Category: PATRONAGE – of MOTHERS, MOTHERHOOD

Posted in A HOLY DEATH & AGAINST A SUDDEN DEATH, of the DYING, DEATH of CHILDREN, DEATH of PARENTS, ACCOUNTANTS, MONEY MANAGERS etc, FEASTS and SOLEMNITIES, PATRONAGE - CARPENTERS, WOODWORKERS, JOINERS, CABINETMMAKERS, PATRONAGE - CHEFS and/or BAKERS, CONFECTIONERS, PATRONAGE - EMMIGRANTS / IMMIGRANTS, PATRONAGE - HAPPY MARRIAGES, of MARRIED COUPLES, PATRONAGE - HOUSE HUNTERS, HOUSE SELLERS, PATRONAGE - LAWYERS / NOTARIES, PATRONAGE - of BASKET-WEAVERS, CRAFTSMEN, PATRONAGE - of MOTHERS, MOTHERHOOD, PATRONAGE - ORPHANS,ABANDONED CHILDREN, PATRONAGE - PARENTS / FAMILIES / LARGE FAMILIES, PATRONAGE - PREGNANCY, PATRONAGE - TEACHERS, LECTURERS, INSTRUCTORS, PATRONAGE - THE UNIVERSAL CHURCH, PATRONAGE - WORKERS, PATRONAGE-ENGINEERS, Electrical, Mechanical etc, SAINT of the DAY, St JOSEPH

Saint of the Day – 19 March – The Solemnity of St Joseph, Spouse of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Patron of the Universal Church

Posted on by AnaStpaul

Saint of the Day – 19 March – The Solemnity of St Joseph, Spouse of the Most Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God and Patron of the Universal Church.   The name ‘Joseph’ means “whom the Lord adds”.   Patronages • against doubt and hesitation • accountants • all the legal professions • bursars • cabinetmakers • carpenters • cemetery workers • children • civil engineers • confectioners • craftsmen • the dying • teachers • emigrants • exiles • expectant mothers • families • fathers • furniture makers • grave diggers • happy death • holy death • house hunters • immigrants • joiners • labourers • married couples • orphans • against Communism • pioneers • pregnant women • social justice • teachers • travellers • the unborn • wheelwrights • workers • workers • Catholic Church • Oblates of Saint Joseph • for protection of the Church • Universal Church • Vatican II • Americas • Austria • Belgium • Bohemia • Canada • China • Croatian people • Korea • Mexico • New France • New World • Peru • Philippines • Vatican City • VietNam • Canadian Armed Forces • Papal States • 46 dioceses • 26 cities • states and regions.

St Joseph is invoked as patron for many causes.   He is the patron of the Universal Church. He is the patron of the dying because Jesus and Mary were at his death-bed.   He is also the patron of fathers, of carpenters and of social justice.   Many religious orders and communities are placed under his patronage.

St Joseph, the spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the foster-father of Jesus, was probably born in Bethlehem and probably died in Nazareth.   His important mission in God’s plan of salvation was “to legally insert Jesus Christ into the line of David from whom, according to the prophets, the Messiah would be born, and to act as his father and guardian” (Directory on Popular Piety and the Liturgy).   Most of our information about St. Joseph comes from the opening two chapters of St Matthew’s Gospel.   No words of his are recorded in the Gospels;  he was the “silent” man.   We find no devotion to St Joseph in the early Church.   It was the will of God that the Virgin Birth of Our Lord be first firmly impressed upon the minds of the faithful.   He was later venerated by the great saints of the Middle Ages.   Pius IX (1870) declared him patron and protector of the universal family of the Church.

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Unknown artist, 19th century, Italian

St Joseph was an ordinary manual labourer although descended from the royal house of David.   In the designs of Providence he was destined to become the spouse of the Mother of God.   His high privilege is expressed in a single phrase, “Foster-father of Jesus.”   About him Sacred Scripture has little more to say than that he was a just man-an expression which indicates how faithfully he fulfilled his high trust of protecting and guarding God’s greatest treasures upon earth, Jesus and Mary.

The darkest hours of his life may well have been those when he first learned of Mary’s pregnancy;  but precisely in this time of trial Joseph showed himself great.   His suffering, which likewise formed a part of the work of the redemption, was not without great providential import:  Joseph was to be, for all times, the trustworthy witness of the Messiah’s virgin birth.   After this, he modestly retires into the background of holy Scripture.

dream of st joseph

Of St Joseph’s death the Bible tells us nothing.   There are indications, however, that he died before the beginning of Christ’s public life.   His was the most beautiful death that one could have, in the arms of Jesus and Mary.   Humbly and unknown, he passed his years at Nazareth, silent and almost forgotten he remained in the background through centuries of Church history.   Only in more recent times has he been accorded greater honour.   Liturgical veneration of St Joseph began in the fifteenth century, fostered by Sts Brigid of Sweden and Bernadine of Siena.   St Teresa of Avila, too, did much to further his cult.

At present there are two major feasts in his honour.   Today 19 our veneration is directed to him personally and to his part in the work of redemption and is his main Feast and a Solemnity in the Universal Church, while on 1 May we honour him as the patron of workmen throughout the world and as our guide in the difficult matter of establishing equitable norms regarding obligations and rights in the social order….Excerpted from The Church’s Year of Grace, Pius Parschj m and joseph

COLLECT PRAYER

Grant, we pray, almighty God, that by Saint Joseph’s intercession Your Church may constantly watch over the unfolding of the mysteries of human salvation, whose beginnings You entrusted to his faithful care.   Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.

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Posted in DOCTORS of the Church, FATHERS of the Church, PATRONAGE - Against SNAKE BITES / POISON, PATRONAGE - GOUT, KNEE PROBLEMS, ARTHRITIS, etc, PATRONAGE - of MOTHERS, MOTHERHOOD, PATRONAGE - THE SICK, THE INFIRM, ALL ILLNESS, SAINT of the DAY

Saint of the Day – 13 January – St Hilary of Poitiers (315-368) Confressor, Bishop, Father & Doctor of the Church

Posted on by AnaStpaul

Saint of the Day – 13 January – St Hilary of Poitiers (315-368) Father & Doctor of the Church, Bishop, Confessor, Writer, Philosopher, Theologian, Preacher, Defender of the Faith.   He was sometimes referred to as the “Hammer of the Arians” and the “Athanasius of the West.”   His name comes from the Latin word for happy or cheerful.   St Hilary was born in 315 at Poitiers, France and he died in 368 of natural causes.   Patronages – against rheumatism, against snakes, against snake bites, backward children, children learning to walk, mothers, the sick/the infirm, 4 Cities.Saint-Hilary-700x475

Hilary was born to pagan parents of Poitiers, France, in 315.   After training in the classics and philosophy, Hilary married.   He and his wife had one daughter, Afra.   All who knew Hilary said he was a friendly, charitable, gentle man.   Hilary’s studies led him to read Scripture.   He became convinced that there was only one God, whose Son became man and died and rose to save all people.   This led him to be baptised along with his wife and daughter.

This gentle and courteous man, became a staunch defender of the divinity of Christ.   He  was devoted to writing some of the greatest theology on the Trinity and was, like his Master, in being labeled a “disturber of the peace.”   In a very troubled period in the Church, his holiness was lived out in both scholarship and controversy.

The people of Poitiers chose Hilary to be their bishop in 353.   As Bishop, he was soon taken up with battling what became the scourge of the fourth century, Arianism, which denied the divinity of Christ.

Saint Hilary, Bishop of Poitiers. — Image by © Bettmann/CORBIS
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The heresy spread rapidly. Saint Jerome said “The world groaned and marvelled to find that it was Arian.”   When Emperor Constantius ordered all the bishops of the West to sign a condemnation of Athanasius, the great defender of the faith in the East, Hilary refused and was banished from France to far off Phrygia.   There, too, his pastoral solicitude led him to work tirelessly for the re-establishment of the Church’s unity, based on the correct faith, as formulated by the Council of Nicea.   To this end, he began writing his most important and most famous dogmatic work: “De Trinitatae” (On the Trinity).   Eventually he was called the “Athanasius of the West” and the “Hammer of the Arians.”

Fearing Hilary’s arguments, Arian’s followers begged the emperor to send Hilary home.  The emperor, believing Hilary was also undermining his authority, recalled him.   Hilary’s writings show that he could be fierce in defending the faith but in dealing with the bishops who had given in to the Arian heresy, he was charitable.   He showed them their errors and helped them to defend their faith.   Though the emperor called Hilary “disturber of the peace,” Saints Jerome and Augustine praised him as “teacher of the churches.”

During the last years of his life, he wrote “Treatises on the Psalms,” a commentary on 58 psalms, interpreted according to the principle highlighted in the introduction to the work:  “There is no doubt that all the things said in the Psalms must be understood according to the Gospel proclamation, so that, independently of the voice with which the prophetic spirit has spoken, everything refers to the knowledge of the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, incarnation, passion and kingdom and the glory and power of our resurrection” (“Instructio Psalmorum” 5).

In all of the Psalms, he sees this transparency of Christ’s mystery and of His body, which is the Church.   On various occasions, Hilary met with St Martin, the future bishop of Tours who founded a monastery near Poitiers, which still exists today.

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St Hilary confers minor Orders on St Martin of Tours

Hilary died in 367.   His feast day is celebrated today throughout the universal Church.  In 1851, Blessed Pius IX proclaimed him a doctor of the Church.

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The Altar of St Hilary at St John Lateran in Rome
Posted in MARTYRS, PATRONAGE - of MOTHERS, MOTHERHOOD, PATRONAGE - PREGNANCY, SAINT of the DAY

Saint/s of the Day – 7 March – Saints Perpetua and Felicity

Posted on by AnaStpaul

Saint/s of the Day – 7 March – Saints Perpetua and Felicity – Martyrs (died c203) in Carthage (Roman province of Africa – modern day Tunisia) – Patrons of Mothers, Expectant Mothers, ranchers, butchers, Carthage, Catalonia.sts perpetua & felicity.jpg

Vibia Perpetua was a married noblewoman, said to have been 22 years old at the time of her death and mother of an infant she was nursing.   Felicity, a slave imprisoned with her and pregnant at the time, was martyred with her.   They were put to death along with others at Carthage in the Roman province of Africa.   According to the passion, a slave named Revocatus, his fellow slave Felicitas, the two free men Saturninus and Secundulus, and Perpetua, who were catechumens, that is, Christians being instructed in the faith but not yet baptised, were arrested and executed at the military games in celebration of the Emperor Septimus Severus’s birthday.   To this group was added a man named Saturus (the Catechist of St Perpetua) who voluntarily went before the magistrate and proclaimed himself a Christian.saints-perpetua-and-felicitas-altar-philip-ralley.jpg

St Perpetua kept a diary during her last days, while she awaited her execution.   Her diary, along with an eyewitness’s account of her death, is one of the oldest, most reliable histories of a martyr’s sufferings.   This account was passed down to encourage other Christians to witness to the world with their lives—to teach others that greater than life itself is knowing Jesus and being loyal to him.

Perpetua’s account records the events that took place in Carthage, Africa, in the year 202, when the Emperor Severus issued an anti-Christian law forbidding anyone to be baptised and become a Christian.   At that time twenty-two-year-old Perpetua was a catechumen, studying to become a Christian.   She was also the mother of an infant son.   Perpetua was arrested along with four other catechumens, including Felicity, her slave woman, who was about to give birth to a child.   All were tried and sentenced to be thrown to the wild beasts in the amphitheatre during a national holiday.   Their deaths would be scheduled along with sports events and various games.

During the days before their execution, their teacher Saturus voluntarily joined the catechumens so that he might die for Christ with them.   Perpetua’s father, a wealthy pagan, pleaded with her to offer sacrifice to the pagan gods so she could be free, but she refused. She said, “Father do you see this water jar, or whatever it is, standing here? Could one call it by any other name than what it is?   Well, in the same way I cannot be called by any other name than what I am—a Christian.”www-st-takla-org-sts-perpetua-n-felicity-015.jpg

While they were awaiting death, Perpetua and her companions were baptised.   Shortly before the scheduled execution, Felicity gave birth to a baby girl.   During childbirth, she had cried out in pain.  Someone hearing her asked her how she would ever endure the suffering of martyrdom.   She replied, “Now it is I who suffer what I am suffering, then, there will be another in me who will suffer for me, because I will be suffering for Him.”

On the day of their execution, the martyrs left their prison “joyfully as though they were on their way to heaven” and entered the arena, where they were killed before the cheering crowd.   Perpetua and Felicity were beheaded; the others were killed by wild beasts.    Today these women are mentioned in the first Eucharistic Prayer.www-st-takla-org-sts-perpetua-n-felicity-021.jpg