Free Republic

May 26 is the feast of the early Church father Saint Quadratus of Athens. He is primarily known as a very early apologist for the faith who presented his arguments directly to the emperor Hadrian while the latter was visiting Athens, sometime between AD 124 and AD 132. Practically all of what is known of his life may be found in this brief biographical notice in Saint Jerome’s work, On Illustrious Men: Quadratus, disciple of the apostles, after Publius bishop of Athens had been crowned with martyrdom on account of his faith in Christ, was substituted in his place, and...

White Semidouble A HUMBLE LAY BROTHER, Didacus of St. Nicholas is welcomed today by his father St. Francis into the company of Bernardine of Siena and John Capistran, who preceded him by a few years to heaven. The two latter left Italy and the whole of Europe still echoing with their voices, the one making peace between cities in the name of the Lord Jesus, the other urging on the Christian hosts to battle with the victorious Crescent. The age which they contributed so powerfully to save from the results of the great schism and to restore to its...

White Double THREE THOUSAND SIX HUNDRED AND SIXTY CHURCHES dedicated to St. Martin in France alone, and well nigh as many in the rest of the world, bear witness to the immense popularity of the great thaumaturgus. In the country, on the mountains, and in the depth of forests, trees, rocks, and fountains, objects of superstitious worship to our pagan ancestors, received, and in many places still retain, the name of him who snatched them from the dominion of the powers of darkness to restore them to the true God. For the vanquished idols, Roman, Celtic or German, Christ...

White Double IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY, in reply to the reproach of exhaustion hurled against the Church, the Holy Ghost raised from her soil an abundant harvest of sanctity. Andrew was one of his most worthy cooperators in the work of holy reformation and supernatural renaissance, which then took place. Eternal Wisdom had as usual suffered Satan to go before, for his own greater shame, cloaking his evil works under the grand names of renaissance and reform. It was nine years since St. Cajetan had departed this world, leaving it strengthened by his labors and all embalmed with the...

White Double HUMILITAS. This word already stood, crowned with gold, upon his family escutcheon, when Charles was born at the castle of Arona. It had been said of the Borromeos that they knew nothing of humility, except to bear it on their coat of arms: but the time had now come, when the mysterious device was to be justified by the most illustrious scion of that noble family; and when, at the zenith of his greatness, a Borromeo would learn to void his heart of self, in order that God might fill it. Far, however, from abjuring the high-mindedness...

White Double KENTY, THE HUMBLE VILLAGE of Silesia which witnessed the birth of St. John, owes its celebrity entirely to him. The canonization of this holy priest, who in the fifteenth century had illustrated the university of Cracow by his virtues and science, was the last hope of expiring Poland. It took place in the year 1767. Two years earlier, it was at the request of this heroic nation that Clement XIII had issued the first decree sanctioning the celebration of the feast of the sacred Heart. When enrolling John Cantius among the saints, the magnanimous Pontiff expressed in...

White Double “O HAPPY PENANCE, which has won me such glory!” said the Saint of today at the threshold of heaven. And on earth, Teresa of Jesus wrote of him “Oh! what a perfect imitator of Jesus Christ God has just taken from us, by calling to his glory that blessed religious Brother Peter of Alcantara! The world, they say, is no longer capable of such high perfection; constitutions are weaker, and we are not now in the olden times. Here is a Saint of the present day; yet his manly fervor equalled that of past ages; and he...

White Semidouble THIS GLORIOUS SAINT was like a beautiful lily, crowning the ancient branch of the kings of Wessex. The times had progressed since that sixth century, when the pagan Cerdic and other pirate chiefs from the North Sea scattered with ruins the island of saints. Having accomplished their mission of wrath, the Anglo-Saxons became instruments of grace to the land they had conquered. Evangelized by Rome, even as the Britons they had just chastized, they remembered, better than the latter, whence their salvation had come; a spring-tide blossoming of sanctity showed the pleasure God took once more in...

White Semidouble Vanity of vanities and all is vanity. No argument was needed to impress this truth upon the Saint of today, when the coffin was opened which contained all that Spain had admired of youth and loveliness, and death suddenly revealed to him its awful reality. O ye beauties of all times, death alone never dies; it invites itself to your dances and pleasures, it assists at all your triumphs, it hears promises said to be eternal: and how quickly it can scatter your adorers! A few years, a few days, perhaps even less, and all your borrowed...

White Double AMONG THE DIVERSE RELIGIOUS FAMILIES, none is held in higher esteem by the Church than the Carthusian; the prescriptions of the corpus juris determine that a person may pass from any other Order into this, without deterioration. And yet it is of all the least given to active works. Is not this a new, and not the least convincing, proof that outward zeal, how praiseworthy soever, is not the only, or the principal thing in God’s sight? The Church, in her fidelity, values all things according to the preferences of her divine Spouse. Now, our Lord esteems...

White Greater Double And I saw another Angel ascending from the rising of the sun, having the sign of the living God; and he cried with a loud voice to the four Angels to whom it was given to hurt the earth and the sea, saying: Hurt not the earth, nor the sea, nor the trees, till we sign the servants of our God in their foreheads. The sixth seal of the Book of destinies had just been opened before the eyes of the prophet of Patmos. It was a time of anguish, the hour for the wicked to...

White Simple SCARCELY HAD TWO CENTURIES elapsed since the triumph of the Cross over Roman idolatry, when Satan began to cry victory once more. While Eutychianism was crowned at Byzantium in the person of Anastasius the Silent, Arianism was rife in the West. Throughout the whole ancient territory of the empire, heresy was supreme, and almost everywhere was persecuting the Church, who had now none but the vanquished for her sons. “But fear not; rather rejoice,” says Baronius at this point in his Annals; “it is Divine Wisdom still delighting to play in the world. The thoughts of men...

White Double “I KNOW NOT VITALIS, I reject Meletius, I pass by Paulinus; he that cleaveth to the Chair of Peter, he is mine.” Thus, about the year 376, when the whole East was disturbed by the competitions for the episcopal See of Antioch, wrote an unknown monk to Pope St. Damasus. It was St. Jerome, a native of Dalmatia, who implored “light for his soul redeemed by the Blood of our Lord.” Far from Stridonium, his semi-barbarous native place, whose austerity and vigor he never lost; far from Rome, where the study of literature and philosophy had not...

White Double WHILE, IN FRANCE, the rising spirit of Jansenism was driving God from the hearts of the people, a humble son of St. Francis, in Southern Italy, was showing how easily love may span the distance between earth and heaven. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself, said Our Lord; and time has proved it to be the most universal of his prophecies. On the feast of the holy Cross, we witnessed its truth, even in the domain of social and political claims. We shall experience it in our...

White Double TODAY THE INFANT MARY smiles upon the lily offered her in the cradle by the representative of a great Order. The Hermits of St. Augustine were being grouped and organized by the Vicar of Christ when Nicholas was admitted into their family, of which he was soon to become the thaumaturgus. When he died, in 1305, the Roman Pontiffs were beginning their exile at Avignon; and his canonization, deferred for nearly a century and a half through the troubles of the period, marked the close of the lamentable dissensions which followed that exile. Peace so long lost;...

White Semidouble “COME, ALL YE WHO ARE DRAWN by the desire of unchangeable good, and who seek it in vain in this passing world; I will tell you what heaven has done for me. Like you, I once sought with feverish eagerness; and this exterior world could not satisfy my burning desire. But, by the divine grace, which fed my anguish, at length she, whose name I then knew not, appeared to me, more beautiful than the sun, sweeter than balm. As she approached, how gentle was her countenance, how peace-inspiring her voice, saying to me: O thou, whose...

White Double THE PRIMARY AIM OF HIS PONTIFICATE Pius X announced in his first encyclical letter, viz., “to renew all things in Christ.” Here we need but allude to his decree on early and frequent reception of holy Communion; his Motu Proprio on church music; his encouragement of daily Bible reading and the establishment of various Biblical institutes; his reorganization of the Roman ecclesiastical offices; his work on the codification of Canon Law; his incisive stand against Modernism, that “synthesis of all heresies.” All these were means toward the realization of his main objective of renewing all things in...

White Semidouble “OUT OF THE EATER CAME FORTH MEAT, and out of the strong came forth sweetness. The people with teeth of steel grinding the nations gives itself up as food to him, to whom was said: Kill and eat; the mouth of the Huns, formerly vomiting foam and rage, now distills the honey of charity. Such, O Christ, are thy miracles; such are thy works, O our God!” Thus does Baronius, on reaching in his history the year of Christ 1000, hail the arrival of the Hungarian deputies, who came to offer to the Roman Church the suzerainty...

White Double AUGUST CLOSES AS IT BEGAN, with a feast of deliverance; as though that were the divine seal set by Eternal Wisdom upon this month—the month when holy Church makes the works and ways of Divine Wisdom the special object of her contemplation. Upon the fall of our first parents and their expulsion from Paradise, the Word and Wisdom of God, that is, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, began the great work of our deliverance—that magnificent work of human Redemption which, by an all-gracious, eternal degree of the three Divine Persons, was to be wrought out...

White Double TO THEE IS THE POOR MAN LEFT: thou wilt be a helper to the orphan. Proud Venice has already seen these words realized in her noble son Jerome Æmilian: today they indicate the sanctity of another illustrious person, descended from the first princes of Navarre, but of still higher rank in the kingdom of charity. God, who waters the trees of the field as well as the cedars of Libanus, because it is he that planted them all, takes care also of the little birds that do not gather into barns: will he then forget the child,...