Saint of the Month: John Wycliffe

John Wycliffe

The Trial of Wyclif by Ford Maddox Brown, the 360th ranked artist of all time.

AKA: Wyclif, Wycliff, Wiclef, Wicliffe, Wickliffe.  He lived before people were too stressed about orthography.
Feast Day: October 30 in North America; December 31 in other Anglican communities.

Really Existed? Sure.  Dude hung out with John of Gaunt.
Timeframe: from the late 1320s to 1384.
Place: England. 

Credentials: Honored as a saint in the Anglican Churches.
Martyrdom: Posthumous only.

Patron Saint of: I don't think Anglican saints have portfolios of patronage.
Symbolism: I don't think they have symbolism, either.

Today is the feast day of John Wycliffe according to the litergical calendar of the Anglican Church of Canada and the Episcopal Church of the United States. In the Church of England and the Episcopal churches of Australia and Brazil, he's honored on New Year's Eve. In Catholicism, for reasons that will become apparent, he's not venerated at all. But that's OK. The concept of sainthood isn't confined to Catholicism, and the Michael5000 Calendar of the Saints is nothing if not ecumenical.  Mind you, an Anglican wouldn't generally pray to a saint and ask them to advocate on their behalf to God, unless they were at the tippy-top of the very most lofty pinnacle of the High Church.  For your average Anglican, a saint is simply a person worthy of respect and contemplation because of their good deeds or character.

If you have a good grounding in British history or traditional Western Civ, the name of John Wycliffe will be at least a little familiar. Within the English-speaking world, he was probably the most important of the religious dissidents of the Middle Ages. As a priest, theologian, and professor of religion at Oxford, he was openly critical of the wealth, worldliness, and ostentation of the clergy. I've read that he was an early forerunner of Protestantism, and I've also read that the ideas of 14th century guys like Wycliffe had nothing to do with Protestantism, and it's a big anachronistic mistake to confuse the two. So yeah, basically he was an early forerunner of Protestantism.

Famously, he oversaw a translation of the Bible into English, and this sounds like a big deal -- the sacred text of Christianity, now available to the common folk! Except, when you think about it, almost none of the common folk could read. Those that could, could usually read in Latin as well as they could in English.  (Nor was this, contrary to what I imagined, the first translation of the Bible into English; turns out there were several already around.)  I suspect that what Wycliffe and his team wanted to do was have Bibles handy that could be read out loud to the common folks who didn't understand Latin.  If I'm right, it almost more of a CD than it was a book, although I may be losing control of my metaphor a bit at this point.

In addition to his belief that the Bible should be available in local languages, Wycliffe believed in predestination and the separation of church and state. This, and his belief that the church should be divested of all its property so that the clergy could be spiritually enriched by poverty, did not universally endear him to the ecclesiastical hierarchy. He likely survived mostly because he was under the protection of some powerful secular leaders, including John of Gaunt, one of the best-connected power brokers in history and the guy who pretty much ran England in the late fourteenth century. Wycliffe's notion that the Church should hand over all of its property to the state -- you can see where this line of thinking would have some appeal to Gaunt.

After he turned fifty, Wycliffe seemed to stop caring much what folks thought of him (it happens!) and began going beyond criticism of clerical excesses. He came out against popular lay practices like the use of holy images and the veneration of saints, and then began to attack even closer-to-the-bone aspects of religious practice like the notion of transubstantiation, the need for the sacraments, and the existence of the Papacy. This was radical stuff indeed.  Although some folks found it thrilling -- enthusiastic followers of the radical Lollard movement that it inspired would be persecuted and executed horribly for generations to come -- the high-placed supporters that had protected Wycliffe began to find him a little too hot to handle.

Remarkably, however, Wycliffe managed to keep out of harm's way for long enough that he could drop dead of a stroke at the end of 1384. Eventually, his books would be burned; indeed, eventually he himself would be posthumously excommunicated, declared a heretic, dug up, and ceremonially put to the flames. The way I see it, though, if you're going to be burned as a heretic, having it happen a few decades after you die takes a lot of the sting out of the experience.

But where are my manners? John Wycliffe was opposed to the veneration of saints, and here I am going on about him in the context of his sainthood. We'll respect the man's sensibility by keeping it brief, and I'll wish you a happy day of his feast. If you like, you can do like John and meditate on the virtues of dissent and reform.

Saint of the Month: St. Cleopas

St. Cleopas

AKA: Possibly "Clopas."  There seems to be two schools of thought about whether Cleopas and Clopas are the same guy.
Feast Day: September 25 in Catholicism; however, October 30 in Eastern Orthodoxy and November 10 for the Copts.

Really Existed? He's in scripture, which can be anything from absolute proof to no evidence at all, depending on your mindset.
Timeframe: Would have likely been 10 to 25 years older than Jesus.
Place: Jerusalem. 

Credentials: By tradition.
Martyrdom: None.

Patron Saint of: No known patronage.
Symbolism: Shown by artists in the context of the story of the Road to Emmaus.

The Road to Emmaus is a concept I'd heard of, but I didn't really know what it was, because I am an ignoramus, and didn't pay attention in Sunday school, and haven't made it past Jonah in the Bible.  It turns out that it is one of the first sightings of the resurrected Jesus Christ, as narrated in Luke 24:13-27. 

Here's the story: Two folks are walking towards Emmaus, a village outside of Jerusalem, talking about how sad they are about this whole crucifixion business that went down over the weekend.  As they walk, they encounter the risen Jesus, but he's incognito and they don't recognize him.  He asks why they're so blue, and they say that there was this awesome prophet who they liked and thought might be the Messiah, but he got killed by the Romans on Friday.  At which point Jesus says "O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!  Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?" which is actually maybe a little hard on them.  

Jesus goes on to "expound... to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself."  That confused me a bit, since I tend to conflate "Scriptures" with "Gospels," and it can be deduced that the Gospels were in fact not yet written at this moment; however, what's really going on of course is that Jesus is citing Old Testament writings that presumably point towards his own coming and recent execution -- although, at this point he still hasn't let Cleopas and his companion know who he is.

About this time, they get to Emmaus.  Jesus looks like he's going to keep going, but they persuade him to overnight with them.  However, at dinner he first reveals his identity to them and then vanishes.  They are all like "OMG," and even though its getting dark they start back to Jerusalem right away to find the disciples, who are still wide awake when they get there and already discussing the other Jesus sightings that have been happening.  At that point, Jesus appears among them again -- but from here on, there is no special mention of St. Cleopas, who is just one person in a small crowd of disciples and apostles.

Now then, there is apparently another figure who shows up in the Gospel of John and various apocryphal writings names Clopas.  It's reasonable to wonder if there's a typo and Cleopas and Clopas are the same guy, in which case things get interesting for St. Cleopas, as Clopas is thought to be a brother of St. Joseph, who is of course Jesus's... well... earthly father?  Adoptive human father?  Step-dad?  This would make him -- him, Cleopas -- Jesus's uncle, which would be both quite an honor and help explain why he was feeling so bad on the Road to Emmaus.  No less a figure than the great Bishop Epiphanius "adds that Joseph and Cleopas were brothers, sons of 'Jacob, surnamed Panther.'"  This last raises the intriguing thought that, if we were to apply modern Western naming conventions, Jesus's last name would be "Panther," which would certainly be rather a rather badass revelation here in the English-speaking world.  This is no doubt complete hogwash, of course.

Cleopas's sainthood appears to be a matter of being close to the scene of the action, and perhaps his rumored family connections.  For such a universally recognized saint, he is by no means a major figure.  He is not mentioned, for example, in any of the four volumes of the L&T hagiographical collection.

Have a great feast day of St. Cleopas!

St. Cleopas (middle) as portrayed by Rowan LeCompte and Irene Matz LeCompte, Third Station of the Resurrection: The Walk to Emmaus (detail), 1970, in the National Cathedral, Washington, D.C.   Blogger Victoria Emily Jones, who also took this photograph, discusses why St. Cleopas's companion is often thought to be a woman, and shows great additional examples of the Emmaus meet-up as imagined by artists.

 

Saint of the Month: Pope St. Soter

Pope St. Soter

Feast Day: April 22.
Really Existed? Almost certainly.

Timeframe: Second century.
Place: Rome.

Credentials: The early Popes have a kind of automatic sainthood.
Martyrdom: Traditionally assumed to have been martyred, but there's no evidence of it.

Patron Saint of: no known patronage.
Symbolism: no known symbolism.

Pope Soter was the 12th Pope, with a pontificate stretching from December 166 to 175.  The Catholic Encyclopedia, after quoting by some length from a surviving letter that was sent to him by St. Dionysius of Corinth, comes right out and says it straight: "Nothing further is known of this pope."

Now, you might be thinking "hmm, if nothing is known about him, how do we know he was a model of sanctity?  Why is he a saint?"  Well, all the Popes are, if you go back far enough!  Starting with the well-known St. Peter, the first 35 popes are all saints by convention, even though the biographical sketches available tend to be more like that of Pope Soter than that of Pope Peter.  Popes #37 (Damasus I) through #49 (Gelasius I) are saints too.  Of the second fifty, about half are saints; it's only after that when you start to reliably get unsainted Popes.

I think it was once widely thought that the early Popes must have all been martyrs to Roman persecution, but Roman persecution, although horrifyingly real enough on occasion, was always pretty sporadic, and it wasn't really a thing during Pope Soter's time.

The Wiki article on Pope St. Soter lists two important things about him: he inaugurated the practice of Easter and declared that marriages needed to be blessed by a priest.  However, the reference cited is super-weak, and I have to think that if there was even the slightest likelihood that either of these things were true, the Catholic Encyclopedia would be all over it.

Happy Pope St. Soter's Day!

Saint of the Month: St. Rosina of Wenglingen!

St. Rosina of Wenglingen

Feast Day: March 11.
Really Existed? Really hard to say.

Timeframe: Different sources say she died in the 400s, or in or around 1000.
Place: Venerated in southern Bavaria; it is unclear whether this implies she lived in the region.

Credentials: Accepted from the folk tradition.
Martyrdom: Vaguely indicated to have suffered some kind of martyrdom.

Patron Saint of: Wenglingen.
Symbolism: The image shown here is probably definitive.

March 11 is not the feast day for any particularly well-known saints, as far as I can gather, so my choice of St. Rosina of Wenglingen was more or less at random. She is a fine example of one of Catholicism's many, many local saints, those recognized by the Church as a whole but really only the focus of devotion only in a limited area.  In the case of St. Rosina of Wenglingen, that area is – as you might expect – Wenglingen, which is in the southern part of Bavaria, in Germany.

There is very little about St. Rosina on the English language internet. CathlicSaints.Info says that she was a “Young woman who consecrated herself to God. May have lived as a forest hermit.” It says that she was a martyr, although it doesn’t give details. Her death is listed as falling in the fourth century. My other go-to online saints calendars and lives don’t mention her at all, and she doesn’t appear in my little print library either.

Yet, last year Rosina of Wenglingen was featured as Saint of the Month in no less a forum than the Vatican’s L’Osservatore Romano.  The article there is a rather twee tale about a girl who passes out while playing the part of St. Rosina in a procession, and everyone is angry when they realize she must be pregnant, but then her boyfriend shows up to announce that their prayers to Rosina have been answered and he has been offered a job in Wenglingen. There is, however, nothing about St. Rosina herself in the story except when the local priest says “There will be a commemoration of St Rosina in our town. She is the patron saint of Wenglingen and there she is celebrated on 11 March.”

Four years ago today, Rosina of Wenglingen was featured on the Portuguese-language Heroines of Christianity site, which noted (via machine translation) that “Although few are the facts about this martyr, Rosina is one of the most popular saints in some parts of Germany.” “Sometimes she is considered a martyr hermit in the woods,” the site adds, and notes that “in historical research Rosina is sometimes confused with a Santa Eufrosina, or with Santa Rufina.” Finally, Heroines notes that St. Rosina has been patron saint of the city of Wenglingen since the 13th century, and that “in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries their worship became ever greater, which resulted in the fact that many girls received their name.”

The German-language Wikipedia site for the Rosinakapelle, Wenglingen's Chapel to St. Rosina, notes that this is “is the only place in the entire Diocese of Augsburg, where the holy Rosina is worshiped.” Like Heroines of Christianity, this article places Rosina’s life and death in the 1000s, instead of the 400s.

So, this all seems quite in order, and in the same way that I was impressed at the continuing local veneration of the Durham Martyrs in that English cathedral city, I thought it was rather touching to find such a robust local tradition of devotion in southern Bavaria. I must confess, however, that I was then a bit surprised to discover the scale of  "the city of Wenglingen," once I finally found it.

Well, I’m a small-town boy myself, and I know that size of population isn't everything. Still, it must take a pretty good turnout of the townsfolk even to fill the little Rosinakapelle, which is at the eastern edge of town. It is very picturesque. Here’s the outside:

The image at the top of this post, which I'd have to think is the definitive image of St. Rosina, is above the alter of this chapel.

Have a wonderful St. Rosina of Wenglingen’s day!

Saint of the Month: Blessed John Speed!

In addition to being among the Martyrs of England and
Wales, Bl. John Speed is often listed among the Durham
Martyrs.  This set of men seem to be an important collective
point of reference to the Catholic community of Durham,
which has named its parish after them.

Bl. John Speed

AKA: St. John Spence, possibly
Feast Day: February 4.

Really Existed? Almost certainly.
Timeframe: Elizabethan era.  Died 1594.
Place: Northern England

Credentials: Beatified in 1927 along with 135 other English and Welsh victims of religious violence.
Martyrdom: Execution by hanging.  Some degree of torture during trial, imprisonment, and the execution itself is not unlikely.

Patron Saint of: No known tradition of patronage.
Symbolism: None.

“The time of the Tudor kings and queens,” we learn from DurhamGhostWalk.co.uk, “was a difficult time for religious people.” Truer words ne’er spoken. You’ll recall that Henry VIII, at the nexus of his unique home life and his political considerations, invented the Protestant Church of England, which many more traditional Catholics found troubling. His daughter Mary, for instance. When she came to the throne, there was a considerable backlash, and it was a difficult time to be a leading Protestant figure. Indeed, 280 were burned at the stake during her five-year reign.  Which, seriously, what is even wrong with people that we have a stock phrase in our language for the concept of "burned at the stake"?

When Mary herself died, her sister Elizabeth took over the throne to commence her epic 45 reign. Would she roll with Dad’s Protestantism, or her sister’s Catholicism? Easy choice, since under Catholic doctrine of the time she was illegitimate and thus ineligible for the crown. Protestantism it was, therefore, and Protestant it would just get more and more as Elizabeth dealt with her potential rival the Catholic Mary Queen of Scots, kept up the traditional rivalry with Britain’s longtime Catholic rival France, sent her fleet against the Catholic Spanish Armada, and sent armies to subdue the Catholic Irish. Was Elizabeth a passionate proponent of Protestant theology? Nah, probably not. It’s just that all her enemies were Catholic.

As Queen Elizabeth got old and tired, her administration lost a lot of its golden-age luster. The bills came due for past military adventures, her more talented supporters started checking out and retiring, and the economy stagnated into a long recession. Like a lot of rulers before and after, she responded, consciously or not, by looking for a class of people she could publicly torment in order to bolster her popularity, and secret Catholics seemed like a good choice. In 1584, just for example, she signed a law making it a capital offense to be an English priest. Over the next dozen years, many priests and people who associated with them would be imprisoned, tortured, and killed, sometimes in unspeakably cruel ways.

John Speed wasn’t a priest himself, but he helped priests who were in the country illegally get from house to house and perhaps from town to town in Northern England. He was caught, and was subsequently killed for his crimes on February 4, 1594, in Durham. It says here that he was hung, which if true was a lousy way to go, but not as elaborately horrible as the horrors inflicted on some of his friends, I'll tell you what.

Pius XI beatified Speed en bloc with 135 other victims of anti-Catholic violence in 1929. A subset of these, not including Speed, are considered the “Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.” The “Eighty-Five Martyrs of England and Wales” are a different group, beatified by John Paul II in 1987. There are a few other sets, too. Some of them are better known than John Speed as saints and/or historical figures in their own right; the point of beatifying whole groups seems to be to underscore that there were a lot of people risking hard punishments for pursuing their religious beliefs, and a lot of people for whom the risk ended badly.

I should mention that having been beatified but not canonized, John Speed is Blessed but not a “saint” per se.

For some reason lost to memory, there has been a note to myself in the document on which I schedule this publication that reads “SotM, Feb 4, John Speed.” It has been there since January 2013. I don’t know why I once thought he would make a good Saint of the Month, particularly since there is already a Saint representing February 4th on the Michael5000 Calendar. By the time I realized that, however, I had already started writing about Queen Elizabeth’s shoddy late reign and there was no stopping Blessed John Speed as Saint of the Month for February 2019.

Anyway, I wish you a happy feast day of St. Jeanne of Valois, and Blessed John Speed.

Saint of the Month: St. Ageranus of Bèze!

St. Ageranus of Bèze


Feast Day: May 19.

Really Existed? Fairly likely.
Timeframe: The 800s.
Place: The Côte-d’Or, which is to say east central France.

Credentials: Recognized by tradition.
Martyrdom: Killed while defending a church.

Patron Saint of: n/a.
Symbolism: n/a.


St. Bruce of Kilatooweenienielie, the Saint of the Month for April, wasn't technically real. A little April Fools joke that was. It was a pretty good one, too! I’m a real card.

Leaving aside St. Bruce – and really, we must – there are only two Australian Saints. The Catholic Church recognizes St. Mary Helen Mackillop, and the Serbian Orthodox church venerates St. Nakanor Savic. Technically, the Australian Anglican Church has a somewhat longer roster of homegrown saints, but Anglicanism attaches very little significance indeed to the title of "saint," so Ms. Mackillop and Mr. Savic are it for all practical purposes.

Australia’s underrepresentation in the holy community got me thinking about the geographical and historical distribution of saints, something that I’ve started to have a little bit of a feel for but have never systematically explored or found pre-explored for me. So my plan for this month was that I’d look at all of the saints that I could find for one given day – today, in fact – and look at their pattern in time and space.  Neat idea, right?

Well, I ran into methodological trouble right from the first entry on the CatholicSaints.Info calendar, for today is the feast day of the Twenty-Five Martyrs of the Mexican Revolution. If we included all of those guys, it would certainly weight our survey towards “Mexico” and “1917.” Setting that issue aside, I moved on to the next fellow, St. Adalric of Blèze. He seemed pretty straightforward: “France,” “888.” The third entry was Blessed Adilio Daronch (“Brazil,” “1924”), but should I include the Blessed (who are basically an associate rank of saints) or stick to full Saints? Another issue set aside, I noticed the next two guys: St. Ageranus of Blèze and St. Ansuinus of Blèze.  Blèze, at this point, seemed to be a amazing hotbed of sanctity. Since my simple little “let’s take a sample!” project was being completely undermined by the messiness of real data, as such projects usually are, I decided to shelve it for now and look into the whole Blèze thing instead.

Here’s what the CatholicSaints profile had on St. Adalric of Blèze: Young boy. Martyred at the monastery of Blèze, Côte-d’Or, France against Norman invaders in 888 at Blèze, Côte-d’Or, France.  Here's what it said about St. Ageranus of Blèze, our actual May Saint of the Month: Benedictine monk. Martyred defending the altar at the monastery of Blèze, Côte-d’Or, France against Norman invaders in 888 at Blèze, Côte-d’Or, France. And so on through five other saints of Blèze. “OK,” I thought, “that’s interesting. I wonder how much is really known about the Norman sack of the church at Blèze. Let’s find out!”

Long story short, it turns out there’s no such place as Blèze and, as far as the internet knows, there never was. I spent more time then you would probably credit hunting down places called Blaise and Blesey and so on that either aren’t particularly close to the Côte-d’Or, or are but don’t seem to have ever had a monastery – although it can sometimes be hard to tell from the internet what was going on in a town 1,129 years ago. But then, on a whim, I looked into the little settlement of Bèze – and boom! Paydirt. Here, from the French language Wiki article on that place, as rendered by machine translation:

In 888, it was the Norman invasion. The five monks, a priest and a child left to defend the abbey are killed. The Normans devastate, sack and ravage everything in their path. The old cave serves as a shelter for the men of the village and the monks who have hidden there. A terrible famine took place after the departure of the Normans because their army had annihilated the crops. The abbey is deserted.

And this tradition is confirmed in, for instance, John J. Delaney's 1980 Dictionary of Saints:

St. Ageranus [was] a Benedictine monk at Bèze, he remained there with a priest, Ansuinus; four other monks, Berard, Genesius, Rodron, and Sifrard; and a boy named Adalric after all the other monks had fled during the Norman invasion. All seven were murdered by the invaders.

Now then.  When I talk about the way that information and misinformation about saints is proliferated on the internet, I tend to think in mechanistic terms, and the two or three of you who follow Saint of the Month might well expect me to start rattling on at this point about whether or not it might be valid to conceive of a St. Ageranus of Blèze who has already achieved an existence independent of St. Ageranus of Bèze, and to wonder whether their identities might blur and drift as we move forward through time.

But instead, I did something a little more daring. I looked through the CatholicSaints.info site and found a person, an actually individual human being, who is responsible for maintaining the site. Then, I sent him a polite little message pointing out the error and offering some evidence to back myself up. And you know what happened? The guy immediately wrote back to thank me, that’s what! Since then, I've noticed that the typo, in all its messy iterations, is gradually getting corrected.  So that’s my contribution to popular hagiography for this month, which ain’t bad though I say it myself.  I feel like I've done pretty well by St. Ageranus.

So, Happy St. Ageranus of Bèze’s Day to you, and six times more happiness for the other sainted men of Bèze, and twenty-five times more happiness for the Martyrs of the Mexican Revolution!

The New Monday Quiz wishes you the joy of the Feast of St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen

---

Since our Saint of the Month for April wasn't, strictly speaking, "real" -- but rather a "Hilarious April Fool's Gag" -- today we will celebrate the feast day of St. Fidelis of Sigmaringen with a New Monday Quiz about his life, times, and works.

---

1. St. Fidelis was born as Mark Roy in 1577. In that same year, Queen Elizabeth of England commissioned a privateering voyage that was successful both in seizing Spanish treasure -- a 4700% percent profit on investment! -- and as a voyage of discovery, circumnavigating of the world. The flagship, originally called the Pelican, was renamed the Golden Hind during the voyage. Who was the captain?

2. Roy was, as his later name implies, born in Sigmaringen. Here's a map showing where that is. In what modern country is Sigmaringen located?

3. We read that, as a student, Roy avoided alcohol and practiced chastity; apparently this sets him apart from other students. In the same passage, we see that he always wore a cilice. What's a cilice, and why do people wear them?

4. After getting his doctorate, Roy taught philosophy at the University of Freiburg. A later philosophy prof at Freiburg is "widely acknowledged to be one of the most original and important philosophers of the 20th century." Supporters point to his 1927 classic Being and Time, his influential argument that "being" or "being-in-the-world" is more central to human experience than rationality, and his contributions to the fields of phenomenology and existentialism. Critics, however, sometimes suggest that his densely argued prose veers perilously close to gibberish, and note that he was a bit of a Nazi tool. Who is this famous philosopher?

5. Roy took the name of Fidelis when he entered the Capuchin order. The modern beverage we call "Cappuccino" takes its name from "Capuchin" -- what is the basic recipe for cappuccino?

6. Fidelis was sent to the Prättigau district of eastern Switzerland in 1622 to convert Calvinists to Catholicism. What are two examples of something that Calvinists believe that Catholics don't, or vice versa?

7. Fidelis's team arrived in Prättigau on the Feast of the Epiphany. What's an example of an epiphany, without the capital E?

8. Because the locals were hostile to his missionary efforts, Fidelis predicted that he would soon be "food for the worms." 259 years later, Charles Darwin would write of worms that "It may be doubted whether there are many other animals which have played so important a part in the history of the world, as have these lowly organized creatures." What makes worms so important?

9. On April 24, 1622, St. Fidelis was killed by Austrian soldiers. A few days later, a British ship called the Tryall, sailing much too far south and east on the way to Batavia, became the third European vessel to spot what large landmass?

10. St. Fidelius was canonized in 1746 by Pope Benedict XIV. Like many older guys of his time, and a rapidly increasing number in our own time, Pope Benedict struggled with gout. What is gout?

---

Answers go in the comments! 

---

Two weeks ago, The New Monday Quiz celebrated fours and tens, on account of how it was 4/10. The answers were:

1. Elements 4 and 10 are Beryllium and Neon.
2. In Genesis 4:10, God is scolding Cain for slaying Abel.
3. Nephi 4:10 begins with the formula "it came to pass," like so many passages of the Book of Mormon.
4. Four Ten was a British racehorse.
5. The fourth and tenth most populous countries are Indonesia and Japan.
6. The answer to the math problem is a gross, or 144.
7. The answer to the other math problem is that no, its diagonal is the square root of 116, which is less than 11 inches, 11 being the square root of 121.
8. If it's "fourth and ten," it's American football and the next play will almost certainly be either a punt or, if the team on offense is far enough down the field, an attempt at a field goal.
9. You could beat four tens with four... queens, for instance, or a straight flush -- five cards in numerical order from the same suit.
10a. the prolific composer is Mozart; 10b the Beatles album is Yellow Submarine.

Out of all the rightness on display in the answers, DrSchnell's rightness was unblemished and absolute!  This makes him the master in perpetuity of all realms of knowledge that involve the intersection of four things and ten things.

---

Saint of the Month: St. Bruce of Kilatooweenienielie!

St. Bruce of Kilatooweenienielie's Sermon to the Flock, by Australian artist Gideon McKilivrey

St. Bruce of Kilatooweenienielie

AKA: St. Bruce the Shepherd
Feast Day: April 1.

Really Existed? Oh, certainly.
Timeframe: Modern times.
Place: Australia.

Credentials: Canonized in 1993.
Martyrdom: None.

Patron Saint of: none.
Symbolism: A young man preaching to a herd of sheep.

According to Manfred Owens' monumental Lives of the Australian Saints, St. Bruce of Kilatooweenienielie was born on the Kilatooweenienielie sheep station in New South Wales. A reverent and pious young man, he made an early profession of chastity -- it was said of him that "his only darling was the Darling River" -- and, in emulation of St. Francis, would often preach the gospel to the animals. In a folk story that has not been sanctioned by church authorities, it is said that on one occasion in his early life he converted as many as 8000 sheep to Christianity in a single sermon.

Tales of his physical and spiritual prowess in early manhood are legion. In the best-known story, which is probably apocryphal, we hear that at age 21 he swam to New Zealand to bring the gospel to the inhabitants of that land, only to be disappointed to find a that the church was already well-established there. A better documented feat was his subsequent swimming of the Bass Strait to Tasmania. Here, he dwelt at the town of Lutana, where he spread faith and good fellowship among the workers at that town's Zinc refining plant, an industrial operation that produces over 250,000 tons of Zinc per year, making it a key global supplier of this important strategic mineral resource.

In later life, St. Bruce retreated to the "outback," or "bush" as it is colloquially known, and began a new life of meditative contemplation. His writings from this period are thought by many to exemplify the mystical aspect of Australian Christian spirituality, as can be seen in this fragment from his famous essay "Blue Sky Mine":

If the blue sky mining company won't come to my rescue
If the sugar refining company won't save me
Who's going to save me?

Australian students of theology have long debated whether the answer to this koan should be assumed to be "God," "Jesus," or perhaps a more subtle personification of Christian practice. That St. Bruce conceived of his relationship with the Almighty as a deeply personal and mutual devotion is evidenced, in any event, in this fragment of prayer from another of his writings:

Here I am, the one that you love
Asking for another day
Understand the one that you love
Loves you in so many ways

Little is known of the last days of St. Bruce's life, including, oddly enough, the exact date or manner of his death. According to witnesses from the Kilatooweenienielie area, "we reckon he just started walking north and, crikey, just kept walking." Many consider this to be a suitably mysterious end for one of Australia's great mystics.

St. Bruce of Kilatooweenienielie was canonized by Pope Bruce III in 1993.​

Image of Saint Bruce swimming across Bass
Strait in Lutana Parish Church, Lutana, Tasmania.

Saint of the Month: Saint Blanchard!

St. Blanchard

AKA: St. Blancardus
Feast Day: March 10.

Really Existed? Well.... the name may or may not ultimately connect with a historical personage.
Timeframe: Difficult to specify.
Place: Northern France, kind of.

Credentials: Recognized locally in Northern France.
Martyrdom: None.

Patron Saint of: no patronage.
Symbolism: A single known representation.


I chose Saint Blanchard by going to a popular internet calendar of the saints and picking him at random out of the thirty or so entries for March 10th. This choice sent me to the distant outskirts of the concept of sainthood, far from the bustle of historical record, folk traditions, and sacred legend. Indeed, Blachard is so far out on the periphery of the roster of saints that it took me hours of searching to find anything beyond his name and the existence of a single shrine.

The website where I first found Saint Blachard indicated that there is “no biographical information on this person.” That's a little discouraging, but by no means unprecidented.  I was surprised, though, that he wasn't on any of the other lists of saints on the internet.  That's unusual.  Was it possible, I wondered, that this Saint Blanchard was nothing more than a typo? But no: there is the matter of the “fountain” – an enclosed statue atop a little mineral spring – on a forest road just south of the village of Nesle-le-Reposte, in France.  It's at 48.625 degrees North, 3.559 degree East. That one presence is not what you’d call a robust legacy, but it is certainly a real thing. Look, here’s a picture:

From this picturesque base of operations, and armed with the precision tool of machine translation, I began to crack the French-language internet. It took some poking around, but I was able to determine that this shrine, in at least one account, has a rudimentary narrative identity! Also, an alarming miraculous tradition:

The Saint-Blanchard fountain, also known as Saint-Alban, was built in 1878. The popular memory reports that the water flowing there is good for the kidneys, freshness of the complexion and to relieve rheumatism. The legend adds that every fertile woman who drinks this water, will find herself pregnant and will give birth to a boy.

There was a tip-off in that passage, but I missed it. Instead, I went off on a journey to find out if French calendars of the saints are kinder to the memory of Saint Blanchard than those in English. But again, I could only find a single example that included him.  Here's the record:

Confessor. Feasting at Nesle-la-Repose, in Brie, we know nothing about him except that he is also honored in the diocese of Auch and that a locality still preserves his memory.

Since Nesle-la-Reposte is in Auch, and the fountain is the only candidate for the “locality” that preserves his memory, we’ve gained only corroboration here -- no new information.

I was well into my second night of scraping the bottom of the internet when I finally struck paydirt on the website of La Association A Cloche Fontaine, a church restoration society an hour’s drive southeast of Nesle-le-Reposte. And here, at long last, is the deal:

BLANCHARD (Saint), Blancardus, [was a] confessor in Brie, where he is particularly honored on 10 March. Saint Alban was also revered under the name of Blanchard, interpretation of the Latin albanus, derivative of albus = white.

Boom! Once I got to that breakthrough, confirmation wasn’t hard to find – it was no further away than Anne Franco̧is Arnaud’s 1837 Voyage archéologique et pittoresque dans le département de l'Aube et dans l'ancien diocèse de Troyes, who wrote of something or other that:

It is in one of these chapels that one preserves the curious Byzantine shrine of St. Albun, vulgarly St. Blanchard, whom we have described in the article of the Abbey of Nesle, from which it is derived.

At last the truth comes out: Our “St. Blanchard” is St. Alban by another name!  A “vulgar” name, in the sense of rural and uneducated. You may have heard of St. Alban, who is actually quite a high-profile saint in Britain.  In Brie, which is basically north central France, someone must have figured at some point in the unrecoverable past that St. Alban meant “St. White” in Latin and could be reasonably translated from “St. White” into French. Viola! The elusive St. Blanchard came into being.

If St. Blanchard is just a local alias for St. Alban, shall I tell you about St. Alban? No, not today. The Feast of St. Alban isn't until June 22. Today is the Feast of St. Blanchard, and I've told you pretty much everything there is to know about him. May you pass his day in good health and spirits.

Saint of the Month: St. Fortchern of Trim!

St. Fortchern as portrayed by Eala Enamels, an artisanal enameling 
workshop in Bagenalstown, County Carlow, Ireland.

St. Fortchern of Trim

AKA: Foirtchern son of Feidhlimidh, son of Laoghaire, son of Niall of the Nine Hostages; also St Fortchearn, St. Fortiarnán, St. Foirtchernn
Feast Day: February 17, or perhaps October 11.

Really Existed? It seems fairly likely.
Timeframe: The fifth and perhaps early sixth centuries.
Place: Ireland.

Credentials: Recognized by tradition.
Martyrdom: None.

Patron Saint of: bell-founders.
Symbolism: "A bishop standing among bell-founders," says one site, although I have not been able to find such an image.

St. Fortchern of Trim really was of Trim, a town northwest of Dublin in County Meath. Tradition has it that in the 430s, when the famously industrious St. Patrick arrived in Ireland, he left his buddy St. Loman at the mouth of the Boyne river to watch over the boat. When Patrick hadn’t reported back after 80 days, Loman took the boat upstream as far as the ford at Trim. There he found Fortchern, the son of the local strongman, who immediately took to the gospel like a fish to water. By the time Patrick caught up, the whole Trim metro area was sold on Christianity, and everybody pitched in on the construction of a church, or possibly a monastery, or possibly a cathedral, or perhaps all three.

Patrick and Loman, so the tale goes, took on Fortchern’s education, trained him into the priesthood, and gave him positions of increasing responsibility in Ireland’s growing ecclesiastical infrastructure. Eventually he was abbot at a monastery founded by Loman, and seemed to be the logical successor when the latter's health began to fail in later life. Indeed, at Loman’s death Fortchearn became the Second Bishop of Meath. He only remained in the post for three days, however, until leaving to become a hermit.

That’s where the story ends in some tellings. There is an important coda, however, that sees the “hermit” Fortchern living for up to 70 more years and setting up a monastery and school of his own, where he would oversee the early training of St. Finnian. St. Finnian is a big deal in Irish history – he’s the founder of the important monastery and school at Clonard – so having him as a student is a big feather in Fortchern’s cap.

Why would Fortchern abandon his bishop’s miter after three days, and then start a whole religious complex of his own elsewhere? For that matter, how could he possibly have the means to do such a thing? Well, the key might be his parentage: he was apparently the grandson of the King of Ireland on his father’s side, and of the King of the Britons on his mother's. “King of Ireland” and “King of the Britons” are fairly problematic concepts in the 430s, but we get it: he was one of the beautiful people of the time and place. 

Maybe. The problem is that although Fortchern’s background might explain how he had the means to become such an influential person, it is also very possible that, as an influential person, he had an aristocratic background tacked on to his backstory in order to give it a little more pizzazz and prestige. This kind of thing is after all common as dirt in history and other forms of human storytelling. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) article on the Saints of Meath discusses how the biographies of St. Loman and other saints were “negotiated” in subsequent centuries by secular and ecclesiastic leaders in order to bolster their various claims to authority. Unfortunately, I don’t have a subscription to the ODNB, so our application of this general phenomenon to the specific case of St. Fortchern must remain conjectural.

I haven't quite figured out how it fits into all of the above, but there 
is also a tradition that St. Fortchen was a crack metalsmith, particularly 
adept at forging bells. This church window in County Carlow illustrates 
this aspect of his story.

Saint of the Month: St. Cewydd

St. Cewydd

St. Cewydd's Church at Aberedw, Wales.  Very picturesque.

Feast Day: July 1, although see below.

Really Existed?  Eh, maybe.
Timeframe: Sixth or Seventh Century, maybe?
Place: Wales.

Credentials: Recognized by tradition.
Martyrdom: None.

Patron Saint of: Welsh rain, kind of.
Symbolism: None.


At CatholicSaints.Info, they say that Saint Cewydd is “Known to have lived in Anglesey, Wales. No other information has survived.” FAIL! Because there is a whole article on Saint Cewydd in The Lives of the British Saints: the Saints of Wales and Cornwall and such Irish Saints as Have Dedications in Britain by Sabine Baring-Gould and John Fisher (1907). Given how intertwined most popular sources of information about saints seem to be, I’m genuinely surprised that CatholicSaints.Info missed the memo.

This all sounds very technical and learned in a nineteenth century sort of way, so much so that you almost don’t notice the absence of any context. For instance, who was this Caw fellow? When did he and his son live? By whom are we “also told” this information? And, since “Cewydd” means “son of Caw,” is this whole paragraph just one big tautology?

We get a bit more from M.L. Dawson, writing in the "Archaeology Notes and Queries" section of the 1888 volume of Archaelogia Cambrenses. Quoting Rees’ “Essay on the Welsh Saints,” he explains that Caw was lord of Cem Cawlwyd and sire of a notable family:

This gives us a lot of context, but it also veers off into the world of mythology. It raises the question of which is more useful, to be told that “no other information has survived” or to be told that our guy’s sister was married to the son that the great King Arthur sired on his half-sister. Wait, what? Well, never mind. It’s obvious which approach is more interesting, anyway.

Speaking of interesting, the fun fact about Saint Cewydd is that he is connected with rain. If it rains on St. Cewydd’s Day, it will continue to rain for 40 more days. It’s hard to test his out, because it’s not really clear what day counts as St. Cewydd’s Day. July 1 seems to be the modern front-runner – hence this post – but I see references to July 2, July 13, July 15, the second Sunday in July, and the first Sunday after St. Swithun’s Day.

Speaking of St. Swithun, did you know that if it rains on St. Swithun’s Day, it will continue to rain for 40 more days? So, in modern hagiography – that of the last few centuries – St. Cewydd is usually cast as the Welsh equivalent to St. Swithun. “No tradition remains to tell us how he became the Welsh S. Swithun,” says The Lives of the British Saints. “The idea is probably derived from some general pre-Christian belief regarding the meteorologically prophetic character of some day about that period of the year.”

That is a lovely example of a throwaway sentence, dignified, learned, and almost empty of meaning. It also fails, like other sources I peeked at, to ask the obvious question: Since “Cewydd” and “Swithun” don’t really sound all that different, isn’t it probable that their overlapping dates and legends are just a matter of people getting them confused one with another? Maybe St. Cewydd is the Welsh St. Swithun because people in Wales started saying “Cewydd” instead of “Swithun.”

It can’t work the other way around, because St. Swithun was Bishop of Winchester and has a relatively robust paper trail.  St. Cewydd is said to predate St. Swithun, but frankly St. Cewydd's paper trail looks pretty flimsy to this amateur.  Maybe no other information has survived after all.

Saint of the Month: St. Apollonia

The Martyrdom of St. Apollonia, Jacob Jordaens, 1628

St. Apollonia

AKA: Saint Apollonia of Alexandria
Feast Day: February 9.
Not to be confused with: Saint Leucio of Apollonia,Saint Tirso of Apollonia,Saint Isaurus of Apollonia,Saint Innocent of Apollonia, Saint Felix of Apollonia, Saint Jeremias of Apollonia, Saint Peregrinus of Apollonia

Really Existed? Very probably.
Timeframe: Third Century.
Place: Alexandria, Egypt.

Credentials: Venerated by tradition.
Martyrdom: Tortured, burned alive.

Patron Saint of: Dentists, people suffering from toothache and dental problems.
Symbolism: Teeth, pincers, a palm branch.


Tomorrow is the Feast of Saint Apollonia.

Q: Then why are you talking about her today, instead of tomorrow?

A: Because I lost track of what day it was.  Shut up.

Q: How do you know that tomorrow is the Feast of Saint Apollonia?

A: That's better.  I know because it's the entry for February 9th in the Little Pictorial Lives of the Saints, a recent gift from the fabulous Mrs.5000.

At 625 pages long, it is really not especially "little."  It was published in 1878 and got a special shout-out from Pope Leo XIII in 1879; my copy shows a copyright renewal in 1894 and was inscribed by "Virginia Wright Wall" in 1955. 

Sometimes I regret living in a time when we are expected to show so
much restraint in our use of fonts.

It takes a lot of text from Butler, the wonderfully earnest and turgid eighteenth century hagiographer, and this makes it very retro and awesome in a dusty sort of way.  It is also matter-of-factly gruesome, and often a bit glib about how much fun it is to be a martyr.

Obviously, Little Pictorial Lives immediately becomes the prize of my little hagiographic library.  To celebrate, we will let it tell us about St. Apollonia in its own words!  I'll just add for context that the kernel of Apollonia's story comes from a letter written at the time by the Bishop of Alexandria, so we're pretty sure that she was a real person who met a real unpleasant fate.  Parental Advisory: This saint's life depicts violence and disturbing images.

I predict that Dr. Noisewater will make a reference to Apollonia 6 reference in the comments.

Saint of the Month: St. Laura of Saint Catherine of Siena

St. Laura of Saint Catherine of Siena

AKA: María Laura Montoya Upegui, Mother Laura
Feast Day: October 21.

Really Existed? Definitely.
Timeframe: 1874-1949.
Place: Colombia.

Credentials: Canonized by Pope Francis in 2013.
Martyrdom: None.

Patron Saint of: People suffering from racial discrimination, Orphans.
Symbolism: None.

To many of us, Saints seem like figures from deep history, but that's not always true. Pope John Paul II canonized some 483 saints, more than five times the number of any other Pope since the 16th century. Most of them were from the modern era, broadly speaking. John Paul II himself has since become a saint. His feast day is tomorrow, October 22! This is hardly a secret -- 800,000 people packed into Rome for the ceremony of his canonization -- but it is still deeply counterintuitive to some of us who are not tied into day-to-day religious practice.

It was Pope Francis, the man currently holding the office, who canonized St. Laura of Saint Catherine of Siena. When you look her up, a feeling that her conceptual distance from you and I is palpably different from that of the ancient saints is immediately evident. For instance, there are plenty of pictures of her.

With so many of the saints, it is unclear how much history is preserved in their legends, if there is any real history at all. With St. Laura of Saint Catherine of Siena, the essential biography is so substantiated as to feel a bit prosaic. She was born in Colombia on May 26, 1874, as María Laura Montoya Upegui. She studied to be a teacher. She wanted to be a nun. She became interested in Native American issues, and became a missionary and advocate. In 1914 she founded the Congregation of the Missionary Sisters of Mary Immaculate and St. Catherine of Siena. Something of her stance within Catholicism can be divined from an article released the Catholic News Agency:

Mother Laura composed for her "daughters" a directory and other writings... to help them understand better their call to serve God among the Indians, and to live a balance between apostolic and contemplative life. She taught by example the "pedagogy of love" as the only way to teach the Indians, the way which allowed access into their heart and culture to bring them Jesus Christ.

She was wheelchair bound towards the end of her life, and died on October 21, 1949.

So, here we have someone who was by all accounts very kind, who made great sacrifices to combat prejudice, and who was undeniably pious. You may or may not see some ambiguities in missionary outreach to Native peoples, but it is certain that she was doing what she felt was right, and what her religious institution asked of her. And so, she seems pretty saintly, does she not?

But that is not quite everything. To be a full-fledged saint, you must be credited with two miracles. And this is where things get potentially awkward, if you don't believe in miracles. Do you believe in miracles? I don't. And if I did, I would find them deeply, deeply troubling on a theological level. Which is beside the point, but I just mention it to indicate how uncomfortable I get when I read passages like this:

The beatification miracle involved the 1994 cure of an 86-year-old woman with uterine cancer.... The canonization miracle involves the healing of Dr. Carlos Eduardo Restrepo, who was suffering from lupus, kidney damage and muscular degeneration. After praying to Blessed Laura, the doctor was said to be completely cured.

Now, I rejoice for the recovery of Dr. Restrepo, who sounds like a nice guy. I'm sure that his religious faith helped him through his sickness, which is awesome. But for purposes of canonization, we are asked to believe that he asked the late Ms. Upegui for help, and she put in a good word for him with God, who then transgressed his own physical laws in order to keep Dr. Restrepo in this mortal vale of tears. Also, because this occurance is being used to substantiate Mother Laura's claim specifically, the bare minimum of rigor requires us to assume that he prayed to her alone, and not to any other saints or to God or Jesus directly. Otherwise, there would be no reason to assume that it was her specifically who was instrumental in the cure. But of course, he doesn't really make that claim. He would be fibbing if he did.

I am sure Dr. Restrepo accepts his miraculous recovery in good faith. But as part of this package, I wonder if he doesn't think from time to time about how disturbing it is that God would have behaved so capriciously in his particular case. Through the sustainence of his life here on Earth, after all, he has been kept from his promised union with God, possibly for a great many decades. Is it really fair that he has been singled out for this punishment, and if so is it fair to implicate Sister Laura in his misfortune?

Well, I am sure that the lay of the religious land looked far different to St. John Paul II and Pope Francis. It probaby looks rather different to you as well. My main point is only this: that from out in the grandstands, where I sit, it is easy to be comfortable with the semi-legendary saints of long ago. It is a lot harder to get my head around a saint who lived in our own times.

Having said that, I wish you a very happy feast of St. Laura of Saint Catherine of Siena.