What is a Saint?
In the Catholic Church, the saints are ordinary people like you and me 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
March 23
St. Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar Rayes
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March 24
St. Oscar Romero
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March 25
Feast of the Annunciation
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March 26
St. Ludger
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March 27
Bl. Henri Grialou
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March 28
St. Joseph Sebastian Pelczar
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March 29
St. Berthold of Mount Carmel
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March 23
St. Rafqa Pietra Choboq Ar-Rayes
St. Rafqa is a patron of those who have lost parents and against bodily ills and sickness.
“I am not afraid of death which I have waited for a long time.
St. Rafqa
God will let me live through my death.”
Rafqa (Rebecca) was the only child born to a poor village couple in Himlaya, Lebanon in 1832. She had a relatively happy childhood until her mother died when she was seven; her father’s financial troubles meant that she had to work as a servant for several years. When her father found a new wife, though, Rafqa felt the pressure to marry. She left home secretly and fled to the convent of the Mariamette sisters, a teaching order. At first assigned to work in the kitchen, Rafqa also learned Arabic, writing, and mathematics, and taught school children.
When Rafqa was forty, a crisis within the Mariamette Order led her to transfer to a monastery of the Lebanese Maronite Order. The change to a contemplative life suited her. Yet she wanted to give Christ more: in prayer, she begged for a share in his suffering. Almost immediately, she was struck with severe pain in her eye.
A botched surgery to correct the problem created an issue with her other eye, and eventually she became totally blind. For the last seventeen years of her life, Rafqa lost the use of her legs. From this time, her chief work was knitting socks by hand. She barely ate, telling others that she was satisfied by the daily Eucharist, which tasted to her of honey.
Rafqa died at the age of eighty-one, four minutes after receiving final absolution. After her burial a light appeared on her grave for 3 nights and the smell of violets emanated from it. She is called “The Flower of Lebanon.” Over 2,600 reported favors have been granted to those who touch the soil from her grave. Beginning four days after her death, miraculous cures were recorded at Rafka’s grave, the first being Mother Doumit whose throat was slowly closing so there was fear she would starve to death. Elizabeth En-Nakhel from Tourza, northern Lebanon, was cured from uterine cancer, through Rafqa, in 1938, the miracle which permitted her beatification.
March 24
St. Oscar Romero
A church that doesn’t provoke any crises, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed — what gospel is that?
St. Oscar Romero
Oscar Romero was born to a large family in El Salvador in 1917. He studied carpentry before entering the minor seminary at fourteen. After his studies were completed, he was ordained a priest in Rome in 1942. He returned to his homeland, where for over twenty years he served as a pastor in San Miguel, El Salvador. When he was named Bishop of Santiago de Maria, his efforts to serve his flock brought him before the conflict between the peasants, many of whom lived in crushing poverty, and the wealthy landowners, who sought to retain their control with the help of the military. He was considered to be a religious and social conservative when he was appointed.
In 1977, Romero was named Archbishop of the capital, San Salvador. The government welcomed his appointment, but ten days later, one of his friends Fr. Rutilio Grande, who had been living among impoverished farmers, was assassinated by a death squad. Romero was deeply affected. From this time, Oscar’s radio sermons increasingly addressed the inequality of a system that held so many in poverty and the immorality of the use of force against the innocent. When an ultra-right wing government seized power in 1979, Romero became an outspoken critic of the regime’s violations of human rights and outright terrorism, including unofficial government death squads.
On March 23, 1980, he made an eloquent radio plea urging those of his flock who were serving in the military to refrain from killing unarmed civilians. called on the Salvadoran military to cease its oppression. “Brothers, you belong to our own people. You kill your own brother peasants; and in the face of an order to kill that is given by a man, the law of God that says ‘Do not kill!’ should prevail.” His pleas effectively became his death warrant.
The next day, while he was saying Mass in a hospital chapel, he was shot dead by an assassin.
In his 2018 canonization Mass for Oscar, Pope Francis praised him as one who “left the security of the world, even his own safety, in order to give his life according to the Gospel— close to the poor and to his people.”
March 29
St. Berthold of Mount Carmel
St. Berthold was born in Limoges, France, the son of a Count. He excelled at his studies at the University of Paris and was ordained a priest. Berthold joined his brother, Aymeric, the Latin patriarch of Antioch, in Turkey. The two joined together to participate in a Crusade to the Holy Land. He was in Antioch during its siege by Saracens.
Following a vision of Christ, Berthold gave up the military life and joined a group of hermits on Mt. Carmel, and established a rule for their community. Many hermits scattered throughout Palestine gravitated to St. Berthold and his new community. Aymeric appointed Berthold the superior of the new community, which he headed for the next 45 years, until his death in 1195.
Following his death, the community became known as the Hermit Brothers of St Mary of Mount Carmel. It was the life and work of Bl Berthold that laid the foundation for the Carmelite Order, which, in 1206 received a written rule from St Albert of Jerusalem, whose rule was approved by Pope Honorius III in 1226. After a long absence, the Carmelites returned to their original home on Mt. Carmel in 1631, building the Stella Maris Monastery in the 18th century.
