What is a Saint?
In the Catholic Church, the saints are ordinary people like you and I who made it to heaven. They’ve done nothing that you and I cannot do, if we persevere in following Jesus Christ and living our lives according to His teaching.
Catholic devotion to the saints is nothing more than respect and admiration for the memory of the deceased heroes of the Church. We honor them as men and women of heroic virtue who can serve as our role models. They were no more perfect than are we; but, at the end of their lives – and hopefully, ours – they received from Our Lord his words, “Well done, good and faithful servant.”
We also ask the saints to intercede for us. Have you ever asked anyone to pray for you when you were having a hard time? That is how Catholics “pray to” the saints – we pray with saints, not to them. As the Letter of James says, “The fervent prayer of a righteous person is very powerful.”
Well-known saints like those below often are remembered in a special way on particular days during the year.
January – February – March – April – May – June
July – August – September – October – November – December
This Weeks Saints
November 8
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
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Thirty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time
November 9
Dedication of St. John Lateran Basilica
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November 10
Pope St. Leo the Great
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November 11
St. Martin of Tours
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November 12
St. Josaphat
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November 13
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
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St. Willibrord
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November 8
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
Élisabeth Catez’s life was outwardly nondescript. Born to a French Army captain and his wife, she grew up in a tight-knit middle-class family that became even tighter after her father’s death when she was 7 years old. She was a lively, popular girl, extremely stubborn, given to fits of rage, but with great reverence for God. Elizabeth’s one accomplishment of note in childhood was a top prize for piano performance at the Dijon Conservatory.
But, on the day of her First Communion, Elizabeth learned from the mother superior of the nearby Carmelite convent that her name meant “House of God.” From this time, she became more and more aware of God’s presence in her soul. At fourteen, she made a vow of virginity, and at seventeen, she announced to her mother that she wanted to enter the Carmel. When her mother insisted that she wait four years, Elizabeth dutifully pursued an active social life, with pretty clothes, parties and dancing. But she also began praying daily to the Holy Spirit, her “Consuming Fire.”
In 1901, Elizabeth entered the Carmelite monastery in Dijon, France. “I can’t find words to express my happiness,” she wrote. Here there is no longer anything but God. He is all; he suffices and we live by him alone.” She was subject to periods of emotional darkness, and her spiritual director expressed doubts over Elizabeth’s vocation. However she was much admired for her persistence in pursuing the will of God and in devoting herself to the charism of the Carmelites. Two years later she professed her final vows, and subsequently became the spiritual director to many others. Her spirituality is considered to be remarkably similar to that of her contemporary and compatriot Discalced Carmelite sister, Thérèse of Lisieux, who was cloistered at the Carmel in Lisieux; the two shared a zeal for contemplation and the salvation of souls.
About this time, she showed the first signs of Addison’s disease, a rare, incurable disease whose side effects are painful and exhausting. She died two years after, in great physical and spiritual anguish. Her dying words were, “I am going to Light, to Love, to Life”
“Everything passes. In the evening of life, nothing remains but love. Everything must be done for love.”
St. Elizabeth of the Trinity
“Prayer is powerful! It fills the earth with mercy, it makes the Divine clemency pass from generation to generation; right along the course of the centuries wonderful works have been achieved through prayer.”
— Frances Xavier Cabrini
November 13
St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
Frances Xavier Cabrini was the first United States citizen to be canonized. Maria Francesca Cabrini was born on July 15, 1850 in Sant’ Angelo Lodigiano, Lombardy, Italy. She was the youngest of thirteen children, and only three of her siblings lived into adulthood. She was born two months premature, causing her to live most of her life in a fragile and delicate state of health.
She was attracted to religious life at a very early age, and was trained to be a teacher at a school run by the Daughters of the Sacred Heart. Because of her health, she was refused admission to the religious order which had educated her. She was asked to teach at an orphanage in Cadagono, Italy. She taught there for six years, gradually gathering a community of religious-minded women around her. She became Mother Cabrini after taking her final vows in 1877.
When the orphanage closed in 1880, she was asked by her bishop to found the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart. Pope Leo XIII then sent her to minister to the many Italian emigrants in America. She traveled with six sisters to New York City and established schools, hospitals, and orphanages there. She became an American citizen in 1909 and eventually traveled to Europe, Central and South America and throughout the United States. She made 23 trans-Atlantic crossings and established 67 institutions: schools, hospitals and orphanages. In 35 years, Frances Xavier Cabrini founded 67 institutions dedicated to caring for the poor, the abandoned, the uneducated and the sick.