Saint of the Day - St. Ulric

St. Ulric was born in 890 A.D. at Kyburg, Zurich, Switzerland. His father was Count Hucpald through whom Ulric was related to the dukes of Alamannia and the imperial family.

A sickly child, it was predicted that Ulric would not live long. However, his life of prayer and study at the monastic school of St. Gall (where he was an excellent student) did more for his health than all the doctors' remedies.

Ulric served as chamberlain to his uncle, Blessed Adalbero, the Bishop of Augsburg, before being appointed Bishop himself. As Bishop, Ulric was fully devoted to his parishioners to whom he offered instruction, comfort, and relief. Butler's Lives of the Saints states "He excused himself from attending the court, knowing of what importance the presence of a bishop is to his flock, for which he is to give a severe account to God." Ulric further devoted himself to building as many churches as possible in order to make the blessings of the Church more accessible to the common people. He was known for a strict adherence to the laws of the Church, which he also demanded of his clergy.

When barbarians attacked his diocese of Augsburg, St. Ulric led the people in prayer which included processions and devotions. Their prayers were answered when the invaders were seized with fear and fled in a panic. They were met and defeated by Emperor Otho.

Ulric passed away on July 4, 973. In his last hours he had ashes strewn on the floor in the shape of a cross and sprinkled with holy water. He was then laid upon this cross on which he died while the clergy sang the litany. He was buried in the Church of St. Afra which he had rebuilt.

St. Ulric was the first saint to be canonized by a pope (Pope John XV) which led to the canonical process which the church uses today to determine sainthood.

He is the patron saint against birth complications and of pregnant women because legend states that pregnant women who drank from his chalice had easy deliveries. Similarly, the touch of his pastoral cross was said to heal those bitten by rabid dogs and earth from his grave is said to repel rodents making him the patron saint against mice and moles. He is also patron saint: against faintness; against dizziness; against fever; against frenzy; against vertigo; of the city and diocese of Augsburg, Germany; of Creazzo, Italy; of happy death; and of weavers.

Saint of the Day - St. Thomas the Apostle

Did you know that in the Church every day is a feast day? That's right, each day of the year is the feast of at least one saint. So I've decided that I'm going to start doing a daily feature on the saint of the day. Today - St. Thomas the Apostle.

St. Thomas is best known as "doubting Thomas," the apostle who told his fellow disciples that he would not believe that Christ had risen and had appeared to them "unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side." A week later, according to the Gospel of John, Christ appeared again to the apostles and instructed Thomas to "put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving but believe."

St. Thomas is mentioned in the Gospels several times prior to this. Catholic Online describes him as a "dedicated but impetuous follower of Christ." This is due primarily to the occasion described in John's Gospel when Jesus informs His followers that He is going to Judea to serve His friend Lazarus, who is ill. The apostles immediately remind Jesus that during their recent stay in Judea the Jews tried to stone him to death. When Jesus is adament that He will go Thomas implores the disciples "Let us also go to die with Him," displaying his love, unto death, for the Lord.

He is mentioned once more in the Gospel of John as the apostle who, at the Last Supper, says to Christ "Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?" In answer to his plea St. Thomas received the "beautiful assurance" from Our Lord that "I am the way, and the truth, and the life."

St. Thomas is mentioned throughout the Gospels as one of the apostles and also as one of those present in the upper room at Pentecost.

Little is known for certain about St. Thomas' later life but tradition holds that he "was sent to evangelize the Parthians, Medes, and Persians; he ultimately reached India, carrying the faith to the Malabar coast, which still boasts a large native population calling themselves 'Christians of St. Thomas.'" He was ultimately martyred circa 72 A.D. when he was stabbed with a spear while in prayer.

St. Thomas is often pictured with a builder's square for several reasons. First, tradition holds that he built the first Church in India with his own hands. The builder's square further represents building a strong spiritual foundation.

St. Thomas is the patron saint: of architects, against blindness, against doubt, of blind people, of builders, of Certaldo, Italy, of construction workers, of Ceylon, of the East Indies, of geometricians, of India, of masons, of Pakistan, of people in doubt, of Sri Lanka, of stone masons, of stonecutters, of surveyors, and of theologians.

The Assault on Women

So apparently today is Women's Equality Day (I think classes should have been cancelled) so it seemed like the perfect day to write this post.

The reason the devil revolted against God was because of pride. He was infuriated that God was going to make him subordinate to these creatures (humans). And the icing on the cake was when God told him that he would have to bow to a human, and not just any human, but a woman, a human of the weaker sex, who God would raise to be the Queen of the Angels, of Heaven and Earth.

From there the devil not only abandoned God but began to actively wage war on Him. And his first attack was on a woman, Eve. He tempted her with the sin he himself had commited, pride, the desire to be greater than God. As we all know, she fell into the trap.

In order to turn the human race back to God, Christ was born and gave Himself as a sacrifice for humanity. To bring His Son into the world God created a woman without sin, the Blessed Virgin Mary, to give birth to the Savior of the World. And this woman was raised above all human beings to be the Queen of the Angels. (As a sidenote, it's kind of ironic that what the devil wanted so much to avoid, a woman being exalted, he brought upon himself. Because if he had never tempted Eve, she would never have sinned, and there would have been no need for a Savior, and therefore no need for a woman without sin. See how God brings good out of evil? If Eve had never sinned we'd have no Mama Mary.)

But the devil has never given up his assault on women, if anything he has become more vicious since the exultation of Our Blessed Mother. Throughout periods of history women have been slaves, have been treated as barely human, as little more than commodities. Then came women's rights. Women gained protection under the law along with the right to vote, etc. But the devil used this to his advantage. In complete opposition to the principles of the original women's rights movement, led by women such as Susan B. Anthony, Alice Paul, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, today's feminist movement has not settled for being equal with men but wishes for women both to be superior to men and alike to men. The devil has taken his original fear, the exultation of a woman, and used it to destroy women. The most tragic example of this is how he has made the mutilation of a woman's body and the destruction of human life a "woman's right" through the horror of abortion.

In this morally turbulent time men and women need to watch out for each other. It used to be that women were the safeguards of morals. One of my teachers told me that "women have forgotten how to be women and therefore men have forgotten how to be men." Women need to step up and take their place again as the protectors of morality. Men need to hold women accountable to this standard and treat us as such.

The devil's first enemy was woman. Women, we need to fight him. Men, please help to defend us.

Regina Angelorum pray for us

Note To Self

The devil is the one who is tempting you right now.

The same devil who brought evil into the world.

Because of him your brothers have been exposed to things that hurt them.

Because of him your cousin left the Church.

Because of him your friend has fallen into depression.

Because of him you've been stabbed in the back by people you thought loved you.

Remember how much you hate him for all of that?

You're gonna make him happy if you give in to this temptation.

And you're gonna hurt Jesus.

The Jesus who died on the Cross for you.

The Jesus who got you through all this pain the devil put you through.

If you give in you're gonna hurt Jesus the same way the devil has hurt you.

Health Care

My younger brother has Asperger Syndrome which is a form of autism, a mental disorder. Basically it means that he's socially awkward and has severe anger problems. As you can imagine my parents have had to take him to alot of doctors over the years which means they have had to pay alot of doctor's bills. On top of this my brother also developed a digestive disorder called celiac disease, I have anxiety disorder, and then you throw in all the regular pediatrician, dentist, and orthodontist bills and it adds up to alot. Honestly, I have no idea how my parents have managed to pay all these doctor bills and still keep a roof over our heads. But my dad worked overtime, my mom got a job, they sacrificed alot, and now my brother is on the right medications and his anger is basically under control, as is my anxiety.

Now the government is going to come in and tell us that we have to get on line. We may not be able to see the doctors who have been taking care of us for all these years. We may not be able to get the medications we need.

So why did my parents even bother? It would have saved them alot of money to just ignore our problems. We could've afforded to add on to the house like my mom's always wanted to. We could've gone on more expensive vacations. Honestly, why should they bother spending all that money taking care of us when the government's just gonna come in and tell them we can't get the care anyway?

Oh wait! That's called child abuse. So why is it that when parents deny their children medical care it's called abuse but when the government does it it's called "fairness"?

Thoughts on Sarah

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a huge Sarah Palin fan. So naturally I was shocked when Sarah announced yesterday that she will be resigning as Governor of Alaska. In the following hours I heard many comments regarding this development from many different people. Some have said don't worry, this means she is gearing up to run for president. Others have said this means she's out of politics for good. However, running through everyone's comments are, why did she really do this?! Simply asking this question has led us to make ridiculous speculations. In doing such we are simply proving Sarah's point when she spoke about the magnet on her parents' refrigerator that states "Don't explain, your friends won't care, and your enemies won't believe you anyway." Politicians and journalists do not believe that Sarah could possibly be resigning for the reasons she stated, the good of her family and the good of the state of Alaska, because Washington has never seen a politician who did not operate out of ulterior motives. Therefore, they can't believe that she doesn't. Yesterday Sarah asked us to trust her with this decision. She has never lied to the American people before, I don't think she's gonna start now.

Thoughts From Literature

I recently read Leo Tolstoy's classic novel Anna Karenina. In it I found this incredible passage which I wanted to share with you:

"Levin walked along the highroad with great strides, attending not so much to his own thoughts (he was still unable to disentagle them) as to a spiritual condition he had never experienced before.

The peasant's words had affected his soul like an electric spark, suddenly transforming and fusing into one a whole swarm of disjointed, impotent individual thoughts that had never stopped interesting him. These thoughts had occupied his mind, though he hadn't known it, even while he had been talking about letting the land.

He felt something new in his soul, and palpated this new thing with pleasure, not yet knowing what it was.

To live not for one's needs, but for God. For what God? And what could you say that was more senseless than what he said? He said it was unnecessary to live for one's own needs; that is, it's not necessary to live for what we understand, for what we're drawn to, for what we want, but we must live for something incomprehensible, for God which no one can understand or define. Well, and what of it? Didn't I understand those senseless words of Theodore's? And after I understood did I have any doubt of their truth? Did I find them stupid, obscure, inexact?

No, I understood them, just as he understands them; I understood them completely, and more clearly than I understand anything in life; I've never doubted it in my life, nor can I doubt it. And not I alone, but everyone, the whole world understands this alone completely, it's the only thing it has no doubt of and always agrees with.

Theodore says that Kirilov the house porter lives for his belly. That's understandable and rational. As rational creatures none of us can live in any other way than for our bellies. Then suddenly this same Theodore says living for your belly is bad, and that you have to live for the truth, for God, and I understand him from a mere hint! And I and millions of people who lived ages ago and are living now, peasants, the poor in spirit, and wise men who've thought and written about this, and said the same thing in their unclear way - we all agree on this one thing: what we should live for, and what it is that's good. There's only one thing I , together with everyone, know with certainty, know clearly and beyond question, and this piece of knowledge cannot be explained by reason - it is beyond that; it has no causes and can have no consequences.

If goodness has a cause, it is no longer goodness; if it has a consequence it is also not goodness. Consequently, goodness is outside the chain of cause and effect.

It is just this that I know, and that we all know.

And I had been seeking miracles; I regretted not having seen a miracle that would have convinced me. And here is a miracle, the only possible one, everlasting, surrounding me on all sides - and I never noticed it!

What miracle can be greater than that?

Can I really have found the solution of everything? Can my suffering really be over now? thought Leving, striding along the dusty road, unaware of either the heat or his fatigue, and with a feeling of relief after long-drawn-out suffering. This feeling gave him so much joy it seemed to him improbable. He was panting with excitement; incapable of walking any farther he left the road for the woods, and sat down on the uncut grass in the shade of the aspens. He took his hat off his sweating head and lay down, leaning on his elbows in the juicy, feathery forest grass.

Yes, I must think it through and clear things up, he thought, staring intently at the untrodden grass before him, and watching the movements of a little green beetle that was climbing up a stalk of couch grass and being hindered by a leaf of goutwort. Let's start all over again, he said to himself, turning aside the leaf of goutwort so that it wouldn't be in the beetle's way, and bending down another blade of grass for the beetle to pass on to. What is making me so happy? What have I discovered?

Before I used to say that in my body, in the body of this grass and of this beetle (there, he didn't want that blade of grass, it's spread its wings and flown away) a certain transformation of matter was accomplished in accordance with physical, chemical, and physiological laws. And in all of us, including the aspens, the clouds, and the misty nebulaein space, evolution takes place. Evolution from what? Into what? Infinite evolution and struggle? As though there could be any direction or struggle in the infinite! And I was astonished that in spite of the greatest mental concentration along those lines the meaning of life was not revealed to me, the meaning of my impulses and my aspirations. Whereas the meaning of my impulses is so clear to me that I live by them constantly, and I was astonished and overjoyed when a peasont expressed it to me: to live for God, for the soul.

I've discovered nothing. I've simply learned what I knew already. I've understood the force that gave me life not in the past alone, but is giving me life at this very moment. I've liberated myself from deception; I've learned to know my Master.

He summarized to himself the whole course of his thinking during the preceding two years, the beginning of which had been a clear, obvious thought about death at the sight of his beloved brother hopelessly ill.

At that time, having understood clearly for the first time that for every human being and for himself nothing lay ahead but suffering, death, and eternal oblivion, he decided that it was impossible to live that way, that he either had to interpret his life in such a way that it did not seem to be an evil mockery on the part of some devil, or else shoot himself.

But he did neither one thing nor the other; he went on living, thinking, and feeling; he even married at just this time, had many joys, and was happy whenever he wasn't thinking about the meaning of his life.

What did that mean? It meant he was living well but thinking badly.

He was living (without being aware of it) in accordance with the spiritual truths he had drunk in with his mother's milk, but he was thinking not only without acknowledging these truths but taking pains to evade them.

Now it was clear to him that he could live only thanks to those beliefs in which he had been brought up.

What would I be, how would I have lived my life, if I had lacked those beliefs? If I hadn't known you had to live for God and not for your own needs? I should have robbed, lied, murdered. None of the things that constitute the chief joys of my life would have existed for me. And though he made the greatest effort of the imagination he could nevertheless not picture to himself the bestial creature he himself would have been if he hadn't known what he was living for.

I was looking for an answer to my question. But thinking could not give me any answer to my question - it is not commensurate with it. It was life itself that gave me the answer, through my knowledge of what is good and what is bad. And I didn't acquire this knowledge in any special way; it was given to me just as it is to everyone - given just because I couldn't have gotten it anywhere.

Where did I get it from? Was it through reason that I managed to see that you had to love your neighbor and not throttle him? I was told that as a child, and I was glad to believe it because what was told me was what I already had in my soul. But who discovered it? Not reason. Reason discovered the struggle for existence and the law requiring anyone who interfered with the satisfaction of my desires to be throttled. That is a deduction made by reason. But it was not reason that could have discovered love of one's fellows, because that is unreasonable.

"Levin recalled a recent scene with Dolly and her children. The children, who had been left alone, had begun cooking raspberries over candles and squirting jets of milk into their mouths. Their mother, who had caught them in the act, tried to impress on them in front of Levin how much work it had taken the grown-ups to make what they were destroying, that the work had been done on their behalf, and if they broke the cups they wouldn't have anything to drink tea out of, and if they spilled the milk they wouldn't have anything to eat and would die of hunger.

And Levin was struck by the stolid, weary skepticism with which the children listened to what their mother was telling them. They were only annoyed that their absorbing game had been stopped, and didn't believe a word of what she was saying. Nor could they have believed, since they were unable to imagine the full volume of everything they made use of, and so could not realize that what they were destroying was the same as what they lived on.

All that comes about by itself, they thought, and there's nothing the least bit interesting or important about it, because it's always been that way and always will be. It's always the same thing over and over again. There's no reason for us to think about it, it's all there ready for us; what we want is to think up something of our own, something novel. Now there we thought up the idea of putting raspberries into a cup and cooking them over a candle and squirting the milk into each other's mouth. That's something novel, it's fun and not in the least worse than drinking out of cups.

Don't we do the same thing, didn't I do the same thing when I was using reason to look for the meaning of the forces of nature and the point of human existence? Levin went on thinking.

And don't all philosophical theories do the same thing when they embark on ways of thought strange and alien to man in order to lead him to a knowledge of what he's known for a long time, and knows with such certainty that he couldn't even go on living without it? Isn't it obvious and clear in the development of every philosopher's theory that he starts off by knowing just as unquestionably as the peasant, Theodore, and not in any way more clearly, the cardinal meaning of life, and simply wants to take a dubious intellectual path in order to return to what everyone knows?

Well then, what if the children were left alone to get hold of or manufacture cups for themselves, milk the cows, and so on? Would they start any mischief? They would just die of hunger. And suppose we were left with all our nonsense and ideas, with no conception of the one God, the Creator! With no conception of what goodness is, no explanation of moral evil!

Just try to build anything without these conceptions!

We destroy because we are spiritually sated. We're just children after all!

Where did I get the joyful knowledge I have in common with the peasant, which is the only thing that gives me any peace of mind? Where did I get it?

I who have been brought up in the conception of God, as a Christian, and have filled my whole life with those spiritual blessings given me by Christianity, overflowing with these blessings and living by them, I too am a destroyer just like the children, that is, I want to destroy what I live by. And the moment an important moment in life comes, just like the children when they're cold and hungry, I go to Him, and I feel even less than the children when they're scolded by their mother for their childish mischief than my own childish attempts at wanton madness should be reckoned against me.

Yes - what I know I don't know by reason, it has been given to me, disclosed to me, and I know it by my heart, and by my faith in the chief things taught by the Church.

The Church? The Church! Levin repeated to himself, turning over on the other side; leaning on his elbow he began gazing into the distance at a herd of cattle that were going down to the river along the farther side.

But can I believe in everything taught by the Church? he thought, testing himself by thinking up everything that might destroy his present peace of mind. He deliberately began recalling all the doctrines of the Church that had always seemed to him the most strange and used to put him off. The Creation? But how did I explain existence? By existence? By nothing? The Devil, sin? But how do I explain evil? Atonement?

But I know nothing, nothing, and there's nothing I can know except what is told to me as to everyone.

And now it seemed to him that there was not a single one of the beliefs of the Church that disturbed the chief thing - faith in God, in goodness, as the sole purpose of mankind.

Every doctrine of the Church could be led back to the belief in the service of the truth rather than of personal needs. And each one would not only not disturb that, but was necessary for the consummation of the principal miracle constantly being manifested on earth, which consists in enabling every individual, in common with millions of the most diverse human beings, sages and fools, children and graybeards - everyone, the peasant, Lvov, Kitty, paupers and kings - to understand beyond question one and the same thing, and to live that life of the spirit that is the only thing worth living for and the only thing we cherish.

Lying on his back now he gazed high up into the cloudless sky. Don't I know that to be infinite space, and not a rounded vault? But no matter how I screw up my eyes and strain my eyesight I cannot help seeing it as rounded and limited, and in spite of my knowledge of its being infinite space I'm undoubtedly right in seeing it as a firm blue vault; I'm more right than when I strain to see beyond it.

Levin had stopped thinking now and was merely listening in as it were to mystic voices that seemed to be carrying on a gay and earnest discussion of something.

Can this be faith? he thought, afraid to believe in his happiness. 'I thank Thee, my God!' he murmured, gulping down the sobs that were rising within him, and with both hands wiping away the tears that filled his eyes.