Catholic Saints & Feasts
"Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume book series: "Saints & Feasts of the Catholic Calendar," written by Fr. Michael Black. These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.
Episodes
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Names are powerful, and none is more powerful than Jesus
Mary and Joseph did not sit across from each other at the kitchen table in the evenings debating a name for their child. They didn’t flip through the pages of a book of saints or bounce ideas off of their friends and family. The baby’s name was chosen for them by God Himself. They were just taking ...
St. Basil: 329–379; St. Gregory: c. 329–390
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saints of Russia, monks, hospital administrators, and poets
Obvious truths are hard to explain, but smart theologians can explain them
The persecution of the Church in the first few centuries, sometimes aggressive, more typically passive, starved her skinny biblical frame of no...
Solemnity; Holy Day of Obligation (in USA: unless a Saturday or Monday)
Eighth Day of the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: White
No one knew Jesus like Mary
No one falls in love with a nature. We fall in love with a person. A woman loves a man, not mankind. And a mother pinches the pudgy little cheeks of a newborn baby, not the cheeks of a newborn nature. Saint Mary gave birth to a ...
c. Late Third century—335
Optional Memorial; Seventh Day in the Octave of Christmas;
Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of the Benedictines
A new captain pilots the ship of the Church in calmer seas
One thousand four hundred years before Christ, approximately when Moses led the Jewish people out of Egypt, a pharaoh ordered his slaves to hew an enormous obelisk out of a bank of stone. It was th...
c. 1119–1170
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: Red
Patron Saint of the clergy
Murder in the Cathedral!
Four knights hustled down the nave of England’s Canterbury Cathedral, weighed down with tackle, and found the church’s strong man. Eyes narrowed. Teeth clenched. Hard words were spit back and forth. Tempers. A tussle. Then the four knights brutishly struck down Thomas Becket, ...
c. 1 A.D.
Feast; Fourth day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saints of babies
No one is less deserving of death than a baby
Herod the Great was not great. He was evil. Herod the Sociopath, or Herod the Devil, would be more accurate titles. Herod murdered his own wife and preserved her corpse in honey. He had two of his own sons strangled to death. He routinely liquid...
c. Early First Century–c. 100
Feast; Third day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of authors, loyalty, and friendship
Outside of Christianity, few people believe God is love
Saint Jerome, while living in Palestine in the late 300s, relates a touching anecdote still being told at that time about John the Evangelist. When John was old and feeble, Jerome re...
c. Early First Century–c. 36
Feast; Second day in the Octave of Christmas; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of deacons, altar servers, stonemasons, and headaches
Christ rises in indignation as the first martyr is brutalized
The practical explanation for a historical event is normally the most convincing. Psychological analysis, guesswork, and overinterpreting frowns and whispers are best ignored...
c. 0
Solemnity
Liturgical Color: White
God robes Himself in flesh, and mission impossible begins
Since the dawn of time the pages of pagan mythology filled men’s imaginations to the brim with wondrous stories. Educated men who could read and write Latin and Greek, broad-minded men trained in philosophy, believed that the forests were thick with fairies, that the god of war launched ...
1390–1473
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: Violet
Patron Saint of Poland and Lithuania
Humility, austerity, work, and intelligence unite in one man
Conquering generals returning home from the rim of the Empire were awarded triumphal parades through Rome’s crowded masses. The booty of war entered the city first on carts—gold plate, silver goblets, piles of aromatic spices—then came the ex...
1521–1597
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: Violet
Patron Saint of Germany
A zealous Jesuit is the tip of the Counter-Reformation spear
The deep impact of today’s saint so shook Germany that the reverberations of his work were still being felt centuries after his death. Saint Peter Canisius composed question and answer German-language catechisms for every educational level. Th...
1542–1591
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of contemplatives, mystics, and Spanish poets
A priest’s love of God is purified by the blue flames of contemplation and mistreatment
The Protestant Reformation sparked a purifying fire in the Catholic Church. Like a prairie fire scorches the thick grasses, thistle, and weeds, so the heat of the Counter-Reformation moved...
c. Late third century–304
Memorial; Liturgical Color: Red
Patron Saint of virgins, the blind, and Syracuse, Sicily
A garden enclosed, no man would lock her in his embrace
Today’s saint is one of only eight women (Mary included) commemorated in Eucharistic Prayer I: “Felicity, Perpetua, Agatha, Lucy, Agnes, Cecilia, Anastasia, and all the Saints…” It was Pope Saint Gregory the Great (590–60...
1531
Feast; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of the Americas
A miracle hangs, frozen in time, in Mexico City
The humble Indian Juan Diego and his wife, Maria Lucia, had accepted baptism from the Franciscan missionaries laboring in Tenochtitlan (Mexico City), the greatest city of Spain’s most impressive colony, the future Mexico. After his wife died in 1529, Juan moved to the home of his ...
c. 305–384
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Archaeologists
A dynamic pope mentors Jerome and embellishes catacombs
Damasus reigned in the era when the popes died in their beds. The long winter of Roman oppression had ended. The arenas were empty. Christians were still occasionally martyred, but not in Rome. The many popes of the 200s who were exiled, murdered, or imprison...
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: white
Patron Saint of air crews and builders
Heaven will reinforce what we know of Christ and Mary
When Jesus said, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock” (Mt 7:24), He likely had a specific house in mind—His own house in Nazareth where He grew up. The footings of many of Nazareth’s houses...
1474–1548
Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: white
Patron Saint of indigenous people
Mary said to Juan: "Am I not here, I who am your mother?"
Good things happen to those who go to daily Mass. A very good thing happened to today’s saint on his long trek to daily Mass, something so extraordinary that it permanently altered a continent. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (the “Talking Eagle”) was born n...
c. 15 B.C.
Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
Patroness of Brazil, Korea, Philippines, Spain, and the United States
Only one person ever chose His own mother
The Ark of the Covenant was a sumptuously adorned chest housing the Jews’ most sacred objects: the tablets of the Ten Commandments, a pot of manna, and Aaron’s staff. Before its disappearance, the Ark was the cen...
c. 337–397
Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Milan and beekeepers
A mighty bishop guides Augustine, admonishes an emperor, and leads his people
If the noble Saint Ambrose had brought Saint Augustine into the Church and done nothing else besides, he would have done enough. Augustine’s conversion was a slow boil. He was ripe for baptism when providence placed him and his mo...
c. Third–Fourth Century
Optional Memorial; Liturgical Color: White
Patron Saint of Russia, sailors, merchants, and children
Santa Claus signed the Nicene Creed
Traditions the world over are so embedded in the rhythms of daily life that their ubiquity goes unnoticed. Why a birthday cake with lighted candles? Why make a wish and then blow those candles out? The origin of this charming tradition is o...
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