St. Saturnin, Martyr

3rd century–c. 257 AD
Patron Saint of Toulouse, France

St. Saturnin, also known as St. Sernin, was the first bishop of Toulouse, in Gaul (modern-day France), and one of the earliest Christian missionaries to the region. During the 3rd century, Christians suffered severe persecution under the Roman emperor Decius.

Pope Fabian sent St. Saturnin to Gaul to evangelize the region and rebuild the persecuted Christian community in Toulouse. Upon his arrival, he began preaching boldly about Christ, baptizing many, and building up the Christian community. His missionary work quickly drew the hostility of the pagan priests.

To reach the church, St. Saturnin had to pass by the Capitol, where a pagan temple stood. The pagan priests kept a watchful eye on him. One day, as he was passing by, a pagan sacrificial rite was underway. The pagan priests seized St. Saturnin and forced him to offer worship to their gods. When he refused, the enraged crowd tied him to a wild bull and drove the animal down the steps of the Capitol. St. Saturnin was then dragged through the streets and battered to death. His companions later recovered his body and reverently buried him outside the city walls.

St. Saturnin’s martyrdom made a deep impression on the people of Toulouse. A church was soon built over his tomb, which became a place of pilgrimage. In the 11th century, the grand Basilica of St. Sernin was erected on the same site in his honor, and it remains a significant church of Roman architecture in Europe and a primary pilgrimage site.

The sacrifice of saints like St. Saturnin demonstrates that the blood of martyrs played a crucial role in spreading Christianity across Europe and beyond, making the Gospel message available to us today.

Catena Aurea by St. Thomas Aguinas

21:34–36

34. And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares.

35. For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth.

36. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man.

THEOPHYLACT. Our Lord declared above the fearful and sensible signs of the evils which should overtake sinners, against which the only remedy is watching and prayer, as it is said, And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time, &c.

BASIL. (Hom. 1. in illud Atten de tibi.) Every animal has within itself certain instincts which it has received from God, for the preservation of its own being. Wherefore Christ has also given us this warning, that what comes to them by nature, may be ours by the aid of reason and prudence: that we may flee from sin as the brute creatures shun deadly food, but that we seek after righteousness, as they wholesome herbs. Therefore saith He, Take heed to yourselves, that is, that you may distinguish the noxious from the wholesome. But since there are two ways of taking heed to ourselves, the one with the bodily eyes, the other by the faculties of the soul, and the bodily eye does not reach to virtue; it remains that we speak of the operations of the soul. Take heed, that is, Look around you on all sides, keeping an ever watchful eye to the guardianship of your soul. He says not, Take heed to your own or to the things around, but to yourselves. For ye are mind and spirit, your body is only of sense. Around you are riches, arts, and all the appendages of life, you must not mind these, but your soul, of which you must take especial care. The same admonition tends both to the healing of the sick, and the perfecting of those that are well, namely, such as are the guardians of the present, the providers of the future, not judging the actions of others, but strictly searching their own, not suffering the mind to be the slave of their passions, but subduing the irrational part of the soul to the rational. But the reason why we should take heed He adds as follows, Lest at any time your hearts be overcharged, &c.

TITUS BOSTRENSIS. As if He says, Beware lest the eyes of your mind wax heavy. For the cares of this life, and surfeiting, and drunkenness, scare away prudence, shatter and make shipwreck of faith.

CLEMENT OF ALEXENDRIA. (Clem. Al. lib. ii. Pædag. c. 2.) Drunkenness is an excessive use of wine; crapula1 is the uneasiness, and nausea attendant on drunkenness, a Greek word so called from the motion of the head. And a little below. As then we must partake of food lest we suffer hunger, so also of drink lest we thirst, but with still greater care to avoid falling into excess. For the indulgence of wine is deceitful, and the soul when free from wine will be the wisest and best, but steeped in the fumes of wine is lost as in a cloud.

BASIL. (in Reg. Brev. ad int. 88.) But carefulness, or the care of this life, although it seems to have nothing unlawful in it, nevertheless if it conduce not to religion, must be avoided. And the reason why He said this He shews by what comes next, And so that day come upon you unawares.

THEOPHYLACT. For that day will not come when men are expecting it, but unlooked for and by stealth, taking as a snare those who are unwary. For as a snare shall it come upon all them that sit upon the face of the earth. But this we may diligently keep far from us. For that day will take those that sit on the face of the earth, as the unthinking and slothful. But as many as are prompt and active in the way of good, not sitting and loitering on the ground, but rising from it, saying to themselves, Rise up, begone, for here there is no rest for thee. To such that day is not as a perilous snare, but a day of rejoicing.

EUSEBIUS. He taught them therefore to take heed unto the things we have just before mentioned, lest they fall into the indolence resulting therefrom. Hence it follows, Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all those things that shall come to pass.

THEOPHYLACT. Namely, hunger, pestilence, and such like, which for a time only threaten the elect and others, and those things also which are hereafter the lot of the guilty for ever. For these we can in no wise escape, save by watching and prayer.

AUGUSTINE. (de Con. Ev. l. ii. c. 77.) This is supposed to be that flight which Matthew mentions; which must not be in the winter or on the sabbath day. To the winter belong the cares of this life, which are mournful as the winter, but to the sabbath surfeiting and drunkenness, which drowns and buries the heart in carnal luxury and delight, since on that day the Jews are immersed in worldly pleasure, while they are lost to a spiritual sabbath.

THEOPHYLACT. And because a Christian needs not only to flee evil, but to strive to obtain glory, He adds, And to stand before the Son of man. For this is the glory of angels, to stand before the Son of man, our God, and always to behold His face.

BEDE. Now supposing a physician should bid us beware of the juice of a certain herb, lest a sudden death overtake us, we should most earnestly attend to his command; but when our Saviour warns us to shun drunkenness and surfeiting, and the cares of this world, men have no fear of being wounded and destroyed by them; for the faith which they put in the caution of the physician, they disdain to give to the words of God.

Catena Aurea Luke 21

KEYWORDS: catholic; lk21; ordinarytime; prayer;

On November 28 We Celebrate the Feast of St. Catherine Labouré

by Vicente de Dios, C.M.. | Nov 24, 2025 | Formation, Saints and Blessed of the Vincentian Family

Catherine Labouré was born in Fain-les-Moutiers (France) on May 2, 1806 and entered the Company of the Daughters of Charity on April 21, 1830. Although favored with the apparition of the Blessed Virgin and other supernatural graces, she led an obscure life of dedication to the needy. She died on December 31, 1876. She was beatified on May 28, 1933 and canonized on July 27, 1947.

Youth

Pierre Labouré, a former seminarian who “preserved through the bad days the Christian sentiments of his Seminary education” (“I know from my own mother that her parents were very Christian. Her father had spent some time in the Seminary before the Revolution, and had preserved, through the bad days of that time, the very Christian sentiments acquired in his first education,” Testimony of Mrs. Duhamel, niece of St. Catherine, in the Process of the Ordinary, November 24, 1857). He married Louise Madeleine Gontard, a teacher in the village, in Senailli on June 4, 1793. These were the bad days of the French Revolution. In 1800, he moved to Fain-les-Moutiers, a small village in the center of France, in the Burgundy region. There he cultivated land that belonged to him. He was a peasant of sufficient means, neither rich nor so poor.

On May 2, 1806, a daughter was born, to whom they gave the name Catherine and the nickname Zoé, because she was baptized on the feast of Saint Zoé, a word that means life. This nickname, however, does not appear in the civil registry nor in the parish register. Catherine’s parents would have a total of 17 children, of whom 10 would live. Catherine was the eighth of those who lived. She was followed by her sister Tonina and by Augusto, the youngest, a very sickly child.

Their mother died on October 9, 1815, when Catherine was nine and a half years old. An aunt of hers takes her and Tonina with her, while the third of the sisters, Maria Luisa, who is already twenty years old, takes charge of the house.

But Marie Louise entered the Daughters of Charity on June 22, 1818, and Catherine returned to her father’s house in January of the same year to take over for her sister. Catherine made her first communion on January 25, 1818.

At the age of 12, Catherine became a woman of work and responsibility. This period would inform her life with virtues that would always accompany her: work: efficiency, silence, sacrifice. She tells her sister Tonina: “Between the two of us we will make the house run”. The task is more than difficult: there were many siblings at home, in summer there were up to twelve seasonal workers, there was a farm with many animals. It was necessary to cook, wash, sew, take food to the workers, to the chickens, to the “seven or eight hundred pigeons”. This anecdote of the pigeons from the Labouré’s dovecote fluttering around Catherine always stands out. Little poetry for so much work.

On top of that, she was given to penance and prayer. At the age of fourteen she decided to fast Fridays and Saturdays. Tonina found out and told her father; the father got angry and argued with his daughter. Catherine convinced him and continued fasting. When she finished her homework she would go to the church to pray and she did it without haste and on her knees on the floor, cold and wet most of the time. She would suffer all her life from arthritis in her knees. She often prayed before the picture of the Immaculate Conception, hands outstretched and feet on the head of the snake, in the parish chapel restored by the Labouré family. There was no resident priest in the village and she had to go to Mass with her family in Moutiers St Jean, half a league from Fain.

She also went to parties in neighboring towns with friends her age. People who knew her later stated that she was blue-eyed, very cheerful and “with an experience and dedication of someone older”. A woman who had occasion to observe her when she went to the festivities of Cormorin, would say many years later, in 1887: “She was not pretty, but gentle and good. Kind and sweet to her companions, even when they tried to make her angry, as children do. And if she saw that the others were angry, she tried to make peace. If a poor person showed up, she would give him what goodies she could get. When the relatives came to the feast to go to the patronal mass, Catherine prayed like an angel in the temple and did not turn her head to the right or to the left (Sister Caseneuve, Process of the Ordinary, June 1, 1897).

Call

When Catherine was 18 years old, she had a dream: She was praying in the chapel of the Virgin, a priest went out to celebrate Mass, every time he returned to the village he looked at her with penetrating eyes; when Mass was over, the priest came out of the sacristy and called her; Catherine ran away and went to visit a sick person; the priest appeared there and told her: My daughter, it is good to take care of the sick; you run away from me now, but one day you will be happy to return to me; God has designs on you, do not forget it. Then the dream ended.

Five years went by and she hardly remembered the dream. It is September 1829 and Catherine is in Chatillon-sur-Seine, where the Daughters of Charity have a residence. Catherine goes to visit them. When she enters the hall, she notices a painting on the wall and is startled: that person, St. Vincent de Paul, is the priest from her dream.

Catherine, before she had seen the painting, told her father that she wanted to be a Daughter of Charity like her sister Maria Luisa, and her father was against it. It was enough that the eldest daughter did that. Since he knew that he would not win by arguing, he hatched a plan. Catherine was normal, cheerful, did not shy away from parties, and several boys had already asked her to marry. She would go to Paris, the stunning city. Five of Catherine’s siblings already worked there. Charles had a small restaurant for workers, 20 Echiquier Street, in the neighborhood of Notre Dame de la Bonne Nouvelle. Let’s see if there, between the kitchen and the table, between the words and the compliments, she would forget such ideas.

Catherine went, worked, and remained unwavering in her decision. She wrote to Marie Louise, the Daughter of Charity, and the latter answered her with an ardent letter: “What does it mean to be a Daughter of Charity? It is to give oneself to God without reserve in order to serve Him in the poor, in His suffering members? If at this moment someone were powerful enough to offer me the possession not of a kingdom but of the whole universe, I would look at all that as the dust of my shoes, quite sure that I would not find in the possession of the universe the happiness and contentment that I experience in my vocation”.

Marie Louise had no idea what would happen to that letter. When, for humanly explainable reasons, she had to leave the community of the Daughters of Charity, her sister, then already Sister Catherine, would return the letter to her, corrected and enlarged. And Marie Louise would rejoin the community in 1845.

Daughter of Charity

Marie-Louise, in her letter, advises Catherine to go to Chatillon-sur-Seine with a sister-in-law of hers, married to Hubert Labouré, who ran a boarding school for young girls. There Catherine learns to read and write a little, because until that moment -and at a good price: 30 francs- she had only learned to sign her name. In Chatillon, she became acquainted with the Daughters of Charity, recognized the priest of her dream in the picture in the foyer and, finally, made her postulancy, a prerequisite for entry into the Daughters of Charity. Her postulancy form, January 14, 1830, reads as follows: “Miss Labouré, sister of the one who is superior of Castelsarrazin, is 23 years old, of good devotion, good character, strong temperament, love of work and very cheerful. She receives communion regularly every day (a lot for the time). Her family is impeccable in its morals and probity, but of little fortune. She has brought 672 francs as a dowry”. Peter the farmer did not want to give her any dowry and it was his sister-in-law who provided it, although not in full.

After the postulancy came the novitiate or seminary. On April 21, 1830, Catherine arrived by horse-drawn carriage at the motherhouse and novitiate of the Daughters of Charity. It was the Wednesday before the transfer of the relics of St. Vincent de Paul from Notre-Dame to St. Lazarus, April 25, 1830.

“The body of St. Vincent had been respected during the French Revolution because of his reputation for charity, one would say rather for philanthropy. It was deposited in a crypt of the Notre Dame Cathedral. We know that the members of the Congregation founded by St. Vincent had initially settled in the priory of St. Lazarus. Hence the name Lazarists, which is still in use today. But in 1830, the Lazarists moved to 95 rue de Sevres, a few steps from rue de Bac.

On Sunday, April 25, a procession led the remains of St. Vincent from Notre Dame to the chapel in the rue de Sévres. It was a solemn procession, in which eight hundred Daughters of Charity marched. The young Catherine took part in it.

After the transfer there was a novena of prayers in the chapel on rue de Sévres, before the body of St. Vincent. Catherine attended.

The first mystical event of her life occurred in this effervescence, in this Parisian month of 1830…” (Jean Gutton, “Superstition Overcome (Rue du Bac)”, Ed. Cerne, pp. 45-46).

St. Vincent de Paul

What was this first event? The vision of St. Vincent’s heart, which Sister Catherine narrated on February 7, 1856:

“I arrived on April 21, 1830, which was the Wednesday before the transfer of the relics of St. Vincent de Paul, so happy and content to have arrived at this great feast that it seemed to me that I was not on earth. I asked St. Vincent for all the graces I needed and I also asked him for the double family [Daughters of Charity and Congregation of the Mission] and for the whole of France, for it seemed to me that it was in the greatest need. Finally, I begged St. Vincent to teach me what I should ask for with living faith; and every time I went to St. Lazarus, I felt great sorrow. It seemed to me that I found St. Vincent in the community, or at least his heart, who appeared to me every time I went to St. Lazarus.

“I had the consolation of seeing him on the little box in which the relics of St. Vincent were displayed. He appeared to me three different times during three consecutive days. Flesh-colored white, he announced peace, calm, innocence, union. Then I saw him red with fire, because he was to enlighten charity in hearts: it seemed to me that the whole community had to renew itself and extend itself to the ends of the world. Then I saw it dark red, filling me with sadness for the pain that had to be endured. I don’t know why or how this sadness focused on the change of government. However, it did not prevent me from speaking to my confessor, who calmed me as best he could, drawing me away from these thoughts…” (Laurentin René, “Catherine Labouré et la Médaille Miraculeuse”, three volumes, Paris 1976-1980, I, pp. 334-335).

During her novitiate, Catherine had visions of the Miraculous Virgin, of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, of the Cross. Those visions, for the time being, were only her world, not yet the world of her sisters of the motherhouse nor the world of the Church. That is why no one suspected anything. Catherine did not radiate any extraordinary halo. The descriptive note that the superiors wrote about the novice Catherine Labouré is terse and anodyne: “Strong, of average size, can read and write, her character seems good, her spirit and judgment are not brilliant, she is pious, she works in virtue”.

Enguien

From the novitiate, in February 1831, she left for her first assignment: the hospice for the elderly in Enguien. Her first and only assignment. Except for a few days during the Paris Commune, she remained there until the day of her death, December 31, 1876. Almost 46 years in the same house.

Successively, and sometimes cumulatively, she was in charge of the kitchen (1831-1836), the linens (1836-1840), the cowshed (1846-1862), the henhouse (1831-1865), the care of the whole house, although without the title of superior (1860-1875), and finally the porter’s lodge (1870-1876).

As can be seen, there are no big changes in Catherine’s life story. Her balance of spirit and her stability in her work astonish the present viewer and prove the truth of her relationship with God.

Speaking of the two types of writings from her pen – on the one hand her notes and accounts, and on the other her accounts of the apparitions – Laurentin makes this comment:

“In the two aspects of her activity, she belongs to the world of the poor: those who have neither the time nor the means to learn to read and write, without lacking intelligence and ability.

Whether it is a secular writing or a message she has received from another world, Catherine shows the same order, the same consciousness, and also the same lack of spelling. She seems to have found from the beginning the form of her writing, its spaces, its margins, which do not move from her first writings to the moment when she no longer has the strength to write. The writings of 1876 resemble the others. Impossible to date them by a change in the form of the letters…

In the moral as in the spiritual, in her life as in her writing, Catherine manifests the same sharpness, the same straightness, the same cleanliness, a capacity to go to the essential without stumbling over obstacles; no literary skill, but a clarity, a continuity. She goes straight to the objective, squeezing from within what comes to her, with the forgetfulness and eclipses common to those who are not writers; but one thing is clear: she discards everything that has no meaning.

The writings of the visionary appear deeply linked to the rest by the interior: responsible for a family since she was 14 years old, Catherine felt spiritually responsible for the religious families to which she belonged, for France in whose heart she lived, for the whole Church. Her prayer, her union with God were receptive to the prophecies that enlightened her interior solicitude. Her charisms were not for her privilege but for her service. The Blessed Virgin did not appear to me, she said, but for the good of the Company and of the Church. (Laurentin René, Ibidem, p. 125).

The poor

The Daughters of Charity “are persons dedicated to God for the service of the poor,” said St. Vincent de Paul.

The poor, for Sister Catherine, were the elderly of Enghien. She loved them not only with her heart, but also with her presence and works. Consequently, they loved her, as attested by witnesses.

When those old people came home with more wine than they could handle, she would take them in and wait for the next day to scold them. If someone asked her why she was so moderate in her scolding, she would reply, “I see Jesus Christ in them.”

She was especially patient with people in distress. One Sister complained about her attentions to an obviously wicked old man and Sister Catherine replied, “Ah well, Sister, pray for him.”

During the revolution of 1871, the militiamen of the Commune occupied the house of Enghien accompanied by “soldieresses”. One of them, named Valentina and described as “monstrous” by documents of the time, ended up in court. Sister Catherine was called as a witness for the prosecution and what she did, according to Sister Cosnard, one of the Sisters of Enghien, was “to speak so well that she saved the life of the citizen…, the citizen who had made us suffer so much” (Sister Cosnard, Apostolic Process, July 9, 1909).

Catherine prayed, and provided the soup even “when the hungry Parisians did not disdain any food – donkey, cat, rat” and handed out the Miraculous Medal to all.

Before leaving Enguien those few days when all the Sisters had to do so, she went to the statue of the Virgin in the garden, so dear to her, removed the crown and took it with her. On returning from Bellainvilliers where she had taken refuge, she found the image in the garden smashed and so she placed the crown on the statue in the chapel. It was May 31, 1871.

Incognito and amnesia

These two words, unavoidable in any biography of St. Catherine, reveal, apart from the instructions she may have received from heaven, the best peasant astuteness.

Incognito means that Sister Catherine managed so that, during her whole life, only her confessors knew that she was the one favored with the visions and apparitions that we already know. The last year, 1876, her superior, Sister Juana Dufés, also knew about it, although it is probable that by then the matter was already a “family secret”.

Amnesia refers to the fact that, for a time, precisely when the “Quentin Canonical Inquiry” (1836) was opened and Sister Catherine could be called to testify, Sister Catherine forgets everything, she remembers almost nothing of what happened and it is useless to summon her for any statement.

Laurentin, benevolent with the saint, praises the incognito and explains amnesia is probable:

• (Incognito): “How to keep a secret with so many direct and indirect means to be torn out? A little weakness or complacency, as well as tension or anxiety, would have been enough for Catherine to become the prey of all the fervors surrounding the miraculous medal. Whatever the part of grace in this matter, the effective defense of Catherine passes through a control of herself without decay and a sure instinct of peasant prudence? Catherine knew how to defend her incognito, assuring the diffusion of the message received thanks to the institutions of the Church, using the secret of the internal forum to obtain publicity in the external forum. Thus she lived her daily service of charity, as a daughter of St. Vincent de Paul, with her secret garden, her communication from heaven. And thus she found the only way, for a woman of that time, to speak out effectively: through an interposed male person”.
• (Amnesia): “An eclipse of the memory is not strange in this matter (and Laurentin cites the cases of the visionaries of Pontmain and Lourdes, also of Thérèse of Lisieux)… What is strange in Catherine is not an easily explainable forgetfulness, but the contrast between this forgetfulness and the growing precision of the memories evoked until 1876, the last year of her life. What is strange in Catherine is not an easily explainable forgetfulness, but the contrast between this forgetfulness and the increasing precision of the memories evoked until 1876, the last year of her life. Should we compare Catherine to those fruit trees that have a last flowering and a last harvest after years of sterility and before dying the following year? Should we explain this phenomenon by the eclipses and fortuitous reviviscences of the human memory that lacks the mechanical rigor of a computer? Or was there in Catherine a peasant policy of amnesia? –I do not know, I do not know more…, it is the eternal answer of the people of the countryside to the curious and indiscreet…” (Laurentin, o.c., pp. 131 and 138).

The end

Not only her knees with their arthritis, but also her heart and even her head began to fail Catherine from the beginning of 1876. She was only allowed to attend to the porter’s lodge. She had been taken away from polishing the living room floorboards and cleaning the old people’s chamber pots at daybreak.

In November, she made her last retreat in the Chapel of Apparitions at the Motherhouse. When she returned to Enghien, she had to confine herself to her room until the end. On one of the last days of the month, she asked Father Chinchon to hear her confession. And so December 31 arrived.

I will no longer see tomorrow, she said.

Sister Dufés contradicts her. Fr. Chevalier comes to visit her. Her niece, daughter of her sister Tonina, also arrives with her two little girls. The sick aunt gives them all the candies and medals she has left. The Sisters of the community follow one after the other, going from the sick woman’s bedside to their occupations.

The superior tells her that she will recover. Sister Catherine repeats that she will die that same day. A Sister brings her more Miraculous Medals, but Sister Catherine can no longer hold them in her hands and they scatter on the bed.

The Christian rite of the agony begins. Catherine would have wanted 63 Children of Mary to pray, one each, the invocations of the litany of the Immaculate Conception. But the girls from the orphanage were with their families because of the New Year’s holidays. The Sisters pray them, without Catherine being able to answer, “as silent at the moment of death as she had been in life”.

At seven o’clock in the evening, sweetly, she falls asleep – this is the expression used by all the witnesses – and dies.

Anticipated devotion

The news spreads like lightning and everyone suddenly knows that the one who has died is the seer of the Miraculous Medal. The uninterrupted parade of people who want to venerate her and touch her body or her dress with a medal begins. There is no sadness, only grateful confirmation of the presence of God and Mary among men. “When one of our Sisters dies, sadness invades us. But, in the death of Sister Catherine, nobody cried, we did not feel sad, it seemed to us that we were next to a saint” (Sister Tanguy, Apostolic Process, June 9, 1909).

Sister Dufés, the superior, called the Sisters and read to them the accounts of the apparitions that Sister Catherine had written and given to her in the spring of that year. A moving spiritual reading in an unforgettable end of the year.

The burial was celebrated on January 3, feast of St. Genevieve of Paris. The procession was led by the elders of Enguien, who had been the first in Sister Catherine’s life. Then, the Daughters of Mary with their banner, many children, young workers from the suburb of St. Anthony with the medal hung on their chests by a white ribbon, people from the neighborhood and from many other places, missionaries of St. Vincent and other priests, 250 Daughters of Charity. They sang and prayed joyfully.

They took the body of the saint in her house in Enghien and, singing “O Mary conceived without sin”, they crossed the garden in procession and deposited the body in a crypt under the chapel of the neighboring house of Reuilly. Someone would later refer to that procession as a “premature worship.”

The saint

Catherine Labouré was beatified on March 25, 1933 by Pius XI and canonized by Pius XII on July 27, 1947. Her body rests today under the statue of Our Lady of the Globe in the altar of the chapel of Rue de Bac dedicated to her. The place no doubt Catherine would have chosen if she had been asked.

Catherine’s holiness was the holiness of the poor. Without glitter and without halos, with the anti-protagonism of concealment in the most humble services. The gifts of the Holy Spirit pass through the particular filter of each person and are translated in many ways for the enrichment and edification of the Church. Catherine’s way coincides with the evangelical disposition of Jesus and with the shadowy existence of Mary and Joseph. The profound communication with God, the highest mystical gifts generously nourish an existence and in the most unsuspected way fertilize many others throughout the world. But that concrete existence, that saint, that river of divine predilection and ecclesial fruitfulness, remains hidden, making its itinerary in silence and humility. Catherine Labouré was called “Violet under the grass.”

KEYWORDS: catholic; lk21; ordinarytime; prayer;

Explore the Saints

St. Virgil of Salzburg

Despite the city attached to his name, St. Virgil of Salzburg was actually from Ireland—he was a pilgrim on his way to the Holy Land who stopped in Salzburg on his journey and stayed as its bishop.

As abbot of a monastery in Ireland in the eighth century, Virgil was one of the most learned men in Europe (he even gained the sobriquet the “The Geometer” for his knowledge of geometry). Virgil decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and he and his fellow companions sailed to France. Virgil spent two years wandering and traveling throughout Europe but did not get any farther east than Bavaria.

During a stay in Salzburg, Virgil was appointed abbot of a monastery, a role that included administrative duties for the bishop of that diocese. He performed these duties admirably and found himself compelled to accept an appointment as bishop of Salzburg.

Virgil ran into trouble with St. Boniface, who disagreed with some of his decisions and teachings and complained to the pope. These inter-saint disagreements came to nothing, however, and Virgil continued on his tenure as a fantastically effective bishop without further disruption from saint or sinner. Virgil rebuilt the cathedral in Salzburg to become an even larger and grander building than it had been originally and sent missionaries to evangelize the surrounding regions.

Virgil himself traveled to preach the Gospel to new people, as far as Hungary and is known as the Apostle to the Slovenians. When he returned from one such journey, Virgil, unfortunately, fell ill and died on this date, November 27, in 784. Virgil was renowned for his great knowledge and his holiness, and his feast is celebrated both in Ireland and throughout central Europe.

St. Virgil of Salzburg, Irish abbot who left for a Holy Land pilgrimage and found yourself bishop of Salzburg—pray for us!

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