THE SAINTS: STORIES, IMAGES, MEDITATIONS

A Saint on Trial: Analyzing the Condemnation of Sir Thomas More

By Michael P. Foley
On the Square, First Things
Thursday, December 4, 2008, 7:27 AM

St. Thomas More’s star has risen and fallen in unusual ways over the years. Hailed in his lifetime as one of the great humanists of the age, he died with almost all of his friends and family accusing him of pointless pertinacity. Though his books were widely read and his integrity respected by even his enemies, it would take another four centuries before a critical edition of his works would appear and for the Church to add his name to the roster of the canonized. Since then, More’s legacy has grown steadily: He was declared the patron saint of statesmen by John Paul II at the start of the new millennium, and he was even added to the liturgical calendar of the Church of England—the legitimacy of which, of course, More lost his life denying.

Thomas More, we now know, was a sage and a saint, but was he guilty of the formal charges that led to his execution on July 6, 1535? Blamelessness before God and before the bench are often two different issues: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, for instance, was a courageous Christian witness, but he was also accused, not incorrectly, of conspiring to assassinate the leader of the Third Reich.

Questions about the justice or injustice of More’s trial propelled a fascinating conference held last month at the University of Dallas. “Thomas More on Trial,” the fourth annual conference of the Center for Thomas More Studies, drew a rare mix of humanities scholars and legal experts approaching the last days of Thomas More from their respective disciplines. The result was a lively and unpredictable discussion on More’s writings, thought, legal skills, probity, and, of course, trial, which took place on July 1, 1535.

Every aspect of the trial was scrutinized. What did it mean to take an oath in the sixteenth century? What were More’s legal rights, and were they respected? Was due process observed during the trial? Did Richard Rich perjure himself, or did he merely misremember his conversation with More that became the most damning piece of evidence submitted? How much pressure were the judges and the jury under from Henry VIII? Which, if any, of the four extant accounts of the trial is the most accurate? And how did More ensure that his side of the story would be heard through his writings without incurring further suspicion of treason?

The conference was filled with surprises. For instance, did you know that we have no copy of the oath which More famously refused to take? That no official transcript of the trial was made? That we are not certain whether there were one, three, or four formal charges? That, contrary to current legal practice, the more grave the case, the fewer the rights of the accused? That More’s civil rights, as defined by English law at the time, may have been more or less respected? In other words, there was nothing procedurally unusual about More spending years imprisoned in the Tower of London, undergoing several interrogations, being suddenly brought to court for trial, and hearing the charges against him (read in Latin) for the first and only time. And there was considered nothing untoward in having judges sitting on the bench with a vested interest (to put it mildly) in seeing More condemned, such as an uncle, a brother, and the father of Anne Boleyn.

As for those charges, there were at most four in number: that Thomas More maliciously refused to acknowledge the king’s supremacy over the Church in England; that he had conspired against the king with Bishop John Fisher; that he had instigated sedition by calling the Act of Supremacy a two-edged sword; and that he had, according to the testimony of Richard Rich, “maliciously, traitorously, and diabolically” denied Parliament’s power to declare the king head of the English Church.

The conference had an impressive line-up of knowledgeable speakers, but the arguable highlight (besides a dramatic reenactment of the trial that bore an eerie resemblance to the Good Friday reading of the gospel) was a panel of four judges, including Sir Michael Tugendhat, Judge of the High Court of England. The justices were given the task of assessing More’s trial, and their differing evaluations were intriguing. Chief District Judge Sidney A. Fitzwater from the Northern District of Texas referred to the verdict as “a legal killing,” while Judges Jennie Jatta (a bankruptcy judge from the Western District of Tennessee) and Sir Michael Tugendhat stressed the difficulty of passing judgment on a world as alien to us as sixteenth-century England (Sir Michael quoted an English proverb: “The past is a foreign country. They do things differently there”). Edith Jones, Chief Judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, saw several substantive and procedural injustices in the trial and remarked that the case “shows the ultimate infirmity of the law,” an infirmity that the legal profession tries to minimize but cannot fully eliminate.

But was Thomas More guilty of high treason? Much depends on the technical meaning of malice, which features in two of the alleged counts, including the fourth and most important. (One of the controversial parts of the trial is that the presiding justices shouted “Malice!” several times during the proceedings, a practice which certainly must have affected the nervous jury and led to their verdict in a breathtaking fifteen minutes.) If malice means a mere intent to violate an Act of Parliament, then More was arguably guilty. But if malice means something more, such as the deliberate will to harm, then More was probably innocent, for his actions appear to have sprung from a genuinely charitable desire to serve his king even when disobeying him.

The issue of malice was particularly interesting since it shows some affinity to our current worldwide and aggressively expanding body of legislation against hate speech. On November 9, the morning after the two-day conference ended, a Dallas pastor was accused by angry protesters of hate speech for offering a sermon entitled, “Why Gay is not OK.” Like the broad use of “malice” which afforded judges and jury the legal cover to oblige the will of their ambitious monarch, one wonders whether the evolving definition of hatred will one day indict every criticism of a group that has garnered political or social sympathy, no matter how respectful, loving, or dispassionate that criticism may be.

When his sentence of execution was given, More said to his judges, all of whom he knew from his own tenure as chancellor:

More have I not to say, My Lords, but that, like as the Blessed Apostle St. Paul, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, was present and consented to the death of St. Stephen, and kept their clothes that stoned him to death, and yet be they now both twain holy Saints in Heaven, and shall continue there friends for ever, so I verily trust and shall therefor [sic] right heartily pray, that though Your Lordships have now here in earth been Judges to my condemnation, we may yet hereafter in Heaven merrily all meet together, to our everlasting salvation.

The statement is classic More. It reveals his authentic desire for a happy reconciliation and a heart as forgiving as St. Stephen’s. But there is a subtext here as well. If More is St. Stephen in this comparison, then the English High Court is Saul of Tarsus, with the blood of a martyr on its hands. More is no doubt sincere in hoping to see these latter-day Sauls eventually become repentant Pauls, but the analogy presupposes their guilt, not his. Regardless of what we today may conclude about More’s legal innocence, there is little question about where More himself stood on the matter.

Perhaps the greatest surprise regarding this trial is not its outcome but its relative neglect. In an era that likes to talk about this or that “trial of the century,” it is astonishing that a capital case involving a first-rate legal mind, philosophical thinker, literary humanist, and, oh yes, canonized saint should have been on the backburner of our collective attention for so long. That, at least, is one injustice which the Center for Thomas More Studies has done much to correct.

Michael P. Foley is an associate professor of Patristics who teaches in the Great Texts Program at Baylor University. He is the author of Why Do Catholics Eat Fish on Friday? The Catholic Origin to Just About Everything (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) and Wedding Rites: A Complete Guide to Traditional Vows, Music, Ceremonies, Blessings, and Interfaith Services (Eerdmans, 2008).

PapaBear must be celebrating this, wherever she is.


Priest who aided lepers in Hawaii to become saint

By NICOLE WINFIELD
Feb. 21, 2009

VATICAN CITY (AP) — A 19th-century Belgian priest who ministered to leprosy patients in Hawaii, and died of the disease, will be declared a saint this year at a Vatican ceremony presided over by Pope Benedict XVI.

The Rev. Damien de Veuster's canonization date of Oct. 11 was set Saturday.

Born Joseph de Veuster in 1840, he took the name Damien and went to Hawaii in 1864 to join other missionaries of the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. Nine years later, he began ministering to leprosy patients on the remote Kalaupapa peninsula of Molokai island, where some 8,000 people had been banished amid an epidemic in Hawaii in the 1850s.

The priest eventually contracted the disease, also known as Hansen's disease, and died in 1889 at age 49.

"He went there (to Hawaii) knowing that he could never return," The Rev. Alfred Bell, who spearheaded Damien's canonization cause, told Vatican Radio. "He suffered a lot, but he stayed."

De Veuster was beatified — a step toward sainthood — in 1995 by Pope John Paul II.

The Vatican's saint-making procedures require that a miracle attributed to the candidate's intercession be confirmed in order for him or her to be beatified. De Veuster was beatified after the Vatican declared that the 1987 recovery of a nun of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary was a miracle. The nun recovered after praying to Damien.

After beatification, a second miracle is needed for sainthood.

In July, Benedict declared that a Honolulu woman's recovery in 1999 from terminal lung cancer was the miracle needed for de Veuster to be made a saint.

The Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Saints said Audrey Toguchi's 1999 recovery from lung cancer defied medical explanation. Toguchi, too, had prayed to Damien.

The Vatican announced the date for Damien's canonization and that of nine others. Five will be declared saints at a ceremony April 26, with the rest, including Damien, on Oct. 11.
Bell said Damien's concern for others was a model for all the faithful today, particularly the young.

"Father Damien's example helps us to not forget those who are forgettable in the world," he said.

Little Sisters of the Poor 'thrilled' their founder will be canonized

By Chaz Muth
Catholic News Service

WASHINGTON (CNS) -- The announcement that Pope Benedict XVI will canonize Blessed Jeanne Jugan, the foundress of the Little Sisters of the Poor, on Oct. 11 has created excitement among members of the congregation worldwide.

"We knew it was only a matter of time, but everyone was just thrilled when the official announcement was made," said Sister Constance Veit, publications coordinator in the Little Sisters of the Poor's Baltimore province. "We've anticipated this for so long."

Pope John Paul II beatified Jeanne Jugan in 1982, and Pope Benedict XVI signed a document Dec. 6, 2008, recognizing the miracle advancing her sainthood cause.

Pope Benedict Feb. 21 presided over a consistory that gave final approval for the canonization of 10 people, including Blessed Jeanne, who began her ministry on the streets of France taking the elderly and poor into her home in the early decades of the 1800s.

To support her ministry, Blessed Jeanne begged for money, a tradition the Little Sisters of the Poor consider a fundamental part of their mission today.

The canonization will take place during the Synod of Bishops for Africa, and is expected to be celebrated in St. Peter's Square, along with four others who will be declared saints.

The miracle linked to Blessed Jeanne concerns Dr. Edward Gatz, a retired Omaha, Neb., anesthesiologist diagnosed with terminal cancer in 1989, Sister Constance told Catholic News Service Feb. 23.

The doctor was advised by a Jesuit priest at Creighton University in Omaha to pray to Blessed Jeanne and a few months later a follow-up biopsy found Gatz -- who is still alive at the age of 71 -- to be cancer-free, she said.

Sister Loraine Marie Maguire, provincial superior of the Little Sisters' Baltimore province, said the timing of Blessed Jeanne's canonization coincides with a milestone in her own ministry.

"For me personally, it has a special meaning because I entered the Little Sisters of the Poor in 1982, the year Jeanne Jugan was beatified in Rome," Sister Loraine said. "Now, in the year of her canonization, I am celebrating my silver jubilee -- 25 years of religious profession. How amazing God is."

Since Blessed Jeanne began her mission in 1839, the Little Sisters of the Poor congregation has grown to more than 2,700 members, who care for approximately 13,000 needy elderly people in 202 family-style homes throughout the world, including 32 in North America.

Rose Dente, 96, one of the oldest residents of St. Martin's Home -- an assisted-living facility run by the Little Sisters in Baltimore -- was ecstatic when she was told the canonization was set for Oct. 11.

"In my heart, I always knew Jeanne Jugan was a saint," Dente said. "Now, the whole world will know it."

Celebrations will be planned at Little Sisters facilities worldwide, and members of the congregation are waiting to see who will be eligible to travel to Rome in October for the canonization, Sister Constance told CNS.

"With the population of older persons growing at an exponential rate, Jeanne's work and her message are even more relevant today than they were when Pope John Paul II beatified her over a quarter-century ago," she said. "As a patroness of the elderly, Jeanne Jugan is truly a saint of our time."

www.faithcomesbyhearing.com/ambassador/free-audio-bible-...

There's a post about this on American Papist. It's obviously a new scripture initiative.

The Little Flower

By R.R. Reno
First Things
Thursday, April 30, 2009, 12:00 AM

When the disciples came to Jesus and asked who will be the greatest in the kingdom, he called for a child to come to him, and answered, “Truly I tell you, unless you turn and become like children, you will never enter the kingdom. Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:1–4). This exhortation is at the root of one of the most fascinating figures in the history of modern Catholicism: Thérèse of Lisieux (1873–1897).

Canonized in 1925 as St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face and declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997, I have known her as The Little Flower of Jesus and Thérèse of the Little Way. These popular, diminutive, and endearing titles capture the mystique and appeal of this very modern saint: a sweet, smiling, youthful girl, perfumed with an innocent and often lachrymose piety—who lived all too briefly as a Carmelite nun, was ravaged by tuberculosis, died a gruesome early death, and left a small body of autobiographical writings of piercing simplicity and depth.

A recent biography by Thomas R. Nevin, Thérèse of Lisieux: God’s Gentle Warrior, provides a richly detailed portrait of this remarkably mature spiritual child. We learn a great deal about the world of late nineteenth-century French Catholicism. It was an era of Republican, anti-clerical domination, and the Church responded by creating a counter-world of intense inward piety.

Born to parents fiercely loyal to Catholicism, every aspect of Thérèse’s life and imagination seems to have been formed by Catholic prayers and principles, so much so that her entrance into the Carmelite convent at Lisieux at age fifteen marked no significant change. Two of her older sisters were already in residence, and the third would soon follow, along with a close cousin. The otherworldly realm of the convent fulfilled and intensified the Catholic world in which young Thérèse was raised.

In addition to helping us see the social and religious milieu of Thérèse’s youth, Nevin orients his readers to the remarkable combinations and paradoxes of her spiritual outlook.

Thérèse often endorses the disposition of radical acceptance: “L’Abandon est le fruit délicieux de l’Amour.” In her autobiographical writings, Thérèse expressed a desire to become dramatic witness to Christ. “Martyrdom: That is the dream of my youth.” She wanted to suffer as a missionary, to accept the heavy weight of the cross, to become a victim for the sake of Christ. “Like Joan of Arc,” she writes, “I would like to be burned at the stake.” And elsewhere: “When I think of all the torments that will be the lot of Christians at the time of the Antichrist, I feel my heart leap, and I would like for those torments to be reserved for me.”

Thérèse, however, did not achieve an ascetic disposition by way of exhortations toward iron-willed self-discipline and other strategies for suppressing the human instincts that so often elbow their way forward and demand their say. Instead, she often asserts herself in flights of spiritual egoism: “Me, I’m the CHILD of the Church.” She does not picture herself prostrate in obedience, but instead refers to Jesus as her “petit enfant.” In a very different but equally intimate and even more striking image, she sees herself being held by Jesus as his baby toy! Or in another place, she reversed the image, imagining within herself “the vocation of Priest. With what love, Jesus, would I bear You in my hands.”

Again and again, Nevin nicely draws out what he calls “an engaging two-sidedness” in Thérèse’s spiritual life: a fierce determination to suffer all for the sake of Christ in concert with an almost whimsical and playful intimacy with Christ. Moreover, Nevin also shows how the two sides belong together in Thérèse’s great, unifying vision of divine love. Love brings the anguish of self-abandonment—and it brings the often silly but fragrant, cherished moments of intimacy.

This young girl’s imaginative zeal for grand gesture of service to Christ—torments! sacrifice! martyrdom!—along with her gauzy images of sporting with the Christ-child in the embrace of love was realized in her slow and painful death. It turned out that Thérèse would not become a famous missionary, boldly preaching to the heathens, nor would she submit her lovely neck to the executioner’s sword as crowds gathered to watch, nor would she become a modern day Joan of Arc. Instead, in the hidden world of the cloister, far from the public eye, entirely removed from the great events of the day, a slow-moving disease patiently, relentlessly killed her.

As the tuberculosis advanced, Thérèse had to abandon the élan and spiritual drama she might have imagined in l’abandon. In her suffering, the smiling baby Jesus did not play with her in the afternoon sunshine. He was only able to be with her in the dark, blind silence of the death he endured for our sake. What God asked of Thérèse was only to die: the utterly banal, empty, and universal destiny we all share. It was the fulfillment of her “little way.”

In this little way, Thérèse testifies to a spiritual purification that came from being entirely captured by a vision of divine love. She writes of becoming a “little child,” and “the smallest of all souls,” even to the point of recognizing that she had no internal grace, no fervent belief, no work of righteousness to offer God. In this sense, Thérèse saw herself as akin to the lost and the damned—void and empty of anything remotely meritorious—and yet held aloft by “the tenderness of his infinite Love.”

Unfortunately, Nevin’s treatment of Thérèse mishandles this fundamental insight. He is concerned to block the “benevolent attempts to dress Thérèse in certifiably orthodox dress, to fit her into the procrustean bed of piety.” This leads him to insist that in her final months Thérèse was denied “the creedal substance of faith and the elementary predicates of hope.” He wants us to see that she was “spurred by love rather than creed.”

These sorts of dichotomies are quite alien to what Thérèse wrote. It is hard to image an imagination more saturated by scriptural passages and theological categories. The extraordinary power of her writing comes, in fact, from the enduring potency of the language of faith, not its denial or supersession. Thérèse’s love-filled experiences of unity with Christ included being denied psychological assurances and images of divine reward. Precisely as such they clarify “the creedal substance of faith” and give insight into the “predicates of hope.”

For example, Thérèse writes, “I had at the time a great interior trial of all sorts to the point of asking myself if there was a Heaven.” This is not, as Nevin suggests, “doubting the existence of a celestial life,” as if the dying Thérèse were entertaining a theological idea. It is an expression of her spiritual maturation. She had previously lived for the sake of heaven but was now being conformed more fully to Christ, who lived only for the sake of love. Put differently, facing her own death, Thérèse recognized that what finally matters is not her own destiny (heaven), but rather the love of Christ (which is the essence of heaven).

The same holds for her famous declaration of solidarity with the damned—“I told the Good Lord that to please him I’d consent to being plunged into [hell] so that he’d be loved forever in this place of blasphemy”—as well as the way in which she identified with “wretched unbelievers.” These formulations do not signal a lack of faith and hope; quite the contrary, they suggest their fulfillment in love.

The proper images for understanding Little Thérèse are not those of modern theology, which tends to promote unfortunate and untenable dichotomies between official church teachings and a living faith, or, as Nevin put it, between “the historical complex of creeds, council statements, theologies, and decrees,” which he suggests “fade before a radical intimacy with Jesus.”

Instead, if we attend to her writings, we see that Thérèse suggests an illuminative rather than critical method. Thérèse takes church teaching about heaven and hell, sin and grace, Christology and ecclesiology and puts them into strikingly fresh forms. She is not critiquing the male priesthood when she imagines her priestly vocation; she is helping us see the universal priesthood of all believers. She is not denying the existence of hell; she is testifying to the omnipotent power of divine love. The truths of the faith are servant truths—they serve the Truth of Christ. They do not fade or fall away. Instead, when used properly, they become ever more luminous with the light of Christ.

As John Paul II observed when he announced Thérèse as a doctor of the church, her radical awareness of her spiritual childhood teaches a fundamental truth. The breath of Christ’s love fans even the smallest spark of desire for him in our hearts. It’s something we all need to hear. But Thérèse also has a lesson for theologians. We should beware the modern tendency to explain the dry limitations we so often feel in the official language of church teaching with easy dichotomies between spirit and letter. The problem is not in the obvious fact that a creed or a council decree is not the living Word of God. As Thérèse’s “little way” suggests, the dryness comes from the poverty of our love.

R.R. Reno, features editor at First Things, is professor of theology at Creighton University.

Cardinal Errors

Observations on sainthood

John McEntee
New Statesman
Published 07 May 2009

They haven’t found a body and the number of confirmed miracles is one short. But despite these apparently insurmountable obstacles, Cardinal Newman is on course to be elevated to sainthood by Pope Benedict XVI within the next year. English Catholics are understandably gratified that the Church of England convert, who died in 1890, is poised to be the country’s first 21st-century saint.

The first miracle is in the bag. A theological panel set up by the Vatican has agreed unanimously that the unexplained healing of an American man bent double by a severe spinal disorder was the result of prayers directed to Newman. The panel spent six months examining the case of 69-year-old Jack Sullivan, a deacon from Marshfield, Massachusetts, after a group of doctors concluded that they had no scientific explanation for his recovery.

But before the cardinal receives his notional wings and halo, evidence of a second miracle will be required. And if past experience is anything to go by, it will not be easy to find.

More than a decade ago supporters of the cardinal’s beatification at his old base, the Birmingham Oratory, were jubilant to find that a local man – a devout Catholic – had petitioned Cardinal Newman in heaven for a cure to his inoperable cancer. His prayers, apparently, were answered. His tumours disappeared and he recovered.

The Oratorians went through the lengthy and tedious process of verifying the miracle, and the Vatican was poised to approve. But then, much to the Oratorians’ chagrin, the miracle man walked in front of a bus and was killed. Theologically, the miracle was cancelled out. He may have had his cancer cured, but his sudden, unexpected and tragic death undid all the lobbying and verification.

As one priest at the Oratory put it: “It is almost impossible to have a miracle verified in this country.

In predominantly Catholic countries like Spain and Italy, and in South America, doctors have no hesitation in endorsing the sudden disappearance of potentially fatal conditions as miracles. Here, doctors describe them as being in remission. That is why the loss of our miracle was particularly galling.” It is notable that the single miracle on Cardinal Newman’s record came from abroad.

The chances of uncovering a second miracle before Pope Benedict XVI accepts Gordon Brown’s invitation to visit Britain next year look slim. Still, the Pope is apparently an admirer of Newman, a former Protestant vicar who converted and was made a cardinal in 1879 by Leo XIII. And while not as enthusiastic as his predecessor John Paul II, who created a record number of saints, Benedict seems determined to elevate Newman.

He has even overlooked another requirement for canonisation: theological law requires the existence of a body – proof that potential saints were once living beings. When Newman’s grave was opened so that his remains could be moved to the Birmingham Oratory, absolutely nothing of his mortal body was found, not even his teeth. All that remained were the brass handles of his coffin and some rotting tassels from his cardinal’s hat. Not much to go on really.

Whose saint is John Henry Newman?

By James Martin
Boston Globe
May 7, 2009

THE DAILY TELEGRAPH in London recently reported that the Vatican had accepted the cure of a Massachusetts man, who had suffered from spinal stenosis, as a miracle attributed to the prayers of John Henry Newman, the Victorian-era cardinal, theologian, and writer. Jack Sullivan, a Catholic deacon in Marshfield, later told the Globe of his overnight cure. "The next morning I woke up," he said, "and there was no pain." Sullivan's dramatic healing would fulfill the church's requirement for Newman's beatification, which could take place as early as this fall. (Another miracle is required for canonization.)

Born in 1801, Newman would make both a fascinating and controversial saint. An eminent clergyman, Newman spent much of his life in the orbit of Oxford University, where he studied and later taught. Ordained in 1824, the brilliant scholar instantly became one of the glittering stars of the Anglican Church.

Over the next decade, he spearheaded the "Oxford movement," which sought to return Anglicanism to more traditional roots. Newman's ultimate decision, in 1845, to convert to Catholicism came on the heels of research that led him to conclude that the Catholic Church had a greater claim to orthodoxy. His conversion horrified much of England.

Even after "crossing the Tiber," however, Newman retained his intellectual independence, freely toggling between traditional and progressive theologies. Despite his conservative theological leanings, he championed such radical ideas as the rights of the individual conscience at a time when that notion was held in low regard in the Vatican. ("Error has no rights" was the prevailing line of thought.) When he was named cardinal in 1879 by Pope Leo XIII, it was joked that perhaps Rome hadn't read all that he had written.

Because of his protean mind and voluminous writings, then, he is beloved by groups that are often at loggerheads. More traditional Catholics admire Newman's elegant apologias for Catholicism. Progressives embrace his work on conscience and the "development of doctrine," the idea that church belief on some matters can change over time - for the better. And ironically, many Catholics suspicious of clericalism often quote this prince of the church, who once quipped about the laity, "[T]he church would look foolish without them." Indeed, one of his most famous articles was called "On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine."

The greatest controversy over the soon-to-be-saint, however, may be his intense relationship with his long-time friend Ambrose St. John. "As far as this world was concerned, I was his first and last . . . he was my earthly light," wrote Newman. Before his death in 1890, Newman made an unusual and strongly worded request. "I wish, with all my heart, to be buried in Fr Ambrose St. John's grave - and I give this as my last, my imperative will," he wrote. As a result, he is beloved among some in the gay community, who often claim him as one of their own.

Last year, church officials announced that they would unearth Newman's remains from a small rural cemetery in Worcestershire in order to transfer them to a marble sarcophagus in the Birmingham Oratory church. But diggers found little left of the cardinal. Some charged that the church wanted to move Newman to whitewash his friendship with St. John. Church officials replied, accurately, that the remains of many saints are often moved to sites that are more appropriate for "public veneration."

Admired by conservatives and liberals, cradle Catholics and converts, as well as anti-clericalists and gays, Cardinal John Henry Newman is destined to be a popular but controverted saint. Who is the "real" Newman? It's a bit like the popular quest for the "historical Jesus." Which one you find depends a great deal on which one you're searching for.

James Martin is a Jesuit priest and author of "My Life with the Saints."

Mother Teresa's Secret Fire

Here is a You Tube video ad on a new book about Mother Teresa, one of my most favorite saints.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNMFTpmVj2Y


It sounds good!

Benefan: Thanks for the tip on this one. I have read 'Come Be My Light' but found it repetitive and dry - it's not especially well-written, but is essential reading in many respects as it deals with Mother's interior life. Perhaps this new book will provide a better glimpse into her life as well as her mind.

This is an item I should have posed on the recent feast of the Saint, May 30. It is fascinating just reading about it. I can't wait to read the book itself.



by Katherine Anne Porter
on the English translation of




In the many hundreds of books in French about the condemnation and retrial of Joan of Arc, the authors invariably base their criticism of the first trial on the evidence given by witnesses in the second. None of these books has been translated into English.

The French seem to write them for each other, or perhaps even at this late day the English reader does not enjoy seeing his nation put so soundly and irreparably in the poorest light of its history.

Whatever the reason, this is the first book based firmly on the retrial of Joan of Arc to be translated into English, and the whole tremendous history is told again, this time by her childhood playmates and relatives, her royal and noble friends, her confessor, her valet, her squires and heralds, and her fellow soldiers.

There are a few of the old enemies of the first court still in Rouen, but they can do her no more harm: and indeed their presence here perhaps lends even a more powerful authenticity to this story than if we heard only from her friends.

It is indeed a beautiful book, well translated, with the speed and symmetry and direction of the life it celebrates; and besides its merit as a work of scholarship, there is warmth and sanity in it, often absent from books about Joan of Arc, who inspires strange fervors and theories.

In my small collection, out of the hundreds, there is one that proves to the hilt that Joan was a Catharist, that outcropping of ancient Manichaeism in medieval Provence; another, that she and her fellow captain, Gilles de Laval, Sire de Rais, were sorcerers, adept in Black Magic.

The fact that Joan's first trial has been exposed in its falseness over and over has no effect on these infatuated minds; nor that Gilles de Rais, though proved a man of bad morals, still was tried and condemned by a court as corrupt as that which condemned Joan.

Still a third book has been published to prove that Joan was a by-blow of the blood royal, and that the "secret" she whispered to the Dauphin in proof of her mission was that she was his half-sister, bastard daughter of his father King Charles VI, the virgin sent to save France after France had been betrayed by a woman.

The woman who had betrayed France was the infamous Isabeau of Bavaria who disavowed her son the Dauphin to make way for Henry VI of England; she had riddled the royal family with bastardy in so many directions, it is possible she may not have been certain which of her many children were legitimate.

There is still a small school of thought in France, more Royalist than any king, which holds that only royal blood could have given Joan her splendor of courage and faith. There is not a word anywhere in the records of either trial to support a claim of royal blood, yet from time to time it is put forth again with passionate lunatic arguments.

The people of Domremy knew exactly who Joan was. Her old friends, neighbors, former playmates, godmothers and godfathers, confessors, and "uncles" by marriage in a distant connection - each in turn tells us something about her, with great freshness of feeling and speech.

Remembering her tragedy during all those years when they were silenced by the fact that she was a condemned heretic, now that the Inquisition had lifted its ban, and they were free to say what they really thought, they claimed her for their own.

When they said, "She was just like us", they meant to say also, "We are like her; she is one of the family; we never thought her so unusual; there were many others like her." They never denied her superiority in all the general virtues, but admired it and wished to borrow virtue from her; and indeed, what happened is so gently and Christianly true--she borrowed virtue from them, in turn.

As they shed light on her childhood and young girlhood among them, by their love and remembrance saving her true story for us, so she shed glory on them. There is a nimbus around every humble country figure, "good Catholics, as those farming people are", said Dunois, who came forward to speak for her before the papal commissioners who were--remotely at the request of King Charles VII, directly by permission from the Pope and the heads of the Inquisition itself--preparing a retrial for her, nearly twenty years after her death.

After five centuries, they stand there in the pure light of day, in their breathing bodies, and we hear their voices raised in their natural speech: "When Joan left her father's house, I saw her pass before the house with her uncle, Durand Laxart. Joan said to her father then, 'Good-bye, I am going to Vaucouleurs.' . . ."

She was on horseback, wearing the customary farm woman's dress of coarse red wool. We do not know how tall she was, nor how she looked, but every one of her witnesses who spoke of the matter at all had one word for her: she was beautiful.

Joan's uncle was taking her to Lord Robert de Baudricourt, where she was going to ask to be taken to the King, or rather as she called him properly, the Dauphin, whom she was to cause to become King Charles VII of France. She had promised her uncle that she would help his wife in her coming childbirth if he would escort her to Lord Robert.

This gentleman, on first sight of her, began her career, and the most tremendous event in French history, by advising her uncle to give her a good slapping and take her home. After talking with her, he gave her a safe-conduct to the Duke of Lorraine. And she was on her splendid way to Orleans, to Rheims, to Compiègne, to the stake at Rouen.

All attempts to account rationally for Joan of Arc's life end no better than those that try to shape it to fit some fantastic theory. She is unique, and a mystery, and as you read about her and think about her life, you are led up to a threshold beyond which she eludes you, you cannot cross it.

Madame Régine Pernoud has the reassuring ground of firm Catholic belief in the practical efficacy of divine inspiration, and as you follow her attentively through her remarkably clear, detailed tracing of this history told by living tongues, netting the testimonies together with her learned, perfectly placed notes, you begin to share with her the experience of those men who were making the investigation little by little, one step at a time, one bit of evidence added to another, or compared, they were arriving at Truth beyond the truth they had hoped to find; her method, so direct and knowledgeable, so dedicated to the discovery and presentation of the mystical truth that inheres in the accumulated, eagerly honest, spoken and recorded testimony, simply leads the way to that truth.

Of all the books I have read on this subject, this is my choice, and the last, profoundly satisfying word for me, for any time to come.




Preface to
'The Retrial of Joan of Arc'
by Régine Pernoud

In 1839, that learned scholar Vallet de Viriville assessed the number of works devoted to Joan of Arc at five hundred; fifty years later the figure had increased fivefold. Yet the interest she aroused in the nineteenth century is as nothing compared with the interest she has aroused since then.

In France, her day has become both a religious and a national festival, Church and state finding themselves at one in raising her likeness on the altar and in the public square. More important, Joan has assumed for our age a living reality unimaginable a hundred years ago.

This being so, it is strange that a document of cardinal importance in Joan's story has been neglected. The detailed record of the trial in which Joan was condemned has been several times published and translated and is familiar in outline even to the general public; one cannot say the same of the record of the proceedings that led to her rehabilitation.

This record is well known to specialists and has been much drawn upon by historians - generally at second hand - but the only edition today available is a transcription of the Latin version prepared by Jules Quicherat. It is an admirable work, but it has been unprocurable for many years, not only in the bookshops but also in the majority of libraries.

As for translations, there is only the very fragmentary one made by Eugene O'Reilly [1] and used by Joseph Fabre, dating from 1868 and 1888 respectively; [2] and it is, moreover, stiff reading.

That is all that we have of the only great document--except the account of her trial and condemnation--that throws on Joan, her personality, and her times the direct light of living men's evidence, reflected by no distorting mirror of chronicle or tale.

What is more, the account of her condemnation, though it gives the drama at Rouen, leaves the details of Joan's life in shadow, whereas the record of her rehabilitation presents all the stages and essential episodes, one by one, from her baptism in the parish church of Domremy to her burning. (It also shows the impression she made on the crowds.)

And it is her childhood friends, her comrades in arms, her former judges, who come, one after another, to evoke her memory; those same persons who had been the actors, or at least the supernumeraries, in the drama of which she was the heroine.

What is more, this rehabilitation suit, staged a bare twenty years after Joan's execution, in itself forms a strange enough page in history; it dealt with events still recent and tinged with the miraculous, events of which men were then free to measure the repercussions.

For if we are in a better position than her contemporaries to analyze their effect on the structure of Europe, there was not, on the other hand, a single peasant or townsman in France whose life would not have been changed, to a greater or lesser extent, by the outcome of those battles that decided whether France should remain attached to England or be free.

Finally, the case that was being argued was a singularly moving one: a victim, a woman, a mere girl had been burnt alive by judicial decree, and the question was whether that victim was a heroine or a simple visionary--that is to say, a dangerous heretic.

The majority of historians have, inexplicably, failed to recognize the importance of the case. Many, looking through entirely modern spectacles, have been unable to see what it revealed to contemporaries. They have assumed the knowledge at that time of certain truths that, in fact, could not have come to light but for the suit for Joan's rehabilitation.

It is, however, indisputable that the details, both of her career and her condemnation, were unknown to the great majority: the details of her heroism to people who had lived in the occupied zone, the details of her trial to the former inhabitants of free France.

Facts that are absolutely familiar to us - the falsification or omission of certain documents in her trial - were totally unknown to those very men who undertook her rehabilitation.

Finally, it is beyond doubt that public opinion, whether for or against Joan, was only inaccurately informed about her story, and that it was the suit that brought the truth to light. Some historians have even thought it possible to regard the whole rehabilitation suit as a cleverly staged play, put on either by the Church or the King.

But if one takes the trouble to follow the stages of this affair, the development of which took no less than seven years and called together people from every district of France and from all social classes, it is clear that a piece of mummery on such a scale would have been difficult to carry through.

It will be up to the reader, in any case, to judge the facts from the documents of the case, which we intend to put before him in a translation as close as possible to the original text. There could be no question of publishing the complete record of the trial.

With the account of each hearing and such legal documents as writs and summonses, it fills no less than octavo pages in Quicherat's edition--and even so he omitted the majority of the preliminary reports (nineteen in all) drawn up in preparation for the case, and likewise the Recollectio, or general résumé of the whole proceedings made by Jean Bréhal (the Inquisitor entrusted with its conduct), which alone takes up a whole volume.

We have extracted only the parts that are to us most alive and most valuable - that is to say, the statements of the witnesses -suppressing only repetitions that would have made the book bulkier without adding anything new.

We have, in addition, put back into the first person those statements that the scribe had transposed into the third on translating them into Latin - "The witness says that ... , etc." - in which he followed the habitual procedure in ecclesiastical courts.

END NOTES:

[1] This was, of course, a translation into French.
[2] For these works, see the Bibliography.

JPI Miracle Goes to Rome

POSTED BY EDWARD PENTIN
National Catholic Register
Monday, June 08, 2009 12:50 PM

Pope John Paul I, born Albino Luciani, has moved closer to being beatified after the Diocese of Altamura-Gravina-Acquaviva delle Fonti in Puglia, southeastern Italy, concluded that a banker, Giuseppe Denora, was cured of stomach cancer in 1992 after praying for the late Pope’s intercession.

Giuseppe Denora, now 60, prayed in front of a newspaper clipping depicting Pope Luciani. He was at the time already receiving chemotherapy treatment, but he wasn’t expected to be cured.

Now, details of the miracle have been sent to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, where further examinations will be carried out. This signifies the start of the “Roman” phase of the process, when a medical board and a team of theological consulters will be called to give their final opinion and judge whether a miracle really did occur.

Verifying the miracle will run parallel to the drafting of the “Positio super virtutibus” of the Servant of God John Paul I — a detailed document on the cause. Last year, which marked the 30th anniversary of John Paul I’s death, the postulator of his cause spoke of a miracle, but his announcement was premature.

John Paul I was the Church’s 263rd pope. He succeeded Pope Paul VI on Aug. 26, 1978, but served only 33 days as the Successor of Peter.

For the full story of Papa Luciani's 'beatification' miracle, and some background info on the beatification process, you may refer back to the articles translated from the August 2008 issue of 30 GIORNI, posted in the POPES BEFORE JOHN PAUL II thread (Post #13,348):
freeforumzone.leonardo.it/discussione.aspx?idd=7973225&p=2


Left photo: Banker Denora, photographed last year.

New papal physician explains doctors' role in sainthood process

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
June 16, 2009

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- The path to sainthood passes through a team of physicians, who pore over medical texts, patient charts and test results to make sure a healing is medically inexplicable.

That does not mean the medical experts declare a miracle, because "the recognition of a miracle is not a matter for medical science," said Dr. Patrizio Polisca, president of the group of physicians who serve as consultants to the Vatican Congregation for Saints' Causes.

The doctor wrote about the physicians' role in the sainthood process in the June 13-14 edition of L'Osservatore Romano, the Vatican newspaper. The Vatican announced June 15 that Polisca, a cardiologist, was named Pope Benedict XVI's personal physician.

Writing about sainthood causes, Polisca said that while medical science and knowledge have changed enormously in the past few decades, the criteria for miraculous healings still follow those laid out 275 years ago by Cardinal Prospero Lambertini, the future Pope Benedict XIV.

The cardinal had insisted that the illness or defect be serious, incurable or extremely difficult to treat; that spontaneous cures were not known to occur in similar illnesses; that no medical intervention used in the case could explain the cure; that the cure was unexpected and instantaneous; and that it was complete and lasting.

Polisca said the role of the physicians is not to declare a miracle, but rather to determine whether an alleged healing could have a natural or a medical explanation. If the absolute majority of the members of physicians' commission vote that a healing has no natural or scientific explanation, the case is passed on to a commission of theologians who determine whether the healing could have been the response to a prayer request for the intercession of the sainthood candidate.

In the case of Catholic martyrs, only one miracle is needed for canonization. For sainthood candidates who were not killed out of hatred for the faith, one miracle is needed before beatification and a second is needed before canonization.

Polisca said the Vatican's medical consultants represent a wide variety of specialties because it is essential that they are able to understand the patients' medical records, the medical tests performed, the diagnosis and original prognosis, the normal course of the illness in question and any therapies attempted.

The fact that a person is healthy in the end does not guarantee a judgment in favor of a miracle if the medical consultants believe the diagnosis was wrong or that the cure was a result of a medical intervention, he said.

In addition, he said, the testimony of medical personnel and family members who assisted the person before the healing also may be examined to confirm the original diagnosis and the unexplainable nature of the cure.

"All of this is done in order to examine the compatibility of the healing with what is known of the natural course of the illness being studied" or of the therapeutic measures taken before the healing was reported, Polisca said.

His piece was part of a collection of articles in the Vatican newspaper marking the 40th anniversary of the current structure of the Congregation for Saints' Causes.

St. Solanus Casey?
Pat McNamara's Blog
Wed., June 17, 2009

David Nantais has a nice article in America about Venerable Solanus Casey, the American Capuchin whose canonization cause is currently under consideration:

The Solanus Casey Center is an urban oasis on Detroit’s east side, situated among signs of death and decay. Much of the surrounding neighborhood is a distressing collection of crumbling homes and vacant lots, stark reminders of the 1967 summer riots when Detroit burned. To the west is Mt. Elliot Cemetery, one of the largest Christian burial grounds in the city. As desolate as it is, this setting is an ideal location for a memorial to Venerable Solanus Casey, a Capuchin Franciscan who devoted his life to serving the city’s poor, sick, outcast and suffering people. Father Solanus had an ability to see potential and beauty in people and situations where others saw only human refuse and devastation. The city of Detroit itself is much in need of realizing the potential it holds beneath its grimy exterior, and Father Solanus would make an especially appropriate patron saint.

Bernard Francis Casey, known as Barney, was born in Prescott, Wis., on Nov. 25, 1870, to an Irish immigrant family. As a young man, he had a momentary experience of the brutality of the world that radically shifted his concept of life. While at work as a trolley conductor in Superior, Wis., he once saw a drunken sailor standing over a woman lying on the tracks; the sailor held a knife in his hand and yelled at the woman, threatening her life. Casey realized that this incident was not an isolated one—that the world was full of such violence. He also realized he wanted to make things better. He prayed for the sailor and his victim, and a few days later told his pastor that he wanted to become a priest.

At St. Francis De Sales diocesan seminary in Milwaukee, Casey floundered academically in courses taught in Latin and in German. After four years there he was advised to enter a religious order instead. He entered the Capuchins at St. Bonaventure’s Monastery in Detroit on Christmas Eve 1896. He received the habit and took the name Francis Solanus, by which he would be known for the rest of his life.

Solanus’s superiors believed that his struggles with academic work during formation would prove an impediment to full priestly status, so they ordained him a “simplex” priest, one who could neither preach nor hear confessions officially. He performed rudimentary duties like serving as porter at the monastery. Yet Solanus fully embraced his mission and greeted each person with such joy and respect that it evolved into a ministry of hospitality and spiritual counsel. Because of his gentle nature, which put people at ease and encouraged even the despairing to hope, Solanus earned the nickname “the holy priest.”

Father Solanus’s caring presence and reputation for listening intently to each person also drew thousands to the monastery. “Do we appreciate the little faith we have?” Solanus once asked a friend. “Do we ever beg God for more?” Solanus counseled his visitors to do both. He welcomed alcoholics and the homeless in the same way he welcomed local dignitaries like Mayor Frank Murphy. By looking beyond the superficial—a person’s drunkenness, addiction, poverty, grief or uncouth behavior—Solanus showed people their reflection as “beloved” in God’s eyes.

One person who made the short pilgrimage across town to St. Bonaventure’s was my grandmother’s sister, Mary Louise. She brought my aunt Debby as an infant to Father Solanus because the child suffered from a painful skin condition, and home remedies had proved inadequate. Soon after the visit to Father Solanus, Debby’s skin cleared up. When I recently heard my Great-aunt Mary Louise recount this story, I was amazed not only by the outcome, but by her faith in the humble Solanus, whom she still reveres.

During the Great Depression, unemployed men lined up outside St. Bonaventure’s asking for food; Solanus helped to provide soup and sandwiches. Soon the few dozen men the Capuchins fed each day grew to hundreds. Father Solanus worked at the soup kitchen, recruited volunteers and elsewhere begged for food and funds to keep the kitchen open. One day food supplies ran short and the staff became concerned that a riot might break out. Solanus assured them that God would provide and invited the men in the line to join in praying the Our Father. Within minutes a bakery truck pulled up, full of donations for the soup kitchen. “Nobody will starve as long as you put your confidence in God,” said Solanus.

Today the spirit of Solanus Casey is alive at the Capuchin soup kitchen, which has found new ways—like the Earthworks project—to peel back the surface of blight and expose the richness and potential within. One of the first of its kind, the Earthworks project grows hundreds of pounds of food each season on 1.5 acres of urban garden, some of it to feed the homeless and some to sell for revenue. Earthworks is not only an agricultural endeavor but also a community development project like dozens of others sprouting up around the city. Neighbors cooperate to clear vacant land (some formerly occupied by a crack house) and recruit local kids to lend a hand and make connections with the earth. To gaze upon soil permeated with pollution (the E.P.A. calls them brownfields) and see possibility—that is the spirit of Father Solanus.

Solanus long practiced his ministry of presence, listening and praying. He never turned people away; in fact, he wanted to see them as soon as they arrived, even at the expense of his own plans. But the ministry exhausted him. Sometimes he would fall asleep while praying in the monastery chapel and startle his fellow Capuchins when he awoke and sat upright in the pew.

When Father Solanus passed away on July 31, 1957, people lined up for two straight days to view his body before burial. Detroit had lost a saint.

It was inevitable that the cause for Solanus’s canonization would be introduced, considering how much he was loved and the thousands of people he had helped. A petition to begin the process was filed under Cardinal John Dearden in 1981. Six years later, Solanus’s body was exhumed and found to be intact. It was transferred to a new coffin and reinterred in a tomb beneath the floor of St. Bonaventure’s, in what is now part of the Father Solanus Casey Center. Each year hundreds of people visit, leaving their requests for prayers and favors on folded pieces of paper above Solanus’s tomb. In 1995 Pope John Paul II declared Father Solanus “venerable.”

His cause for beatification, according to Richard Merling, O.F.M.Cap, director of the Father Solanus Guild, requires one medically verified healing miracle. A number of documented miracles have been sent to Rome, and the guild is awaiting approval. If Solanus is canonized soon, he could become the first U.S.-born male saint.

Detroit has suffered for a long time, and recent financial problems, a crumbling urban infrastructure and a corrupt former mayor have deflated the spirits of many residents. If Father Solanus were alive, he would be saddened, I think, but he would not stand idle. No, he would encourage people to search for the budding grace of God, present among them like a lone flower in bloom among the weeds and trash of an abandoned city lot.

Elizabeth Ann Seton: A Profoundly Human Saint

By Elizabeth Bookser Barkley
St. Anthony Messenger
July, 2009

Daughter, wife, mother, widow, friend—all of these describe this first American-born saint.

Barbara McCormick, 76, admired Elizabeth Seton long before she was canonized. Barbara heard about Elizabeth at a Sisters of Charity high school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she still lives. When McCormick decided to return to college at age 39, she “used Elizabeth as my model and guide, balancing my family, education and faith life, as I envisioned her doing it those many years before. During my 20 years of teaching, she was my model and support for all things.”

Now that the word “saint” has been attached to Elizabeth Seton, some Catholics might be conjuring up a gauzy image of an ethereal woman. But this country’s first native-born saint shatters that stereotype. Elizabeth was nothing if not intensely human, her holiness rooted in her wholeness.

In the details of her life as daughter, wife, mother, widow and friend, we discover a well-rounded woman who knew how to love deeply and was always a person for others, even in the midst of trying situations.

A Selfless Spirit

Elizabeth was born in New York City on August 28, 1774, to Richard Bayley and Catherine Charlton Bayley, who died when Elizabeth was three.

One of three daughters, Elizabeth, or “your Betty” as she refers to herself in letters to her father, admired the work of her physician father. Dr. Bayley attended to immigrants as they disembarked from ships onto Staten Island, and cared for New Yorkers when yellow fever swept through the city, killing 700 in four months in 1795.

Dr. Bayley’s selflessness was inherited by his daughter. As a young mother and wife, Elizabeth was among the orginal members of the Society for the Relief of Poor Widows with Small Children, founded in 1797 by Isabella Marshall Graham in New York. Elizabeth and her friends Catherine Dupleix and Eliza Sadler paid $3 a year in dues to help support the work.

As treasurer, it fell to Elizabeth to visit homes to assess the families’ situations. In a letter to Julia Scott, she tells of her own two boys “who were taken sick this morning with symptoms of the measles which are very prevalent in our city.” She thanks Julia for the money to aid the widows.

Even as Elizabeth deals with her own sons’ illnesses, she comments that “indeed I have many times this winter called at a dozen homes in one morning for a less sum than that you sent, for you may be sure these measles cause wants and sorrows which the society cannot even half supply and in many families the small pox and measles have immediately succeeded each other.”

A Well-rounded Life

Serving others—that’s what saints do. But during the same years that she was attending to widows and children, Elizabeth was also living the life of a socialite, as a member of Trinity Episcopal Church, the church for New York’s upper class, and a devotee of the theater, popular novels and music.

In a letter to Julia, Elizabeth teases that angels must exist because when coming out of the theater with her sister “we came out in a violent thunder gust and got in our hack with carriages before and behind and aside—the coachmen quarrelling. First one wheel would crack, then another...but my Guardian Angel landed me safe in Wall Street [where she and her young family lived] without one single hysteric.”

And while we know she immersed herself in religious books, like A Commentary on the Book of Psalms, which she received from her beloved Episcopalian minister, Rev. John Henry Hobart, she also notes in a letter to Eliza Sadler during the same years that she loved The Children of the Abbey, a gothic novel that was a hit in America at the time. “Indeed,” she wrote, “I could not name more than half a dozen I would rather read.”

Elizabeth was an accomplished pianist, while her husband, William Seton, who brought the first Stradivarius violin to America, relaxed in the evening by playing for and with his young wife.

If music linked them while they were together, Elizabeth’s letters kept them in touch while her husband traveled on business for his father’s merchant import firm, the prestigious Seton, Maitland and Company. Less than six months after their marriage in 1794—when she was 19 and he 25—she sent him this message in a letter: “Ah, my dearest husband, how useless was your charge that I should ‘think of you.’ That I never cease to do for one moment, and my watery eyes bear witness to the effect those thoughts have, for every time you are mentioned they prove that I am a poor little weak woman.”

If caring deeply for William made her “weak” in her own eyes, that label fell away quickly as she was challenged in her early years of marriage to draw upon an inner strength to see her through crises that might have driven truly “weak” women to despair.

A Rapidly Expanding Family

Childbirth was always risky in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, and Elizabeth narrowly escaped death delivering her third child, Richard, in 1798. “My illness was so severe that both mother and child were some hours in a very doubtful situation,” she writes to Julia. Elizabeth had just enough energy to look down from her bed to watch as her father, on his knees, “blew the breath of life” into Richard’s lungs and “by his skill and care” restored the baby.

No sooner had she recovered from childbirth than she and William took over the care of his six younger siblings, since he was now responsible for them after the elder Seton’s death. (William’s father had been widowed twice.) Imagine the adjustment for Elizabeth, “who so dearly loves the quiet and a small family” in taking on these duties for several years with the help of William’s sister, Rebecca.

In addition to caring for her own three children, one a newborn, Elizabeth Seton became a mother to the six newly orphaned Setons, ages seven to 17, caring for their physical needs and teaching them to read, write and sew. At times the house emptied out while the older Seton children were away at school, but activity picked up when they came home for holidays.

Even though she had help from Rebecca and a housekeeper, Elizabeth must have felt she had plunged into the middle of a whirlwind of activity and neediness. Having moved into a larger home to accommodate the Seton clan, she writes to Julia, “I cannot help longing again for the rest I have never known but in Wall Street.”

That coveted rest would elude her as she helped William with the family business. “My William has kept me constantly employed in copying his letters and assisting him to arrange his papers, for he has not friend or confidante on earth but his little wife.”

Profound Losses

The business took its toll on her husband’s health, already weakened by a youthful bout with tuberculosis. With the family business slipping, along with William’s health, the couple arranged a sea voyage to Italy in 1803.

Turning over the care of their four youngest, including baby Rebecca, to relatives, Elizabeth and William took with them eight-year-old Anna Maria (nicknamed “Annina”), and headed off to Leghorn, where they would be welcomed by Antonio Filicchi and family, at whose counting house William had interned.

As their ship entered the port at Leghorn, the Setons were met by Italian officials who denied them entry, since their ship had departed from the port of New York, where yellow fever was raging. Despite the protests of the Filicchis, the Setons were sent to a lazaretto for quarantine, “an immense prison bolted and barred.” There William lay “on the old bricks without fire, shivering and groaning, lifting his dim and sorrowful eyes, with a fixed gaze in my face while his tears ran on his pillow without a word.”

Although they were eventually able to leave the quarantine and visit Pisa for a few days, it was to no avail. As Elizabeth’s husband sobbed, “My dear wife and little ones,” he died in her arms, with their Annina nearby. By Italian law, he was buried within 24 hours.

Elizabeth describes the ordeal in a journal she kept for William’s sister and her “soul sister,” Rebecca: “Oh, oh, oh what a day. Close his eyes, lay him out, ride a journey, be obliged to see a dozen people in my room till night—and at night crowded with the whole sense of my situation—O my Father, and my God!”

William was not the first or the last of several loved ones she would hold as they journeyed into the next life. Two years before William’s death, her father had suddenly taken ill. The previous day, he had called Elizabeth out “to observe the different shades of the sun on the clover field before the door and repeatedly exclaimed, ‘In my life I never saw anything so beautiful.’”

The next day, as he came in from the wharf, his legs weakened and he turned delirious. The night he died he continually cried out to her phrases like “all the horrors are coming, my child, I feel them all,” before “he became apparently perfectly easy, put his hand in mine, turned on his side and sobbed out the last of life without the smallest struggle, groan or appearance of pain.”

Losing her father, then her husband, was devastating—but even more wrenching, she would bury two daughters. Both of them died after she moved to Emmitsburg, Maryland, to open a school and found the Sisters of Charity. When her children were toddlers, Elizabeth had described how “my precious children stick to me like little burrs”; in their later years she would have given anything to keep them that close.

More Heartache

Already bonded to Elizabeth after William’s death in Italy, Annina, as oldest, was her mother’s support during widowhood and her move from New York to her new life as religious “mother.” After a failed romance, which Elizabeth nurtured her through, Annina helped with the young boarders in the school. What a shock for Elizabeth to one day notice Annina’s reddened cheeks, the telltale sign that, just as her beloved William had, she was being dragged down by tuberculosis.

Annina’s death at age 17 was a role reversal, the daughter comforting her mother: “When in death’s agony her quivering lips could with difficulty utter one word, feeling a tear fall on her face, she smiled and said with great effort laugh, Mother, Jesus at intervals as she could not put two words together.”

Annina’s death almost undid Elizabeth. Her family, friends and spiritual mentors feared for Elizabeth’s physical and spiritual health. But she bounced back, giving herself over to God, and feeling Annina’s presence in her life to help her go on.

When a few years later daughter Rebecca developed a tumor in her hip, which no doctors could cure, Elizabeth sat with her “nine weeks, night and day,” holding Beck to ease her pain before she died at age 14.

A Mother's Worry

Even as she was attending to her sick daughters, Elizabeth worried about her sons, William and Richard. Neither seemed suited for business, though she arranged for both to work in Italy with Antonio Filicchi, who remained her friend over the years after William’s death.

The life young Will aspired to caused her great worry: He wanted to join the United States Navy at a time when wars were raging off the shores of the States, and France and Italy were constantly in an uproar.

But before her death, Will had settled down, well established in the Navy, “more and more pleased with the choice of his profession which seems to us so extraordinary.” Had she lived, Elizabeth would have been grandmother to his eight children.

Richard, Will’s younger brother, also spent some time with Antonio Filicchi. Filicchi’s letters assured Elizabeth that Richard was “very satisfactory,” in response to Elizabeth’s concerns in her final years of life: “if my Richard does but do well is my greatest anxiety.” Though neither son was much of a letter-writer, William had a better excuse since he was away at sea.

To Richard she writes: “You can have no idea of our anxiety to hear from you—six, seven, eight months without one line.” He did make it home to see his mother before her death in 1821, then followed his brother into the Navy the next year as a captain’s clerk. A year later he died on ship while nursing the American consul to Liberia and was buried at sea.

Even as Elizabeth fretted over her sons, she found comfort in the companionship of her only remaining daughter, Catherine—variously nicknamed Kitty, Kate, Kit or Jos (her middle name was Josephine). In a note to her daughter on her birthday in 1819, Elizabeth wrote, “Whose birthday is this, my dear Savior? It is my darling one’s, my child’s, my friend’s, my only dear companion left of all you once gave with bounteous hand—the little relic of all my worldly bliss.”

As Elizabeth was nearing death, a huge concern was to prepare Catherine to face life without her mother. The Little Red Book of advice and spirituality she wrote for Catherine was her daughter’s keepsake for many years after Elizabeth’s death.

Keeping a promise they made to Elizabeth near her death, longtime friends Robert Goodloe Harper and Catherine Carroll Harper took Catherine into their home after Elizabeth died. Like her brother Richard, Catherine never married. She became a Sister of Mercy in 1846, devoting more than 40 years to working with prisoners in New York as Mother Mary Catherine.

Lifelong Friends

Although Catherine moved in with the Harpers, several offers to take in the soon-to-be-orphaned child came from relatives and friends, including Julia Scott. It was in letters to friends like Julia, Catherine Dupleix, Eliza Sadler and Antonio Filicchi that Elizabeth would share the ups and downs of her life, from early marriage until near death.

Julia and Elizabeth had much in common. Probably a family friend of the Bayleys in New York, Julia was about 10 years older than Elizabeth. After Julia’s husband died in 1798, a foreshadowing of Elizabeth’s own widowhood, she moved to Philadelphia, remaining a lifelong friend through her letters, sharing details of the joys and sorrows of daily life.

To Julia in 1801, Elizabeth writes about her father’s death: “The night before my father’s death Kit lay all night in a fever at my breast and Richard on his mattress at my feet vomiting violently.”

Once settled in Emmitsburg, she kept in touch with Catherine, writing, “Kitty is only less than an angel in looks and every qualification. Oh, Dué, if you knew her and your little Beck as they are and could see them every day, you would say there is nothing like them.”

Still playful even as a religious sister, she writes Eliza Sadler that when the “echo” of news that Eliza had decided to go to France reached Emmitsburg, “Kit and I answered it with so many Ah’s and Oh’s—you would have been amused to hear us.”

Near the end of her life, Elizabeth continued to write Antonio, whom she sometimes called “my dearest Tonierlinno.” To him, she owed much. He and his wife, Amabilia, had helped bury William, and had provided a temporary home for her and Anna Maria.

It was Amabilia who had invited Elizabeth inside a Catholic church, where she was amazed by worshipers’ belief in the Real Presence in the Eucharist, a belief foreign to her experience as an Episcopalian. It was Antonio who taught her the Sign of the Cross.

During the young widow’s voyage back to the States, Antonio was with Elizabeth and Anna Maria. And it was he who encouraged Elizabeth to pursue the call to become Catholic, despite pressures back home from the Rev. Hobart and her Protestant friends. Throughout her life, she would turn to him for financial support, but more importantly as an anchor for her Catholic faith.

Years later, now as a leader of a religious community, Elizabeth would remind him of the essential role he played in her spiritual life: “The first word I believe you ever said to me after the first salute was to trust all to him who fed the fowls of the air and made the lilies grow.”

As her health was failing in 1818, she penned this line to him: “Dearest Antonio, I may well say with my whole heart, ‘Thy will be done’—love and bless your little Sister and devoted EASeton.”

On January 4, 1821, at 46, Elizabeth died of the tuberculosis that had plagued her much of her life, especially in her last few years. Although she would have to wait to fulfill her desire to be with Antonio in eternity, she herself was finally one with her God, as she had wanted.

When Elizabeth died, she left more than a legacy of Catholic education and religious leadership; she left an imprint on the many family and friends to whom she had endeared herself. As Barbara McCormick and others have testified so often, that imprint has not dimmed over the nearly two centuries since her death.

In Elizabeth Seton, McCormick sees “a saint for the 21st century and all of the centuries to come”—for her strength, her courage, her faith and her humanity.


Elizabeth Bookser Barkley is a professor of English at the College of Mount St. Joseph in Cincinnati, Ohio. She says, “Like Elizabeth Ann Seton, I was/am daughter, wife, mother, widow, teacher, sister, religious sister, friend.”

'Oldest' image of St Paul discovered

Archaeologists have uncovered a 1,600 year old image of St Paul, the oldest one known of, in a Roman catacomb.

By Nick Pisa in Rome
Telegraph.co.uk
Published: 5:46PM BST 28 Jun 2009

The fresco, which dates back to the 4th Century AD, was discovered during restoration work at the Catacomb of Saint Thekla but was kept secret for ten days.

During that time experts carefully removed centuries of grime from the fresco with a laser, before the news was officially announced through the Vatican's official newspaper L'Osservatore Romano.

There are more than 40 known Catacombs or underground Christian burial places across Rome and because of their religious significance the Vatican's Pontifical Commission of Sacred Archeology has jurisdiction over them.

A photograph of the icon shows the thin face of a bearded man with large eyes, sunken nose and face on a red background surrounded with a yellow circle – the classic image of St Paul.

The image was found in the Catacomb of St Thekla, close to the Basilica of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, which is said to be built on the site where he was buried.

St Thekla was a follower of St Paul who lived in Rome and who was put to death under the Emperor Diocletian at the beginning of the 4th Century and who was subsequently made a saint but little else is known of her.

Barbara Mazzei, the director of the work at the Catacomb, said: "We had been working in the Catacomb for some time and it is full of frescoes.

"However the pictures are all covered with limestone which was covering up much of the artwork and so to remove it and clean it up we had to use fine lasers.

"The result was exceptional because from underneath all the dirt and grime we saw for the first time in 1600 years the face of Saint Paul in a very good condition.

"It was easy to see that it was Saint Paul because the style matched the iconography that we know existed at around the 4th Century – that is the thin face and the dark beard.

"It is a sensational discovery and is of tremendous significance. This is then first time that a single image of Saint Paul in such good condition has been found and it is the oldest one known of.

"Traditionally in Christian images of St Paul he is always alongside St Peter but in this icon he was on his own and what is also significant is the fact that St Paul's Basilica is just a few minutes walk away.

"It is my opinion that the fresco we have discovered was based on the fact that St Paul's Basilica was close by, there was a shrine to him there at that site since the 3rd Century.

"This fresco is from the early part of the 4th Century while before the earliest were from the later part and examples have been found in the Catacombs of Domitilla."

Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, the Vatican's culture minister, said:"This is a fascinating discovery and is testimony to the early Christian Church of nearly 2000 years ago.

"It has a great theological and spiritual significance as well as being of historic and artistic importance."

The Catacomb of St Thekla is closed to the public but experts said they hoped to be able to put the newly discovered icon of St Paul on display some time later this year.

St Paul was a Roman Jew, born in Tarsus in modern-day Turkey, who started out persecuting Christians but later became one of the greatest influences in the Church.

He did not know Jesus in life but converted to Christianity after seeing a shining light on the road to Damascus and spent much of his life travelling and preaching.

St Paul wrote 14 letters to Churches which he founded or visited and tell Christians what they should believe and how they should live but do not say much about Jesus' life and teachings.

He was executed for his beliefs around AD 65 and is thought to have been beheaded, rather than crucified, because he was a Roman citizen.

According to Christian tradition, his body was buried in a vineyard by a Roman woman and a shrine grew up there before Emperor Constantine consecrated a basilica in 324 which is now St Paul Outside the Walls.

St Paul's Outside the Walls is located about two miles outside the ancient walls of Rome and is the largest church in the city after St Peter's.

His feast day is on Monday along with St Peter and it is a bank holiday in Rome where they are patron saints of the city.

Officials are considering opening the tomb below St Paul's in the Basilica's crypt which is said to hold his remains.

Pope Benedict XVI clears way for Cardinal Newman to become a saint

Cardinal Newman founded the high church Oxford Movement in the Church of England before coverting in 1845

Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
Times Online
July 3, 2009

Pope Benedict XVI today cleared the way for Cardinal John Henry Newman to become a saint.

The Pope issued the decree that allows the beatification of England’s most significant convert to Roman Catholicism.

Cardinal Newman, who founded the high-church Oxford Movement in the Church of England before going over to Rome in 1845, is set to become the first non-martyr saint in England since the Reformation.

The Pope opened the way for the beatification in 2001 by officially recognising the healing of Jack Sullivan, a Catholic deacon in the US, as a miracle resulting from the intercession of Newman.

In 2000 Mr Sullivan, married with three grown-up children, was warned by his doctor that he could become paralysed after suffering problems with his back. He went home and prayed for the intercession of Cardinal Newman and when he awoke the next morning Mr Sullivan was pain-free and could walk upright for the first time in months.

Another miraculous cure is understood to have been reported and will be investigated after the beatification. If accepted as valid by the Holy See, it would allow Newman to be canonised.

He would become the first British saint since St John Ogilvie, a Scottish martyr, was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1976. The last English saints, 40 martyrs of the Reformation, were canonised in 1970.

The Times has learned that the rite of beatification is likely to take place next spring, in Birmingham, Westminster or in Rome.

Serious consideration is being given in Rome to a Papal visit in September next year to follow the beatification. The Papal visit would be pegged to a Newman theme and possibly include a lecture in Oxford where Newman did so much of his own theology.

The Holy See will now prepare for a lavish ceremony to mark the beatification, after which the cleric, who died in 1890, can be known as Blessed John Henry Newman.

The Pope has been a student of the writings of Newman since a young seminarian and has personally followed the progress of the cause.

Cardinal Newman was Britain’s most high-profile convert until the reception of former prime minister Tony Blair into the Catholic Church shortly before Christmas last year.

Today’s step forward came when Pope Benedict XVI promulged the decree approving the miraculous healing from Mr Sullivan’s “serious debility of the spine” in Boston.

“The prayers of Christ's faithful all over the world have now been answered,” said Father Paul Chavasse, Provost of the Oratory in Birmingham, the community founded by Newman.

"The Holy Father’s decision is one of great significance for the whole Church. I pray that Newman, by the example of his life and the depth of his teaching, will be received as an authentic guide for Catholics everywhere.

“It is surely providential that the beatification of this great English theologian will occur in the pontificate of Benedict XVI, a major theologian in his own right whom Cardinal Newman has influenced profoundly.”

In 1991 Pope John Paul II recognized the heroically virtuous life of Cardinal Newman, the first of the three steps towards canonisation, and granted him the title “Venerable”. He will continue to be called “the Venerable Servant of God” until the solemn ceremony at which he is beatified or declared “Blessed”.

The Catholic Church believes that God works miracles through the prayers of people in heaven, Father Chavasse explained.

For someone to be proclaimed “Blessed”, his or her heavenly intercession must be judged responsible for a miracle on earth, which must always be a physical healing. In the case of martyrs, their deaths for the faith alone suffice for beatification.

For a miracle to be approved, a panel of doctors has to rule that the healing is scientifically inexplicable, while theologians examine whether it occurred as the result of the intercession of the person whose beatification is being considered.

If the doctors and theologians judge the case positively, it is then examined by the Cardinals and Bishops of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. The results of these discussions are communicated to the Pope who alone can declare a healing to be a true miracle. Only when all these stages have been successfully completed does the Pope authenticate the miracle.

A second miracle has to be recognised for a person to be canonised, that is declared to be a Saint.

Mr Sullivan said: "Upon hearing of the recent developments in Rome regarding Cardinal Newman's Cause for Beatification, I was left with an intense sense of gratitude and thanksgiving to Almighty God and my intercessor Cardinal John Henry Newman. I have dedicated my vocation in praise of Cardinal Newman, who even now directs all my efforts."

In the Archdiocese of Birmingham, the Diocesan Administrator Bishop William Kenney, who is leading Catholics there until a successor to the former Archbishop Vincent Nichols is chosen, said: "I am delighted to hear that the Beatification of Cardinal Newman will take place. This is an opportunity for a real renewal of spirit among Catholics and many others, not least here in the city of Birmingham."

Archbishop Nichols said in Westminster: "I am delighted to learn this news, which will be warmly welcomed by Catholics around the world. To have Cardinal Newman among the Blessed is an occasion of great thankfulness to the Lord and of great pride to those associated with him in Birmingham and in Oxford. I am sure he will help us greatly in the task of protecting the Faith amidst the difficulties he foresaw so clearly."

Father Daniel Seward, Parish Priest of the Oxford Oratory, said: “The beatification of John Henry Newman will be a great moment for the Catholic Church in England and for the English Oratory which he founded. Newman’s pursuit of truth, his defence of conscience and his kind and faithful exercise of the priesthood make him a figure for us to imitate and a friend whose prayers will help us from Heaven.”

There will be a Solemn Mass of Thanksgiving and Te Deum at the Oxford Oratory at 11am on Sunday 12 July.

Yaqoob Bangash, past president of the Newman Society in Oxford, said: “I am delighted to hear the news. Newman has always been regarded as a great thinker and scholar, and now there is also true recognition of his holy virtues. Being in Oxford, where Newman studied and lectured, we now have a another reason to imitate his zealous search of truth in all fields of life— something which the Oxford University Newman Society, of which I am Past President, continues to promote through its series of lectures and other events in Oxford and beyond.”

Miracle Derry mum meets Pope Benedict

Derry Journal
Published Date: 03 July 2009

A Derry woman who made a miraculous recovery from a brain haemorrhage after being blessed with the mitt of Padre Pio, has received Holy Communion from Pope Benedict XVI in San Giovanni.

27 years ago Ann Mulrine collapsed while she was pregnant with twins. At the time doctors told her husband Sean that his wife had suffered a brain haemorrhage and she had no more than half an hour to live.

Faced with the prospect of losing his wife and his two unborn children, Sean was advised to sign forms which would allow medics to keep his wife alive by ventilator until the boys reached 38 weeks. However the power of prayer was about to step in.

Despite doctors telling Sean his wife was clinically dead he continued to hope as he sat by her beside in the Royal Hospital saying the rosary.

"One night I looked up the corridor and I saw this figure coming around the corner and I ran towards it and said: 'Excuse me, you're looking for me.'

"I had never met the man in my life, I didn't know who the man was; don't ask me why I said that. He said: 'I'm looking for a man called Mulrine.' I said: 'That's me.' The man's name was Michael Murray and he and his wife ran the Padre Pio Centre for Northern Ireland.

"He said: 'I got a phone call about half-an-hour ago from a lady who said for me to take the glove of Padre Pio to Sean and Ann Mulrine in the Royal Hospital.'"

The brown mitt was one that Padre Pio had over the bandages on the stigmata on his hands.

The glove was placed on Ann's head. Despite all the tubes, she moved her hand and brought the glove to her face, blessing herself three times,

Doctors were astonished, and the next day Ann opened her eyes and began to talk. She was taken off the ventilator and a week later her sons were born in Derry

Sean and Ann were so transformed by what had happened they began their Padre Pio prayer group and now run the Padre Pio Centre for Northern Ireland, which is affiliated to the monastery at San Giovanni Rotondo.

However they don't make a fuss about what happened - they simply say Ann's recovery was a grace given by God through the intercession of Padre Pio.

The couple have runs numerous trips to San Giovanni in the last three decades and recently visited to view of body of St Pio, which has been exhumed.

Last week the couple were invited to a special Mass in San Giovanni celebrated by Pope Benedict XVI and Ann was invited to receive communion from His Holiness, because of her dedication to St Pio.

"Ann was very nervous, but she told me it was the experience of a lifetime," said Sean. "Later when we attended a reception we saw him leave on the Popemobile."

Ann also met Pope John Paul II at the canonisation of Padre Pio when she presented him with a gift.

The couple's Padre Pio group are planning a final trip to San Giovanni and Sorrento on August 28 for seven days. This will be the last opportunity to venerate the exhumed remains of St Pio as new arrangements are to be put in place after his feast day on September 23.

I love all these miracle stories. They kind of counter-balance the articles on the Culture and Politics thread.

There are periodic special Masses for the sick here using Fr. Seelos relics.


Annapolis woman healed of cancer through intercession of Bl. Seelos

Annapolis, Md., Jul 3, 2009 / 06:53 am (CNA).- An Annapolis woman whose cancer disappeared without explanation has become the focus of canonization efforts for a priest who was once a pastor in her diocese.

Mary Ellen Heibel, 71, was miraculously cured of terminal cancer after praying to Blessed Fr. Francis Seelos, a 19th century Redemptorist priest who had once served in the Annapolis, Maryland area.

“I was first diagnosed with esophageal cancer on January 6, 2003,” Heibel told CNA, “and it was all gone on February 8, 2005.”

As the tumors spread, Heibel had undergone radiation and chemotherapy over several months, but the doctors did not expect a full recovery. “They said the only thing they could do was keep me alive for a little while,” Heibel explained.

But then, a priest from Pittsburgh told Heibel about Fr. Seelos and recommended that she pray a novena to him with her pastor. She did so and a week later, she underwent a scan, which revealed that all the cancer had disappeared.

Heibel said the doctors couldn’t explain it. “It was a miracle,” she said.

In addition to praying the novena, Heibel carries a relic of Fr. Seelos on her person.
“It’s a small chip of bone that I wear around my neck in a little brass reliquary,” she told CNA. “I got it from a friend when I was going to have my surgery.”

Fr. Byron Miller was appointed as the Vice Postulator for Seelos’ Canonization Cause in 2000. At the same time, he was assigned as Director of the National Shrine of Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos.

“Part of my responsibilities at his national shrine in the U.S. is to seek and follow-up on possible strong medical cures through the intercession of Bl. Seelos,” Miller explained to CNA.

Fr. Miller was contacted by Heibel, first in writing and then by phone. “I am interested in hearing all those who have good things to report, but the ‘unusual’ or ‘rare’ circumstances do stand out,” he told CNA.

“Also, because Mary Ellen Heibel is a parishioner at St. Mary’s Church in Annapolis, which is staffed by the Redemptorists, and where Fr. Seelos was pastor during the Civil War – it was easy for me to stay in contact with her and with those connected to her.”

Fr. Miller explained that there is a “cherished and ardent” local devotion to Fr. Seelos in New Orleans, as well as in Pittsburgh, Baltimore and other areas where Seelos was stationed. He mentioned that there is a newsletter distributed to 24,000 households per month, helping to raise and maintain awareness of Seelos’ canonization cause, along with testimonials from various parts of the country.

Father Francis Xavier Seelos was a Redemptorist priest, a member of the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer, a missionary congregation that seeks to preach the Gospel to the most poor and abandoned in society. Known as the “Cheerful Ascetic,” he developed a reputation for his happy disposition and compassion.

Seelos was born in Germany in 1819, but moved to the United States and was ordained in Baltimore. He served in parishes in Baltimore, Annapolis, Pittsburg and Cumberland.

Father Seelos lived a life that was simple and attentive to the needs of his people. As a parish priest, he became known for his availability and kindness. People would come from neighboring towns to receive his spiritual direction and go to confession with him.

From 1863 to 1866, Seelos became an itinerant missionary. Later, he was assigned to a Redemptorist community in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he also worked as a pastor, showing special concern for the poorest and most abandoned in society. He cared for those with yellow fever, and in 1867 he died of the disease.

Miller explained to CNA that Heibel’s case is currently in the Diocesan Inquiry Phase, which began on May 19th, when the panel to be conducting the Inquiry was sworn in at a Mass with Archbishop Edwin O’Brien of the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

The panel, which consists of canon lawyers, notaries and a physician, will gather testimony and evidence of the miraculous cure, to be shipped to Rome, where Seelos’ case for sainthood is being examined.

Pope Hopes Excommunicated Nun Might Become Saint

AUTHOR: JAMES MARTIN, S.J.
America Magazine
POSTED AT: 2009-07-09 11:00:23.0

Yes, you read that headline correctly.

Mother Mary McKillop, the foundress of the Australian-based Sisters of St. Joseph of the Sacred Heart, was, in 1871, officially excommunicated by her local bishop, on the grounds that she "'she had incited the sisters to disobedience and defiance." That same church leader, Bishop Sheil, had earlier invited her to work in Adelaide, where she and her sisters would eventually set up schools, a women's shelter and an orphanage, among their many works. But McKillop's independent spirit was a threat to Bishop Sheil, who had her booted out of the church. Yesterday, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke with Pope Benedict XVI about McKillop's possible canonization, in a conversation reported in the Brisbane Times here. Just last year, the pope visited McKillop's tomb in Sydney during his visit to Australia for World Youth Day. Prime Minister Rudd said that the visit "left a deep impression on the Holy Father."

In April of this year, in an extraordinary gesture, Bishop's Sheil's successor, the current archbishop of Adelaide, Philip Wilson, made a public apology to the Sisters for their foundress's excommunication. Standing before her statue, said that he was "profoundly ashamed of the Bishop's actions in driving the Sisters out onto the streets." McKillop was beatified (the next-to-last step for canonization) by Pope John Paul II in 1995.

The idea of a holy woman who had been at loggerheads with the hierarchy--and was even excommunicated--is not new in the annals of the saints. The most recently named American saint, Mother Theodore Guerin, foundress of the Sisters of Providence of St. Mary of the Woods, was once locked into a room in a rectory by her bishop, who was infuriated by her (similarly) independent spirit. Around the time of her canonization in 2006, I recounted her story in an op-ed piece in The New York Times here, called "Saints That Weren't." (Their title, not mine.)

It was a tough article for some Catholics to read, and I got letters by the dozens (literally). Half of them praised me for reminding Catholics that being in trouble with the church hierarchy is no barrier for holiness; and the other half expressed fury (again, literally) that I was suggesting that being in conflict with the church was a requirement for holiness. (I was arguing only the former--and from history.)

The canonization of trouble-makers shows that the Vatican typically has a clearer understanding of holiness than do some contemporary Catholics, who sometimes conflate holiness with being unthinking, uncritical or blindly obedient. But popes have often canonized saints who were held in contempt by some church leaders of their time. Here, for example, is part of the hair-raising tale of Mother Guerin's run-in with Bishop de la Hailandiere:

"At the time, the idea of an independent woman deciding where and when to open schools offended Célestine de la Hailandière, the Catholic bishop of Vincennes, Ind. In 1844, when Mother Guérin was away from her convent raising money, the bishop ordered her congregation to elect a new superior, in a bid to eject her from the very order of nuns that she had founded. The independent-minded sisters simply re-elected Mother Guérin. Infuriated, Bishop Hailandière told the future saint that she was forbidden from setting foot in her own convent, since he, the bishop, considered himself its sole proprietor. Three years later, Bishop Hailandière demanded that Mother Guérin resign. When she refused, the bishop told her congregation that she was no longer superior, that she was ordered to leave Indiana, and that she was forbidden from communicating with her sisters. Her sisters replied that they were not willing to obey a dictator. The situation worsened until, just a few weeks later, Bishop Hailandière was suddenly replaced by the Vatican. From then on, the Sisters of Providence flourished. Today its 465 members work in 10 states, the District of Columbia, China and Taiwan."

Musty stories of dead nuns? Not so fast. These stories have profound implications not simply for Catholics in general, but perhaps for those American religious women who are the current focus of the Vatican's investigation--an Apostolic Visitation that is to examine their "quality of life." Some of these sisters, and perhaps even a few congregations, may one day find themselves on the receiving end of some criticism, when the final report is released in a few months, or years. They may take heart in the story of Blessed Mary McKillop and St. Theodore Guerin.

And others. Even some of the most universally beloved saints have sometimes found themselves in conflict with the church: St. Joan of Arc, the patroness of France, was burned at the stake as a heretic by church authorities; St. Ignatius of Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit Order, was locked in jail for a time by the Inquisition; and St. Bernadette Soubirous, the visionary of Lourdes, was initially rejected by her local pastor, who refused to believe in her reports of visions. On a somewhat less exalted level, think of modern-day theologians like John Courtney Murray, Yves Congar and Henri de Lubac, who were either officially silenced or restricted in their teaching and writing, and then later "rehabilitated," and in the case of Congar and de Lubac named cardinals. (Robert McClory has an eye-opening book on the topic called Faithful Dissenters: Stories of Men and Women Who Loved and Changed the Church.)

Mother McKillop was beatified in 1995. From the sounds of Prime Minister's Rudd's comments, and the implied message of the pope's visit to her tomb, she will soon become a saint--perhaps the patron saint of troublemakers.