Reflecting on the Saints

Of the various Saints and Feast Days that we remember during this week: December 29 - SOLEMNITY OF THE HOLY FAMILY OF JESUS, MARY AND JOSEPH December 29 - Saint Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr December 31 - Saint Sylvester I, Pope January 1 - SOLEMNITY OF MARY, THE HOLY MOTHER OF GOD January 2 - Saints Basil the Great and Gregory Nazianzen, Bishops and Doctors of the Church January 3 - The Most Holy Name of Jesus January 4 - Saint Elizabeth Ann Seton, Religious (USA) January 5 - Saint John Neumann, Bishop (USA) I’ve chosen to write about St. Basil the Great : As his title “The Great” suggests, even in his lifetime St. Basil was an incredibly important figure in the Eastern (Orthodox) Church .   Born around 330 AD, to a fairly wealthy Greek speaking family in Cappadocia (today in Turkey ), along with his brother Gregory of Nyssa and his friend Gregory of Nazianzus , are collectively referred to as the Cappadocian Fathers . The three were born into the time just after th...

Of the quite many Saints and Feast Days to choose from this week:  Dec. 23 - Saint John of Kanty, Priest Dec.  25 - THE NATIVITY OF THE LORD Dec. 26 - Saint Stephen, The First Martyr Dec. 27 - Saint John, Apostle and Evangelist Dec. 28 - The Holy Innocents, Martyrs Dec. 29 - St. Thomas Becket, Bishop and Martyr Dec. 29 - THE HOLY FAMILY OF JESUS, MARY AND JOSEPH   I decided to write about the Holy Innocents . The day commemorates an incident in the Gospel of Matthew ( 2:16-18 ): When the magi had departed, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream and said, "Rise, take the child and his mother, flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you. Herod is going to search for the child to destroy him." Joseph rose and took the child and his mother by night and departed for Egypt. He stayed there until the death of Herod, that what the Lord had said through the prophet might be fulfilled, Out of Egypt I called my son. When Herod realized that he had been deceiv...

Of the fairly few Saints on the liturgical calendar in the past week: December 21, St. Peter Canisius, SJ, priest I’ve chosen to write about St. Peter Canisius, SJ . The future St. Peter Canisius, SJ was born in 1521 in Nijmegen in the then Duchy of Guelders , which was then part of the Hapsburg Netherlands and part of the Holy Roman Empire .   In modern times the city is located in the (Kingdom of) the Netherlands near the border with Germany and at a key crossing point of the Waal River in the Rhine River delta.  The city became the site of major fighting during the failed Allied thrust called “ Operation Market Garden ” over the Rhine and into Germany in September 1944.  I mention this because anyone who’s read the book or seen the movie “A Bridge Too Far” or even the HBO series “Band of Brothers” would know about Operation Market Garden and the role that Nijmegen played in the battle. Yet, more than four centuries before that, in 1521, Nijmegen was th...