On Sunday, November 12, the Gospel passage that was proclaimed was Matthew 25:1-13. The end of the passage had these sobering word: “Therefore, stay awake, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” November is a month when we remember the faithful departed and a time of year when we are reminded that one day we will die. Benjamin Franklin once quipped, “In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.” I thought that it would be good today in light of this to quote from a statement issued several years ago by the Roman Catholic Bishops of Maryland: “Comfort and Consolation Q & A: Questions to Consider Now and at the Hour of Our Death.” Today I want to quote from the preface of that important document.

Isaac Hecker (1819-1888) was born to a family of German immigrants in New York City. When he was five, his father deserted the family. Because of the financial crisis this caused the family, his two older brothers left school and became apprenticed bakers. Young Isaac joined them in the family business. As a young man he had a mystical experience. This led him on a spiritual journey from the Methodist Church to Unitarianism, Mormonism, the Transcendentalist Community at Brook Farm, and finally to Catholicism at the age of twenty-five. This was a very countercultural move on his part as anti-Catholicism in America was at an all-time high. Shortly after becoming a Catholic, he felt a call to the priesthood and entered the Redemptorist Fathers. Isaac Hecker believed that Catholicism and Americanism were complimentary. If the Catholic Church could free itself from its European appearances, he thought, it could fulfill its ultimate mission: the conversion of America to Catholicism.

On March 11, the church celebrated the memorial of St. Martin of Tours (316?-397). Two parishes in the Archdiocese of Washington are named after him: St. Martin’s on North Capitol Street N.W. in Washington, D.C. and St. Martin’s in Gaithersburg. St. Martin was born of pagan parents in modern-day Hungary. His father was in the Roman army and at fifteen Martin followed in the footsteps of his father by joining the army. He became a catechumen a short time later and was baptized when he was eighteen. When he was twenty-three, he refused a bounty from the emperor Julian and said at the time, “I have served you as a soldier; now let me serve Christ. Give the bounty to those who are going to fight. But I am a soldier of Christ, and it is not lawful for me to fight.” For a while he was imprisoned but eventually discharged and went to be a disciple of St. Hilary of Poitiers.

Eusebio Kino was born in the principality of Trent in 1645. When he was twenty, he entered the Society of Jesus (Jesuits) hoping to become a missionary in Asia. Instead, he was sent to New Spain where he was assigned to what was considered “the outskirts of Christendom”—an area comprising present day Sonoma in Mexico and southern Arizona. During the next twenty-four years he covered on horseback or on foot this very large territory, which was approximately twenty thousand square miles.

Saint Maria de Mathis founded the Adorers of the Blood of Christ in Italy in 1834. The vision for this new congregation was that the sisters should provide a reconciling presence among the poor. According to the Constitutions of the Adorers of the Blood of Christ each sister should be “a living image of that divine charity with which [Christ’s] blood was shed, and of which it was and is sign, expression, measure and pledge.”

Pierre Péteul was born on March 30, 1895. He served in the French army during the First World War. He was wounded at Verdun and received the distinction of five citations and the Croix de Guerre. After the war he entered the Capuchin Franciscan Friars where he received the religious name Marie-Benoît. He was sent to Rome where he earned a doctorate in theology. In 1940, he returned to France where he was stationed at Marseilles.

October is National Domestic Violence Awareness Month. Today, I want to present some thoughts on this important and relevant topic. “The number of women who are beaten and abused in their homes, even by their husbands is very, very high,” Pope Francis said in answer to a question by a woman named Giovanna, a victim of domestic violence .. “The problem is that, for me, it is almost satanic because it is taking advantage of a person who cannot defend herself, who can only [try to] block the blows,” he said. “It is humiliating. Very humiliating.” Giovanna said that she had four children to take care of after they escaped from a violent home. For women suffering abuse, help is available.

Dorothy Mae Stang was born in Dayton, Ohio on June 7, 1931. After she graduated from high school in 1948, she entered the Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur. Sr. Dorothy professed her final vows in 1956. From 1951 to 1966 she taught in Catholic elementary schools in Illinois and Arizona. In 1966 she volunteered to work in Brazil. Eventually she was drawn to the remote regions of the Amazon and the cause of poor farmers who were exploited and robbed by rich loggers and cattle barons. Because of her criticisms of illegal logging and her continual defense of poor farmers, her co-workers named her “the steel flower.”

Blessed James Miller was born in 1944 near Steven’s Point, Wisconsin. He was the oldest of five siblings of a farming family of which he was always proud. He loved farm work, but he started thinking about the priesthood as a high school student. The Christian Brothers who taught at the Catholic High School he was attending encouraged him to consider being a teaching brother. In 1959, at the age of 15, he joined the juniorate of the LaSalle Christian Brothers in Glencoe, Missouri. A juniorate is essentially a high school of boys thinking of a joining the religious congregation. The juniorate was also a self-sufficient farm that the students helped to run. After finishing high school, he entered the novitiate of the LaSalle Christian Brothers and then was sent to the University of Minnesota at Winona to study Spanish.

Bernard Francis Casey (nicknamed Barney) was born on November 25, 1870, in Oak Grove, Wisconsin. He was the sixth of sixteen children born to Irish immigrants Bernard James Casey and Ellen Elizabeth Murphy. He felt called to the priesthood after witnessing a drunken sailor stabbing a woman. First, he studied at the seminary for the Archdiocese of Milwaukee. Classes were taught there in either German or Latin—neither of which he knew because of his limited educational background. In time he was advised to consider a religious order if he wanted to pursue ordination to the priesthood. When he prayed about what he should do, he felt led to apply to the Capuchin Friars in Detroit. After entering the Capuchins in 1897, Barney Casey was given the religious name Solanus after Saint Francis Solanus (1549-1610), a Spanish Franciscan friar and missionary in South America.

Last Sunday Marcello Cardinal Semeraro, the prefect of the Dicastery for the Causes of Saints, travelled to the village of Markowa, in southwestern Poland to preside at the beatification of an entire family: Józef and Wiktoria Ulma and their seven children. They were murdered because they had practiced the corporal work of mercy of sheltering the homeless.

I am continuing this series on Saints and Blesseds of the United States. This week I am featuring Blessed Stanley Francis Rother (1935-81) who has a special connection with my family. More on that below. Much of the material that I am presenting is taken from the website of the Archdiocese of Oklahoma City, his home diocese. Another useful source for this brief portrait of Blessed Stanley is an interview with his sister in the National Catholic Register.