his wounds bleed, and they hastily rescued the blood for relics. He was buried in the Dominican church of Savigliano, and, later, when the church was ruined by revolution, the relics were moved to the parish church.
A chapel was built at the site of the martyrdom and richly decorated with narrative frescoes. Processions were made there several times a year by the people of Savigliano and Cerverio, invoking Bartholomew against thunder and hail especially. At the same place, a fig tree was honored for many years for its connection with Blessed Bartholomew; it was supposed to have sprung up at the time of the martyrdom, at the very place the martyr fell (Benedictines, Dorcy).
1894 St. Conrad of Parzham Franciscan mystic lay brother Marian devotions gift of prophecy read people’s hearts
Œttingæ Véteris, in Bavária, sancti Conrádi a Parzham, Confessóris, Ordinis Minórum Capuccinórum, caritáte et oratióne insígnis; quem, miráculis clarum, Pius Papa Undécimus Sanctórum número adscrípsit.
    At Wertingen in Bavaria, St. Conrad of Parzham, confessor, of the Order of Friars Minor Capuchin, outstanding both for prayer and for love of neighbour.  Being renowned for miracles, Pope Pius XI enrolled him among the number of the saints.

1894 ST CONRAD OF PARZHAM
In its external aspects nothing could offer less of sensation or romantic interest than the life of this humble Capuchin lay-brother. Born in the Bavarian village of Parzham of pious parents, simple folk, but not indigent, Conrad was the ninth and youngest of the family.
In his early years he set an example of conscientious industry and of great devotion to the Mother of God. After his parents’ death, he entered the noviceship of the Capuchins, being then thirty-one years of age, took his solemn vows in 1852, and shortly afterwards was sent to Altötting, famous for a much venerated shrine of our Lady. There for forty years he discharged the duties of porter, an office which, owing to the multitude of pilgrims who were continually coming and going, offered endless opportunities for the exercise of charity, patience, tact and apostolic zeal. In all these respects he left an ineffaceable impression of self-abnegation and union with God. He seemed to have the gift of reading hearts, and there were occasions on which he manifested a strange knowledge of the future. Worn out with his labours he fell grievously ill in 1894 and died on April 21 of that year. Perhaps the most conclusive testimony to St Conrad’s exceptional virtue is the fact that, though the process of beatification was held up by the war of 1914-1918, he was canonized in 1934, only forty years after his death.
The decree of beatification containing a brief biographical sketch is printed in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, vol. xxii (1930), pp. 319—323. See Fr Felice da Porretta, Ii B. Corrado da Parzham (1930), and Fr Dunstan, St Conrad of Parzham (1934).

Born Carl Birndorfer in Parzham, Bavaria, Germany, on December 22, 1818, he became a Capuchin lay brother in 1849. For more than thirty years, Conrad served as porter or doorkeeper of the shrine of Our Lady of Altotting, and he was known for his Marian devotions. Conrad had the gift of prophecy and of reading people’s hearts. He died in Altotting on April 21. He was canonized in 1934.


THE PSALTER OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY PSALM 341

I rejoiced in thee, O Queen of Heaven: because under thy leadership we shall go into the house of the Lord.

Jerusalem the heavenly city: may we attain to the rewards of Mary.

Obtain for us, O Lady, peace and pardon: and the victory over our enemies, and triumph.,

Strengthen and console our hearts: by the sweetness of thy piety.

So, Lady, pour into us thy mercy: that we may devoutly die in the Lord.

Let every spirit praise Our Lady

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 heaven:  only 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 html  Indulgences 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 2000)  Quang 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  Uniates  Chalcedon
Mary the Mother of Jesus Miracles_BC  Lay Saints  Miraculous_Icons  Miraculous_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
Miracles 100   200   300   400   500   600   700    800   900   1000  
 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]
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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 Indulgences  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 Marian shrines May 23, 1995 Zarvintisya Ukraine Lourdes Kenya national Marian shrine    Quang Tri Vietnam La Vang 1798  
Links to Related Marian Websites  Angels and Archangels
Doctors_of_the_Church   Acts_Apostles  Roman Catholic Popes  Purgatory  Uniates, 341 2023