Saints

My dear people  of St. Mary’s,

At a Mass in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, October 18, during the Synod on the Family, Pope Francis will canonize Louis and Zélie Martin as saints. Every canonization of new saints is important in the Church, but this will be unique. This will be the first time that a husband and wife will be canonized as a married couple. All other married saints have previously been canonized as separate individuals.

Louis Martin was born in the city of Bordeaux, France, in 1823. Very religious as a young man, he decided to enter an Augustinian monastery, but was rejected because he was deficient in Latin. He became a successful watchmaker.

Marie-Azélie Guérin, known throughout her life as “Zélie”, was born in Saint-Denis-sur-Sarthon, France, in 1831. As a young woman she had the desire to become a   religious sister, but was ultimately turned away by the Sisters of Charity of St. Vincent de Paul due to poor health. She became a highly successful lacemaker, specializing in Point d’Alençon lace.

They met in 1858, crossing the Saint-Leonard Bridge in Alençon. Zélie would later reveal that in that moment she heard an interior voice speak to her: “This is he whom I have prepared for you.” They were married three months later.

The newlyweds lived in continence for the first year of their marriage, but then, with the help of a priest, discerned that God was calling them to have children. They were blessed during their marriage with nine children, four of whom died in infancy.  The remaining five, all girls, each entered religious life. Their youngest daughter, St. Thérèse of Lisieux, was canonized in 1925, and was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1997.

The Martins lived in Alençon as a very happy, loving and devout family until Zélie died from breast cancer in 1877. At the time of her death she was forty-five years old, a wife for nineteen years, and her youngest child, Thérèse, was a mere four years of age. Louis then moved the family to Lisieux and raised the five girls himself, living to see three enter the Carmelite convent there.

In 1889, Louis suffered two paralyzing strokes, following which he developed cerebral arteriosclerosis. He spent three years at the Bon Sauveur asylum in Caen, but in 1892 he returned home, where his daughters Céline and Léonie cared for him until his death in 1894 at the age of seventy. Céline entered the Carmel of Lisieux six weeks later, and Léonie became a Visitandine nun in Caen in 1899. Léonie’s cause for beatification has recently been accepted by the Congregation of Saints in Rome.

The statue over our tabernacle in the church is a replica of the Martin family statue of the Blessed Mother, dubbed by St.  Thérèse: “Our Lady of the Smile”. It was before this statue that the Martin family said their nightly prayers for years. Now we know that extraordinary, ordinary family contains at least three canonized saints, and perhaps more to come.

In the last letter he ever wrote, St. Louis Martin had some words for his daughters: “I want to tell you, my dear children, that I have the urgent desire to thank God and to make you thank God, because I feel that our family, though very humble, has the honor of being among the privileged of our adorable Creator.”

Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, pray for us!

—Fr. McCartney

My dear people of St. Mary’s:

There is a story that I have read several times, but have not yet been able to independently verify. On October 16, 1978, General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish Defense Minister, was working at his desk in his office in Warsaw, when suddenly church bells all across the city began to ring out. Puzzled, he continued working, when suddenly the door sprang open and one of his assistants came running in, breathless. The man exclaimed in a state of near panic, “General, they’ve just elected a new pope!” Jaruzelski, whose face seldom showed any expression, let alone emotion, replied blankly: “What do we care?” The assistant responded, “Oh we care, General, we care!”

Of course, on that day when the Cardinal Archbishop of Cracow, Karol Wojtyla, was elected pope, few could have imagined the dramatic impact he would have on the Church and the world. However, recall that when Our Lord died, his followers did not expect the Resurrection, but his enemies did, and they placed a guard on the tomb. So too, when St. John Paul II was elected, faithful Catholics did not at first comprehend that one of the greatest saints of modern times now stood in their midst, but many enemies of Christ and His Church immediately recognized a great foe. And they began to make plans to defeat him.

Ironically, the accession of St. John Paul to the papacy probably helped General Jaruzelski to rise as well. As the people of Poland began to rise up against their communist oppressors, Jaruzelski was chosen to be Prime Minister of Poland. In 1981, he was the one who imposed martial law on the people, in an attempt to crush the emerging pro-democracy movements, like the famous “Solidarity,” headed by the then-unemployed electrician Lech Walesa. It was during his rule that Fr. Jerzy Popiełuszko, a priest associated with the Solidarity union, was beaten and murdered by agents of the Polish communist secret police. Fr. Popiełuszko was declared “Blessed” as a martyr by the Church in 2010. Jaruzelski was responsible for the silencing of journalists, and the arrests and unlawful imprisonments of thousands of people, and even the killings of many who opposed the government. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he was forced to resign his position as President of Poland. After a free, democratic election, he was succeeded as President by Lech Walesa.

General Jaruzelski died on Sunday at the age of 90. Still almost universally loathed by the people of Poland, it will take some time before historians can write the definitive account of his crimes against his people. The Catholic journalist Phil Lawler wrote: “One of the most enduring visual images of the Cold War—one of the early signs that the Soviet empire was doomed—was the sight of General Wojciech Jaruzelski, the Polish strongman, literally shaking as he addressed the enormous crowd that gathered to greet St. John Paul II on his triumphant return to his homeland.” The photo at left shows the weak strongman, and the strong weak-man facing each other.

Jaruzelski spent his years of forced retirement trying to rehabilitate his reputation and justify his unjustifiable actions. But shortly before his death, the old atheist called for a Catholic priest to administer for him the last rites of the Church of his youth. He also was given a Catholic funeral Mass, attended by Lech Walsea. His eternal judgment is up to Almighty God. But it does seem that St. John Paul and Blessed Jerzy Popiełuszko may well have been intercessors for a man who, after a lifetime of living a lie, died grasping for the Truth.

—Fr. McCartney