In the reflection today, I am going to look at four faithful Catholics who we celebrate this week who come from different cultures and different eras of Church history. I love the community of saints, which not only included canonized saints, but all the faithful departed who are in eternal life with God. These saints we celebrate this week show us the joy and diversity of our Catholic faith.
Walker Percy (5/28/1916 - 5/10/1990) lived most of his life in Mississippi and Louisiana. After both his mother and father died, both from apparent suicides, he grew up with relatives in the influential Percy family in Greenville in the Mississippi Delta. He graduated from Greenville High School, where one of his best friends was the celebrated Civil War historian Shelby Foote. After his conversion to Catholicism as an adult, he became an acclaimed novelist and Catholic philosopher. He is most famous for his novel The Moviegoer, which was awarded the National Book Award in 1962. The Moviegoer happens to be one of my favorite novels. I first read that novel while working at the high school that Percy attended. He is buried at the cemetery at the Benedictine abbey in Covington, Louisiana, where he was an oblate of the Benedictines.
Saint Damien of Molokai (1/3/1840 - 4/15/1889) is celebrated on his feast day of May 10. His statue is located in the national Capitol building in Washington, DC, being one of their two statues chosen to represent the state of Hawaii. St Damien, who was canonized in 2009 by Pope Benedict XVI, gained a lot of publicity last summer when a New York congresswoman called his statue a symbol of patriarchy and white supremacist culture, which could not be farther from the truth. From a poor Belgian family, Damien became a priest with the Congregation of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary. He volunteered to go to his congregation’s missions in Hawaii, when he went to the island of Molokai to serve the leper colony there after having served in other mission churches in Hawaii. He served the lepers from 1873 until his own death in 1889 at the age of 49, which came about after he himself contracted the disease from the lepers. Even in the midst of his illness, Damien was able to proclaim: “I consider myself the happiest missionary in the world.” Father Damien’s holy life of selfless service and of advocating for improving the living conditions for the lepers has not only inspired many of the Catholic faithful, but also many non-Christians throughout the world.
Santo Domingo de la Calzada (1019 – 5/12/1109) was born into a peasant family in Spain and applied to be a Benedictine monk two different times as a young man, but was turned down. Instead, he lived his life as a young man as a hermit in a cave. He worked with the newly arrived bishop in the area to combat a plague of locusts. The bishop was very impressed with young Dominic and he was ordained a Diocesan priest. He spent a lot of his priesthood improving the pilgrimage route, building bridges, clearing land, and even building an alternative causeway route on the pilgrimage route of St James that is now part of the modern route that I have hiked in Spain. The town that he founded on the Camino is named after him and remains one of the highlights of the pilgrimage trail.
St Simon Stock (1165 - 5/16/1265) was originally from England. Legend has it that he lived in the trunk of a tree as a hermit as a young teenager, and, as a young man, that he traveled to pilgrimage to the Holy Land where he joined the Carmelites. Returning to Europe, he founded many Carmelite Communities, especially in university towns such as Cambridge, Oxford, Paris, and Bologna. He helped to change the Carmelites from a hermit Order to one of mendicant friars, adopting a lifestyle of poverty and traveling from town to town in order to preach, evangelize, and minister to the people. An apparition of the Blessed Mother appeared to him in Cambridge, England, on July 16, 1251, at a time when the Carmelite Order was being oppressed. The Virgin Mary appeared to him holding the brown scapular in one hand. The brown scapular has come to be an important devotion in the Carmelite tradition.
The community of saints speak to us through space and time. May we be inspired by these wonderful examples of the faith whose feast days or day of passing into eternal life that we mark this week.
Blessings to all of you - have a blessed week. Father Lincoln.
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