Saint Michael Center

January is the month of the Holy Name. It is a month filled with feast days of many well-known saints, including our own patron saint, St. John Bosco. We invite you to pray to or with them…visit our PRAYER section

JANUARY SAINTS CALENDAR
1	Solemnity of Mary, Mother of God
2	Saint Basil (379) and Saint Gregory Nazianzen (389).
3	Saint Genevieve (512).
4	Saint Elizabeth Anne Seton
5	Saint John Neumann (1860). Saint Telesphorus (154).
6	The Epiphany The Baptism of Jesus The Marriage Feast at Cana Saint Gaspar, Saint Melchior and Saint Balthasar (First Century). Blessed Andre Bessette (1937).
7	Saint Raymond of Pennafort (1275). The Bringing Back of the Child Jesus from Egypt
8	Saint Apollinaris (180).
9	Saint Julian of Antoich (313).
10	Saint Nicanor (76).
11	Saint Hyginus (158).
12	Saint Benedict Biscop (690).
13	Saint Hilary of Poitiers (368).
14	Saint Malachias (Fifth Century B.C.).
15	Saint Paul, the First Hermit (342).
16	Saint Marcellus (309). Saint Priscilla (First Century).
17	Saint Anthony the Abbot (356).
18
19
20
21	Saint Agnes
22
23	The Solemn Espousals of Our Lady and Saint Joseph
24	Saint Francis de Sales
25	The Conversion of Saint Paul
27	Saint Angela Merici
28	Saint Thomas Aquinas
31	The Holy Infant of Prague
31	Saint John Bosco

The custom of liturgically commemorating the Divine Maternity of Our Lady in the Christmas season began soon after the Council of Ephesus. It was at this council, in the year 431, that the Catholic Church infallibly declared and defined the Divine Maternity of Our Lady. The Catholic Church tells us that in order to be saved we must believe with our full hearts that the same Person Who is the Son of God the Eternal Father in His Divine nature is also the Child of Mary the Virgin in His human nature. Anyone who refuses or hesitates to call Mary the Mother of God will never be saved. Saint Elizabeth, the cousin of Our Lady, cried out for joy in her doorway when Mary came to visit her after the Annunciation and said, “And whence is this to me that the Mother of my Lord should come to me!” (Luke 1:43). Saint Paul clearly tells us in the Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter 4, verse 4, “God sent His Son born of a woman.” The dignity of the Mother of God transcends anything that can ever be imagined. It is God giving Himself in fullness to a creature in relationship and in love. Now that God has become man, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity through all eternity must call God the Father His Father and Mary the Virgin His mother. What God the Father is to the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity by nature, Mary the Virgin is to Him by grace. At the command of Mary, God must now obey.

This is the day on which Jesus first shed His Precious Blood. It is the day on which Jesus was given His Holy Name. Mary, the virginal Mother of Jesus, held her Divine Child in her arms while His Precious Blood was being shed for the first time. This was in the rite of circumcision, a required religious observance of the Jews. It was the purpose of Jesus to fulfill perfectly all the requirements of the Old Law until the Old Law was abolished and the New Law established in its place. Because of the sacredness of the body of Jesus, and because he was liturgically allowed to do so as head of the family, Saint Joseph circumcised Mary’s Child in the cave where He was born. Circumcision was a rite of the Old Law, but by virtue of shedding the blood of the Lamb of God in this rite, Saint Joseph participated in the priesthood of the New Law. The circumcision was a sorrow to Our Lady, but it was a sorrow mingled with joy. Mary, the Mother of Jesus, knew that all true Christians would see, in the circumcision of Jesus, how incarnate God had become when He could shed blood.

Saint Joseph gave Jesus His Holy Name. This he was told to do by the Angel Gabriel. Jesus is a name which is substantially the same in sound in all the languages of the world. In the early ages of the Church, when Catholics were so persecuted and lived in the catacombs, the beautiful abbreviation of the Holy Name for those who used it was HIS. These are the first three letters of the name of Jesus when written in Greek: IHSOUS. This symbol Catholics still retain.

Of the many saints named Elizabeth, the one most gloried in by all Americans is Saint Elizabeth Anne Seton who was born in New York City in 1774. After her husband’s death she converted to the Catholic Faith from Episcopalianism. She became a nun and founded the Sisters of Charity of Saint Joseph. She died in Emmitsburg, Maryland in 1821, the same year as Napoleon, when she was forty-six years old. She was canonized in 1975.

This was the showing of Our Lord as a Child to the Gentile Kings. The Epiphany occurred twelve days after the birth of Jesus. The English call it Twelfth Night. It is one of the most important feasts in the Catholic Church. The Epiphany is God letting us know simply and dramatically that though He was born of the Jews, He was destined for the Gentiles. The Jews rejected Jesus. Their Temple was crashed to the ground in the year 70, and has never been built up since. Gentile Kings came over a thousand miles from the East to greet Jesus at His birth. This feast is often celebrated on the first Sunday after January 1.

Jesus was baptized when He was thirty years old and about to begin His public life. A special feast of the Baptism of Jesus is kept on the Sunday after the Epiphany. This was when the heavens opened and the Eternal Father’s voice was heard to say, “This is My Beloved Son, in Whom I am well pleased.” In dramatic simplicity and clear revelation, the voice of God the Father let us know that the Child of Mary the Virgin is both true God and true Man. No one who does not believe this can be saved. The Baptism of Jesus also commemorates the institution of the sacrament of Baptism – of Baptism by water, essentially necessary for salvation. The presence of Jesus in the River Jordan sanctified, on this day, all the water of the world for this purpose.

This marriage feast occurred at the end of January, in the year 30, but it is celebrated today because it is, in its way, an epiphany – a showing of the power of Jesus – because it was His first miracle. This marriage feast is spoken about in the second chapter of Saint John. It was held in the little town of Cana, north of Nazareth, in Galilee, in the first year of Our Lord’s public life. At the Blessed Virgin’s request, Jesus changed six jars (120 gallons) of water into wine. This miracle, in addition to showing God’s generosity and His eagerness to grant Our Lady any favor, is by way of giving us the type and symbol of the fact that the water poured upon every Catholic at Baptism is to give him the right to another sacrament, the Blood of Jesus in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, which he receives at Holy Communion.

This was when Jesus was three years old. The Holy Family fled from Egypt, a land of the Gentiles, on February 17, 1 A.D. They lived in Egypt, in a town called Fostat, near Heliopolis and not far from Cairo. The Holy Family had to leave Bethlehem because of the wickedness and cruelty of the Jews, and had been warned to do so by the Angel Gabriel appearing to Saint Joseph. Herod, the King of the Jews, who tried to slaughter Jesus as an innocent Child, died in 3 A.D. Joseph and Mary then returned to Jerusalem with the Divine Child. But they had no trust in Herod’s successor, whose name was Archelaus and who was one of his sons. They were warned again by an angel to avoid him, and so, on their return to the Holy Land, they traveled north of Judea, to Galilee, to the town called Nazareth, where Jesus was conceived. There they lived for twenty-seven years in the little house where Mary also was conceived and where she was born. This holy little house, miraculously transported, first to Dalmatia in 1291, and then to Loreto, in Italy, in 1294, is known as the Holy House of Loreto.

Saint Agnes was a glorious virgin and martyr slain with the sword at the age of thirteen. Her name is mentioned in the Roman Canon of the Mass, and always in the Litany of the Saints. Saint Agnes is one of the most beloved saints in the Catholic Church, and every age has venerated her. Her name has been given to thousands of Catholic churches, and to hundreds of thousands of Catholic girls.

This marriage of Our Blessed Lady and her virginal spouse took place when he was thirty and when she was fourteen years, four months and fifteen days old. Their first espousals (their engagement) took place on the previous September 8, Our Lady’s birthday. These espousals were arranged by the providence of God so that the virginal Mother of the Eternal God might have a virginal husband who would care for her and protect her Divine Child. Saint Joseph died when he was sixty years old, in the year 29 A.D. Our Lady died when she was seventy-two years old, in the year 58 A.D. Both of them are now, in soul and in body, in Heaven, along with Jesus, the third member of the Holy Family.

He was Bishop of Geneva and a Doctor of the Universal Church. He was only fifty-five years old when he died. He was cofounder, with Saint Jane Frances de Chantal, in 1610, of the Order of Visitation nuns, the Order to which Saint Margaret Mary, the great apostle of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, would one day belong. He converted 72,000 Calvinists to the Catholic Faith.

Saint Francis de Sales tells us concerning Saint Joseph: “His humility, as Saint Bernard explains, was the cause of his wishing to quit Our Lady when he saw that she was with child; for Saint Bernard says that he spoke thus to Himself: ‘Ah! What is this? I know that she is a virgin, for we have together made a vow to keep our virginity and purity intact – a vow which nothing would induce her to break; yet I see that she is with child. How can it be that maternity is found in virginity, and that virginity does not hinder maternity? O my God! Must not this be that glorious Virgin of whom the Prophets declare that she shall conceive and be the Mother of the Messiah? Oh, if this is so, God forbid that I should remain with her – I, who am so unworthy of such an honor! Better far that I should quit her secretly on account of my unworthiness, and that I should dwell no longer in her company.’”

Saint Paul the Apostle, whose name before his conversion was Saul, on the road to Damascus heard the voice of Jesus speaking to him from the sky and saying, “Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou Me?” He then went on to Damascus, and was baptized in the Catholic Faith by Saint Ananias. Later on, because he was meant to be the Apostle to the Gentiles, and after seeing how much the Jews as a nation despised and rejected Jesus, he changed his name from Saul, which is Jewish, to Paul, which is Gentile. This was in admiration of a Roman named Sergius Paulus (Saint Paul of Narbonne, feast day March 22), whom he met and converted.

A little Italian girl of northern Italy, she lost her parents and was completely orphaned at the age of ten. When she was thirteen, the priest, by a special favor in those days, used to give her Holy Communion several times during the week. When she was twenty-one years old, she was told in a vision to found a Religious Order for the instruction of young girls. She thought no group of young girls in all the history of the Church was more beautiful than Saint Ursula and her 11,010 companions, all martyred for their Faith and their virginity in Cologne, in Germany, in the year 383. And so Saint Angela Merici, with twelve girl companions, in 1535, founded the famous and beloved Order of nuns known as the Ursulines. They now have convent schools for girls all over the world. The last word Saint Angela Merici spoke was the Holy Name of Jesus, just before she died, at the age of sixty-six.

He was the Angelic Doctor of the Church, a member of the Dominican Order, admired for the brilliance of his mind in writing such great works as the Summa Theologica, but loved for the warmth and devotion his heart had for the Blessed Sacrament. Saint Thomas said, “I found more wisdom in prayer at the feet of the Crucified than in all the books I ever read.” When Saint Thomas Aquinas was thirty-nine years old, at the request of Pope Urban IV, he wrote the Mass and the Office for the feast of the Corpus Christi. This was in the year 1264. The Catholic hymns, Tantum Ergo, and O Salutaris, and the Panis Angelicus and Adoro Te Devote, Latens Deitas, and the beautiful sequence in his Mass of Corpus Christi, known as the Lauda Sion Salvatorem, are all the works of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Every time a Catholic priest gives Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, he chants a prayer of Saint Thomas Aquinas and the choir sings a hymn he composed. Saint Thomas died when he was only forty-nine years old, on his way to the Second Council of Lyons. Although a Dominican, he died in a Benedictine monastery, of Fossa-Nuova, and the monks of this monastery thought his death there one of the greatest honors their house had ever been given.

He was one of the glories of the Catholic Church in the last century. He was the founder of the Salesians, a Religious Order of men under the protection of Saint Francis de Sales, and of a Religious Order for women called the Daughters of Mary, Help of Christians. Saint John Bosco was the spiritual father of that glorious young boy, Saint Dominic Savio, whose biography he wrote.

The image of the Child Jesus known as the “Infant Jesus of Prague” was actually of Spanish origin. IN the 17^th century, this beautiful statue was brought by a Spanish princess to Bohemia and presented to the Carmelite monastery. For many years this statue has been enshrined on a side altar in the Church of Our Lady of Victory in the city of Prague. It is of wax, and is about nineteen inches high. It is clothed in a royal mantle, and has a beautiful jeweled crown on its head. Its right hand is raised in blessing: its left holds a globe signifying sovereignty. So many graces have been received by those who invoke the Divine Child before the original statue that it has been called “The Miraculous Infant Jesus of Prague.”

JANUARY SAINTS