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Posted by on Nov 10, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

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November 10 is the feast day of St. Leo the Great, who was pope from 440 – 461. “The Great” is a title reserved for few popes. The Catholic Encyclopedia claims that he was the second most important pope after St. Gregory the Great in the ancient church. “The Great” is a title that is well deserved in the case of Pope St. Leo. He not only had a major impact on the development of Christian theology concerning the Incarnation, but he also laid the foundation for the authority of the Bishop of Rome over other Christian bishops. St. Leo the Great is remembered in history for turning Atila the Hun away from the gates of Rome. He also convinced the Vandal leader, Genseric, to stop pillaging Rome after the city had been occupied.

The vortex of social, political, and religious upheaval that enveloped the western Roman Empire in the fifth century is amazing even by the standards of the 20th century. Major portions of the West had already been invaded when St. Leo was elected Pope. (See time line.) Many of us were taught that it was the period of the barbarian invasions – that time when our European ancestors swept into the empire from north and east of the Danube. Our understanding of that history is now more detailed and we can see that it was a time of more than marauding tribal armies, it was an epoch of massive migrations. The History Channel’s series, “The Barbarians,” presents a popularized version that gives some scholars heartburn, even as they acknowledge that the broad themes are correct. The history is very complex, involving alliances between tribes and the empire, betrayal, and mass reprisals. In many respects, we tend to see the Roman Empire as massive and stable. In reality, it was a constantly bubbling cauldron, in which the metal itself was slowly being consumed.

As a child, I saw devotional pictures of Pope St. Leo going out to meet Atila and heard stories of how the barbarian and his horde turned away in terror upon seeing a vision of Saints Peter and Paul accompanying the Pope. The historical reality was probably even more of a testimony to Pope St. Leo’s courage and diplomacy. As a Deacon in Rome, the young Leo had been sent by the emperor to negotiate a dispute between two powerful imperial officials in Gaul (present day France) – Aetius, the Roman commander, and the chief Roman magistrate, Albinus. His success marked him as an astute judge of people, circumstances, and possible solutions. More importantly, the end of the dispute with Albinus left Aetius in a strong position to create an alliance with the Visigoths to defeat Atila near Orleans.

As a result of this and other experience, Pope St. Leo did not meet Atila unprepared. When we become aware of the actual history, that Atila wanted to return home to the steppes of central Asia and his armies wanted to stay in Italy, there is more to his retreat from the gates of Rome. Atila was dealing with command problems and fever from the Tiber’s swamps. This additional historical information only adds luster to Pope St. Leo’s courage and insight at a time when rulers were often the first to leave their cities in a time of crisis.

Pope St. Leo’s skill in handling the Vandals under Geneseric is no less amazing. It would set the standard by which bishops tried to mitigate the depredation of the empire’s collapse and begin the assimilation and Christianization of these large dislocated populations.

All of these circumstances would have made it a very reasonable historical outcome for the central governance of the Church to have left Rome and moved to the secure eastern capital of the empire – the New Rome – Constantinople. Certainly any focus on doctrinal issues should have disappeared from the West as well. In the chaos, one would reasonably expect that the bishops would be left to themselves to sort out religious and civil matters. Pope St. Leo reversed all of these more likely historical outcomes.

The Dark Ages that followed his papacy were bad enough. Yet I wonder where western culture would be today if Pope St. Leo had not laid the foundations of a more centralized Latin church, with definite doctrinal boundaries that emphasized the humanity and the divinity of Christ. The emphasis on the Incarnation – God With Us – in the unfolding of history created a vision which survived apocalypse, by focusing on the Kingdom of Heaven. It was certainly not an escapist vision, but rather, one grounded in very gritty realities. It is not for the faint of heart.

Pope St. Leo the Great’s vision did not involve trying to hold on to a world that had been swept away. He looked for the God With Us to chart a new course that would forever change history. As we survey the tsunami of blood that was the 20th century and which swept away several empires, it might be good to leave the walls of St. John Lateran and pass through the city’s gates to confront the present with courage, vision, and hope.

There is a very interesting video on the history of the Huns that gives us a window onto the world in which Pope St. Leo the Great lived.

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Posted by on Nov 9, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Feast of the Day – Dedication of St. John Lateran: Rome’s Cathedral

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November 9 is the feast of the Dedication of the Basilica of St. John Lateran.

The Pope’s main Church is St. Peter’s Basilica -True or False? The correct answer is False. Interestingly, the cathedral for the Bishop of Rome – the Pope – is the Church of St. John Lateran. It was originally built in the fourth century on land that had belonged to the Lateran family but had become the property of the Emperor Constantine. St. John Lateran is the oldest and ranks first among the four great patriarchal churches of Rome. The present church was commissioned by Pope Innocent X in 1646.

How can you have a feast day celebration for a building? It is not about the stones and lumber. It is a celebration of Latin Christianity’s central parish of its central diocese. In a broader sense, the feast celebrates what the building is and signifies. The church building is an ancient Christian meeting place and symbolizes the center of the vast world wide community that is the Catholic Church.

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Posted by on Nov 9, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Marriage and Divorce – A Reconsideration by Evangelicals?

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For all of us who have ever felt guilty about stressing the importance of grammar, the absence of quotation marks in the Greek New Testament shows that we have not been overly obsessive. David Instone-Brewer, a British evangelical scripture scholar, in the October 5, 2007 cover article of Christianity Today, says that if we place quotation marks in Jesus’ answer regarding divorce (Matthew 19: 13-15), there are more justifications than adultery alone. In “When to Separate What God Has Joined: What Does the Bible Really Teach About Divorce?” Instone-Brewer makes the case that in Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus is being asked if he supports an “any-cause” approach to divorce. According to Instone-Brewer, Jesus’ response is to quote Moses and reaffirm the limited justifications for divorce. Instone-Brewer is a specialist in Jewish thought during the time of Christ and he concludes that there are four reasons for permissible divorce in the Old and New Testaments: adultery, abuse, sexual or emotional abandonment, and neglect.

David Van Biema, in Time (November 6, 2007), reports on Instone-Brewer’s article and also cites the fact that divorce rates are the same or higher for Evangelicals in the United States compared to the national average, this according to the Barna Research Group poll taken in 2001. Van Biema speculates that the reason for publishing Instone-Brewer’s article was to provide Evangelicals with some way to deal with the conflict between the literal words of Jesus and St. Paul in the New Testament and their everyday experience.

This is an interesting example of how the way one approaches scripture affects the understandings gained from its study. A strictly literal approach, without a broader understanding of the culture and thinking of the time, can create unnecessary tensions with our everyday experience. There is an interesting commentary, “Grounds for Divorce in God’s Law,” at BibleGateway.com on Matthew 19: 13-15. Jesus’ teaching on marital commitment should be seen in its relationship to forgiveness – our ability to live in proper relationships with others. According to this commentary, Jesus’ teaching follows his teaching on forgiveness. One who refuses to forgive will tend to look down on weaker people – women and children. This approach is refreshing because it challenges us to see marriage in the context of proper or just relationships with others. What is often seen as an issue of “private” morality occurs in a much broader social matrix of justice.

In many respects, Evangelicals, who are often seen as focusing too narrowly on scripture, may help all of us go beyond the question of whether divorce is permissible for Christians. The broader challenge Jesus puts to us is whether we can live the deeper meaning of marriage as a living witness of peace, justice, and love.

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Posted by on Nov 7, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Saint of the Day – San Diego de Alcalá de Henares

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November 7 is the current feast of St. Didacus, a latinized form of the name Diego. (The traditional feast day was November 12). San Diego (1400 to 1463), was a Franciscan lay brother who exemplified the reform movement of his time. He never learned to read or write and devoted his life to prayer, penance, and the service of the poor and the sick. San Diego’s life is an ironic example of a man who found fame and posterity by renouncing them.

San Diego was born in San Nicolás del Puerto in the province of Sevilla, Spain. As a boy, he served a local hermit, taking on that austere lifestyle and raising vegetables for the poor. At 30, he joined the Franciscans and around 1441 he was sent with a small group to Fuerteventura in the Canary Islands. Despite his lack of education, he became the Guardian of the small convent. Under his leadership and by his example, the observance and piety of the group came to the attention of Pope Eugene IV. San Diego returned to Spain in 1449 and went to Rome in 1450 for the canonization of fellow Franciscan San Bernardino de Siena. There was a severe outbreak of plague in Rome and San Diego became even more highly regarded for his care of the sick and the dying. He lived at Alcalá de Henares from 1456 until his death on November 12, 1463.

San Diego became a reluctant hero, even in death, because of the number of documented miracles that were attributed to him. However, he was not canonized a saint until 1588, due to reforms that the Church was undertaking to remove the lives of the saints from the realm of legend to those of rigorous historical fact. Despite the reformed standards, the holiness of his life and documentation of miracles made his biography similar to those of devotional legend.

San Diego’s wide popularity in the 16th and 17th centuries was emblematic of a major shift in Spanish society. San Diego’s patron, Santiago (Sant Yago – St. James the Apostle), was the patron of Spain and represented her struggle to reconquer Iberia after the Moorish conquest. As Santiago Mata Moros, St. James the Killer of Moors, was a less relevant model as the Reconquest came to a close. San Diego’s example of heroic Christian virtue became a new model of the Christian ideal in the emerging union of the seven kingdoms.

When Sebastián Vizcaíno entered San Miguel Bay in Alta California aboard the San Diego in 1602, he renamed it San Diego Bay, because his men would hear Mass there on November 12. On July 1, 1769, Blessed Junipero Serra would found Mission San Diego de Alcalá on the same bay, the mission which would later give rise to the City of San Diego, California.

Although San Diego now enjoys the obscurity that he sought in life, he should be remembered and celebrated as someone who saw that mysticism and service to the marginalized could not be separated. Spirituality and social justice are the two necessary dimension of meeting and serving the living Christ.

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Mission San Diego de Alcalá, San Diego, CA

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Posted by on Nov 2, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

All Souls Day – The Mystery of Transition

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According to Catholic, Orthodox, and Anglican teaching, the communion of saints is made up of the faithful on earth (the church militant), the saints in purgatory (the church penitent) and the saints in heaven (the church triumphant). November 2, All Souls day, is the day on which prayers are offered for the dead, in keeping with this belief in the communion of all Christians in the Mystical Body of Christ.

Purgatory was a belief rejected by many of the Protestant groups during the Reformation. In part, this rejection was a reaction to the sale of indulgences which induced believers to part with money in exchange for the release of their loved ones from Purgatory. The Catholic Church responded by asserting that nothing had been sold and that free will offerings and alms, along with prayer and fasting were traditional ways in which the faithful on earth interceded for the deceased in their state of transformation. Jimmy Akin, a Catholic apologist (defender) and former Protestant, presents a detailed defense of Purgatory in his paper, “How to Explain Purgatory to Protestants.”

Tertulian, in the third century, taught that Purgatory was a physical place hidden deep in the bowels of the earth. It was a place where Christians who were not martyrs went after death and waited to be released at the final judgment. This view was quickly rejected by the Church.  Purgatory was seen to be a condition of the soul, not a physical place. More recently, Pope John Paul II stated that purgatory is a condition of existence outside of the passage of events we call time. According to the Pope and the Catechism of the Catholic Church, purgatory is not necessarily a place of physical suffering, but a place of transformation. Jimmy Akin, in his defense of Purgatory, says that it is implied in certain schools of Protestant belief, since man only stops sinning at the time of death and cannot sin in Heaven. Therefore, there has to be a point of purgation.

Those of us who grew up Catholic in the 1950’s remember that indulgences had certain time values assigned to them. Certain prayers or devotional acts remitted the temporal punishment of so many days or years. When I asked priests about it as a boy, they tended to roll their eyes and say that it didn’t make much sense to them – there is no time in eternity. Some tried to explain that the time was somehow equivalent to the benefit that so many days of penance would have had on the departed soul. The assignment of days and years of spiritual benefit has now been erased from our concept of prayers and devotional acts. The view today is one of solidarity with the deceased, as living members of the community. Consequently, Catholic observances tend to be less anxious and mournful than during my childhood.

The Mexican Día de Los Muertos – The Day of the Dead – a joyful celebration which actually lasts from October 31 to November 2, celebrates those in heaven and purgatory. Preparation for this celebration begins in mid-October. Death and the afterlife have a very different sensibility among less industrialized segments of Mexican society. The reality of the afterlife is not doubted but is instead celebrated. There are fewer effects of secularization in this population, so the images and concepts that result may seem bizarre to industrialized sophisticates. Pageants of saints and devils, candy in the form of skulls, and even a mock funeral procession with a live person in the casket are part and parcel of a lively festival. Altars with votive offerings bring to mind those of pre-Christian shamans and an ongoing connection with ancient indigenous traditions as well.

Life, death, and new life is also a persistent belief outside of Christianity and a mystery that can never be understood but only celebrated. What happens at that moment of transition between two worlds and modes of existence? Something terrible and something wonderful. All Souls Day is a day to stop and ponder the mystery.

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Posted by on Nov 1, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Saint of the Day – All Saints

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The feast of All Saints was originally celebrated as the feast of All Martyrs on May 13, beginning around 610, when it was established by Pope Boniface IV. The date coincided with an ancient three day Roman festival, Lemures, which ended on May 13. Lemures was a time when Romans attempted to appease the dead. The date was also celebrated as the dedication of the Pantheon in Rome to St. Mary and All the Martyrs. A feast commemorating All Martyrs was held as early as 270, but there is no record of the actual date. There is evidence that All Martyrs was observed in Antioch on the first Sunday after Pentecost in the 300’s. This tradition still continues in the Orthodox and Eastern Churches as All Saints Sunday. The feast of All Saints was proclaimed on November 1 when Pope Gregory III (731-741) dedicated a chapel within St. Peter’s for the relics of the apostles and all saints. The Irish church celebrated All Saints on April 20 throughout the early Middle Ages.

Devotion to the saints became a highly contentious issue during the Reformation. Reformers alleged – with some very good evidence – that the saints were being worshiped, as opposed to being venerated. The general criticism was that attention was not being focused primarily on Christ. The focus on relics, indulgences, and special novenas appeared to make these exemplars of the faith into demigods.

500 years later, and 40 years after the Second Vatican Council, our approach to the saints is more communal. The Mystical Body of Christ, as emphasized by Pope Pius XII in Mystici Corporis Christi (On the Mystical Body of Christ -1943), led to a broader understanding of the holiness and vocation we all share in the Communion of Saints. In keeping with the renewed emphasis on St. Paul’s vision of the church as the Mystical Body, the contemporary church has renewed the ancient Pauline tradition of referring to all Christians as “the saints” or those made holy in Christ. Some sermons today even extend the feast day greetings to everyone in the congregation.

Experiencing the Communion of Saints as more than an intellectual concept is difficult. Something of the reality can be experienced in the new Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels in Los Angeles. The largest church in the United States, Our Lady of the Angels has an enormous openness and can be somewhat overwhelming, until you start to walk down the aisle. The walls are covered with huge tapestries designed by John Nava and manufactured in Belgium. All of a sudden you are part of large community of saints who really look like people. The faces are not stylized in the traditional poses of rapture. The faces are all the more startling because in many cases they are the actual likeness of the saint. Paintings of the 136 saints and blesseds were first made from photographs. The paintings were then graphed and digitized and sent by e-mail to the looms for weaving. Nava’s art is described as neo-classical post-modernist, indicating a vision of the post-modern world returning to classical forms in a completely original way. This style might be a very apt inspiration for all of us post-modern saints.

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Posted by on Oct 31, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Halloween – The Secularization of the Pagan

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Halloween, that most secular of days, has become a time for adult parties, candies, and Hollywood ghosts and goblins. A safely scary, “ending of daylight savings time,” festival. It is a holiday of candy. The day on which the largest amount of candy is sold in the United States.

Just as we have a secularized Christianity at Christmas – the Happy Holidays which we celebrate without reference to the “Reason for the Season” – Halloween echoes pre-Christian and Neo-Pagan rituals – without a real connection to the earth or that troubling notion of the sacred.

This is not to say that having fun is not a good excuse. However, the focus on the fun excuses any obligation to enter into the mysteries of religion. The witch on her broomstick, the bed sheet with eyes that we call a ghost, the iconic “happy face” on the hollowed out pumpkin, evoke no real connection with the earth and the spiritual powers of nature. There is no shaman, no calling down of the spirits and ecstatic dance, no trances induced by ritual fasting and drumming.

The Celtic New Year’s holiday is not a fall harvest festival in an urban culture in which 2% of the people produce enough food and fiber for the rest. The days are getting shorter in the northern climes.  It is still 3 weeks to that least commercial of holidays – Thanksgiving.

For all of our talk about spirituality, whether traditional or New Age, our cultural manifestation of these ancient festivals shows very little of the spiritual, whether Christian or Pagan. Our focus is not on the transcendent – the totally other. Nor is it on the immanent – the divine fire within. We are becalmed in a world with little dimensionality.  And  we wonder why everything seems flat, gray, and listless!

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Posted by on Oct 30, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

The Mists of Avalon – Christian and Pagan in Camelot

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Halloween evokes the notion of the pagan that underlies so many feasts of the year. The Celtic New Year festival, Samhain (So-ween), celebrated on November 1, with its focus on the the fading of the boundary between the living and the dead, became a celebration of Christian ancestors – All Hallows (Saints). It seems simple and straightforward.

The complexity of the pagan world of the British Isles transitioning to Christianity comes to life in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s 1979 novel, The Mists of Avalon. Critics either condemn or praise this best selling classic as a feminist retelling of the legend of King Arthur. The story is told from the standpoint of the women in a world in transition. Women are losing the power and influence they had under the pagan cult, moving to a subservient passive-aggressive role in a Christianity dominated by men. The Goddess is being supplanted by the God.

What might have been shocking almost 30 years ago – the presentation of Arthur, Guinevere, and Lancelot and their enemies as morally and sexually ambiguous – seems to be a fairly standard deconstruction by our standards. Like our world today, The Mists of Avalon is painted in shades of gray. All of the characters have great strengths and weaknesses, they all make compromises, and they all see their plans brought to naught by forces beyond their control.

In the first chapters of the book, as voiced by Arthur’s half sister and priestess of Avalon, Morgaine, the tone is decidedly anti-Christian and specifically anti-Catholic. Morgaine’s father, Taliesin, the Merlin of Britain, or chief Druid, presents broad overreaching relativism and tolerance, contrasted with the narrow Christian priests, intent on convincing women that they must be subservient and do good to atone for the fact that sin came into the world through the first woman, Eve. (Note: St. Paul said that sin came into the world by the first man, Adam, but that is grist for another post.) Pagans didn’t have a concept of sin, and Christianity would now make everyone slaves of sin and degrade the very nature of men and women as sinful from conception. It all seems somewhat predictable as a standard anti-colonial, neo-pagan, and feminist polemic that is the standard critique of the moral bankruptcy of Christianity.

Toward the end of the book, the tone has shifted significantly, since the human weakness and moral ambivalence of the devotees of the Goddess have become more than obvious. The cult of the Goddess becomes blended into Christianity; as the cult of the Virgin Mary as guardian of the flame of the feminine and the fertility of the earth.

The psychological and spiritual portraits of the men and the women are compellingly complex. It is far from a man-hating feminist rant or an anti-Christian tract. The book actually celebrates the richness of the masculine and the feminine, quite apart from their stereotypical traits. Men and women, pagan and Christian, are both strong and weak, nurturing and exploitative, bold and yielding.

In the end, the will of God and the Goddess is done. It is a long book but well worth the time.

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Posted by on Oct 23, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Saint Saves Europe for Christianity – St. John Capistrano

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The feast day of St. John Capistrano (1385-1456) is October 23. He was born in Perugia and practiced law in the courts of Naples. He was later appointed governor of Perugia. St. John Capistrano’s life changed unexpectedly when he was captured, as Governor, in a dispute with a neighboring town. When he was released, instead of resuming his former life, he joined the Franciscans in 1416.

Certainly, St. John Capistrano would have been remembered for his preaching in many countries and setting up convents as part of the Franciscan renewal. His travels took him through Italy, Germany, Bohemia, Austria, Hungary, Poland and Russia. At the age of 68, his long life, at a time when people were lucky to make it into their 50’s, seemed like it might be summarized by his accomplishments as a jurist, governor, and evangelist.

However, Providence, in the form of Pope Callistus III, would call on St. John Capistrano to play a major role in shaping European and Christian history. The Pope called on him to preach and lead a crusade against the Turks, who were laying seige to Belgrade. Constantinople had fallen to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 and the Sultan planned to be on his way to Vienna after Belgrade.

Prior wars and skirmishes with the Turks and other groups in the Balkans had depleted the ranks of the nobility who made up the armies. Peasants were conscripted to make up the shortfall. The Hungarians, under Janos Hunyadi, had waged several successful campaigns against the Turks, but they were surprised by the rapid arrival of the Sultan’s forces at Belgrade. It is worth taking the time to read the whole story at TheHistoryNet.

We have seen this scene in movies and on TV many times. A rag tag army is up against a much larger, better, equipped and trained imperial force. Before reinforcements and St. John Capistrano’s Hungarian crusaders arrived, the city garrison was down to 5,000 men. The Turks probably had about 100,000 troops and blockaded the city’s harbor on the Danube. St. John Capistrano probably led a group of about 30,000 peasants, to bring Hungarian forces up to about 60,000 or 70,000.

Now, we all remember the fictional Hollywood scene in which a courageous leader launches a futile sally that leads to a rout of the imperial troops. Well it actually happened. The walls had been breached. The elite Janissary troops had entered the city. Hunyadi had the defenders set the moat on fire and slaughtered the invaders inside the walls. The next day, as the Turks were burying their dead, a small group of peasants – against orders – came out through the walls and started to fight. St. John Capistrano, while trying to get them to retreat inside the walls, found himself surrounded by 2,000 men and advancing on the Turks. He lead the advance with the words, “The Lord who made the beginning will take care of the finish.”

In a sequence of events that seemed highly improbable, other units joined in a cascade that led to a complete rout of the Turks. The Hungarian forces lost about 10,000 men. The Turks lost 50,000 in the battle and another 25,000 were slain by Serbs during the retreat. The Sultan lost most of his officers and almost all of his equipment.

Hunyadi and St. John Capistrano died shortly thereafter. With them died hopes that Christian forces could retake Constantinople. Today 550 years later, the Ottoman empire is gone and the former Christian Byzantium, now modern, secular, Moslem, and known as Turkey, is trying peacefully to join the European Union.

Certainly, St. John Capistrano never sought his place in history. His Franciscan vocation was a renunciation of the life of a jurist and governor. It is also probable that he saw his crusade as highly unlikely to succeed. Courage, holiness, learning, and leadership make a combination that is exceptionally rare. It is the stuff of legends, Hollywood sagas, and saints.

mision-san-juan-capistrano.jpg  Mission Gardens, San Juan Capistrano, California

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Posted by on Oct 22, 2007

Saint of the Day – Pope St. Leo the Great

Saint of the Day – St. Peter of Alcantara

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St. Peter of Alcantara (1499 -1562) exemplified the spirit of the renewal and reform undertaken by the Catholic Church in the 1500’s. Even among Catholics, there can be an overgeneralized view that there were many abuses in the Church at that time and that reforms were undertaken only as a means of launching a counter offensive, called the Counter Reformation. As is always the case, life and history are more complex.

St. Peter of Alcantara was a contemporary of St. Ignatius Loyola and St. John of the Cross, and he was a confessor to St. Teresa of Avila. His life was modeled on St. Francis of Assisi. A young man, from a well-to-do and socially prominent family, he not only joined the Franciscans, but led a movement of Barefoot (Discalced) Franciscans, with a stricter rule of religious life. He was a gifted preacher, administrator, and leader who was not above washing dishes or chopping wood.

As Spain was expanding in the New World in the Golden Century (El Siglo de Oro), there was a strong movement to renew Christian life. Of course, Spain’s history was very different from the rest of Europe. Spain had been conquered by the Moors in the 700’s and the Reconquest (Reconquista) by the Christian kingdoms had just been completed in 1492. Spain was building on a 700 year Arabic and Jewish legacy that had focused on learning and asceticism. The Caliphate (the Moorish government organization based in Cordoba) united both religion and state under Islam and created a culture of immense wealth and knowledge.

St. Peter of Alcantara and his contemporaries had very little in common with the controversies that had enveloped northern Europe. Understandably, their lives had been shaped by different issues and forces. The 1500’s were a time of Christian resurgence in Iberia and of expansion overseas. The spiritual flowering of Spain occurred against a backdrop of massive change and the imposition of uniformity by the state and the Inquisition.

Yet, St. Peter Alcantara and his contemporaries led a major movement of renewal and reform that was more than conformist. Their movement would provide much of the impetus for the reform of Catholicism that would persist for 400 years.

Now that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation have formally ended, we would do well to take a closer look at St. Peter Alcantara and his contemporaries. Like them, we stand on the brink of a new era. We are leaving 300 years that played down the mystical heritage of western Christianity as a “combination of mist and schism.” St. Peter Alcantara was a mystic and a man of action. He and the other spiritual leaders of Spain’s Golden Century present us with a golden opportunity to have a vision beyond imperialism and reactionism as we face the challenges of our time.

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