5 January 2024 - St John Neumann - Weekday of the Christmas season - Friday - 1 John 3:11-24

In our first reading, the letter to John states that the key to discipleship is love. The letter goes on to say that hate and jealousy drive the contempt that most of the world has for Christians. Yet, out of love and compassion, we persevere in our faith and we endure. 

St John Neumann is the saint we celebrate today. He was born in 1811 in the country of Bohemia, a very Catholic country that had a large number of priests at that time. Bohemia is now a part of the Czech Republic. Neumann felt called to travel to North America, where he attended seminary in New York and to serve as a priest in the growing missionary Church there. He had a gift for learning languages, which served him well in the very diverse Catholic community in the United States. Although he started as a diocesan priest, he later joined the Redemptorist missionary order, eventually serving as its provincial. In 1848, he became a US citizen. In 1852, Neumann became the 4th Bishop of Philadelphia, where he established a thriving system of parochial schools. Under his leadership, the schools in his diocese grew in number from 2 to 100. He is the patron saint of Catholic eduction. A hard worker, he died of exhaustion at the young age of 49. Pope Paul VI canonized him in 1977. We here in the United States can count St John Neumann as our of the Fathers of our American Catholic Church. Here is a great quote for St John Neumann about our vocation as Christians: “Everyone who breathes, high and low, educated and ignorant, young and old, man and woman, has a mission, has a work. We are not sent into this world for nothing; we are not born at random…  God sees every one of us; he creates every soul, . . . for a purpose. He needs, he deigns to need, every one of us. He has an end for each of us; we are all equal in His sight, and we are placed in our different ranks and stations, not to get what we can out of them for ourselves, but to labor in them for him. As Christ has his work, we too have ours; as He rejoiced to do His work, we must rejoice in ours also.” What wonderful words upon which we may ponder.