Tag: Jesuit saints and blesseds

Saint Aloysius Gonzaga

GonzagaThis poignant waiting titled, “The Vocation of St. Aloysius Gonzaga,” by Guercino, hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC). The Gonzaga family castle looms in the background and the crown of the marquisate on the ground behind him, which he has relinquished. The lily is a sign of his chastity.

Aloysius’ father was not persuaded that his son had a vocation to be part of the new group called the Society of Jesus, much less a priest. Therefore, he sent his son to the Superior General of the Society of Jesus with a letter stating, “I merely say to Your Reverence that I am sending you the most precious thing I possess.” The young Aloysius distinguished himself as a model Jesuit. As the plague came to Rome in 1591, Aloysius  threw himself into caring for plague victims. But he was told by his superiors not to touch them, lest he contract the disease. One day, he carried a man from his bed, was infected with the plague and then died, at age 23 in the octave of Corpus Christi.

The opening Collect of his Mass today speaks of asking for the same grace Aloysius had: to join innocence with penitence. As J. Michael Thompson writes in a hymn for our saint, we trust as Aloysius did, in the “Trinity of endless mercy.”

The Church named Saint Aloysius a patron of youth, and of those living with HIV/AIDS.

Saint John Ogilvie

St John OglivieSaint John Ogilvie is only officially recorded Scottish martyr as of now.

Asked if he feared death, Father John replied, “No more than you do to dine.”

One says, In February 2010, during a visit to Rome by the Scottish bishops’ conference, Benedict XVI asked the bishops to promote devotion to St. John Ogilvie among priests – since the Jesuit martyr had been “truly outstanding in his dedication to a difficult and dangerous pastoral ministry, to the point of laying down his life.” Later that year, during the Scottish segment of his U.K. visit, the Pope again encouraged priests to look to the saint’s “dedicated, selfless and brave” example

Walter Ogilvie was a Scottish noble who raised his son John in the state religion of Scotland, Calvinism. John converted to Catholicism at age 17 at Louvain, Belgium. He joined the Jesuits soon after in 1597, and was ordained in Paris, France in 1610. Sent to work in Rouen, France.

It was a time of great persecution of Catholicism in Scotland. “Send only those,” wrote the Earl of Angus to the Jesuit General, “who wish for this mission and are strong enough to bear the heat of the day, for they will be in exceeding danger.” Wholesale massacres of Catholics had taken place in the past, but by this point the hunters concentrated on priests and those who attended Mass. The Jesuits were determined to minister to the oppressed Catholic laity, but when captured, they were tortured for information, then hanged, drawn, and quartered.

Ogilvie repeatedly requested assignment to his home Scotland, and it was finally granted; he returned in November 1613. He worked as an underground missionary in Edinburgh and Glasgow, dodging the Queen‘s priest-hunters, disguised as a soldier named Watson. After 11 months in the field (and on the run), John was betrayed by a phony Catholic, imprisoned, interrogated, then tortured for the names of active Catholics. He gave no information. “Your threats cheer me; I mind them no more than the cackling of geese,” he told his captors. Asked if he feared to die Father John replied, “No more than you do to dine.”

After three trials he was convicted of treason for being loyal to the Pope, and denying the king‘s supremacy in spiritual matters. He is the Church‘s only officially recorded Scottish martyr. He suffered terrible tortures, including being kept awake for eight days and nine nights, in an attempt to make him divulge the identities of other Catholics. Nonetheless, Ogilvie did not relent; On 10 March 1615, aged thirty-six years, he was paraded through the streets of Glasgow and hanged and disembowelled, according to the penalty of the time, at Glasgow Cross.

North American Martyrs

AuriesvilleToday is the feast day of The North American Martyrs, the French Jesuit priests who died at the hands of the Huron and Iroquois Indians in the 17th century. There is a Shrine of the North American Martyrs, in Auriesville, New York. Sadly, the Jesuits have given up the administration of the Shrine.

These martyrs are: Saints Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf, René Goupil, Jean de la Lande, Antoine Daniel, Noël Chabanel, Charles Garnier and Gabriel Lalemant.

Following the heart and mind of Saint Ignatius of Loyola and the mission of the Society of Jesus to be missionaries, Isaac and his companions left everything they had known to preach the Good News of Jesus Christ to a people whom they had never met. The Holy Priests suffered extreme physical hardships, and ultimately offered their lives, for a people for whom they had the deepest love.

They were canonized June 29, 1930 by Pope Pius XI. Their liturgical memorial in the USA is October 19, and September 26 in Canada.

We pray with the Church: O God, who chose to manifest the blessed hope of your eternal Kingdom by the toil of Saints John de Brebeuf, Isaac Jogues and their companies and by the shedding of their blood,graciously grant that through their intercession the faith of Christians may be strengthened day by day.

St. Isaac Jogues and Companions, pray for us!

Saint John Ogilvie

St John OgilivieSt. John Ogilvie, by your devotion to Christ you held fast to the faith, even unto martyrdom.  With the grace of God, may I have a loving heart in the midst of trials.  May I, like you, “be of good cheer” and trust in the love of God. 

Today the Church in Scotland and the Society of Jesus celebrates the feast of Saint John Ogilvie commemorating the 400th anniversary of his death. This Jesuit priest is a martyr who earlier in life made a conversion to Catholicism.

John Ogilvie was born in Scotland in 1579 and raised as a Protestant. He was sent abroad for studies where he converted to Catholicism. By 1599, he entered the Jesuit novitiate in Vienna leading to his ordination to the priesthood in Paris in 1610.

Father Ogilvie was missioned by his religious superiors to return to his native Scotland in 1613. Within a year was arrested in Glasgow. Having spent spent an extended amount of time in prison and he was tortured, but never denounced his obedience to Catholic faith and the leadership of the Roman Pontiff. On March 10, 1615, he was tried for high treason, found guilty and executed.

Father John Ogilvie was beatified in 1929 and Blessed Paul VI canonized him in Rome in 1976.

 

Tomas Munk, and father, cause for beatification advances

Munk familyArchbishop Stanislav Zvolenský, archbishop of Bratislava, will preside at the ceremony of the closure of the diocesan process of the cause for  beatification and sainthood of the Jesuit novice Tomáš Munk and his father František on April 20, 2015.

The Family Munk were  Jewish converts to Catholicism in 1939. Tomáš entered the novitiate in Ružomberok in 1943. Due to the Nazi ideology against Jewish people, the Munk family were captured by Nazis at the end of 1944. Tomáš was captured in novitiate and later was deported together with his father to the concentration camp Sachsenhausen. Father and son were shot to death during the death march from Sachsenhausen to Berlin on April 20, 1945.

Another good example of holiness in families. I wrote about Tomas in 2009 here at the Communio blog.

Saint Claude la Colombiere

St Claude alliezThe day after to the liturgical and civil observance of Saint Valentine (bishop and martyr) we have one of the great proponents of Divine Love, the Jesuit Spiritual director of Saint Margaret Mary of Alocoque, Saint Claude la Colombiere (1641-1682). The example of Saint Valentine needs to be followed; one of  his 17th century disciples was a Jesuit who knew first hand the meaning of what it means to follow God’s approach: love.

The logic of love Claude came to know was manifested in his spiritual paternity of another saint, the Visitation nun and saint, Margaret Mary Alacoque. Margaret Mary was truly a spouse of the Master. This encounter was pivotal for him. Saint John Paul II said in an address:

The decisive event which marked the life and spirituality of Saint Claude La Colombiere was certainly his meeting with Sister Margaret Mary Alacoque, which took place in the Visitation Monastery in Paray-le-Monial in February 1675. On the occasion of a meditation which he gave the community, an interior voice suggested to the woman religious to turn to him in confidence: “This is the one I am sending you.” In face, from her first confession, Fr. Claude was aware of the authenticity of the mystical experience of the young Visitation Sister and Margaret Mary knew she was seeing the fulfillment of the vision of the flaming heart of Jesus with two other hearts which became lost in the divine heart: hers and that of the spiritual director who had been sent to her.

It is said that the day after Claude’s death, Sister Margaret Mary received supernatural assurance that Claude needed no prayers, as he was in already heaven; he was enjoying the fullness of communio with the Trinity. Claude was considered a “dry” martyr, having suffered every abuse for the Christian faith except death. The life of Saint Claude was an example of being in correspondence with the Lord Himself –through the logic of Love– that he was know to be concrete example of mercy in the face of trials. Saint Claude’s  life of holiness drew many of the Protestants to the Catholic Church. His was a trust that we must adopted: “In Thee, O Lord, have I hoped; let me never be confounded.”

May we learn from Saint Claude la Colombiere what it means to be in relationship with Jesus the Good Shepherd, true Divine Love.

Saints Edmund Campion and Robert Southwell, and companions

Edmund CampionToday, particularly on the Jesuit ordo, is the Feast of Saints Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, and the English Jesuit martyrs. These men of God were tortured and executed for their faith in Jesus Christ and their adherence to the authority of the Roman Pontiff in Elizabethan England.

One of the famous texts from this era is  “Campion’s Brag,” Saint Edmund’s clear and undisputed defense of the Catholic faith.

Through the intercession let us pray for the Catholic Church in the UK, and in the USA.

 

“The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood.”

To the Right Honourable, the Lords of Her Majesty’s Privy Council:

Whereas I have come out of Germany and Bohemia, being sent by my superiors, and adventured myself into this noble realm, my dear country, for the glory of God and benefit of souls, I thought it like enough that, in this busy, watchful, and suspicious world, I should either sooner or later be intercepted and stopped of my course.

Wherefore, providing for all events, and uncertain what may become of me, when God shall haply deliver my body into durance, I supposed it needful to put this in writing in a readiness, desiring your good lordships to give it your reading, for to know my cause. This doing, I trust I shall ease you of some labour. For that which otherwise you must have sought for by practice of wit, I do now lay into your hands by plain confession. And to the intent that the whole matter may be conceived in order, and so the better both understood and remembered, I make thereof these nine points or articles, directly, truly and resolutely opening my full enterprise and purpose.

i. I confess that I am (albeit unworthy) a priest of the Catholic Church, and through the great mercy of God vowed now these eight years into the religion [religious order] of the Society of Jesus. Hereby I have taken upon me a special kind of warfare under the banner of obedience, and also resigned all my interest or possibility of wealth, honour, pleasure, and other worldly felicity.

ii. At the voice of our General, which is to me a warrant from heaven and oracle of Christ, I took my voyage from Prague to Rome (where our General Father is always resident) and from Rome to England, as I might and would have done joyously into any part of Christendom or Heatheness, had I been thereto assigned.

iii. My charge is, of free cost to preach the Gospel, to minister the Sacraments, to instruct the simple, to reform sinners, to confute errors—in brief, to cry alarm spiritual against foul vice and proud ignorance, wherewith many of my dear countrymen are abused.

iv. I never had mind, and am strictly forbidden by our Father that sent me, to deal in any respect with matter of state or policy of this realm, as things which appertain not to my vocation, and from which I gladly restrain and sequester my thoughts.

v. I do ask, to the glory of God, with all humility, and under your correction, three sorts of indifferent and quiet audiences: the first, before your Honours, wherein I will discourse of religion, so far as it toucheth the common weal and your nobilities: the second, whereof I make more account, before the Doctors and Masters and chosen men of both universities, wherein I undertake to avow the faith of our Catholic Church by proofs innumerable—Scriptures, councils, Fathers, history, natural and moral reasons: the third, before the lawyers, spiritual and temporal, wherein I will justify the said faith by the common wisdom of the laws standing yet in force and practice.

vi. I would be loath to speak anything that might sound of any insolent brag or challenge, especially being now as a dead man to this world and willing to put my head under every man’s foot, and to kiss the ground they tread upon. Yet I have such courage in avouching the majesty of Jesus my King, and such affiance in his gracious favour, and such assurance in my quarrel, and my evidence so impregnable, and because I know perfectly that no one Protestant, nor all the Protestants living, nor any sect of our adversaries (howsoever they face men down in pulpits, and overrule us in their kingdom of grammarians and unlearned ears) can maintain their doctrine in disputation. I am to sue most humbly and instantly for combat with all and every of them, and the most principal that may be found: protesting that in this trial the better furnished they come, the better welcome they shall be.

vii. And because it hath pleased God to enrich the Queen my Sovereign Lady with notable gifts of nature, learning, and princely education, I do verily trust that if her Highness would vouchsafe her royal person and good attention to such a conference as, in the second part of my fifth article I have motioned, or to a few sermons, which in her or your hearing I am to utter such manifest and fair light by good method and plain dealing may be cast upon these controversies, that possibly her zeal of truth and love of her people shall incline her noble Grace to disfavour some proceedings hurtful to the realm, and procure towards us oppressed more equity.

viii. Moreover I doubt not but you, her Highness’ Council, being of such wisdom and discreet in cases most important, when you shall have heard these questions of religion opened faithfully, which many times by our adversaries are huddled up and confounded, will see upon what substantial grounds our Catholic Faith is builded, how feeble that side is which by sway of the time prevaileth against us, and so at last for your own souls, and for many thousand souls that depend upon your government, will discountenance error when it is bewrayed [revealed], and hearken to those who would spend the best blood in their bodies for your salvation. Many innocent hands are lifted up to heaven for you daily by those English students, whose posterity shall never die, which beyond seas, gathering virtue and sufficient knowledge for the purpose, are determined never to give you over, but either to win you heaven, or to die upon your pikes. And touching our Society, be it known to you that we have made a league—all the Jesuits in the world, whose succession and multitude must overreach all the practice of England—cheerfully to carry the cross you shall lay upon us, and never to despair your recovery, while we have a man left to enjoy your Tyburn, or to be racked with your torments, or consumed with your prisons. The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored.

ix. If these my offers be refused, and my endeavours can take no place, and I, having run thousands of miles to do you good, shall be rewarded with rigour. I have no more to say but to recommend your case and mine to Almighty God, the Searcher of Hearts, who send us his grace, and see us at accord before the day of payment, to the end we may at last be friends in heaven, when all injuries shall be forgotten.

(Icon by William Hart McNichols, enthroned outside the St. Edmund Campion Chapel in America House, New York.)

Saint Ignatius of Loyola

Ignatius at ManresaThe Church liturgically recalls for us one of the Master’s of the spiritual life, Saint Ignatius of Loyola. The Pilgrim died in 1556 and was the author of the Spiritual Exercises and founder of the Society of Jesus.

It may be a little early to speak of a commemoration for the 500th anniversary of the Spiritual Exercises, but it may be good to keep this anniversary in mind. 2022 is the year when we will study and live the foundational experiences of Ignatius in Manresa. This picture shows Ignatius in awe in meeting the Lord as he writes his religious experience that gave rise to him following his vocation with prayerful  intensity. Do we have a similar conviction as Ignatius?

This 2008 animation of an Olive, gives a sense of the life Saint Ignatius of Loyola, written, produced and narrated by Jason Kapell of the Fairfield University Media Center. It is nicely done –remember it is short and sweet with a Spanish Olive narrating.