SAINT ISIDORE OF SEVILLE
Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church, c.560-636
4 April


SAINT ISIDORE, bishop of Seville and Doctor of the Church, had the phenomenal versatility of a Leonardo da Vinci.  Like that famous Renaissance genius, he had an amazing store of information, including, among other things, a knowledge of history, science, natural history, literature, and philosophy.
Isidore's parents gave four children to the Church: Leander, Fulgentius, and Isidore became bishops, Florentina became an abbess; all four were eventually canonized saints.  Born about 560 at Cartagena, Spain, Isidore was educated by his elder brother, Archbishop Leander, in the cathedral school of Seville.  He had always been a poor student until one day, when he was skipping school, he sat down near the edge of a spring and noticed some grooves worn into the rock.  Discovering that the grooves were caused by the constant flow of water, he decided that, similarly, the continual repetition of lessons might make a permanent impression on his memory.  After that, Isidore disciplined himself to long hours of study, and in a short time he mastered Latin, Hebrew, and Greek.

On March 13, 599, after Leander's death, Isidore succeeded to the see of Seville.  The Visigoths (Germanic invaders) had controlled Spain for several centuries, and at that time their barbarous influence was threatening to destroy Spanish civilization.  By using every educational and religious means at his disposal, Isidore converted the Visigoths from Arianism to Catholicism, thus unifying the faith of the nation.  He also helped to eradicate the acephalite heresy (it professed that the human and divine natures in Christ are identical), encouraged monasticism, and strengthened religious discipline everywhere.  Isidore guided the course of three synods and presided over the Fourth Council of Toledo, held in 633.  There it was decided, under Isidore's influence, to establish a school in each diocese where the clergy could be trained in the liberal arts, and in Hebrew, Greek, medicine, and law.

Isidore was the first Christian writer to attempt compiling a summation of universal knowledge, an encyclopedia.  His work, called Etymologies or Origins contained in compact form all the knowledge of his age.  It preserved many fragments of classical learning in a way that was intelligible to the Germanic peoples of his time.  This contribution to the field of education gained for Isidore the title "Schoolmaster of the Middle Ages," and until the middle of the sixteenth century his Origins remained a favorite textbook.  He also rendered a great service to the Church in Spain by completing the Mozarabic missal and breviary begun by Saint Leander.

Isidore was as outstanding in the practice of charity and mortification as he was in the cultivation of knowledge.  His house was continually crowded with the poor of the countryside.  Shortly before he died, he went to church and, covering himself with sackcloth, had ashes placed on his head.  Thus dressed as a penitent, he prayed earnestly for the forgiveness of his sins and gave all his possessions to the poor.  He died a short time later, on April 4, 636.

SAINT VINCENT FERRER
Confessor, 1350-1419
5 April


THE fourteenth century, a century of upheaval, a century of contradictions, was a time in which the Church saw both the holiest and the wickedest of men.  She was blessed with multitudes of saints and was, at the same time, torn with quarrels and heresies.  Perhaps one of the most significant tests the Church ever withstood occurred in this century the Great Western Schism.  Rival popes were reigning at Rome and Avignon and even faithful Christians were divided in their allegiance.  It was to be many years before it was firmly established which of the claimants was the true pope.

It is typical of the century that one of the anti-popes, Peter de Luna, or Benedict XIII as he called himself, should have had for his confessor and champion a Dominican who was one of the most powerful preachers and most learned teachers of the time, a man destined for sainthood-Vincent Ferrer.
Before the century was spent there were no less than three claimants to the papacy.  Though mistaken, Saint Vincent was deeply sincere in recognizing Benedict, and it was under the authority of the pope at Avignon that he taught, traveled, and preached.  Yet the responsibility of advising this man whose obstinacy kept the Church in schism for so long was a terrible strain.  While residing at Avignon as confessor and advisor to Benedict, Vincent's health broke and all despaired of his life.

It was at this point in his life, on October 3, 1398, that our Lord appeared to him and restored his health, commanding him to travel and preach in the tradition of Saint Dominic and Saint Francis, who also appeared in the vision.  Armed with powers of apostolic missioner and papal legate, he set forth from Avignon, For twenty years his preaching took him about, his eloquence moving great masses of people everywhere, resulting in needed reforms.  He was followed by a crowd of disciples whom he eventually organized under a religious rule, calling them the "Penitents of Master Vincent." They instructed the ignorant, visited the sick, and often remained behind to continue works which he inspired.  It is almost surprising to find that in this century of suspicion, laxity, accusation and counter-accusation, no breath of scandal or whisper of suspicion appears to have touched any member of that large group of men and women moving freely about the country.  There were at times as many as ten thousand persons in the group.

Still the schism continued.  A meeting was arranged between the papal claimants.  Benedict refused to attend.  It is difficult even to imagine Vincent's interior conflict.  He had a deep affection for the man at Avignon and believed in him, but Vincent was a man who influenced nations.  His was a tremendous responsibility, for it was largely through his preaching, his sanctity, and his miracles that Benedict continued in power.  Slowly Vincent began to revise his position.

Finally, in 1416, he publicly withdrew his support of Benedict, paving the way for the resignation of all contenders and the end of the Great Schism.  "But for you," wrote Gerson, a theologian of the time, "this unity could never have been achieved."
Vincent died, April 5, 1419, as he had lived, preaching Christian truth.

SAINT JOHN BAPTIST DE LA SALLE
Confessor, 1651-1719
7 April


AS MUCH AS we may sometimes dislike the process, we all have to be educated; we must be taught to distinguish between what is good and bad morally and what is true and false intellectually.  Contemporary secular educators give attention to the second task but often neglect the first.  A man who paid a lifetime of attention to both was Saint John Baptist de la Salle, founder of the Brothers of the Christian Schools, or "Christian Brothers," and one of the great educators of modern times.

Born in 1651, John Baptist entered the field of education more or less by accident while he was a young priest in his native town of Rheims, France.  For six years before his ordination in 1678, he had the responsibility of caring for his orphaned brothers and sisters, and immediately after becoming a priest was given other tasks of a similar nature.  A dying fellow priest asked Father de la Salle to take over his position as spiritual director of a girls' orphanage, and a short time later Madame de Croy6re, a wealthy woman of Rheims, requested the priest to help a layman, Adrien Nyel, to found, with her financial assistance, two schools for the city's poor boys.

Forced into the role of an educator by these events, Father de la Salle took a good look at his new field and saw its deplorable condition.  Except for a few free elementary schools that were shabby relics of the medieval past, staffed by incompetent teachers who had failed to get better wages elsewhere, the poor were left without any means of education.  The rich had all the means for the expensive education of the academies and universities, but all was taught by outworn methods, the content no longer related to the world people lived in and, what was worse, was only nominally religious.

After Father de la Salle looked, he acted.  To accomplish any reform he had to reach the heart of the problem: the education of children, especially the children of the growing masses of the poor.  His aims at first were modest, merely to provide good education for the poor children of Rheims.  Choosing seven teachers from the schools he had helped found, he took them to live at his family home while he imparted to them his ideas for school reform.  Five of the men left when they realized that the task would demand a complete dedication of their lives to the education of the young; others took their place, however, and Father de la Salle soon had to rent a larger house for his recruits and devote all his time to their training.  Finally he realized that the problem was not confined to Rheims and that it would grow worse in the future, as cities grew in population under the pressure of industrialization.

In 1684 he organized his followers into a religious institute and became their first director.  Members of the new congregation took the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, but in order to give all their time to educational work, they did not become priests, their status as brothers being permanent.  Through his community, Father de la Salle made revolutionary changes in the teaching methods of the day.  Abandoning Latin as the language of instruction, he insisted on the use of the common tongue of the people; he also largely did away with individual instruction, instead having groups of children at the same mental levels taught by a single instructor (his famous "simultaneous method").  These and other practices are described in his classic Manual for Christian Schools, written about 1693.  In the free education that they gave to the poor, the brothers taught all the modern, as well as the classical, subjects, and made Christian doctrine the cornerstone of the whole curriculum.

Such a fresh, intelligent approach to elementary education was exactly what France needed, and Father de la Salle's young society shortly had more work than it could handle.  Along with teaching, it assumed the work of training young laymen to be teachers in their own towns; a school for this purpose which was opened in Rheims in 1688 is recognized today as having been the world's first normal school.  As the institute expanded to Paris and other cities, it further diversified its activities; a technical school for the sons of artisans and a school for delinquent children were two later projects.

With expansion came opposition; secular educators, overly conservative clergy, and many of the wealthy saw nothing but danger in Father de la Salle's determination to educate the poor and to do it with better methods than the traditional ones.  The priest himself was not worried by opposition, which expressed itself in everything from personal abuse to lawsuits against his schools.  He had an unbreakable serenity that came from the acceptance of God's will as the rule of his life.  While others worried, he prayed; and God heard his prayers.  By the year of his death, 1719, his institute was firmly established in France and was soon to spread throughout the world.  Father de la Salle was canonized by Pope Leo XIII in 1900; few men have ever done more for children or for Christian education than this resolute French priest.

SAINT STANISLAUS
Bishop and Martyr, 1030-1079
11 April

WHEN Saint Stanislaus became bishop of Cracow in 1072, everyone agreed that a good choice had been made.  The people of the city loved him for the work he had done among them as a priest, and his fellow clergymen were willing to admit that he excelled them all in ability and devotion.  Stanislaus, who had been born in 1030 in a small town near Cracow, was a learned man with a university education but still a humble person, completely without ambition for himself.  He had to be ordered by Pope Alexander II to accept the bishopric, and after his consecration, he continued to live exactly as before: caring for the poor and the weak and gently leading people to a better practice of their faith.

All would have been well in Cracow, had it not been for the king of Poland, Boleslav II, who kept his court there.  He was commonly known as "Boleslav the Cruel," and was all that a monarch should not be: treacherous, lustful, and vindictive, with no use for morality or those who preached it.

So scandalous was the king's life, that Stanislaus, soon after he became bishop, went to Boleslav and rebuked him to his face for his vicious conduct.  Willing to humor the bishop, the king made a pretense of better living for a while, but soon returned to his old habits.  The whole nation was outraged by Boleslav's next exploit, which was to kidnap the beautiful wife of one of his chief noblemen and take her to his palace for the satisfaction of his own lust.  The Polish nobles called on the hierarchy of the country to condemn this foul act, and once more it was Stanislaus- and only Stanislaus -who had the courage to face the king.  This time Boleslav revealed his true character, as he reviled the -bishop and warned him not to meddle in the affairs of others.

Stanislaus was quite undisturbed by the threats and, when the king refused to mend his ways, excommunicated him.  This act, which even further alienated his people from him, drove Boleslav into a fury.  Choosing a time when the bishop was saying Mass at the chapel of Saint Michael, outside Cracow, the king went there and ordered his guards to slay the bishop.  When they returned and told him they had been afraid to do the terrible deed, the king seized a sword, rushed into the chapel, and cut Stanislaus down at the altar.  It was in May 1079.  For this terrible deed Pope Gregory VII put Poland under an interdict; when the people of the country, already enraged at the fate of their beloved bishop, heard this, they rose up and drove Boleslav into exile.  Stanislaus was canonized by Pope Innocent IV in 1253, and has always been one of the favorite saints of the Polish people, who remember gratefully his fearless opposition to a godless ruler.

SAINT MARTIN I
Pope and Martyr, c.-655
13 April


(Picture)
SILENCE can be a shield of safety, and compromise a mask. Both these defenses were rejected by Saint Martin I in his long struggle to defend the doctrine of the humanity of Christ against political power and heretical bishops in the seventh century.
In spite of the fact that several popes had condemned it at Rome, a heresy known as monothelism was spreading through the Eastern churches.  Its supporters, among them the patriarch of Constantinople and Emperor Constans II, denied that Christ could have both a divine will and a human will.  Finally Martin, a priest of Rome born in Tuscany, was sent to Constantinople as the pope's representative.  To effect a peaceful compromise, the new patriarch, Paul, influenced Constans to issue an imperial edict called the Typos, or Rule of Faith, which forbade any mention of the controversy by Catholics or heretics.

Elected pope himself in 649, Martin immediately summoned a council of bishops at the Lateran.  This council condemned the heresy, excommunicated its teachers, and condemned the Typos, saying, "The Lord has commanded us. to shun evil and do good, but not to reject the good with the evil.  We are not to deny at the same time both truth and error." Martin risked the enmity of Constans even further by publishing the council's decisions to the entire Church and deposing heretical bishops and patriarchs throughout the East.  He clearly stated that this was his right, "in virtue of the apostolic authority given to us by the Lord through Saint Peter.  "

Constans accused Pope Martin of being an "intruder," "a heretic and rebel, an enemy of God and of the state"; he had the pope captured in 653.  Martin had a long and arduous voyage, and at none of the ports of call were the priests and faithful permitted to bring him any relief.  It was more than a year before his captors brought him to Constantinople.
Then, after months of solitary imprisonment and illness, Martin was brought to "trial" before a civil judge.  Refusing to accept the Typos, he was found guilty and subjected to more humiliation and cruel treatment by his hostile guards.  When Constans told the dying patriarch Paul of his vengeance on the troublesome Martin, Paul sighed, "Alas!  This will only increase the severity of my judgment." He had supported the heresy and had refused to submit to the pope's authority, but Saint Martin's fate weighed heavily on his conscience.  He asked Constans to spare Martin's life.

Another pope had been elected at Rome, and it seemed that Martin, for all his generous loyalty to the Church, had been forgotten.  Months of lonely imprisonment at Constantinople followed, and then he was exiled to the famine-stricken Sevastopol in the Crimean Peninsula in the Black Sea, where he died in 655.  Last of the popes to be honored as a martyr, he is commemorated on November 12 in the Roman liturgy.
In the Greek liturgy his feast is celebrated on April 13 by Catholics as well as by the churches, now separated from Rome, for whose unity in faith with the See of Peter he gave his life.

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