Pontian and Hippolytus lived in 3rd century Rome and died in Sardinia in the persecution of Maximus Thrax about the year 235.  Sardinia was Roman penal colony no one escaped from, the Romans called it  the “Isle of the Dead.” 

They’re considered important martyrs in the early church and their bodies were taken back to Rome by Pope Fabian. Pontian was buried in the chapel of the popes in the cemetery of St. Callistus. Hyppolytus was buried in a cemetery along the Via Tiburtina.

Originally they were honored separately in our liturgical calendar, but in 1969 when our calendar was reworked after Vatican II they were given a feast together. One reason was that they were rivals for power in the Roman church and were reconciled as they faced death together. Forgiveness is always identified with martyrdom. 

They also give us a picture into the early development of the papacy in Rome. It was not the smooth process often pictured in church history books. . 

The early church in Rome emerged from the large Jewish community in that city, which gradually separated from the synagogues to settle into house churches, modeled after the Jewish synagogue. There’s evidence that the separation was not peaceful. 

 Historians like Eamon Duffy say that the house churches in Rome were less centrally organized than the communities in Antioch, for example.“To begin with, indeed, there was no ‘pope’, no bishops as such, for the church in Rome was slow to develop the office of chief presbyter, or bishop.” (Saints and Sinners, A History of the Popes, New Haven, USA, 1997 p 7)

That’s not say that the Roman church wasn’t looked up to. From earliest times the Roman church was seen as the church founded by two great apostles, Peter and Paul. It was also the church of Rome, seat of Roman government. Some of its members served in Caesar’s household.

The papal office developed in response to heresy. Rome was a magnet drawing teachers like Marcion who came to Rome in 140 and wished to do away the Old Testament and all Jewish teaching. About the same time, Tatian and the gnostic Valentinus visited Rome. They had to be dealt with.

That’s where figures like Hippolytus come in. He was a brilliant theologian and champion of orthodoxy. Yet, according to some sources he thought he should be bishop of Rome rather than someone like Callistus, a former slave whose abilities he considered far inferior to his own.  The papacy then was far from the well-ordered institution we know today.

The saintly martyrs we honor today didn’t live or die in a vacuum. They were fully involved in their own. unsettled times. I wonder if Pope Fabian, who was a peacemaker, brought their remains back to Rome as examples of peace and reconciliation for a church experiencing heretical teachers and periodic outbursts of persecution.

Living in your own times is always a form of martyrdom.  

The Old Testament books of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy describe the journey of the Israelites from Egypt up to their entrance to the Promised Land, but these books are also a biography of Moses, their great leader. They describe 120 years of Moses’ life and what he did and said.

Today, his death on Mount Nebo overlooking the Promised Land is described. Yesterday, we read from the Book of Deuteronomy. (Dt 31, 1-8) some of his final words.  “I am now one hundred and twenty years old and am no longer able to move about freely.” Then he gives over leadership to Joshua; he’s not going to enter the Promised Land.

Moses speaks little about himself or his accomplishments, his failures or regrets, as his life ends. Even his place of burial is unknown. Rather, he speaks about the Lord God and what God has done. It’s not me, it’s not Joshua, it’s not human power and wisdom that will be with you, Moses says to the people. “It is the Lord, your God, who will cross the Jordan before you.” And to Joshua:

“Be brave and steadfast,
for you must bring this people into the land
which the Lord swore to their fathers he would give them;
you must put them in possession of their heritage.
It is the Lord who marches before you;
he will be with you and will never fail you or forsake you.
So do not fear or be dismayed.”

Moses’ last gift to those who follow him is a fearless faith. A great gift to pass on.

A Pew Survey awhile ago mentioned that some scientists think we will live to 120 years old in the future. The survey asked representatives of the various religious traditions what they thought about it. I noticed the Jewish response was for it. Were they thinking of Moses?

I’m celebrating Mass at St. Mary’s Parish in Colts Neck, New Jersey, these last two days.Kids from a summer camp are coming for Mass along with the usual morning community.

 I told the kids today that when I was young in grammar school in Bayonne, NJ,  my sister and I would go to the 9 AM Children’s Mass each Sunday. The priest who celebrated the Mass, usually a Passionist from Union City, NJ, came to our house for breakfast afterwards.

 His first question to my sister and me was “What were the readings at Mass today?” That was followed by another: “What did I say in my homily?” 

I learned early on to listen to the readings and prayers at Mass.

“Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” The young boy Samuel was told to say that when God called out to him by name in the temple. God calls each of us by name when we pray. There is something in the readings we hear and the words of our prayer meant for us.

It’s not enough to know our prayers and how to say them. We need to listen to them.

April 11th is the feast of St. Clare who, like Francis of Assisi, heard God’s word and saw it meant for her.  It’s not enough to know all the facts of the lives of the saints. We have to listen to the wisdom they want to teach us and make it our own.

“Sacred scripture is of the greatest importance in the celebration of the liturgy,” the church stated at the Second Vatican Council ( SC 24), and in its reform of the liturgy it directed that “the treasures of the bible are to be opened up more lavishly, so that richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God’s word. In this way a more representative portion of the holy scriptures will be read to the people in the course of a prescribed number of years.” (SC 51)

In the scriptures ” the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them; and the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as support and energy for the Church, strength of faith for her sons and daughters,  food for the soul, a pure and everlasting source of spiritual life.” (DV 21)

The Word of God is supposed to be a feast.

Our present Sunday and weekday lectionaries, which we follow in this blog, try to answer the church’s wish. They make the treasures of the scriptures more available for the faithful. They’re a feast.

Yet as we know feasts, meant to be fulfilling, can sometimes be overwhelming. We may not be able to take them all in.

Our lectionaries may seem like that: too much to take in. For example, we read from Mark 1-12 for the first 9 weeks of our church year. We read from Matthew 5-25 from weeks 10 to 21. We’ll read afterwards from Luke till the end of November, when Advent begins.

In that same period we read numerous selections from the Old Testament and the New Testament, this week from Jeremiah, one of the major prophets. A big banquet. 

We might be tempted to yearn for the older lectionary for the Tridentine Mass, which was used in the Extraordinary Celebration of Mass in Latin. It contains  a much smaller sample of scripture readings: about  22 percent of the Gospels, 11 percent of the epistles and less than1 percent of the Old Testament. But that approach abandons the church’s desire to be open to the  treasures of the scripture and a deeper biblical spirituality.

We might also be tempted to abandon the liturgy altogether for another way of spirituality or devotion. But that would means abandoning the prayer of the church. 

In her Constitution on the Liturgy, the church emphasizes the place of the Word of God in the  mystery of the Eucharist. She believes that “the two parts which, in a certain sense, go to make up the Mass, namely, the liturgy of the word and the eucharistic liturgy, are so closely connected with each other that they form but one single act of worship.” 

In both the liturgy of the word and the liturgy of the Eucharist we’re to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” (SC 56) Jesus Christ is with us in the liturgy, not just to be adored, but to be our Teacher and Lord. He speaks to us through the scriptures and comes to us in the Bread.

As he was with his first disciples, he is with us as our patient Teacher and Lord. The lectionaries are meant to be read again and again. Let’s patiently learn from them.

August 11 is the feast of St. Clare of Assisi, an important saint in the 13th century Franciscan movement that had a profound impact on the Christian world. Besides her example of faith, Clare was a woman who advanced women’s rights, changing the society she lived in.

Clare came from a powerful aristocratic family of landowners who held extensive farmlands around Assisi in Italy and controlled the peasants working them. A private army of knights protected and advanced her family’s interests. 

Clare, like Francis of Assisi, came from a family of merchants intent on bettering themselves by exploiting the new trade routes linking Italy to the rest of Europe, but Clare felt called to another way of life. She wished to follow Jesus Christ.

She left her wealthy family as a young woman of 18 to embrace a life without property. “Foxes have dens and the birds of the air have their nest, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head,” Jesus said. Like Francis, who encouraged her, she began searching for treasures of another kind. 

As she wrote to Agnes of Prague, princess of Bohemia:

“Happy is she who clings with her whole heart to him whose beauty the hosts of heaven admire, whose tenderness touches, whose contemplation refreshes, whose kindness overflows, whose delight overwhelms, whose remembrance delightfully dawns, whose fragrance brings the dead to life again, whose glorious vision brings happiness…

He is the radiance of eternal glory, the brightness of eternal light and the mirror without blemish.

Gaze on the mirror each day and study your face in it…Indeed in that mirror blessed poverty, holy humility and inexpressible charity shine forth.” 

Assisted by Francis, Clare and some young companions, including her sister Agnes, moved to the abandoned church of San Damiano outside Assisi after Holy Week in 1212.There they renounced a life of privilege and properties to live humbly and simply, following Jesus Christ.  

The community she founded would be known later as “The Poor Clares.” It drew together women from the ranks of royalty to the poorest peasants.

Clare and women like her were part of an important spiritual movement in medieval Christianity which enriched the church with new forms of religious life and devotion. They were young people reacting to a world in love with success and insistent on class.  In a time of violence and competition, ruthless pursuit of wealth and privilege, they pursued another way:

“You are the spouse, and the mother and the sister of my Lord Jesus Christ.” It came down to that.

We’re reading today at Mass one of the three long discourses Moses speaks to the people poised to enter and take possession of the land they have been promised.

Here are his words…as they are. They speak for themselves.

Think! The heavens, even the highest heavens,

belong to the LORD, your God,

as well as the earth and everything on it.

Yet in his love for your fathers the LORD was so attached to them as to choose you, their descendants,

in preference to all other peoples, as indeed he has now done.

Circumcise your hearts, therefore, and be no longer stiff-necked.

For the LORD, your God, is the God of gods,

the LORD of lords, the great God, mighty and awesome,

who has no favorites, accepts no bribes;

who executes justice for the orphan and the widow,

and befriends the alien, feeding and clothing him.

So you too must befriend the alien,

for you were once aliens yourselves in the land of Egypt.

The liturgy of the church leads us into the mystery of Jesus Christ. It’s also leads us into the  mystery of the Church, especially as we celebrate the saints over the church year. .

August is a month for celebrating a variety of saints from different times and places. There’s Lawrence from late 3rd century Rome, and Clare from 12th century Italy , Jane Chantal from 17th century France and Teresa Benedicta and Maximilian Kolbe from our own time. Each one sheds light on the mystery of the church through time.

St. Lawrence was a deacon who served the poor in a turbulent time. What does he tell us? He is a witness to the enduring command of the church to serve the poor. He also reminds us that the church, like Jesus Christ, dies and rises again. 

Four days before his death on August 10, 258, Pope Sixtus and four deacons were seized and executed in the catacombs of St. Callistus. Their death, followed by Lawrence’s death and the Roman government’s appropriation of church’s resources deprived the church of its leaders and left it penniless.  Yet the church emerged from that critical time stronger and attracting more members than ever before. 

The church shares in the mystery of Jesus Christ, dying and rising. The church also shares in that mystery in our time.

What does St. Clare tell us? She founded a religious community in the 13th century that drew together women from all ranks of society; from royalty to the poorest peasants. Historians see an early advocate of women’s rights in her.

What can we learn from her? The church engages the society it lives in. It gets involved in its issues and brings it her gifts.

What does Saint Jane Frances de Chantal tell us? Like Clare of Assisi, she founded a religious community for women, the Visitandines, influenced by St. Francis de Sales and his spiritual teaching. As a widow with children she wished to explore a new model for religious life, one less rigorous than older models, where women together could pursue a devout life and serve their neighbor. Though she had to settle for a more structured church model, Jane Frances de Chantel brought new life to the church.

She tells us that the church is meant to explore new ways and new structures in its path through this world. 

What do SaintsTeresa Benedicta and Maximilian Kolbe, who died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942, tell us? The church always enters the suffering of its time, no matter how unexplainable or evil it is.

Our feasts and our saints connect us to the times we live in. Atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6th, the Feast of the Transfiguration of Jesus on the mountain, and August 9, the memorial of Edith Stein, Sister Teresa Benedicta.

On the mountain Jesus appeared in a blinding light of glory, heralding glory for all creation. On August 6th a blinding light of destruction appeared at Hiroshima threatening the glory promised to creation. Humanity itself shares in that threatening event. The concentration camps of the 2nd World War, which we remember with Sister Teresa Benedicta, are also signs of endangered human life. We cannot take the promise of glory lightly. We must pray for it.

The saints open the mystery of the church and the mystery of our world to us.