God's Unusual Saints

God’s Unusual

Saints

Edward J. Hahnenberg

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© 2006 Edward J. Hahnenberg. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 5/17/2006

ISBN: 1-4259-3821-3 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4670-7707-1 9ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

Cover photograph by author, St. Peter’s Square, March 18th, 2005. All rights reserved.

Dedication

As I sit here in a Paris café on pilgrimage to the sites in France where several of the saints discussed in this book lived out their lives, I see the bustling traffic of many Parisians returning home from their workplaces. The experience of traveling from London to the capitol of France by train, under the English channel, would have been an unthought of wonder to anyone living in England or France but a century ago. This April morning my wife Marlene and I paid our respects to the great St. Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey and this evening we will spend the night and tomorrow in Lourdes. Then on to Switzerland to visit the home of St. Nicholas of Flue, and back to France to Rouen, Lisieux, and Paris once more.

In preparation for this book, I traveled over the past two years to many of the places where the saints discussed in this work lived or died. From Lisieux to Lourdes, and Ruoen in France; from Eisenach, Germany to Rome; from Sachseln, Switzerland, to Paris’ Chapelle Notre-Dame de la Médaille Miraculeuses and London’s Westminster Abbey… I felt it was essential to experience as many of the places visited or lived in by the saints I have chosen as I could, albeit hundreds of years later. My nine children’s namesakes just happen to be in the book, because in most cases my wife and I chose their names because of a fascination with the unusual lives their patrons lived. So, to Therese, Edward, Frances (deceased), Elizabeth, Nicholas, Marie Bernadette, Rose, Benedict, and Matthew… these are your exemplars, unusual though all of them are. Having grown up with you, I find that you, too, are not only unusually wonderful children, but extraordinary in so many ways. May these, your patron saints, watch over you.

With great love, pride, and gratitude, Dad.

Contents

The Sanctity of God’s Universe

The Anomalies of Sanctity

God’s Tramp

The Married Mystic

The Lighthearted Saints

The Fourteen Year-old Wife

The Celibate Husband King

The Clairvoyant Mother

The Doctor of the Little Way

The Draft Dodger

The Incorrupt Visionary

Miracles at Lourdes

The Pole Sitter

The Teenage Female General

An Evangelist Who Wasn’t One

The Beautiful One

The Reluctant Musical Bride

The Papal Prophet

A Model Housewife

A Slave Who Became Queen

The Angry, Absent-Minded, Flying Friar

The Medal Saint

Final Thoughts

Bibliography

About the Author

The Sanctity of God’s Universe

Normally, the word sanctity applies to heroic holiness exemplified in the lives of saints. However, in the Encarta World English Dictionary , the definition given for sanctity is: the condition of being considered sacred or holy, and therefore entitled to respect and reverence.

Therefore, by that definition, we all live in a sacred or holy place… God’s physical universe. Travel with me, if you will, for a few pages, as I take you on a ride into that universe. It is in this macrocosm of God’s physical creation that science is finding the predictable but, more often than not, the unusual. A good illustration of this is Europe’s most famous mountain, the Matterhorn in Zermatt, Switzerland. Taking the train ride from Brig to Zermatt takes one through spectacular and breath-taking vistas in the heart of the Swiss Alps, until one reaches the small town. Then, out of the wonder of the surrounding snow-capped mountains, springs this marvelous canine-toothed wonder, the Matterhorn. About 2000 meters up the mountain on the newly-constructed ski-lift, one can stop at a small plateau, get off, and marvel at power and majesty of God’s creation. My wife and I arrived there in a cloudless sky to spend one of the most emotional 90 minutes of our lives. To sit on a bench, or on the deck of the small restaurant, and gaze at this unusual marvel of geologic upheaval was tantamount to being in the presence of God Himself.

The Big Bang theory that scientists have come now to accept as fact boggles the mind. According to the latest findings in the spring of 2006, from what they called the most precise measurements of our infant universe by the WMAP (Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe), scientists have found new evidence that the universe suddenly grew from sub-microscopic to astronomical size in less than the blink of an eye. From a marble-sized piece of matter to a physical universe beyond the limits of what telescopes can determine… all happened within one trillionth of a trillionth of a second. If that isn’t unusual and wonderfully bizarre, nothing is…

These findings confirm for many that God created the Matterhorn and all of physical creation ex nihilo and designed the forces of nature to shape the universe under his creative guidance.

The WMAP’s latest observations confirmed WMAP scientists’ 2003 estimate of the age of the universe, at about 13.7 billion years.

As an amateur astronomer, I find the science-fiction movies of the Star Trek and Star Wars ilk to be just that… fiction. With the recent launching of New Horizons, NASA’s exploratory probe to Pluto, the distance the spacecraft will travel boggles the mind. It will take the New Horizons spacecraft up to 10 years to reach Pluto, traveling at unparalleled speeds of up to 75,000 kilometers… or over 45,000 miles an hour. Once it gets there, it will take an estimated four hours and 25 minutes for its radio-transmitted data to reach Earth.

Until recently, Pluto was thought to be the outermost planet in our solar system. However, with recent discoveries of planetoids in the Kuiper Belt, a new planet, larger than Pluto, named Xena was discovered in 2005.

The new planet has an estimated diameter of 1,700 miles, about 20 percent greater than Pluto. Like Pluto, Xena consists of rock and ice and is part of the Kuiper belt, an array of similar objects that forms the outer shell of the solar system. It takes about 560 Earth years to make one full revolution around the sun.

Solar system astronomers first identified the Kuiper belt in 1992. They now estimate that as many as 70,000 bodies comprised of rock and ice are circling the sun outside the orbit of Neptune. How many vistas such as the Alps and its Matterhorn are on these stellar bodies we will never see!

These discoveries give the scientific community a new idea of the enlarged view of the solar system which was unknown a mere decade and a half ago. Yet we are talking about one star… our sun… in the Milky Way galaxy, which contains at least 200 billion other stars (more recent estimates have given numbers around 400 billion) and their planets, and thousands of clusters and nebulae. In order to reach the nearest of these hundreds of billions of stars, Alpha Centauri, four and half light years away, it would take some 70,000 years to get there traveling at speeds comparable with our fastest space probes. Even traveling at the speed of light, 186,000 miles a second… assuming a straight line path, it would take nearly five years to approach the nearest star in our own galaxy! No matter our fantasies about space travel, interstellar voyages make for the stuff impossible dreams are made of.

Moving out beyond our galaxy into true outer space… the distances between our galaxy and other galaxies that I and many other amateur astrophotographers have photographed… are, for practical purposes, truly incomprehensible. For, the pin-points of light now reaching our telescopes come from stars that may no longer exist, due to their birth and death cycles. How many galaxies does the universe contain? No one knows. The question is definitely in the minds of many scientists who are trying to obtain a good estimate of the number of galaxies in the universe. The methods used to achieve such numbers vary, and therefore, the results differ as well. Also, as new and improved technologies become available, astronomers can detect fainter objects that were not seen before. These objects that have come into view will in turn change the estimated number of galaxies. In 1999 scientists using the Hubble Space Telescope estimated that there were 125 billion galaxies in the universe. As observations keep on going and astronomers explore more of our universe, the number of galaxies detected will increase.

The unfathomable distances between physical objects in the known universe gives an overwhelming insight into the creative power of our Creator.

What does this primer on astronomy have to do with God’s unusual saints? A lot.

Just as astrophysicists have hypothesized so much about our solar system and universe which has turned out to be inaccurate as new discoveries are made, so too in the spiritual realm of sanctity, there are saints which do not fit the mold of what a saint should be.

For example, in our solar system, why is it that our sister planet Venus is the only planet that rotates around the sun in a retrograde manner? Why do Mercury and Venus have no moons, but all the rest of the planets have one or more? Why does Europa, a moon of distant planet Jupiter, have the likely chance of being one of the only places in the solar system besides Earth where liquid water exists in significant quantity?

It seems that almost every time there is an assumption by scientists about planets and their moons within our solar system, it is upended by surprise discoveries of space probes and the Hubble space telescope. Every day, literally, some new anomaly in our solar system and beyond is discovered.

The Anomalies of Sanctity

In the Catholic Church there is the traditional model of the saint… originally it was the apostles and early martyrs who gave their lives during the Roman persecutions. Then, it was those who chose the hermetic and monastic life, great thinkers, popes, and doctors of the Church… Anthony, Jerome, Augustine, Ambrose, Benedict, Gregory the Great, and others who were not officially canonized but whose cultic veneration elevated them to the level of the sancti . In the middle ages, heroic sanctity, recognized by the process of papal canonization, became a more important criterion… Martin of Tours, Francis of Assisi (although he was never canonized), and Catherine of Siena are examples. During the post-Reformation period, Ignatius Loyola, Theresa of Avila, and John of the Cross, combined heroic sanctity with gifted knowledge and leadership.

As I grew up in a pre-Vatican II world, my idea of a saint, in my youth, was that one had to be either a martyr or a saintly priest or nun… one who renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil. That notion is still around in this post-conciliar world.

The many men and women canonized by John Paul II represents more than all his predecessors combined. Most of those canonized by John Paul II were bishops, priests, and members of (or founders of) congregations or religious orders. A great number of these were modern martyrs. According to the Vatican (http://www.vatican.va/), John Paul II beatified 1332 men and women and canonized 482. The first known canonization by a pope occurred in 993 AD, when Ulrich of Augsburg was formally proclaimed a saint by Pope John XV. In the Decretals of Pope Gregory IX in 1234, it became the general law of the Church in the West, that only the pope could canonize a saint.

However, as in the case of anomalies in the physical universe which at first glance seems to be an extremely ordered creation, so too in the Church, there are canonized saints who do not seem to fit the traditional ideas of what a saint should be. Yet their lives give witness to the ever creative ways God leads his own to heaven. Their lives should inspire all of us that sanctity is always possible in this life in spite of our foibles or failures as humans.

Probably canonization is not in the plan for most of us, but that is not important. What is important is that we move on in the universe of his love, wherever that journey may lead us.

God’s Tramp

A quiet young boy sat by the window in his home, looking out at the rain-laden trees in northern France. He was a mere seven years old, and was to be the eldest of his parents’ fifteen children. He had been named Benedict Joseph at his baptism by his middle-class parents John and Anne Labre.

What are you thinking about, quizzed his mother.

The boy smiled at his mother but said nothing.

Benedict Joseph was the pride of his mother, who saw at his early age, a future priest. Anne Labre’s son was not like other children of Amettes. He smiled often and seemed happy, even though there was a certain sadness reflected in his young eyes. There really was no reason for this apparent melancholy, for the family was fairly well-to-do. His father was a shopkeeper in the village and provided well for his growing family in pre-Revolution eighteenth century France. Prizing education highly, his parents sent young Benedict to study at age twelve with his uncle, Cure Francis Joseph Labre, who was the parish priest of Erin… a neighboring village a dozen miles from Amettes.

What motivated this decision was the character of the young boy and the willingness of his paternal uncle to privately tutor Benedict in studies for the priesthood.

In his pre-teen years, prior to his taking up residence with his uncle, Benedict would speak with his mother of his horror for sin, and she would often find him practicing acts of mortification…unusual for a boy whose early education in the parochial school in his hometown was typical.

After being introduced to Latin by Cure Labre, the young Joseph commented to his mentor:

Uncle, I find your teaching about the lives of the saints to be most interesting… but this Latin… I don’t understand it.

If you are to be a priest, you must learn Latin, explained the Cure.

Latin is a bore… maybe I am not called to be a priest.

However, the teenager persisted and mastered Latin grammar and several classical writings. Thomas a Kempis’ Imitation of Christ became more of interest to him than world history or Cicero. He liked teaching catechism to the village children and reading to the sick. He especially enjoyed being alone in prayer.

So attracted did he become to the life of solitude that he asked his uncle if he could join the Trappists. His uncle put him off by referring him to his parents; his parents would have none of it, and told him he must wait till he grew older.

When a local epidemic of cholera spread throughout the villages, Benedict and the Cure became more interested in assisting the sick and their needs than in education. While the Cure was visiting and comforting the sick, Benedict served as a farm laborer caring for the families’ cattle. He cleaned their stalls and fed them, seemingly oblivious to the