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
August 9
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
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Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 10
St. Lawrence of Rome
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August 11
St. Clare of Assisi
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August 12
St. Jane Frances de Chantal
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August 13
Bl Michael McGivney
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August 14
St. Maximilian Kolbe
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Feast of the Assumption
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August 9
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
(Edith Stein)
Born into an Orthodox Jewish family, Edith Stein renounced her faith as a young teenager in 1904 and became an atheist. At University she took a degree in philosophy at the age of 25 and became a prominent professor of philosophy at Freiburg.
It was through an encounter with a young widow that Edith first “came face to face with the cross and the divine strength it gives to those who bear it.” Shortly after, she read the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila – in a single night. She was profoundly affected; The next day, she bought a Catholic catechism. She converted to Catholicism on January 1, 1922.
She became a leading speaker and writer in the Catholic Womans Movement in Germany. Because of her Jewish ethnicity, she was forced to leave her teaching post after the Nazi rise to power. In 1935, she entered the Carmel of Cologne, taking the name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. As the Jewish pogroms began under Hitler, Teresa consciously identified herself with the destiny of her people and offered herself for their salvation.
In 1938, she moved to a convent in Echt, Holland. Four years later, the Nazis responded to vocal criticisms by the Dutch bishops conference by arresting all Catholic converts of Jewish descent. Teresa and her sister, who had been with her in the convent, were arrested on August 2, 1942. transported to Auschwitz, where they died in the gas chamber a week later.
A Carmelite notice of Teresa’s death declared, “She has been called to God who accepted her sacrifice, which will bear much fruit in the people for whom she prayed, suffered, and died.”
“The world doesn’t need what women have, it needs what women are.”
St. Teresa Benedicta
August 10
St. Lawrence of Rome
Deacon Lawrence was one of seven deacons in Rome who were in charge of giving help to the poor and the needy. At that time, in the third century, the emperor Valerian began a great persecution of Roman Christians, decreeing that all bishops, priests, and deacons were to be arrested and executed. When the bishop of Rome Pope St. Sixtus was arrested and condemned to death, Lawrence followed him weeping, “Father, where are you going without your deacon?”
Before this, Lawrence correctly perceived the avaricious nature of Emperor Valerian. The members of the Christian community had unswervingly obeyed the Gospel message by supporting the poor and needy of the city. Unbeknownst to the authorities, Lawrence began distributing to the poor of Rome the remaining money and treasures of the church and of its members who had been arrested.
When he himself was arrested, Valerian offered him clemency if he would bring to Valerian all of the fabled gold and silver treasures of the Church. At the end of the three days that Lawrence had requested to do this, Lawrence brought before him all the poor and needy of Rome, saying, “Here is the church’s treasure!”
For his witness, he was ordered to be burned on a grating over a slow fire. Tradition holds that the execution of this lowly deacon sparked massive conversions to the Christian faith, so impressed were the residents of Rome with Lawrence’s living witness to the message of Jesus to recognize Him in the poor of the world. There is a legend that the ashes of his burned body were dispersed by the winds, and appear at different places around the world on his feast day
Behold in these poor persons the treasures which I promised to show you; to which I will add pearls and precious stones, those widows and consecrated virgins, which are the Church’s crown!
St. Lawrence of Rome
August 12
St Jeanne de Chantal
St. Jeanne (Jane) Frances de Chantal (1572–1641) was born in Dijon, France. Her mother died when she was 18 months old, and her father, head of parliament at Dijon, France, became the main influence on her education. She lived up to her noble status as a refined, cheerful, and beautiful woman. At the age of twenty-one she married Baron Christophe de Chantal and together they had six children, three of whom died in infancy. She married into, not only a title, but also a household in deep debt; she managed every detail of the Baron’s estate, finally bringing its finances into order.
She was strong in her faith, having daily Mass said in her castle and giving alms to the poor. After seven years of marriage, her husband was killed in a hunting accident. She was deeply dejected, but to protect the estate of her children, she was obliged to live with her vain, fierce, extravagant and ill-tempered father-in-law for seven years. She had a vision of a man who would be her spiritual director, and during Lent of 1604 she met St. Francis de Sales. She wanted to become a nun but he persuaded her to defer this decision. To her private vow of chastity she took a vow of obedience to his direction.
Francis told Jane of his plan to found an order of women dedicated to charitable works. At the age of forty-five, on Trinity Sunday, June 6, 1610 she and Francis founded a religious institute for women, the Congregation of the Visitation, which was to exemplify the virtues of the Virgin Mary at the Visitation: meekness and humility. The Visitation sisters accepted women who were rejected from other religious orders due to age or illness, who were widows or lay women. They were not a cloistered order at first, but after experiencing opposition to the order, Francis de Sales was obliged to make it a cloistered community following the Rule of Saint Augustine.
She underwent many great trials, including the death of Francis de Sales and many of her close family and friends. When a plague ravaged France, killing her daughter-in-law and son-in-law, she encouraged the local authorities to make great efforts for the victims of the plague, and she put all her convent’s resources at the disposal of the sick. In addition to her personal trials, she had to undergo great trials of the spirit—interior anguish, darkness, and spiritual dryness. She traveled extensively to found new Visitation houses, having established eighty-six at the time of her death on December 13, 1641.
Hold your eyes on God and leave the doing to him. That is all the doing you have to worry about.
St Jeanne de Chantal
August 14
St. Maximilian Kolbe
“If anyone does not wish to have Mary Immaculate for his Mother, he will not have Christ for his Brother.”
St. Maximilian Kolbe
St. Maximilian Kolbe was born in Poland in 1894 and at about the age of 10 had a vision of the Virgin Mary. She offered him a white crown and a red crown, representing purity and martyrdom. He chose both, a foreshadowing of his life to come. In 1910, he joined the Conventual Franciscan Order. He studied in Rome and traveled to Japan and India as a missionary, but poor health forced him to return to Poland in 1936. During WWII he welcomed thousands of refugees, including over 2,000 Jews, and aided them in escaping the mounting tyranny.
Kolbe’s monastery served as a publishing house for anti-Nazi pamphlets and tracts. Because of this and his good works, he himself was arrested by the Nazis in 1941 and was taken to the Auschwitz concentration camp. After a prisoner escaped toward the end of his second month in the camp, ten inmates were chosen at random for execution. He offered his life for that of one of the prisoners and was condemned to a slow death in a starvation bunker. Kolbe led the condemned in prayers and songs to Our Lady for two weeks, calming and comforting his fellows.
Kolbe was the last of the prisoners to remain alive after two weeks. On August 14, 1941, he was given a lethal injection of carbolic acid. He was canonized as a Saint and Martyr of Charity in 1982.