NOVEMBER SAINTS

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All Saints.  This is the feast, not only of all saints who have been canonized, but of all saints who have not been canonized and are in Heaven.  It is, in a generous way, the feast of all those who are still on earth and are trying to be saints.  No one can be a saint without love for and protection by and devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary.  She is Queen of All Saints. Saint Paul tells us that the will of God is not merely for our salvation, but also for our sanctification.  Everyone is called to be a saint.  Anyone who does not become a saint has no one but himself to blame.  Our Lady holds her greatest bounties and generosities in store for those who are starting to be saints.

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All Souls.  On this day every priest in the Catholic Church is allowed to say three Masses for the souls in Purgatory.  The first saint who started the celebration on this day of the feast of All Souls was Saint Odilo, whose feast day is January 1.  This was in 998.  All prayers for the souls in Purgatory are most efficacious when put under the protection of the Blessed Virgin Mary.    Saturday is Our Lady's special day during the week.  Our Lady visits Purgatory every Saturday to release the souls there who have died during the week and who have worn the brown scapular of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.  When Our Lady was assumed into Heaven on August 15, who undoubtedly took countless souls from Purgatory with her, perhaps all of them that were then there. Our Lady's promise to those who wear the brown scapular is this:  "Whosoever dies in this scapular shall not suffer eternal fire.  On Saturday, as many as I shall find in Purgatory, I shall free." Blessed Claude de la Colombiere says that "of all the forms of our love for the Blessed Virgin and its various modes of expression, the scapular is the most favored."  The prophecy of Ezekiel declares, "The gate of the inner court that looks toward the East shall be shut for six days, but on the sabbath day it shall be opened."  The Church has applied this prophecy to Our Lady of Mount Carmel.  The "inner court" means Purgatory, and the "sabbath day" means Saturday, the day when Our Lady abundantly releases souls from Purgatory and brings them to Heaven.

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Saint Martin de Porres (1639).  He was a South American, born of a Spanish father and an Indian mother.  He lived at Lima in Peru.  He became a lay brother in the Dominican Order.  So great was his holiness that his light shone all through the New World.  His memory will never be forgotten.  So great was his power of prayer that he raised a dead man to life.  He was seventy years old when he died.  Pope John XXIII canonized him on May 6, 1962.  

Saint Malachy O’More (1148).  He was a noble Irish saint who was born at Armagh in the year 1095.  He was the Primate of Armagh in his day.  Armagh was the first see established in Ireland by Saint Patrick.  On a pilgrimage he made to Rome, Saint Malachy stopped at the Abbey of Clairvaux, and died in the arms of Saint Bernard, its abbot.  Saint Bernard wrote the life of Saint Malachy.  Saint Bernard and Saint Malachy were buried in the same grave.  Saint Malachy O’More is well known for his famous prophecies concerning the nearness of the end of the world.

Saint Sylvia (572).  Saint Sylvia was the mother of Saint Gregory the Great, Pope and Doctor of the Universal Church.  She was one of the most beautiful widows Rome has ever known.  Saint Gregory’s sanctity and intellectual brilliance are in no small way due to this precious mother.  A chapel has been built on the Caelian Hill in Rome on the spot where her house was when she lived there.

Saint Winifred (650).  She was a niece of Saint Beuno, a bishop of Wales.  She was murdered and her head cut off by Caradog of Hawarden who wanted to violate her purity.  The spot where her head fell on the ground caused the rising of a holy well, called Saint Winifred’s Well.  It still pours forth nine and one-half million gallons of water every day, and miracles still occur there. Saint Beuno wrapped Saint Winifred’s body and severed head in his cloak, and laid them at the foot of the altar where he was to say Mass.  When the Mass was ended, Saint Winifred was restored to life again, with her head rejoined to her body.  She is perhaps the greatest glory of Wales.  She is certainly the clearest remembrances there of the truth Wales once had when it was a Catholic country.

Saint Hubert (727).  He was a French saint and a nobleman who, when his wife died, became a cleric.  He is the patron saint of hunters.

 

Saint Charles Borromeo (1584).  He was the nephew of Pope Pius IV.  He was “the soul of the council of Trent,” which protected the Catholic Faith in the sixteenth century against the inroads of the Protestant Reformation.  Saint Charles Borromeo wrote the following prayer to his guardian Angel:  “ Beloved angel, who has been given me as a protector by the Divine Majesty, I desire to die in the Faith which the Holy, Roman and Apostolic Church adheres to and defends, in which all the saints of the new Testament have died, and outside of which there is no salvation.”  Saint Charles Borromeo gave Saint Aloysius his first Holy Communion.

 

Saint Leonard of Limoges (559).  He was a nobleman at the court of Clovis, the first Catholic King of France.  King Clovis was his godfather.  Saint Leonard was even more noted for his sanctity than for his nobility. He has been kept in loving remembrances by French Catholics form his day to ours.

 

Saint Willibrord (739).  He was born in England.  He was trained in Ireland to be a missionary.  He then went to what is now Holland, and Belgium and Denmark.  He was made Bishop of Utretch.

 

Saint Ernest (1148).  He was a Benedictine abbot from Germany who joined the second crusade.  He was tortured and killed at Mecca for refusing to embrace Islam.

 

Saint Godfrey (Geoffrey) (1115).  He was a French saint who became a monk when he was five years old.  He spent nearly all of his time, night and day, in prayer.  He was a Benedictine.  When made a bishop, he lived in his palace just like a monk.  He fed people with his own hands.  He constantly visited the hospitals where the sick, and even the lepers, were kept. He was a great opponent of the greed and laxity of the clergy of his day.

 

The Basilica of the Holy Saviour (324).  This marks the day, in 324, when the great Pope Sylvester consecrated this church to Our Lord.  It is one of the seven great churches of Rome.  Since the twelfth century it has been called the Basilica of Saint John Lateran because it has been also especially dedicated to Saint John the Baptist, under whose patronage the baptistery of this church was placed.  It is the major church of the Holy Father, the Pope.  The heads of Saint peter and Saint Paul are kept in it.  It is called in an inscription on its walls, “The Mother and the Head of All Churches of this City and the World.”

 

Saint Zachary and Saint Elizabeth (First Century).  Saint Zachary and Saint Elizabeth were the father and the mother of Saint John the Baptist, the last and the greatest of the prophets and the precursor of Our Lord.  Saint Zachary's story is beautifully told in the first chapter of Saint Luke.  Saint Zachary was spoken of in one of the three canticles of the New Testament, which is known as the "Benedictus."  It is recited in the prayers of priest as part of their liturgical worship.  Saint Zachary was inspired by God through an angel to give Saint John the Baptist his name.  Saint Zachary was martyred in the Temple of Jerusalem by the Jews.  The martyrs of the Old Testament run from A to Z, from Abel, the son of Adam and the first martyr that ever was, to Zachary, the father of John the Baptist and the last martyr of the Old Testament

Saint Elizabeth was the cousin of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  It was to her that Mary went in haste after she had conceived her Child, and after she learned that Elizabeth had conceived hers.  The second phrase in the "Hail Mary", "Blessed are thou among women and blessed is the fruit if thy womb," was given us by Saint Elizabeth.  And so, her memory is beautifully kept in the Rosary, where this phrase is mentioned fifty-three times.  Saint Elizabeth's first greeting to Our Lady, when she saw her standing in her doorway was:  "Whence is this to me that the Mother of my Lord should come to me!"  This was a sheer and unequivocal way of proclaiming Mary, her own cousin, to be the Mother of God.    With Elizabeth's as the central greeting, the Angel Gabriel's as the first and that of the Council of Ephesus as the last, this is the full "Hail Mary":  Hail, Mary, full of grace; the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.  Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.

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Saint Leo the Great (461). There have been thirteen Popes named Leo; five of them canonized saints:  Saint Leo I, Saint Leo II, Saint Leo III, Saint Leo IV, and Saint Leo IZ.  Saint Leo I, called Saint Leo the Great, was a Pope and Doctor of the Church.  He reigned for twenty-one years and fought all manner of heretics.  He was "the soul of the Council of Chalcedon," in 451, which condemned the Monophysites, those heretics who held that the human nature of Jesus was absorbed into the Divine, and no longer exists.  This heresy would leave Mary, the Mother of God, without a Child.  Saint Leo the Great, by his personal power and fearlessness, kept Attila and the Huns from invading the city of Rome in the year 452.  

Saint Martin of Tours (397).  Saint Martin of Tours was a great saint whose life was written by Saint Gregory of Tours.  Saint Martin was born in Hungary.  He was educated in Italy.  He became a Christian in France.  He was the uncle of Saint Patrick, the great apostle of Ireland.  He was the staunch friend and ally of Saint Hilary of Poitiers; Saint Martin of Tours worked many miracles while on earth, including the raising of the dead.

Saint Josaphat (1623).  He was a Basilian monk of the Ruthenian rite who became Archbishop of Polotsk, after the Orthodox Ruthenian Church was officially united to Rome.  He fought vigorously in support of the primacy of the Pope.  In a sermon he cried out, “Please God I will give my life for the holy union, for the supremacy of Peter and of the Holy Father, his successor.”  Soon after a mob of Orthodox invaded Saint Josaphat’s episcopal residence and killed him.

Saint Roy (Rufus) (200).  The name Roy is a form of Rufus.  Saint Roy was the first bishop of Avignon in the south of France.  That was the place where the Popes were exiled, seven of them, from the year 1309 to 1377.

Saint Emil (Emilian) (574).  He was a poor shepherd of Spain.  He became a hermit and then was ordained a priest.  He gathered around him a large number of disciples and became their abbot.  He is called the first Spanish Benedictine.

Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini (1917).  The first saint ever to die in the United States as an American citizen was named Frances.  She is Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini, who was born in 1850, and who died in 1917 at the age of sixty-seven.  She came to this country from Italy in an effort to keep her beloved Italian Catholics from being perverted in their Faith by those in this country who plotted against it.  She became an American citizen a few years before she died.  She died in Chicago.  Her body is now in New York.  She is the namesake of that notable saint called Frances of Rome, who died in 1440, and who is remembered on her feast day March 9.  Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini added Xavier to her name because she wished to make the great apostle of the Society of Jesus, Saint Francis Xavier, the patron of her crusade for the Faith in the United States.  

Saint Stanislaus Kostka (1568).  He was born in Poland.  He entered the Society of Jesus when he was eighteen years old.  He died within ten months, famous for his angelic innocence and sanctity.  He died on the feast of the Assumption of Our Lady, as he had predicted.  His great friends in the Society of Jesus were Saint Peter Canisius, who sent him to Rome, and Saint Francis Borgia, who received him into the Order of Saint Ignatius.  The Blessed Eucharist was the center of his life.  Every morning he heard two Masses.  Before his entrance into the Society of Jesus, twice the angels brought him Holy Communion, when he was being persecuted by his own family.  Our Lady appeared to him and placed the Infant Jesus in his arms.  It was Our Lady who told him to become a member of the Society of Jesus.

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  Saint Laurence O’Toole (1180).  Saint Laurance O’Toole was born in Leinster in Ireland.  He became an Augustinian when he was a little boy of twelve.  He was made Abbot of Glendalough when he was twenty-five.  Eight years later he was made Archbishop of Dublin.  At the tomb of Saint Laurance O’Toole seven dead persons where raised to life.  He was canonized in 1226, the year Saint Francis of Assisi died.

 

  Saint Albertus Magnus (1280).  Saint Albertus Magnus (Albert the Great) was a Dominican.  He was a teacher of Saint Thomas Aquinas.  He is one of the greatest theologians of the Catholic Church.  He studied all the sciences, and knew and saw and declared how shallow they were for all purposes of eternal wisdom.  His great devotion was to the Blessed Sacrament and to our Blessed Lady.  He was seventy-four years old when he died.  Saint Albert the Great is one of the Doctors of the Catholic Church.

 

  Saint Margaret of Scotland (1093).  This great and saintly princess and queen was the granddaughter of King Edmund Ironside of England.  She was the wife of King Malcolm III of Scotland, whose father, Duncan, was murdered by the noted Macbeth.  There never was a more royally holy woman, wife and widow than Saint Margaret.  Of her eight children, two of her sons become monks.  One of her daughters became a queen, married King henry I of England, and because of her heroically holy life was, like her mother, a saint.  Her name is Saint Matilda, and she is known in history of Good Queen Maud.

 

            Saint Margaret of Scotland was a relative of Saint Stephen of Hungary.  She was only forth-three years old when she died.  She thanked God for the afflictions He sent her in her illnesses.  She spent hours and hours in prayer, and was always grateful to God for every gift she had received.  Her beautiful grace after meals is known as “Saint Margaret’s Blessing.”  Saint Margaret is the patroness of Scotland.

 

            Saint Gertrude the Great (1302).  Saint Gertrude, who is called the Great, was a brilliant and holy little German girl who entered religion at the age of five.  She was born in the town of Eisleben, which later gave the world the heretic, Martin Luther.  The Order she joined was the Benedictines.  She was so brilliant in her earliest years that all the simple and clear truths of Divine Revelation became part of her thoughts and her speech.  Though she was capable of learning all secular sciences, Our Lord appeared to her and told her to love no other books but the Bible and the works of the Fathers of the Church.  Saint Gertrude was the first great apostle of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.   On the feast of Saint John the Evangelist, she was taken by him to Jesus and permitted to rest her head on His Sacred heart.  Saint Gertrude was forty-six years old when she died.  Two saints especially devoted to Saint Gertrude were Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint Francis de Sales.

 

  Saint Elizabeth of Hungary (1231).  Saint Elizabeth was a princess of Hungary.  She married Louis of thuringia, and had three children.  After his death, she became a Franciscan.  She is the patron saint of the Third Order of Saint Francis.  She died when only twenty-four years old, the same age as the Little Flower of Jesus, Saint Casimir of Poland and Saint Gabriel of the Most Sorrowful Virgin.  Four years after her death, Saint Elizabeth of Hungary was canonized.  The dead have been raised to life when brought to her tomb.

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Saint Hugh of Lincoln (1200).  Saint Hugh of Lincoln, though born in France, became a Carthusian monk at the age of twenty and went to England.  He was sixty years old when he died.  So great was his holiness that kings and nobles carried his coffin to the grave.  He was canonized twenty years after his death.

 

Blessed Rose Philippine Duchesne (1852).  She was a French girl born at Grenoble who became a Visitation nun.  After her Order had been violently attached and dispersed during the French Revolution, under the guidance of Saint Madeleine Sophie Barat she incorporated her community into the Madams of the Sacred Heart.  Blessed Rose Philippines’ great desire was to go and labor in foreign missions.  When she was forty-nine years old, she set sail for America.  She landed at New Orleans, and then went north to Saint Charles, not far from Saint Louis, Missouri.  She later worked among the Indians at Sugar Creek.  The Indians called her “the woman who prays always.”  It is one of the glories of the United States that the body of this saintly nun is still kept in our country.  She died when she was eighty-three years old.  She is buried at Saint Charles, Missouri.

 

Saint Hilda (680).  She was an English nun, a Benedictine abbess and one of the greatest women of her land.  She was a relative of a king, Saint Edwin.

 

 

The Basilicas of Saint Peter and Saint Paul.  The Basilicas of Saint Peter, the Apostle and first Pope, were built at the foot of Vatican Hill in Rome by Pope Saint Cletus.  It has since grown to be the greatest and most impressive church in the world.  Fifty thousand people can be accommodated in it.  The feast of November 18 commemorates the solemn consecration of the new basilicas there by Pope Urban VIII, in 1626.  It is on the spot where Saint Peter was crucified upside down in the year 67.    Pope Saint Cletus also built a church over the tomb of Saint Paul-outside-the-walls, on the road to Ostia.  This church has been made larger and larger through the years.  A great fire destroyed it in 1823.  It was rebuilt, and its final structure, as we see it today, was consecrated by Pope Pius IX in 1854, two days after he had defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  The Pope ordered that the commemoration of the dedication of Saint Paul's Basilica should take place on November 18, together with that of Saint Peter.  

Pope Saint Cletus also built a church over the tomb of Saint Paul-outside-the-walls, on the road to Ostia.  This church has been made larger and larger through the years.  A great fire destroyed it in 1823.  It was rebuilt, and its final structure, as we see it today, was consecrated by Pope Pius IX in 1854, two days after he had defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception.  The Pope ordered that the commemoration of the dedication of Saint Paul's Basilica should take place on November 18, together with that of Saint Peter.

  Saint Mechtilde (1310).  She was a Benedictine nun at Helfta in Germany and was a teacher of Saint Gertrude the Great.  She received revelations from God, which Saint Gertrude recorded.

 

  Saint Felix of Valois (1212).  Saint Felix of Valois, when seventy years old, along with Saint John of Matha, founded in France, in 1197, a Religious order known as the Trinitarians.  The purpose of this Order was to take captive Christian slaves away from the Mohammedans in Spain and in North Africa.  So pleased was the Blessed Virgin Mary with this Order of Trinitarians, that when Saint Felix was dying, she appeared to him wearing the habit of his Order.  Saint Felix of Valois was eighty-five years old when he died.

The Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary (13 B.C.). Saint Joachim and Saint Anne, the father and the mother of the Blessed Virgin Mary, presented the to God in the Temple, to live there and to belong to God forever, when she was three years, two months and thirteen days old.  Saint Joachim and Saint Anne sensed in the Blessed Virgin Mary from the moment of her birth that she was divinely great, and belonged to God and not to them.  When her father and her mother brought Mary to the Temple of Jerusalem and presented her there, Saint Zachary, a priest of the Temple and the father of Saint John the Baptist and the husband of Saint Elizabeth, received her.  He took her by the hand and led her into the cloister of virgins who dwelt in the Temple.  There she stayed, adored God and prayed until she was fourteen years old.  Then her first espousal to Saint Joseph were miraculously arranged by God, so as to give her a virginal husband to protect her in her virginal motherhood when she conceived her Divine Child and brought God into this world.

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  Saint Cecilia (230).  Saint Cecilia is one of the most venerated virgin martyrs of the Church. Her name is mentioned in the Roman Canon of the Mass and always in the Litany of the Stains.  She belonged to a noble family of Rome.  Her father was a pagan and her mother a Christian.  From her early youth she consecrated her virginity to Christ.  Her father insisted on her marrying a young pagan nobleman named Valerian.  On the evening of her wedding day, she told Valerian that she had an angel guarding her virginity.  Valerian said that if he could see the angel, he too would believe in Jesus Christ.  Cecilia told Valerian that if he were baptized a Christian he could see the angel.  He went and was baptized by Pope Urban I – he and his brother Tiburtius.  They returned to Cecilia, and both of them saw a most beautiful angel standing beside her.  These two brothers, Valerian and Tiburtius, proclaimed themselves Christians, and were martyred in the year 229, along the their jailer whose name was Maximus.  Cecilia buried them. Less than a year later the Roman soldiers broke into Cecilia’s house.  They tried to suffocate Cecilia in a bath, and when they could not, one soldier struck her three times on the neck with a sword.  She lay on the ground for three days before she died.  She was buried in the Catacomb of Saint Callistus.  She was eighteen years old when she was martyred.  This is a church built to Saint Cecilia in Rome, and dedicated to her.  At the end of the sixteenth century, her body was found to be incorrupt and as beautiful as the day she died, preserving, after thirteen centuries, all its virginal loveliness and modesty.

 

  Saint Clement (100).  Saint Clement was the fourth Pope.  He reigned in the Catholic Church from the year 90 to 100.  Saint Clement, as did all the early Popes, shed his blood for the Faith.  He died the same year as Saint John the Evangelist.

 

  Saint Chrysogonus (304).  He was martyred for the Faith at Aquilea in northern Italy during the persecution of Diocletian.  His name is mentioned in the Roman Canon of the Mass. He consoled and encouraged the martyr, Saint Anastasia, during her imprisonment.

 

            Saint Flora (856).  Saint Flora was the companion of a beautiful Spanish girl named Mary, and their feast are celebrated together.  They were beheaded by the Mohammedans for refusing to deny their Catholic Faith.

 

  Saint Catherine of Alexandria (307).  The first and foremost of all the Catherines among the saints is the beautiful, young, eighteen-year old girl of Alexandria in Egypt who was martyred for her Faith.  The intellectuals of her time and place were so upset by the brilliance of her mind that she was called the defend the Catholic truths before fifty pagan philosophers.  She completely confounded them with her arguments and her eloquence.  They tortured her by means of an engine fitted with a spiked wheel. On this wheel she was rolled, but before it could do harm to her it miraculously fell apart.  She was then scourged and thrown into prison and at last beheaded.  She is the patroness of philosophers.  She is one of the fourteen Holy Helpers, and is invoked in lawsuits.  Saint Catherine’s body was carried by angels to Mount Sinai, where God gave Moses the Ten Commandments.  There, on the top of this sacred hill, her virginal remains await the resurrection on the last day.

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            Saint Joyce (Jucunda) (466).  She was a beautiful little Italian virgin, a spiritual daughter of Saint Prosper.

 

  Saint Leonard of Port Maurice (1751).  Saint Leonard of Port Maurice was a most holy Franciscan friar.  He lived at the monastery of Saint Bonaventure in Rome.  He was one of the greatest missioners in the history of the Church. He used to preach to thousands in the open square of every city and town where the churches could not hold his listeners.  The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin, the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and the veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus were his crusades.  He was in no small way responsible for the definition of the Immaculate conception made a little more than a hundred years after this death.  But Saint Leonard’s most famous work was his devotion to the Stations of the Cross.  He is sometimes called the Saint of the Stations of the Cross.  So brilliant and holy was his eloquence that once when he gave a two weeks’ mission in Rome, the Pope and the College of Cardinals came to hear him.  Saint Leonard of Port Maurice also gave us the Divine praises, which are said at the end of Benediction.  He died a most holy death in this seventy-fifth year, after twenty-four years of uninterrupted preaching.

 

 

The Miraculous Medal of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1830).  This is the feast of the lovely medal designed by the Mother of God herself and given to a beautiful nun, Sister Catherine Laboure, now canonized saint, a Sister of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul.  Our Lady appeared three times to Saint Catherine Laboure in the year 1830.  Our Lady told Saint Catherine just how the medals in her honor should be made and designed.  On one side of each medal is an image of Mary, with the words, "O Mary conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee." On the other side is the first letter of the name Mary, placed in the center with twelve stars around it, a cross just above it, and the hearts of Jesus and Mary engraved just below it.  These miraculous medals are now called, in simplicity, "Mary medals". By holding them, wearing them, kissing them or showing them to others, countless favors and miracles have been worked everywhere by the power of the intercession of the Mother of God. 

Blessed Leonard Kimura (1619).  Blessed Leonard Kimura of the Society of Jesus was a descendant of a noble Kimura who was the first Japanese baptized by Saint Francis Xavier.  Blessed Leonard Kimura, through humility, became a lay brother in the Society of Jesus.  He joined the Society of Jesus at the age of thirteen, and was a catechist for thirty years.  Along with thirteen other brave Japanese Catholics, he spent three years in prison.  Right in the prison itself – which he turned into a religious house, with regular hours for prayer – he converted ninety-six Japanese to the Catholic Faith.  He was burned to death on the hill of Nagasaki.  He was forty-three years old when he went to God.

 

  Saint James of the Marches (1476).  He was an Italian Franciscan priest and missionary who preached in many countries in Europe. He was a friend of Saint John of Capistrano.  He had the gift of miracles and made countless conversions.  For forty years he never let a day go by without giving a sermon or an exhortation.

 

  Saint Saturninus (303).  He was an aged priest from Carthage in Africa, who fled to Rome with his deacon, Sisinius.  He was arrested there and sentenced to hard labor in the building of huge baths for the pagans of Rome.  In the midst of his hard work and toil, and despite his age, the light of his Faith was seen by all who met him.  Many Roman pagans began to be converted by Saint Saturninus, attracted by the holiness of his looks and encouraged by what he taught and said.  He and his deacon were beheaded by order of the pagan Emperor Diocletian.

 

  Saint Andrew (61).  Saint Sandre was the older brother of Saint Peter.  He was the first of the Apostles to be called by Our Lord.  He was a disciple of Saint John the Baptist, who pointed out Jesus to him as the Messias.  Saint Andrew summoned his brother, Peter, and both became glorious Apostles of Our Lord.  Saint Andrew preached the Gospel, after Our Lord’s death, in Asia Minor and to the people of Scythia.  He then went to Macedonia and to Greece.  He was martyred at Patras, in Achaia, by being tied to a cross shaped like the letter X, and ever since called the “Saint Andrew’s cross.”  Saint Andrew made his cross a pulpit.  On it, while he bled and bled from scourgings he had received, he preached to the faithful for two days until he died.   Part of his body is now in the town of Amalfi in southern Italy.  He is the patron saint of Russia and also of Scotland.

 

Saint Maura (Fourth Century or earlier).  Saint Maura was a young Catholic virgin of Constantinople, cruelly martyred for the Faith.  Her memory haunted the haters of the Catholic Faith for years after her death.  Even Julian the Apostate, the Roman Emperor who died in 363, was worried about the way in which Saint Maura was venerated.  On of the Ionian Islands, between Greece and Italy, was named after her.  Her name is a beautiful variant of Mary, the name of the Mother of God.

 

-from “Saints to Remember from January to December,” by the Slaves of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

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St. Michael the Archangel

St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle; be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil. May God rebuke him, we humbly pray. And do you, O prince of the heavenly host, by the power of God, cast into Hell Satan and all the evil spirits who prowl about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen.


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