September 12th, St. Guy

St. Guy

Welcome to the saint of the day. Today, September 12, the Church celebrates the feast of Saint Guy of Anderlecht, also known as Saint Guido, a Belgian Christian known as the “Poor Man of Anderlecht.”

The few facts that we know of him show, that he totally demonstrated in his life Christ’s worry for the poor and marginalized. Saint Guy did not have much worldly belongings, but he was inundated with love and kindness to others. Charged with grace of God, he worked untiringly at the most tedious jobs, and in a short time became a well recognized person, as a friend of the poor, in spite of remaining a poor man all through his life. Although, he never joined a particular religious order, Saint Guy was visited for spiritual direction by many, and through his model, brought many closer to Christ.

Born in Anderlecht, Belgium, a small village outside of Brussels, Guy was reared and instructed, by poor, but saintly parents. Early in life he had a great affection to Our Lord and Holy Mother Mary. This warm relation with Jesus and Mary made him select a life that is set apart for the deprived. Throughout his childhood, he gave away all he had, and spent his days visiting the ailing and aged of the town. Guy came to be recognized as a saint by many.

As he grew up his commitment to Jesus and Mary and his dedication to the poor became the innermost concerns in his life. He spent hours in prayer each day, rarely sleeping but instead contemplating the Lord. His devotion to Jesus and Mary was noted by a holy priest who asked his to serve the Church. He virtually lived in the Church, praying, cleaning the church and giving arms to the poor who came to seek his help.

However, saintly a person may be, he or she is likely to go off track. This occurred  to Guy also.  A rich merchant from Brussels approached   him with a business scheme. He advised Guy to be a associate with him, in an endeavor. The merchant suggested that earnings from it could be used to assist the deprived. At first sight Guy became charmed of the idea of business and joined him. However, the business failed totally. Guy realized the suggestion for business as a way of making money for the poor, came from the evil spirit. The fact that he ventured into it for a short time filled him with remorse.

In his early 60s he came back to Anderlecht and soon died there of natural causes. People around him started esteeming him as a saint. He was buried in Anderlecht, and many miracles were credited to his mediation at his grave. Saint Guy is the patron saint of Anderlecht.  His intervention is invoked for healing  from epilepsy and rabies.  In atonement Guy engaged in rigorous acts of atonement for the rest of his life, offering all he had to the Lord for his fickleness. He traveled on pilgrimage—on foot—for seven years, visiting Rome and then the Holy Land, coming back  to Belgium and serving as a guide at the holy shrines.

September 11th, St. John Gabriel Perboyer.

St. John Gabriel Perboyer

Today, the 11th of September, the Church celebrates the feast of St. John Gabriel Perboyer.
St. John Gabriel was born in Puech, France,  on January 6th, 1802, to a devout family of eight children. Including John Gabriel, five of the Perboyer children became consecrated religious - three priests and two nuns. He was ordained at age 23 and taught theology at the seminary before being appointed rector and later master of novices in Paris - on account of the holiness his superiors saw in him.
Louis, his younger brother, died on his way to preach in China at the age of 24 and John Gabriel was asked to continue the mission that had been given to his brother. He reached on the island of Macao on August 29, 1835. After getting acclimatized in Macau, John Gabriel began the long trip in a Chinese junk ship, walking, and on horseback, which brought him after eight months to Nanyang in Henan, where the compulsion to learn the language imposed itself.

After five months, he was able to articulate himself, though with some trouble, in good Chinese, and at once threw himself into the ministry, visiting the small Christian communities. Then he was transferred to Hubei, which is part of the region of lakes formed by the Yangtze kiang , Blue River. He worked in his apostolate for four years.
A decree of the Manchurian emperor, Quinlong,  had banned  the Christian religion in 1794.  This resulted in a hunt for Christian missionaries; the soldiers used threats to force a catechumen to reveal the place where the John was hiding. The catechumen was a weak person and could not stand the threat of the soldiers. So, he informed  the soldiers his whereabouts.  John was arrested and underwent the cruelest tortures. He was brought before four different tribunals and subjected to 20 interrogations.
The Prayer of St. John Gabriel Perboyre: “O my Divine Savior, transform me into Yourself. May my hands be the hands of Jesus. May my tongue be the tongue of Jesus. Grant that every faculty of my body may serve only to glorify You. Above all, transform my soul and all its powers so that my memory, will and affections may be the memory, will and affections of Jesus. I pray You to destroy in me all that is not of You. Grant that I may live but in You, by You and for You, so that I may truly say, with St. Paul,"I live-- now not I-- but Christ lives in me."
This prayer had its consummation On 11 September 1840;  the imperial order came decreeing his death by strangulation.
With seven criminals the missionary was led up a height called the "Red Mountain." As the criminals were killed first, Perboyre reflected in prayer, to the wonderment of the bystanders.
When his turn came, the executioners stripped him of the purple tunic and tied him to a post in the form of a cross. They passed a rope around his neck and strangled him.
His body was brought back to France, but his heart remained in his adopted homeland, the land of China.
The heroic suffering and death of John Gabriel led to his beatification in 1889. Pope John Paul II canonized him as Saint John Gabriel Perboyre, on June 2nd 1996.

September 10th, the Great Martyrs of Japan

The Great Martyrs of Japan

Welcome to the Saint of the Day. Today, the 10^th of September, the Church celebrates the feast of the Great Martyrs of Japan.

On the 10^th of September, The governor of Nagasaki picked 52 prisoners including 21 monks, some of whom had been imprisoned for many years in very cruel conditions. The governor ordered all of them to be sentenced to death by beheading. This execution order also included the prisoners' children.

On September 10, 1622, prisoners carried crosses in their hands, and came to the execution grounds and many of the crowd that came to watch those included Christians, reportedly crying and wailing to see their priests who had converted them. The priests in answer to this told the crowd that God would give them other teachers and that they needed to keep their faith until death.

. Four Japanese lay Christians who had entertained priests in their houses, as well as twenty-five priests and monks, European and Japanese, were given a stake where he or she was to be burned. Each priest kissed the stake he was given many times, and their example was followed by the Japanese Christians.

As the preparations for execution were conducted, Father Espinola asked one of the mothers, Isabel Fernandez going to be beheaded: where her son was. The mother lifted the five year-old child, named Ignacio, in her arms and answered Father Espinola:

“Father, here is my son. I will offer him to God; he will become a martyr with me.”

In order to dishearten the priests and monks, who are going to be burned at the stake, the men and women and children, most of them under 10, were beheaded first. This was a heart renting scene for the priests and monks to see their folks brutally murdered before their eyes.

The burning took place over several hours, and it was claimed that Father Ouimura lasted three hours alive. After the end of the burning, many local Christians, estimated up to 50,000 in the vicinity of Nagasaki, attempted to gather relics, but they were beaten by the guards. However, no atrocious, brutal and barbarous measure could wipe out Christianity from Japan, which was planted by the missionaries and watered by the blood of infants, lay persons, priest and monks.

Today there are an estimated half a million Catholics in Japan spread over 16 dioceses, 1500 priests and 850 parishes.

September 9th, St.Peter Claver

St.Peter Claver

A painting, by an eye witness, Johann Moritz Rugendas, depicts a scene, below, the deck of a slave ship. A thousand arrived every month, to the port of Cartagena, Colombia. Into the vortex of this undignified trade center, where the black slaves arrived famished, diseased, and hopeless, the young Jesuit, Peter Claver, ventured in, as the slave of the slaves, which subsequently made him, the saint of the slaves.

Welcome to the saint of the day. Today the 9th September the Church celebrates the feast of St.Peter Claver

A native of Spain, the young Jesuit Peter Claver left his homeland Catalonia, forever in 1610, to be a missionary in the colonies of the New World. He sailed into Cartagena, a rich port city where he was ordained in 1615.

Peter had joined the Jesuits at the age of 20. While doing his philosophy at Palma , Mallorca, he came to know the porter of the college, St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, a lay brother known for his holiness and gift of prophecy. Rodriguez felt that he had been told by God that Claver was to spend his life in service in the colonies of New Spain, and he frequently urged the young student to accept that calling.

Peter Claver's predecessor, Jesuit Father Alfonso de Sandoval, had devoted himself to the service of the slaves for 40 years before Claver arrived to continue his work, declaring himself "the slave of the Negroes forever."

As soon as a slave ship came into the port, Peter Claver moved into its infested hold to minister to the ill-treated and worn out passengers. After the slaves were herded out of the ship like chained animals and shut up in nearby yards to be gazed at by the crowds, Claver plunged in among them with medicines, food, bread, brandy, lemons and tobacco. With the help of interpreters he gave basic instructions and assured his brothers and sisters of their human dignity and God's saving love. During the 40 years of his ministry, Claver instructed and baptized an estimated 300,000 slaves.

His apostolate extended beyond his care for slaves. He became a moral force, indeed, the apostle of Cartagena. After four years of sickness which forced the saint to remain inactive and largely neglected, he died on September 8, 1654. The city magistrates, who had previously frowned at his solicitude for the black outcasts, ordered that he should be buried at public expense and with great pomp.

He was canonized in 1888, and Pope Leo XIII declared him the worldwide patron of missionary work among black slaves.

He is considered a heroic example of what should be the Christian practice of love, and of the exercise of human rights. 

September 8th, St. Adele.

St.Adele

Leaving the pomp and glory of the Duchess and the countess of Normandy, a woman in 1067   went
in search of serenity in the tranquility of a Benedictine convent of Messines, near, Ypres. She is St.Adele, of Messines.
Welcome to the Saint of the Day. Today the 8th of September the Church celebrates the feast of St. Adele.
Adèle was the second daughter of Robert II , the King of France and Constance of Arles. In January 1027 she married Richard III, Duke of Normandy. This marriage lasted only for a few days. In the same year she married Baldwin V, Count of Flanders.
She had an eventful political life as the Countess of Normandy. The husband of Adele, Baldwin, was a great reformer of the church. As his wife Adele often fuelled these reforms ultimately benefitting the church in a big way. One of the contributions of Baldwin was the foundation of what is known as the collegiate churches, which was the system of pastoral service popular before the parish churches became common.

Adele’s influence was evident in the establishing the Colleges of Aire, Lille, and Harelbeke as well as the abbeys of Messines and Ename. Some of the pitched battles of the First World were witnessed by Flanders and many an ancient Abbeys and Churches were raised to the ground.

 After Baldwin’s death in 1067, she went to Rome, took the nun’s veil from the hands of Pope Alexander II and retired to the Benedictine convent of Messines, near Ypres. There she later died and was buried at the convent

September 7, St. Marko Krizin

St. Marko  Krizin

Marko  Krizin was born in 1588 in Križevci, Croatia. He studied philosophy in Graz, Austria, where he joined the Congregation of Mary. Krizin decided to become a priest, so he was sent to Rome to stay at the Pontifical German and Hungarian College and study theology as a candidate of the Diocese of Zagreb, Croatia.

He was studying at the Pontifical Gregorian University from 1611 to 1615, and was intelligent, virtuous and diligent. Marko was ordained as priest and after that returned to his Diocese of Zagreb, where he performed pastoral work. Shortly after, the Archbishop of Ostrogon and Cardinal Petar Pázmány summoned him to Hungary. Till 1616 he was a teacher and headmaster of the Trnava Seminary in Slovakia and was appointed canon.

At the time Košiće,  was a fort of Hungarian Calvinism. In order to help the few Catholics left, who were even deprived of their churches, two Jesuits, a Hungarian Stephen Pongrácz,  and a Pole, Melchior Grodziecki,  were summoned to look after the faithful who spoke Hungarian and Slovakian. Mark of Križevci a Croatian worked with them in 1619 as a missionary.

At the time of the Calvinist uprising  against the Catholics under a Calvinist commander George Rákóczy came to Košice with his army and imprisoned the three missionaries. As they refused to convert to Calvinism, the three missionaries were tortured to death. Mark was set on fire by a torch and decapitated on September 7, 1619. The Jesuit Grodziecki was murdered on the same day, and Pongrácz the following day.

The coffin, with the remains of the three martyrs now lies in the Ursuline church in Trnava, where the veneration of the martyrs developed.

Holy Pope Pius X beatified them on January 15, 1905.

Pope John Paul II canonized these three martyrs for their faith on July 2, 1995 in Košice.

September 6th, St. Eleutherius

St. Eleutherius

Welcome to the saint of the day. Today, 6th of September; the Church celebrates the feast of, St. Eleutherius, the Abbot. We have scanty documented evidence, on the life and activities of, St. Eleutherius. However, the documented information, that we have of him is, from one of the pillars, of the early Christendom, Pope St. Gregory, the great.
A number of entries in the Dialogues of Pope Gregory illuminates, life at St. Mark, under Abbot, Eleutherius in the abbey. The monks told Gregory , that “by his tears, Eleutherius, raised up one that was dead”

Eleutherius, told Gregory that he had come across a young boy, who lived in a nunnery and was possessed by devils, had taken him back to San Marco, and with the help of, the other monks had cured him

The Dialogues also reveal, that Eleutherius later moved, to the monastery of Gregory,in Rome.  There, he cured Gregory,  of an illness that had prevented him, from fasting at Easter.
These words of Pope st.Gregory sums up the essence of St. Eleutherius: “ He was so simple a man, one of such great penance, that we must not doubt that Almighty God granted much to his tears and his humility!”
After resigning his abbacy, Saint Eleutherius,  died in Rome in Saint Andrew's monastery, about the year 585.