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Lay Saints and Servants of God Servant of God Queen Isabel Queen Isabel the Catholic is arguably one of the greatest woman in history. By her vision and courage Isabel changed the face of the world. By her devotion to Christ and her loyalty to His Church, Isabel was instrumental in rescuing the Church of the Middle Ages from external and internal destruction. Above all, the virtue of Isabel points to the perfection of the Blessed Mother, thus studying and meditating on Isabel’s life helps us to penetrate great mysteries. Isabel’s faith and purity were evident from her earliest years. When as a girl she was faced with forced betrothal to the monstrous Don Pedro Girón her immediate response, as Girón journeyed toward her, was three days of prayer and fasting before the Blessed Sacrament, saying, “Compassionate God, let him die or let me die!” Girón died. When Isabel was offered the chance to seize the throne from a corrupt and enfeebled king, she instead pledged her loyalty to him. Later the throne came to her by right. Immediately neighboring Portugal invaded Castile. Isabel, in her mid-twenties, went from town to town and prayed for support. The people could not resist her. They flocked beneath her banner and, after dramatic battles, saw off the attackers. Isabel promptly gave all glory to God. Greater battles were to come, with Isabel and her husband triumphantly concluding the longest war in history – 770 years – thus regaining from Islamic invasion all of Spain for Christendom. In the same year that this was accomplished, 1492, Isabel sponsored the voyage of Christopher Columbus on which the Americas were discovered. Thus began the largest evangelization campaign since the Apostles, with millions of souls converted to Catholicism. This was to include rescuing millions of Aztec Indians from a diabolical cult which had claimed tens of thousands of lives each year in sacrifices to ‘serpent-gods’. Queen Isabel, by God’s grace, helped save the Church in Europe from continuing decline by initiating an ecclesial and religious reform which anticipated the Council of Trent by eighty years. The fruits of this reform include, by God’s grace, such saints as St. Ignatius of Loyola, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. John of the Cross. The Catholic Church in Spain proved impervious to the insidious divisions which were to cost hundreds of thousands of lives in wars across the rest of Europe. Isabel’s awesome legacy is spiritual as well as temporal. For example, if we are to grow in understanding of Mary’s unique role as Mother of all Christians and, as Queen of the Universe, then one way is by studying and meditating on the life of Queen Isabel. For it was by her purity and good purpose that Isabel united the strong men of Spain who, until then, had often been fighting each other. These men were won over by her purity, and they saw her purpose was good, and they fell in to serve her with their all. And though Isabel began her reign with a divided kingdom and corrupt civil apparatus, it was by her impartiality in justice, and by her tender compassion for the poor and the weak, that her realm was repaired, united and then expanded through incorporation with 26 other kingdoms, including Naples and Sicily, becoming the world’s first global empire. The wicked feared her. Death stole two of Isabel’s beloved children from her, and death struck again at two of her grandchildren. Through it all, this serene queen bore it with such incredible grace, with such a growth in faith, that she provides for us a model modeled on Mary for how to bear our sufferings and surrender all to God. Isabel helps us penetrate glorious mysteries. In her lifetime she was loved by millions; now she is loved by even more. St. Thomas More England is Mary’s Dowry and if England is to become Catholic again, it will happen in part, thanks to the inspiration and intercession of St. Thomas More. Sir Thomas More (1478-1535) was an English Member of Parliament who became Lord Chancellor. In 1531 when Henry VIII announced that the king, and not the Pope, was the head of the Church in England, More refused to accept it. The next year he resigned from the Chancellorship and wrote a justification of his position in 1533. Two years later Parliament passed a bill requiring that all subjects take an oath acknowledging the supremacy in England of Henry over all other foreign kings, including the Pope. More refused, was imprisoned and a year later was executed. St. Thomas More was offered every chance to avoid death – so long as he would renounce the supremacy of the Holy Father over the Church in England. And More sought out every chance to avoid death – so long as he did not have to renounce his Catholic Faith or his loyalty to the Holy Father. But Christ and His Church meant more to St. Thomas than anything else, and so Henry VIII killed his friend as he had killed several of his wives – by ordering his beheading. A week before he died, More wrote the following words in a prayer which Miles Jesu uses often: “Glorious God, give me the grace to amend my life, and to have an eye to my end without begrudging death…Give me, good Lord, a longing to be with You, not to avoid the calamities of this world, nor so much to attain the joys of heaven, as simply for love of You.” St. Thomas More is a patron of Miles Jesu, because of his supreme love of Christ and his loyalty to the Catholic Church. This is the spirit behind the Prayer of Miles Jesu, written by our founder, Fr. Alphonsus Maria Duran, that says: “Use our smallness to make world leaders and nations accept also Your absolute authority over temporal things as God the Son and Redeemer, Jesus Christ.” This same point of Christ’s sovereignty occurs twice in our Miles Jesu constitutions, including as a fundamental purpose: “The fulfillment of the reign of Christ on this earth, that all world rulers will acknowledge Christ as the Supreme Ruler and Chief, making the Gospel the theoretical and practical foundation of all Law.” [Constitutions 12. See also 10.] This contains a truth that should end what has been a ferocious debate. From where does authority come? Who is the ultimate sovereign: the King, or the Parliament, or the people? Each answer has ardent adherents. But a king has no right to supplant the Pope. A Parliament has no right to go against the natural law by, for example, legalizing abortion in the civil law. And a democracy becomes tyranny when the people become divorced from truth. The answer is that sovereignty can lie in a monarch, a parliament or a people, so long as they are correctly subordinated to the ultimate sovereignty of Christ, the King of Kings. This is not a threat to anybody’s welfare, but on the contrary, it is only the reign of Christ which can guarantee our freedom, only Christendom (wherever the sovereignty of Christ is recognized and celebrated) which elevates man to his fullest dignity. To this St. Thomas More firmly held, and thus he throws light on political life today, just as he did five hundred years ago. St. Maria Goretti St. Maria Goretti gave an heroic example of chastity and charity through her martyrdom at the hands of a young man whose uncontrolled passions led him to attack her. The young man was Alessandro Serenelli. His family shared a building with the Goretti family and Maria and Alessandro frequently crossed paths. After her father died while she was still young, Maria continued to carry out her daily household chores with cheerfulness and responsibility. She prepared eagerly to receive her First Holy Communion. Alessandro, on the other hand, darkened his soul by spending time reading immoral publications and allowing his mind to be filled with impure thoughts. On several occasions, Alessandro propositioned Maria and harassed her with impure suggestions. Although Maria always rebuffed his advances, Alessandro’s depravity was such that he would not be influenced by her good example. On the final occasion he became aggressive. Maria shouted at him, “No! It is a sin! God does not want it!” He stabbed her 14 times and she died after 20 hours of suffering. When the parish priest came to bring her Viaticum, she gazed on the crucifix on the wall and said, “I, too, pardon him. I, too, wish that he could come some day and join me in heaven.” Passionist Father Giovanni Alberti, editor of a magazine that promotes devotion to St. Maria Goretti, said the young girl, “was not a saint who was holy for five minutes…but she made choices for holiness throughout her brief life.” “It is not common at the age of 11 – or even 100 – to forgive someone who hurts you because that is what Jesus would want,” he said. Maria Goretti is a saint “not just because she refused her attacker’s advance,” he said. “It was the whole situation: her charity, what she said, how she acted, that she forgave.” On June 24th, 1950, Maria Goretti was canonized by Pope Pius XII. In the crowd of a half a million people, standing next to Maria Goretti’s mother, was Maria’s forgiven murderer. St. Casimir St. Casimir is an excellent example of serving God as a celibate layman. Born in the 15th century, he was known for his heroic chastity and love for the poor, while also obediently carrying out his duties as a prince. His father was Casimir IV, king of Poland. The following is quoted from Butler’s Lives of the Saints, New Concise Edition, Great Britain, 1985.“The saint’s love of God showed itself in his love of the poor, and for the relief of these the young prince gave all he possessed, using on their behalf the influence he had with his father and with his brother Ladislaus when he became king of Bohemia... The nobles of Hungary, dissatisfied with their king, Matthias Corvinus, in 1471 begged the King of Poland to allow them to place his son Casimir on the throne. The saint, at that time not fifteen years old, was very unwilling to consent, but in obedience to his father he went to the frontier at the head of an army. There, hearing that Matthias had himself assembled a large body of troops, and finding that his own soldiers were deserting in large numbers because they could not get their pay, he decided on the advice of his officers to return home. The knowledge that Pope Sixtus IV had sent an embassy to his father to deter him from the expedition made the young prince carry out his resolution with the firmer conviction that he was acting rightly. King Casimir, however, was greatly incensed at the failure of his ambitious projects and would not permit his son to return to Cracow, but relegated him to the castle of Dobzki. The young man obeyed and remained in confinement there for three months....An attempt was made to induce him to marry a daughter of the Emperor Frederick III, but he refused to relax the celibacy he had imposed on himself. An attempt was made to induce him to marry a daughter of the Emperor Frederick III, but he refused to relax the celibacy he had imposed on himself. St. Casimir’s austerities did nothing to help the lung trouble from which he suffered, and he died at the age of twenty-three in 1484. He was buried at Vilna, where his relics still rest in the church of St. Stanislaus. Miracles were reported at his tomb, and he was canonized in 1521. |