Friday was All Saints Day and Saturday was All Souls Day.
Thanks to secular society, these are forgotten in the pervy hoopla around Halloween.
All Saints Day commemorates the people who have set heroic examples for us as Christians.
Mary is the Queen of the Saints. Saint Joseph, her earthly protector and spouse, is there with her.
So is John the Baptist, and his parents Zachary and Elizabeth.
The Apostles are there as Christ’s own disciples. For the record, Peter and his brother Andrew, John and his brother James, Thomas (the doubter), Philip, Matthew (the taxer), Bartholomew (Nathanael), Simon the Zealot, James (Son of Alphaeus), and Jude (Thaddeus). And Matthias, who the Apostles picked to replace Judas Iscariot.
Execution of Saint Peter, by Luca Giordano
There is St. Stephen, the first martyr.
And so are many women of the Faith during the time of the Roman Empire. Mary Magdalene, who left prostitution for charity. Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus. Other women like Salome (not the promiscuous little skank who was Herod the Incestuous’ stepdaughter and niece), but Salome the mother of the Apostles James and John. Mary (wife of Alphaeus) the mother of the other Apostle James and Joses. Mary Magdalene, Salome, and Mary (wife of Alphaeus) were there at the Cross on Good Friday, and they were the three women who went to Jesus’ tomb on Easter Sunday to anoint His body, and Christ revealed Himself to Mary Magdalene as being risen.
There was a woman called Berenike (Greek for “victory bearer”), who wiped Christ’s face to refresh Him as He carried the crossbeam of His Cross on Good Friday. The Latinized spelling of her name? Veronica. Her spouse? Zacchaeus the short tax collector who Christ converted to do good.
Veronica wipes the face of Jesus. Still from “The Passion of the Christ”
There are the women like Lydia the wealthy dealer in purple cloth, who provided for Paul the Apostle and his companions and their works. There was Tabitha, the woman who sewed for the poor, who Peter the Apostle raised from the dead.
And the martyrs. Agatha. Lucy. Agnes. Cecilia. Anastasia. Felicity and Perpetua. The first four were girls or young women who powerful pagans wanted for sex. Anastasia was a widow who was burned alive for professing the Faith.
Perpetua guides the sword to her own neck. The soldier did not want to murder her, but he was under orders to do so. Perpetua was more afraid of losing her soul than losing her head.
Felicity and Perpetua were experienced women. Perpetua, a young, educated, and hot noblewoman, was nursing an infant when the Romans put her and Felicity to the sword. They put Felicity, a slave woman, in the cell with Perpetua, and the two became friends. Felicity gave birth in prison.
There are non-Catholics who the Church recognizes as saintly. These include the Patriarchs Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the Maccabee family of Jewish warrior heroes, other leaders like Joseph and Moses and Joshua and King David and the Prophets like Samuel and Elijah and Isaiah and Jeremiah, who risked life and limb to try to steer the Jewish people right.
Honorable mention also goes to Esther, the Jewish queen of the Persians for risking her head to save her people, and to Naomi and Ruth. Ruth, the loyal Moabite woman, was the great-grandmother of King David, and one of the ancestors of Jesus Christ. There was Deborah the judge, who held deliberations in the open so she couldn’t be slandered. And Hannah the prophetess, Samuel’s mother, who dedicated him to the Lord.
Susannah the Jewish beauty in Babylonian captivity who resisted the lecherous clerics at the risk of her own head, is also considered a saint. The prophet Daniel, as a teenager, defended her in court and got the lechers to contradict each others’ testimony. Props to Daniel for using his wits to defend the innocent, props to Susannah for being faithful to her husband, and props to the Jews for being for justice enough to consider Daniel’s shattering of the evil clerics in court and punishing the evil clerics instead of punishing an innocent woman.
We also mention the people of Ethiopia. Philip the Apostle evangelized one of Queen Candace’s officials. There was a Jewish community in Ethiopia, which dated to the time of King Solomon of Israel and the Queen of the South (Ethiopia). Missionaries came to preach Christ to the people. So a nation in Africa has the honor of being the first to be called Christian.
[Roughly 25 students from Ethiopia were attending Cumberland College in Whitley County, Kentucky when I worked there as a reporter. They attended our tiny Catholic church as it was the form of Christianity closest to their Coptic faith. I hosted three students at my home and introduced them to bourbon … at the time, Whitley County was dry. But not my pantry!]
Then the march of saints through history. Here are just a few:
Saints George and Sebastian. Roman soldiers and martyrs. Saint Valentine, priest and martyr, and friend to young people seeking good spouses. He also restored sight to a blind teenage girl and sent her a kind note before his death, leading to the tradition of valentines.
Saint Monica, whose prayers and efforts turned her lecher son Augustine into a Christian, a priest, a bishop, and a philosopher. Saints Benedict and Scholastica, brother and sister, who founded the Benedictine orders of monks and nuns.
St. Patrick, Apostle of Ireland. St. Boniface, Apostle to the Germans.
St. Nicholas, bishop, child protector and trafficking opponent. His charity led to the gift giving tradition that comes with the Christmas season.
Then the medieval and Renaissance and Reformation era saints. Saints Cyril and Methodius, who brought the Faith and the Cyrillic alphabet to Eastern Europe. St. Anthony. St. Catherine of Siena, a writer and activist nun of great charity who did everything from persuading a pope to return to Rome to holding a man’s head while he was being executed wrongfully, to give him courage in facing death. St. Thomas Aquinas, the greatest theologian and thinker of the Church. St. Francis of Assisi. St. Ignatius and St. Francis Xavier; Basque soldiers and founders of the Jesuits; the Jesuits used to do a great deal of good. St. Rose of Lima and St. Teresa of Avila, saints from Peru and Spain.
St. Peter Claver, the apostle of African slaves, who fought for better treatment of slaves, and fought to end slavery.
Detail from “Oath of Queen Jadwiga” by Josef Simmler
Original was stolen by Nazis during Wold War Two, and belongs to Poland
And there were even a few saints among the leaders of Europe. Saint Bridget, queen of Sweden. Saint Elizabeth, queen of Hungary. Edward the Martyr and Edward the Confessor, both kings of England. Saint Casimir, Crown Prince of Poland. Saint Louis IX, crusader king of France, after whom the city Saint Louis is named. Vincennes, Indiana is named for a little town in France where Saint Louis held court under an oak tree so the peasants wouldn’t be intimidated when they brought their troubles to him. St. Jadwiga (Harriet), the queen of Poland and Lithuania, renowned for her charity to the poor from her own means. Saint Joan of Arc, the martyr recognized as a saint only a century ago, in 1920.
I have mentioned Saint Bernadette and Saint Therese of Lisieux in past columns. Andy Williams, Jennifer Warnes, and Anne Murray have honored St. Bernadette with songs. I have also mentioned the magnificent Apostle Paul and the best writer of all time, Saint Luke. And the redoubtable Mother Cabrini.
And I have mentioned St. Aufidia, who is known only to a few. After a re-enactment of William Henry Harrison and settlers against Tecumseh and his braves in Vincennes, Indiana in 2017, 99 and I then went to St. Francis Xavier Church, the old country cathedral in Vincennes, and made a visit to the crypt while a wedding was just starting in the church above. Four bishops for Indiana, all from France, are buried in the crypt, and religious art and sculptures stand as tokens of the French settlers’ devotion to Christ, the saints, Mary, and their clergy. A remembrance of a macabre but totally respectful European practice marked the people’s giving honor to St. Aufidia, a Latin girl, as she witnessed to the Faith at the cost of her life. She died, a martyr, a victim of the Romans. Her bone fragments, on display on a red velvet stand in the crypt, are a stark reminder of what it cost some to witness to the living God.
There are far more saints than days on the calendar, so the Catholic Church picked November 1 as a day to honor them all. Halloween started as an “eve of All Saints Day” commemoration, and it is now a spooks and goblins holiday. Much like the Christmas season has turned from the worship of Christ to the worship of consumerism.
I have been blessed to see the work of men like Junipero Serra, who evangelized California and showed the American Indians how to live in European-American society. Ditto for Father Kino, who worked in Mexico and Arizona. 99 and I have placed our hands on the sarcophagus of King Wenceslas of the Czechs who died a martyr to the Faith as he fought his pagan brother and other homicidal members of his court. We prayed before the tomb of his grandmother St. Ludmilla, whose own pagan daughter strangled her. We stood before the memorial to St. John Nepomuk, who a king killed because he would not divulge the queen’s confession. The king suspected his queen had an affair and wanted names. These holy people lay interred inside the churches of Prague Castle.
In Ireland, 99 and I stood at Tara, where St. Patrick evangelized the High King and members of his court, outside, at night, inside a ring of torches and armed guards. And on the eve of All Saints Day 2001, we attended Mass in the little village church in Lorraine in France where Joan of Arc was baptized, attended Mass, received Penance, Communion, and Confirmation, and learned her faith before God Himself sent her on a mission to free her people from the English. Since the town is remote, we were immediately the objects of the parishioners’ attention that evening. The priest knew enough English and 99 knew enough French so he and his parishioners could learn a little about us and what brought us to the home parish of such a famous saint.
St. Anthony’s Chapel, Pittsburgh
And in Pittsburgh 99 and I saw the skulls, bones, and other relics of many martyrs and holy men and women of God, and a thorn from the Crown of Thorns. Father Suitbert Mollinger, the Belgian pastor of Saint Anthony’s Chapel, in the Troy Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh, near where the steel mills used to be, had brought these to America when mobs in Germany and Italy were looting churches to support secular rulers of those lands and to grab the gold and silver that encased the relics. The church also has life-size Stations of the Cross carved from wood and painted like Nativity Scene figures which the pastor rescued from a church in Germany. St. Anthony’s Chapel is macabre and sobering at the same time, a place where I have undergone thoroughly humbling examinations of conscience in the presence of the bones of those whose lives and deaths made them great.
If you are a Catholic or an Orthodox Christian, you are familiar with relics, and the role of saints and martyrs in the Faith. If you are a Protestant, come to this great shrine in a modest neighborhood in Pittsburgh on a Saturday afternoon. Even though the speaker will be a fervent Catholic, do not shy away from the humbling and awe inspiring Thorn and bones of the Apostles and martyrs. Your faith as a Christian traces back through many of these people too.
Even a playboy like Tom Selleck gave a nod to Father Damien of Molokai. In one of the Magnum episodes, TC was flying him to Molokai to give Christmas presents to children at an orphanage there. Father Damien, aka Damien De Veuster, ran a colony for lepers there and was a martyr to the disease.
Believe it or not, Baldwin the Leper King, a youth who was bold enough to beat Saladin in battle in the Holy Land and Robert the Bruce, Liberator of Scotland, were lepers. Baldwin died at 25; Robert died in his early 50s.
Are there saints and martyrs in our times? Yes.
Are they all Catholics? No.
Mother Teresa is regarded as saintly by Christians and non-Christians alike for her great charity. And even she had her detractors, when she personally rubbed the Clintons’ evil faces in abortion, like she would do to a dog who crapped in a house.
Others attacked her for showing charity to people they consider being of no value. Many of these share the eugenic Nazi-like vision of Margaret Sanger and the leftists who view charity as a waste when without charity, the poor die off and no money is wasted on their care, or the poor become violent and help prompt the overthrow of non leftist governments.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the anti-Nazi German Protestant pastor, was hanged by the Nazis only a couple of weeks before they surrendered.
Edith Stein, a Jewish convert to Catholicism, died as a Catholic nun in the gas chamber at Auschwitz in 1942. More than 2000 Catholic priests, mostly Poles, died at Dachau during the rule of Hitler.
(Source: Priestblock 25487: A Memoir Of Dachau, by Jean Bernard, translated by Deborah Lucas Schneider, Zaccheus Press, 2007)
That doesn’t count Maximilian Kolbe, a Polish priest who volunteered to die in place of a prisoner picked at random at Auschwitz to die. The Nazis deprived him water and starved him to death in the summer of 1941.
Hundreds of thousands of people tried to shelter Jews during World War Two. The Nazis discovered and killed many of them. Corrie Ten Boom, a Dutch woman, and her family, sheltered many Jews and Resistance fighters. Her book “The Hiding Place,” is a well-known classic and a movie. She survived the concentration camps, but her sister did not. They were Protestant martyrs.
The people of Lourdes, the French Pyrenees village where Saint Bernadette grew up, sheltered many Jews and helped them escape across the mountains into Spain. Because of this, a grateful Jewish writer wrote “Song of Bernadette,” which became a classic book and movie.
Leftist scum dig up corpse of Nun and display her, Spanish Civil War
The Spanish leftists known as Republicans murdered thousands of priests and nuns during the Spanish Civil War. They raped many nuns, and dug up dead nuns to desecrate their corpses. This is what to expect if Antifa and like-minded scumbags ever obtain any power here. They need to be exterminated like the vermin they are.
Leninist Communists and Stalinist Communists killed at least 20 million Russians, Belarusian, and Ukrainians in the 1920s and 1930s. In the winter of 1932-1933, the Reds deliberately starved 5 to 7 million Ukrainians to death. It took Hitler 12 years to have 6 million Jews murdered.
Chinese girl put to the sword — victim of the Japs, Nanking, 1936
The Japs in World War Two killed 20 million or so people, mostly Chinese, by very brutal methods. They also raped and murdered many Asian women and even some American and Australian and European nurses they took captives. The women who suffered worst among the European captives the Japs took were Dutch women and teen girls in what is now Indonesia. Many of the Dutch females, living in what is now Indonesia as colonials, suffered rape and beheading. The Japs cut open many Russian women they caught in Manchuria during their truly vile human experiments at Unit 731, a chemical and biological warfare research slaughterhouse in Manchuria.
I can’t bring myself to feel sorry for the Japanese for getting nuked and firebombed. They perpetrated far worse evils on the peoples of the countries they invaded. If that is less than Christian of me, then it is what it is. I am imperfect too.
Ditto for the Krauts. Hitler and his scum murdered 20 million Slavs and six million Jews and millions of others.
During and after World War Two, the Soviets murdered many Eastern Europeans, especially in Poland during and immediately after the war, in Czechia and Slovakia after the war, and in Hungary during the Uprising of 1956. Pro-Soviets in the Deep State’s State Department signaled Khrushchev it was okay for him to unleash the Red Army on the Hungarians.
Hungarian girl and national flag during the Uprising, 1956. God Save Hungary!
In Yugoslavia, nationalist Communist Tito ordered thousands of executions. The Americans and British turned over two million Russians and other Eastern Europeans to Stalin in a forced repatriation massacre called Operation Keelhaul. The Soviets either murdered or worked to death virtually all of these unfortunates. Among the victims were the Vlasov troops – Soviet POWs in German uniforms under the command of Russian general and POW Vlasov who turned on the Nazis and liberated Prague from the Germans in 1945, while the Red Army parked their tanks to allow the Germans to slaughter Czechs. Vlasov and his men surrendered to our troops, who turned them over to the Soviets on orders from General Eisenhower. All were murdered.
Mao and his followers murdered 40 to 60 million Chinese.
In today’s world, many Christians are victims of Islamist animals who claim the Koran allows them to lie, cheat, and steal, rape and murder those who are not Moslems. Al-Baghdadi, the serial rapist and coward who blew himself and three children into chunks when Americans attacked his compound, raped Kayla Mueller and ordered her beheaded.
Kayla Mueller. RIP, Child of God!
Yazidi survivors of the rape camp said al-Baghdadi’s people pulled out Kayla’s fingernails to torture her and keep her from scratching them. She spurned their orders to convert to Mohammedanism. She shielded other captive females who were Yazidi pagans from worse abuse. She suffered serial rape from al-Baghdadi (who the Washington Post’s anti-American scumsuckers called “an austere scholar”) and others, but reportedly turned down a chance to escape with the Yazidi females because she thought her fair skin and non-Middle Eastern voice and mannerisms would give the other females away. Miss Mueller had come to that part of the world as a lay Protestant aid worker and idealist who wanted to serve. Despite the help she gave to Arab people, Al-Baghdadi had her head cut off.
Christians from around the Middle East have suffered this same fate for as long as there have been Moslems up till today. Virtually all the martyrs from then until today have been Orthodox Christians or Catholics.
There are many martyrs to Leftists, to Nazis, to Jap militarists, to Communists, and to Islamists in the last 100 or so years. They stretch from the many millions of people in humble stations in life on up to Nicholas and Alexandra of Russia, and their four daughters and their son. And to Alexandra’s sister Elisabeth, who as an Orthodox Christian nun suffered being thrown down a mine shaft and silenced with grenades and fire by the Communist humanitarians who captured her. Lenin personally rejoiced at her murder.
Princess Elisabeth. Widow, Orthodox Nun, Martyr.
And Princess Mafalda of Italy, who the Nazis on Hitler’s orders captured, raped in prison, and left to bleed to death of her wounds during an air raid.
Our own John F. Kennedy, a Purple Heart-earning war hero, was a martyr to the Deep State because he didn’t believe in letting them keep their illicit powers. Kennedy committed many sins, but the death of his son Patrick in August 1963, according to what I have learned, brought him to reconcile with Jackie, go to Confession, and stop his serial sex romps with many female admirers in the days before he was murdered.
And what about the many who lose their lives serving their fellow men and women as military people, first responders like police and firemen and paramedics and emergency room nurses, or those who step up to shield victims of crime like my own uncle, Father Bernard Tobin, did?
JFK’s sins that he evidently tried to atone for lead to this thought:
Remember the saints were not perfect, but they became servants of God. They heeded Jesus’ admonition to the woman caught in adultery: “Go and avoid this sin.”
Mary Magdalene’s sins have been mentioned. So have those of Saint Augustine.
King David is an object lesson in sinning and redemption. His greatest sin was the arranged murder of Uriah the Hittite to cover up for his screwing Uriah’s wife Bathsheba. Far worse than anything we have done.
When Nathan the Prophet to his face accused King David of this horrible crime, David repented and humbly accepted punishment. King David’s Psalms grace the Catholic Mass, between the Epistles on Sundays and before the Gospels on other days.
All the Apostles except John fled on Good Friday. Jesus forgave them. But those who fled suffered painful executions. They died as martyrs.
We mock or shake our heads in disgust over the Kardashians. But Kim’s recent trip to Armenia and her baptism in the church there spotlights Armenia as being the second nation, after Ethiopia, to be officially Christian. Both nations are primarily Orthodox Christians, like the Greeks and Russians. Kim’s trip also spotlighted the Turks’ genocide of the Armenians.
And if baptism was genuine for Kim, her act will clean up. She is not beyond redemption, nor are any of us who wish to follow God and live as His children.
It is in our fallen nature to sin and to be cowardly. It takes grace and courage and discipline to do better.
It is also in our imperfect nature to forget what is important.
When God saved Peter the Apostle from Herod the Incestuous’ guards and executioners, he went to the house of Mary the mother of John Mark, where Christians were huddling in fear, praying. The house had a barrier fence around it. Peter knocked at the gateway door of fence. A maid named Rhoda recognized Peter’s voice, and in great joy ran inside the house and told the others Peter was outside. Since they didn’t believe her, an argument ensued. Meanwhile Peter was cooling his heels in the darkness. The people inside finally came to check on Rhoda’s story. They let Peter in.
Peter stayed just long enough to have them tell James the local bishop (and the author of the Epistle of James) and the Christian community that he was OK and then he left.
Poor Rhoda must have felt foolish. But how many times have we, in a state of fear or astonishment, done something dumb?
John Mark had an even more embarrassing episode as a follower of Jesus. On Holy Thursday, he was following Our Lord and the scurvy crew of Temple guards and leaders and other assorted riffraff who were taking Him from the Garden of Gethsemane back into Jerusalem to torture Him and have Him condemned. The Apostles had fled, so all of a sudden John Mark, who had wrapped himself in a very large linen cloth, was conspicuous. The scurvies grabbed John Mark, and he escaped by running away naked. This guy was the Mark who wrote the Gospel …. he described for the ages his own most humiliating experience of fear and exposure. Anyone who could debase himself like that for all time had to be telling the truth.
This leads in to All Souls Day, in which Catholics pray for the repose of souls not in Hell, but not purified enough yet to be in Heaven. Not all Christians agree with us, but we will pray for their loved ones as well as ours, for God has not revealed to us who He has called home.
Why do we pray for the dead?
Because God commands us to.
We find in the Book of Maccabees 2-12:43-46 the story of how Judas Maccabee took up an offering to pray for the souls of his dead soldiers so their sins would be forgiven. The scriptural writer notes that if they had gone to Heaven right away, there would be no need for prayer, and if they had gone to Hell, no amount of prayer was going to get them out.
The New Testament and early Church history have ample proof the early Christians believed in Purgatory because the Church Fathers taught it.
St. Peter in 1 Peter 3:19 says, “It was in the spirit also that He went to preach to the spirits in prison.” Jesus was talking to people who had died, but were neither in Heaven or Hell. Peter and virtually every other pope for the first three centuries of the Church’s existence died a martyr.
St. Paul, in 1 Corinthians 3:11-15 says, “No one can lay a foundation other than the one that has been laid, namely Jesus Christ. If different ones build on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay, or straw, the work of each will be made clear. The Day will disclose it. That day will make its appearance with fire, and fire will test the quality of each man’s work. If the building a man has raised on this foundation (Christianity) still stands, he will receive his recompense; if a man’s building burns, he will suffer loss. He himself will be saved, but only as one fleeing through fire.”
St. John in 1 John 5:17 says “True, all wrongdoing is sin, but not all sin is deadly.” John was the only Apostle not to die a martyr. But then, he was the only Apostle present on Calvary when Christ died for our sins on the Cross.
These New Testament readings all point to people not purified enough to enter Heaven, but certainly not evil enough or uncaring enough to deserve Hell. That, folks, is most of us. Most sins are sins of falling short, not sins of plotting to prey upon others.
Why do we pray for the dead?
Because it’s in our nature.
Prehistoric man and our Native American Indians worked hard, and invented tools that would save them labor. They loved art, and expressed it to the limits of their abilities.
They loved their spouses, their children, their friends.
They buried their dead with respect.
They worshiped God to the limits of their abilities.
Despite their primitive natures, they were thinking creatures, whom God made in His image and likeness, and infused with souls.
“Appeal to the Great Spirit” by Cyrus Dallin
They understood there was an afterlife and there was something greater than themselves. They erred in worshiping Nature, or the Sun, the creation, rather than God the Creator, but they were much too intelligent to worship themselves.
Self-worship is the lunacy of too many people today who think they are the center of their own universe. Those who worship themselves have an idiot for a deity.
Why do we pray for the dead?
Because we all need help, we benefit from praying, and we benefit from being prayed for.
History records eyewitnesses of only two people going bodily into Heaven. The Virgin Mary, of course, and Elijah the prophet, in his fiery chariot. Almost nobody gets that kind of curbside service to the Pearly Gates! So those of us who have to climb or hitchhike or low-crawl to Heaven need all the help we can get.
Elijah and Elisha, and the Fiery Chariot
The early Christians held Masses in the Catacombs – the tunnels under Rome – and used the coffins of the dead for altars. The early Christians’ graffiti in the Catacombs refer constantly to prayers for the dead.
St. Monica asked her son St. Augustine to say Masses for her soul when she died. Augustine was a long-time lecher who repented, and became one of the greatest philosophers of the Church. Monica prayed long and hard for him to pull his life out of the sewer … showing the power of a mother’s prayers.
The great and holy people throughout history asked for the prayers of others and the prayers of those in Heaven. Even the Apostle Paul and Joan of Arc asked for these prayers. The Bible records Paul’s requests, and the national archives of France record Joan’s requests.
Bear in mind Joan of Arc was able to see and embrace St. Catherine and St. Margaret, who had been martyred by beheading in the Middle East many years before she lived. Bear in mind Joan of Arc saw Michael the Archangel. And bear in mind St. Paul saw Our Lord Himself!
Joan of Arc, when she was on trial for her life, told the evil judges that the saints told her she would be rewarded in Heaven, and this made her able to bear her trials.
One of the evil judges asked Joan if she was in the state of grace (“saved,” for our Protestant readers). This was a trap. If she said yes, she was guilty of presumption and pride. If she said no, she was confessing to being an evil person.
One of the judges, who had a conscience, cried out, “It is a terrible question! Joan, you don’t have to answer!”
But Joan did answer. “If I am in the state of grace, may God keep me there. If I am not in the state of grace, may God put me there.”
Florence Carrez in the film “Trial of Joan of Arc”, 1962
Joan could barely read and write, but she could show courage and judgment.
She also showed concern for the dying, even the English soldiers her men mortally wounded. She had to attack them and beat them as invaders, but she sat with them as well as with her own men who were on the verge of death after a battle, and had the Last Rites given to them.
Joan also had self-control. Joan wanted to marry, and she had France’s bravest men under her command. She had a crush on one of her officers, the Duke D’Alençon, who was married. But she behaved herself. She even was kind enough to tell the Duke’s wife it had been revealed to her (Joan) he would come home to her (his wife) safe from the wars. This set the Duke’s wife’s heart at ease, for she had been worrying hard about him. Joan set a great example in personal morality as well as courage, wisdom, and charity.
D’Alençon and Joan’s other surviving officers testified to these and other things about Joan when Pope Callistus III, at the request of Joan’s mother and the Inquisition officer of France, ordered a trial of rehabilitation to determine if Joan’s name should be cleared. (The Inquisition had examined and endorsed Joan, and had tried unsuccessfully to block the English from executing Joan.) The officials cleared Joan’s name, declared her conviction a fraud based on political treachery, and convicted Bishop Cauchon, who spearheaded her conviction and execution, of a number of offenses.
Back to my point. Joan ran an army and yet still made time to pray for the dead and dying.
99 says a saint whose work she once read said, “Every soul has a price. If someone is unwilling to pay for his own soul, someone else must buy it for him.”
Cloistered nuns pray for souls to turn to God … when no one else will. The wicked, the sinful … and those who have lost all hope especially benefit from the nuns’ work … when they turn to God.
Some of you have read my tributes to Dad and Mom Sherlock, to Grandpa Charlie, Granny Theresa, Grandpa Leo, Bobbie, and Granny Ruth. And my brother Bryan, my sister Lizzie, and my close friend Greg the Sicilian.
And to my uncles Chuck, Donald, Rusty, and Joe, and to my aunts Billie, Olive, Lorraine, and Jess.
To role models like Mr. Deagon and Mr. Repucci, and to their wonderful wives who helped so many children and young adults.
And to the many who came before them to build this nation, and before they came to America, the many of my blood and the blood of friends of mine who helped build Christendom in Europe.
Think about your beloved dead, not only on a day like All Souls Day, but as many days as possible. Their sacrifices, and the sacrifices of people from Adam and Eve to the present led to the way of life you enjoy. Pray for all …. and live in a way that would make your loved ones proud of you. Let them know their sacrifices were worth it.
The same goes for our great nation. There are many heroes listed in the history books. But there are also millions of men and women who contributed as service members, first responders, and others who faced death and/or deprivation to make this nation a better place.
Don’t take liberty and prosperity for granted. Virtually all Democrats and a large percentage of Republicans want to take them away from you and your children forever. Become informed, then give some time and money to help those like President Trump and like-minded people at the national, state, and local level. Your nation’s liberty and prosperity are gifts that have to be protected every generation.
Joy is meant to be shared. So are worry and sorrow. The burden of worry and the burden of sorrow becomes lighter if there are more people to carry it. And helping others carry the burden of worry or the burden of sorrow helps you keep your mind off of troubles of your own. For in helping others, you are building your own character and winning a measure of mercy from God for your own sins.
Reach out to those who ask for your help…. and those who need your help but don’t ask for it … in their times of trouble. Help them and pray for them … one of the greatest acts you can do is selflessly seek the help of God for those who truly need His help. You’re not addressing God here like a little kid addresses Santa Claus before Christmas … you’re being a person of good will taking time out from your own concerns to help a brother or sister who could use some help.
I truly believe that God hears and answers the prayers of those who ask favors, not for themselves, but for someone else who is in need. It must touch even His mighty heart to see one of His children in need, and seeing His other children pleading with Him with all their hearts to help His daughter or son in need.
We pray for the repose of our loved ones’ souls. We pray for the loved ones of the dead, so they will have the strength to live their lives in a way that would make those who went before them proud of them. We pray for ourselves, so that we might have the will to live life the way God wants us to live it.
For all of you, regardless of your denomination, as you travel to your eternal reward, may the road rise to greet you and may the wind always be at your back. May the sun shine warm upon your face, and may God hold you in the palm of His hand. May you make it safely into Heaven long before the Devil knows you’ve passed on.
May God bless you all, every day, as long as you shall live.
SHERLOCK RESEARCH
WE CAN SHOW YOU HOW TO BE YOUR OWN DETECTIVE.
