Saints’ feast days in December

The ornament of Elizabethan Oxford — the queen herself had marked him — who slipped away to Douai and the Jesuits, returned disguised as a jewel merchant, and for a year preached to hunted Catholics while his ‘Brag’ and Ten Reasons ran from secret presses. Betrayed, racked three times, offered preferment to conform, he told his judges that in condemning him and his companions they condemned all their own ancestors.

A Roman maiden martyred under Julian the Apostate, her family destroyed around her — father, mother, sister — before she was scourged to death rather than yield her faith or her purity. Her small basilica on the Esquiline, rebuilt by Bernini, has kept her memory since the fifth century.

Son of the caliph’s Christian treasurer at Damascus, who left office for the monastery of Mar Saba — and from safely beyond the emperor’s reach wrote the defenses of the holy images that steadied the Church through iconoclasm. His Fount of Knowledge summed Greek theology; his hymns still carry Easter in the East. He is the last of the Greek fathers.

A Cappadocian who entered monastic life at eight and founded in the Judean desert the Great Laura — Mar Saba — mother of Palestinian monasticism, inhabited to this day. Twice he walked to Constantinople in extreme old age to plead his people’s causes before emperors, and was heard.

A Frankish noble at the Austrasian court who, moved by the monk Amatus, freed his serfs and turned his mountain villa into the double monastery of Remiremont — ‘Romaric’s mount’ — where the praise of God was kept in unbroken relays, and where he died after thirty years a monk.

A Welsh convert who became a Benedictine at Valladolid and returned to England repeatedly — expelled four times, he came back five — serving London heroically through the plague of 1603. Taken at Mass in his vestments, he told the court he would have brought them all back to the faith of their fathers, and went to Tyburn cheerful, aged thirty-three.

The pope of the martyrs’ memory: he drained and adorned the catacombs, composing with his own hand the marble epigrams that still mark the tombs. He commissioned his secretary Jerome to revise the Latin Bible, defended Nicene faith East and West, and asked for himself only burial apart, judging himself unworthy to lie among the saints.

The ‘teacher of the saints of Ireland,’ whose great school at Clonard on the Boyne formed — tradition counts them — the Twelve Apostles of Ireland, Columba and Brendan among them. He taught the Scriptures to thousands and died of the plague, taken, his monks said, in ransom for his people.

A Brescian merchant’s daughter who ran her father’s mill-girls’ welfare before she ran hospitals — through cholera, war, and the bombardment of Brescia, where her Handmaids of Charity walked the streets gathering the wounded of both armies. She could not go to bed with a quiet conscience, she said, on a day she had missed a chance to do good.

Burgundian princess, widowed queen of Italy imprisoned by her husband’s rival, rescued and wed by Otto the Great — empress, regent for her grandson, and through every reversal a founder of monasteries and friend of Cluny. She died at the abbey of Seltz she had built, praying for the souls of all her dead.

A Provençal theologian who at his first Mass saw Christ between two chained captives, one Christian and one Moor — and founded the Trinitarians, vowed to ransom Christian slaves, a third of all revenues set aside for it. Across five centuries his order freed captives by the tens of thousands, sometimes leaving brothers in exchange.

An Irish monk of the royal house of Thomond, pilgrim to Rome and first bishop of Killaloe, remembered as a preacher who crossed to the isles — the remote Flannan Isles of the Hebrides bear his name and the ruins of his chapel — and for the blessing he left on his people’s land and cattle.

A Roman pope of few years and great friendships — Jerome, Augustine, and Paulinus of Nola all praised him — who steered the Church through the first Origenist controversy and lived, Jerome said, in such poverty and zeal that Rome did not deserve to keep him long.

A Navarrese shepherd-monk exiled by a king for refusing to surrender his monastery’s goods, who rebuilt the ruined abbey of Silos into a wonder of Romanesque cloister and scriptorium. Spanish tradition brought expectant mothers his staff for blessing — the mother of St. Dominic Guzmán, who bears his name, among them by legend.

The Dutch Jesuit who almost single-handedly held the German lands for the Church — forty years of preaching from Vienna to Fribourg, founding colleges, attending Trent, and writing the catechism that went through two hundred editions in his lifetime. He assured the overburdened that with God’s help they would find time to do it all.

Chaeremon, the aged bishop of Nilopolis, who perished with companions in the Arabian desert flying the Decian persecution; and Ischyrion, an Alexandrian steward impaled for refusing his master’s order to sacrifice. Dionysius of Alexandria recorded their deaths, tokens of the multitude whose names are written in heaven.

A Kraków professor of Scripture, unjustly ousted from his chair for years and made a country pastor — he feared the cure of souls, and won his parish anyway — then restored to the university he served till eighty-three. He walked to Rome four times, gave his cloak to beggars repeatedly, and ate no meat for thirty-five years; Kraków’s students still venerate his tomb.

The father and mother of all the living, whose fall made the promise: the seed of the woman shall crush the serpent. The Church’s ancient calendars kept them on Christmas Eve — the old Adam remembered on the vigil of the New — and medieval mystery plays decked a ‘paradise tree’ with apples for their day: an ancestor of the Christmas tree itself.

A Roman matron who served the confessors imprisoned in the great persecution and was burned at Sirmium; her relics came early to Constantinople and her name into the Roman Canon. On Christmas morning for centuries the pope’s second Mass was sung in her basilica at the foot of the Palatine — the martyr remembered within the Nativity itself.

Third bishop of Worcester, a protector of orphans and the widowed and a stern reformer who made enemies enough to seek vindication at Rome. With the herdsman Eof’s vision of the Virgin he founded Evesham abbey, one of great houses of medieval England, where he was buried.

Pope through the great turning: Constantine’s peace, the building of the first basilicas of St. Peter and the Lateran, and the Council of Nicaea, to which he sent his legates. Over his long, quiet pontificate the Church came out of the catacombs; the last day of the year bears his name across Europe.