St Peter Fourier

The 16^th/17^th century priest and educator Peter Fourier is remembered on 9th December.

Peter Fourier was born in Lorraine (now part of eastern France) in 1565. He attended the Jesuit university at Pont à Mousson and became a member of the Regular Canons of St Augustine at Chamousey.

He later became the parish priest at Mattaincourt, a village in the Vosges region, where he would stay for the next 30 years. Spiritual life was in poor shape, but Fourier transformed it by making dramatic changes not only to what happened in church but to the life of the village.

One of his innovations was to open a community bank that did not charge interest on loans. Another was to open schools that charged no fees for poor children. He found that nuns made excellent teachers and he found a worthy partner in this work in Alix Le Clerc. Together they opened a number of schools in the area, although these were all for girls as the boys’ school that Fourier founded failed to thrive.

© John Welford

St Frances de Chantal

12^th December is the saint’s day for a 17^th century French nun, Frances de Chantal. She was the founder of the Order of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

She was born in Dijon in 1572, was married at the age of 20 and widowed at 28 when her husband, the Baron de Chantal, died after a hunting accident. She proved to be a very able administrator of her late husband’s estates.

In 1604 she met Francis de Sales (who also became a saint) and expressed her wish to join a Carmelite nunnery. Knowing about her organisational skills, he had a better idea, which was that she should set up a community for women who believed that they had a vocation for the religious life but were not quite sure about the direction that it should take. These would be widows such as herself and younger girls who were uncertain about their future.

Frances duly set up the first “Congregation of the Visitation” at Annecy in the French Alps. The task was not easy, duly mainly to the attitude of some the first adherents – a number of the younger women came from wealthy families and did not see why they should do menial work, and some of the widows was very self-centred.

However, Frances persevered and had established more than 80 congregations by the time of her death in 1641.

© John Welford

St Paul the Hermit

15^th January is the saint’s day for Paul the Hermit, the first well-known person who adopted this lifestyle as a means of devoting himself to his Christian faith.

Paul was born in Lower Egypt in the year 229. He became a Christian but lost his parents when he was only 15. He had an inheritance to live on, but was in danger from persecution by the Roman authorities. He was given refuge by a pagan friend but a relative threatened to betray him in order to gain his inheritance. That was when Paul decided to escape into the desert to live the life of a solitary hermit.

Until the age of 43 he lived alone in a desert cave next to a stream, depending for all his physical needs on a palm tree that supplied both food and clothing. However, at that point he was visited by a raven which brought him half a loaf of bread, which he did every day without fail for the next 70 years.

St Anthony visited Paul when the former was aged 90 and the latter 103. The raven then turned up with a full loaf, and the two saints debated for a long time over which of them should have the privilege of breaking it.

Paul lived on for another ten years until Anthony, on another visit, found him lying dead on the ground, apparently prostrated in prayer.

There is a lot of suspension of disbelief needed in order to accept the full story of Paul the Hermit, not least the exceptional longevity of Paul, Anthony and the raven!  And where did the raven get the bread from? As with many such early stories of the saints, the details tended to become embellished with the retelling, and one must always bear this in mind.

© John Welford

St Catherine Labouré

28^th November is the saint’s day of Catherine Labouré, a French nun who lived from 1806 to 1876. She was devoutly religious from an early age and had no desire other than to join a religious order. In 1830 she was admitted to the Sisters of Charity.

Almost immediately after her admittance she began to see visions of the Virgin Mary, which developed into a symbol in which a large letter M was surmounted by a cross accompanied by two hearts, that of Jesus surrounded by a crown of thorns and Mary’s pierced with a sword. She also heard Mary’s voice telling her that these symbols would benefit anyone who wore them.

The end result was the “Miraculous Medal”, of which an initial batch of 150 was struck. The other side of the medal, oval in shape, was an image of Mary surrounded by the words: "O Mary! conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee". The medal became highly popular among Roman Catholics who believed that wearing one would confer “great graces” on them.

Although one can admire people who have been accorded sainthood because of their noble deeds or personal sacrifice, there are some saints whom it is much more difficult to accept as deserving such status. For me, Catherine Labouré falls into this category.

For one thing, she advocated a practice that seems to confuse religion with magic, namely the wearing of a special symbol that will confer benefits not available to non-wearers. This is surely not far from the medieval practice of selling odd bits of wood that were supposed to be pieces of Christ’s cross, thus playing tricks on gullible people. One might think that a modern-day Chaucer would have had something to say about “miraculous medals”.

Also, surely we need to be far more careful about how we regard people who claim to have had miraculous visions or heard voices telling them to do certain things. Modern psychology knows far more about hallucinations than people did in past times, and it is now accepted that such things are common symptoms of conditions including paranoid schizophrenia.

Should we really be accepting as saints people who are simply suffering from a deep-seated mental illness?

© John Welford

St Peter of Alexandria

26^th November is the saint’s day of Saint Peter of Alexandria, who was martyred by the Romans in 311. He is widely believed to be the last Christian martyr before religious toleration was declared throughout the Empire by Emperor Constantine.

Peter became Bishop of Alexandria in 300, and was noted for his policy of lenience towards Christians who had been forced to renounce their faith (sometimes after torture) but who now wanted to return to the fold. This policy did not go down well with everyone, one of these critics being a priest named Melitius who maintained that such people must be re-baptized if they had ever sacrificed to pagan gods since their original baptism.

When Peter was forced to go into hiding, Melitius usurped his position as bishop, for which deed Peter had him excommunicated. However, true to his policy of offering forgiveness to backsliders, Peter offered Melitius the chance to repent and be accepted back into the Christian community.

When Peter was martyred by being beheaded, Melitius escaped the persecution and continued to cause trouble in the church by leading a breakaway sect. It is little surprise that Peter was later canonized but Melitius was not.

© John Welford

St Josaphat

12^th November 1623 was the day on which Josaphat Kunsevich, the Archbishop of Polotsk (now in northern Belarus) was murdered by a mob because he sought to reconcile two divergent parts of the Christian Church. He was canonized, as Saint Josaphat (or Joseph) of Polotsk, in 1867, being the first saint from the eastern (Orthodox) church to be recognised as a saint by the Roman Catholic Church.

He was born in the 1580s at Vladimir, which is now on the border of Poland and Ukraine. Although his father was Catholic, Josaphat became a monk in the Orthodox monastery at Vilna and eventually rose to be the abbot. As such, he practiced the Byzantine rather than the Roman rite in his worship.

In 1617 he was elected as Bishop of Vitebsk and then became Archbishop of Polotsk. His diocese was riven between two opposing groups, namely those who sought to preserve the division between east and west and those who wanted to bring the two sides together in the eventual hope of uniting the Church. By siding with the latter faction, Josaphat made many enemies for himself. These even included Catholics who objected to his use of the Byzantine rite.

Although he never advocated violence in pursuit of his aims, plenty was used by both sides during years of rioting. Eventually, the separatists descended on Josaphat’s house, having hatched a plot that would give them an excuse to remove him once and for all. A mob burst into the courtyard of his house and, when Josaphat appeared, knowing full well what the outcome would be, he was attacked with axes and then shot, his body being thrown into the river.

This sad business, in which Christians were content to murder fellow Christians, was put into perspective by the fact that lives were saved by local Jews who rushed in to restore order and prevent more of Josaphat’s followers from being killed.

© John Welford

St Marius and St Martha

19^th January is the day for remembering the story of Marius and Martha, a married couple who were martyred for their faith during the reign of Emperor Claudius in the 1^st century.

They lived in Persia and were extremely wealthy. However, as Christians they realised that they had a duty to help the poor and gave all their fortune away.

They travelled to Rome along with their sons Audifax and Abachum, but arrived in the middle of an orgy of bloodletting as Claudius carried out a wide-ranging persecution of Christians. This was done by herding all the captured Christians into an amphitheatre, killing them, and then burning all the bodies.

The family from Persia escaped this purge but decided to do what they could to respect the victims. They therefore gathered all the ashes and gave them a Christian burial. This action was enough to condemn them and they suffered the same fate as the martyrs who had preceded them, although without the burning. They in turn were given a respectful burial by other Christians.

During the 14^th century it was believed that their bones had been discovered and these then became holy relics which were distributed in churches throughout Europe.

© John Welford