Use one of the votive masses (BCP - Various Occasions) or a common of saints from Lesser Feasts and Fasts. Or these lessons, "For Social Justice"

    Isaiah 42:1-7 I have given you as a light to the nations
    Psalm 72 Deus, judicium - Give the rulers your justice, O God
    James 2:5-9, 12-17 What good is faith without works?
    Matthew 10:32-42  I have come to set a daughter against her mother 

1 - Joseph of Arimathea
     Alphonsus Mary Ligouri, founder of the Redemptorists, 1787
2 - Basil the Blessed, Fool, 1552
3 - Flannery O'Connor, Novelist, 1964
4 - John Baptist Vianney, Curé of Ars, 1859
5 - Mary McKillop, Founder of Sisters of St Joseph of the Sacred Heart, 1909
6 - TRANSFIGURATION OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST
      Paul VI, Bishop of Rome, 1978
7 - John Mason Neale, Priest 1866
    - Victricius,  Peacemaker, 407 
8 - Dominic of Guzman, Founder of the Order of Preachers, 1221
   - Fourteen Holy Helpers 
9 - Franz Jägerstätter, Martyr, 1943
10 - Laurence, Martyr at Rome, 258
     - Edith Stein, Martyr of the Holocaust 1942
11 - Clare of Assisi, Poor Clare, 1253
12 - Florence Nightingale, Renewer of Society, 1910
       William Blake, Poet & Seer, 1827 
13 - Jeremy Taylor, Bishop, 1667
     - Tikhon of Zadonsk, monk & bishop, 1783
     - Clara Maass, Renewer of Society, 1901
14 - Jonathan Myrick Daniels, Martyr,  
     - Maximilian Kolbe, Priest & Martyr, 1941 
15 - ST MARY THE VIRGIN
16 - SIKH festival: Paryushana Parva  (festival of fasting, friendship,
forgiveness)
16 - John Courtney Murray, scholar & priest, 1967     
17 - Joan Delanou, founder of the Sisters of St Anne of Saumur, 1736
18 -William Porcher DuBose, scholar & priest, 1918
     - Jeanne de Chantal, co-founder of the Order of the Visitation, 1641 
19 - Blaise Pascal, Apologist 1662
20 - Bernard of Clairvaux, 1153
21 - Abraham of Smolensk, Abbot, 1221
22 - Ignacio Silone, Novelist, 1978
     - SIKH Day of Forgiveness:  Khamapana
23 - Rose of Lima, Penitent, 1617 
24 - ST BARTHOLOMEW THE APOSTLE
       Anniversary of the Massacre of the Huguenots 1572
     - Simone Weil, Mystic, 1943 
25 - Louis of France 1270
26 - Anne Hutchinson, Prophet, 1643
27  - Thomas Gallaudet with Henry Winter Syle
      - Monica, Widow, Mother of Augustine, 387
      - Helder Pesoa Câmara, Bishop, 1999
28 - Augustine of Hippo, 430
30 - Jeanne Jugan, Founder, Little Sisters of the Poor, 1879
31 - Aidan of Lindisfarne, 651 
     - John Bunyan, Teacher, 1688

Of the saints listed above, I have been blessed with the great honor of meeting two of them in person--Jonathan Myrick Daniels, an Episcopal seminarian, and Dom Helder Câmara, the saintly Brazilian bishop. I met Jon at St. Paul's, Selma, Alabama, in a long, hot summer there, at the end of which he was murdered by white racists as he tried to protect children from their gunfire. Jon was a seminarian on leave from the Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who tried hard to change the Church, brought his African American friends to St Paul's Selma, and in a conversation I remember (in the sacristy at St. Paul's) tried to limn some distance between the civil rights movement and the Kingdom of God, which some of us were willing to see as too close for his comfort. He gave his life for both, but first for his young friends.

Dom Helder I met at a lecture hall in Chicago, taken there by my Carmelite friend Dennis Zygadlo. I remember Dom Helder as being very short, his English even shorter, but his love enormous and obvious to all. He died last year at age 90 at his home in Olinda, Brazil, famous for his work among the poor and his denunciation of dictatorship. When he was called 'the red bishop', he responded: "When I fed the poor I was called a saint. When I asked why they are poor, I was called a communist." Porque los pobres son pobres? Porque los ricos son ricos. (Porque means both 'why?" and 'because'.) Brazil's president eulogized him as a "blessed man who dedicated his life to ecumenical human rights" and declared three days of mourning.

On another occasion I was further blessed by Paul VI, at a general audience at Castel Gondolfo in 1969, when Roman Catholic sisters mistook me for a bishop and tried to kiss my hand because I was holding up an amethyst pectoral cross (which I had bought in Lebanon) for the Pope to bless. Thus bishops are recognized sometimes, for their gemstones, and not for their conspicuous poverty. I tried to tell them that I was an Episcopalian, but that of course came out in Italian as a bishop, and the amethyst was conclusive evidence. It disappeared from the Casa in a burglar's visit. A Roman Catholic seminarian once presented me with several authentic first class relics (he had a friend at the Curia in Rome), one of which was a relic of the Curé d'Ars, John Baptist Vianney, a bit of bone or a hank of hair, which I had for years and reverenced until it was stolen for the silver reliquary in which I kept it. Lay not up for yourselves neither amethysts nor relics upon the earth where thieves break through and steal.

John Mason Neale I remember from the beautiful statue of him which was commissioned by my friend William Ferndel Orrick, when he was rector of the Ascension, Chicago, and which stands in that church's organ screen today, with Father Orrick's ashes in the pavement of the sanctuary under the altar, where we bury saints. He was, like Bill Orrick, uninhibited in his high churchmanship, but as was usual in such cases, inhibited by his bishop. The Hymnals 1940 and 1982--indeed the hymnals of all the denominations--would be much the poorer without his gifted translations of the old Greek and Latin hymns, and indeed his original hymns as well. He also revived a nursing sisterhood (later to become St. Margaret's) in the Church of England and led in the Cambridge Camden Society in its renewal of the church's liturgies.

Dominic Guzman I know of because yesterday here in Managua was his feast day as one of the city's patrons. The official patron of Managua since its foundation is Saint James, but he appears only on city stickers. Dominic gets promoted and pushed by the populace, who celebrate his day with lots of rum and coke, and the Dominicans, who run the University of Central America here and some parishes under his patronage. A tiny foot high statue of Domingo is carried about and brass bands accompany it all over town, adorned with flowers and gauze curtains. There's fireworks and a great Desfile Hipico (Horse Parade) here, with races and high class horseflesh on display by the horses' wealthy owners, who are thoroughly sozzled in the saint's honor each year. The president of the Republic was photographed tipsy this year, 380 pounds of rejoicing for Santo Domingo. Blaise Pascal I met in college, when my religion teacher, a Presbyterian minister, used his Pensées for a text, because he was glad of the concurrence of his Calvinism with Pascal's tendency to Jansenism. Pascal, a brilliant mathematician as a youth, had in 1654 several midnight revelations that his religion was too intellectual and too remote. He joined the Jansenists in their battles with the Jesuits' "meaningless jargon, casuistry, and moral laxity." His provocative and pregnant "Pensées" were published only posthumously, and are only fragments that he probably intended for a casebook of Christian truths. After you have read them you will always remember that "the heart has its reasons that the Reason does not know." The Jesuits I know are closer to the heart of Jesus than the ones Pascal knew about in his arguments.

Of Joseph of Arimathea, more is known from legend than from history. Our "Lesser Feasts and Fasts" commentary insists that "Joseph's claim for remembrance does not depend upon such legends, however beautiful and romantic" but repeats the early church's face-saving propaganda that Joseph had come forward boldly to do for Jesus' corpse what was demanded by Jewish piety, and to provide his own garden tomb for the murdered rabbi. It's more acceptable too for the Easter pageant, and a model for our Easter gardens. John Dominic Crossan and other scholars think otherwise--that the Bible story is a cover for the horrible facts: graveyard dogs finished the desecration and disappearance of the physicality of Jesus, which was the usual follow-up to the disgrace and outrage of imperial crucifixion. See Central America in this century for further "Desaparecidos" of imperial policy--we're still digging up their bones. Joseph has ever since been enlisted to be patron saint of undertakers, a comfort to us all. Many women mystics die young and far from home, or far from themselves. Flannery O'Connor (1925-1964) a Catholic marooned with peacocks on her mother's dairy farm in rural Georgia, wasted away with lupus, and clung to Christian hope in spite of her disability. She died in "the Christ-haunted Bible Belt" where, out of the purgatory of her life (she believed purgatory the most hopeful doctrine of the Church) she brought forth the theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and wrote them down in stories with miraculous names. "The Violent Bear It Away" (from Matthew 11:12) "Everything that Rises Must Converge", and "The Artificial Nigger", a title that got the book banned by a black priest and a cracker bishop in Georgia who hadn't bothered to read it. It is appropriately a tale about the moral blindness of southern bigots.

Simone Weil (1909-1943) was born a Jew in France, studied philosophy, joined an anarchist brigade in the Spanish civil war, until an accident forced her return to France. A mysticaal experience watching a religious procession in Portugal convinced her that "Christianity is preeminently the religion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I among others." While reciting to herself George Herbert's poem "Love" {for text, see Homily Grits for Mary & Martha, July 29}, she felt "Christ himself came down and took possession of me." The pro-Nazi Vichy government fired her from her teaching job, 'though she considered herself an unbaptized Catholic. She said she could not bear the thought of separating herself from the "immense and unfortunate multitude of unbelievers" by being baptized. The spirit of imperial Rome horrified her as its pervasiveness spread in the the Christian church. Though some of her mysticism is weird and semi-gnostic, some of her religion self-hating and even Marcionite in her rejection of the Hebrew Scriptures, she remains an example of an intense marginal sanctity, ferociously hanging onto "heaven by the hems" from just outside the door.

Accompanying her this month is Edith Stein (1891-1942), born to Orthodox Jewish parents in Germany on Yom Kippur. By the age of 13 she had declared herself an atheist, and was one of the first women to matriculate at the University of Göttingen, where she studied with Edmund Husserl, father of phenomenology. He invited her to Freibug, where she got her doctorate at the age of 23. One night in 1921 she happened on the biography of Teresa of Avila, the Carmelite mystic. By morning she had finished it and been converted. Baptized on New Year's day, Edith continued to go to synagogue with her mother, feeling that baptism had reunited her with her Jewish roots. (It's an understanding of Baptism that Jesus embraced, and gave as the reason for his own Baptism.) Frightened by the growing anti-Jewish hatred in Germany, she wrote to Pius XI, to warn him; he didn't reply. Of course she lost her job, and applied to enter the Carmelites. She spent her last night with her mother in a synagogue before she was formally clothed as Sister Teresa Benedicta a Cruce--"blessed by the Cross"--which she explained was chosen to refer to the "fate of the people of God, which was beginning to reveal itself." She was smuggled into Holland after Kristallnacht, but in 1940 the Nazis arrived and forced her to wear the Yellow Star. The Nazis said they would spare Jewish Christians if the Church kept silent, but the bishops of Holland denounced he persecutions and the Gestapo arrived at the convent to arrest her. She died in the gas chamber at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. She was martyred as both a Jew and as a Christian: she saw that her death was in solidarity with her people and with Jesus, her Jewish brother. But we ought not to think that we can co-opt her for a Júdenrein Aryan heaven, for there is no such place.

Mary McKillop,(1842-1909) a/k/a Mother Mary of the Cross, is Roman Catholicism's first recognized saint of Australia, the founder of the Sisters of St. Joseph. She suffered much, as did many religious women, at the hands of he hierarchy. She insisted that her sisters be governed by a mother general responsible directly to Rome, and not to the local bishop. After all that's how Dominic got away with real preaching at the local level of ignorance and superstittion with his well trained Order of Preachers. (My own bishop is far away in Chicago, a blessing indeed for a priest in Nicaragua--a form of the globalization of Hope.) One bishop excommunicated her, a second expelled her, a third wrote poison pen letters to Rome. She travelled to Rome, talked with Pius IX, who was amazed to meet an excommunicated nun, and got his approval. Nevertheless a bishop in Adelaide slandered her as an alcoholic embezzler of funds, but another official inquiry again exonerated her, although the Australian bishops ganged up on her and had to be overruled once again by the Pope. She referred to all her trials as "presents from God."

Florence Nightingale and Clara Maass are canonized together in the Kalendar of the Evangelical Lutheran Churches. Florence also has a date in the Episcopal Church's lists. The first was born in 1820 in the Italian city for which she was named, brought up in class privilege in England, educated in languages by her father. At the age of 17 she heard the voice of God calling her to mission, and she found it to be in nursing. In the Crimean war, she went to Turkey with a party of nurses in 1854 and found hospital conditions appalling. She became a national hero in her struggle with filth and foolish doctors, a fight that would last most of her life, even into her blindness. Clara Maass was born in 1876 in East Orange, New Jersey, and was one of the first graduates of the Newark German Hospital. She served in the Spanish-American war, in Cuba and the Philippines, nursing victims of Yellow Fever. She herself contracted dengué, "breakbone fever", and was sent home. She volunteered for experiments to prove that yellow fever was also vectored by mosquitoes, and after a second infection she died. She was the only woman, the only north American, go give her life in the research. In 1952 Newark German Hospital changed is name to Clara Maass Memorial.

Rose of Lima was born in Lima, Peru, and called Rose because she was so pretty. Much sought after by suitors, she refused them all and plastered her pretty face with pepper and lime to disfigure herself and discourage los muchachos. When her father's investments failed, she worked at gardening and needlework to support the family, and spent years as a recluse in a shed in the garden, and gave herself to good works amongst the poorest, 'though often sick herself and in anguish. She wore a little prickly silver crown of thorns as a permanent penance, and when she died she was much eulogized by the male hegemons of the Church. Less retiring, Anne Hutchinson,a Puritan prophet came to Boston in 1634, with her husband and children. She was a midwife and a healer skilled in herbal medicines who might have given Rose of Lima another model for her imitation. She had advanced ideas about women's rights that we don't think of as Puritan, and was brought to heresy trial at 46, in her fifteenth pregnancy. Forced to stand for the trial, she was called a heretic and held in prison in the winter, though she continued to teach and preach until she was banished from the "shining city on the hill" which Puritanism thought itself to be. She was forced to travel to Rhode Island and there had a miscarriage, over which the Puritans in Boston rejoiced with their monster god as they promised to do in heaven whilst they watch the sufferings of the damned. Forced also to flee Rhode Island to escape the god's monsters, she got as far as Long Island and there in 1643 was massacred with her children, by American Indians, a martyr to male stupidity.

Monica was a Christian in Carthage before her more famous son, Augustine, and was appalled by his immersion in the Manichean cult, a Babylonian religion, dualistic and doubtless with much influence on Augustine for the rest of his life, for his doctrine of Original Sin served to import the bonds of darkness and evil impulse forever back into our religion. No Jesus of history for them, but a celestial Christ, and a celibate one, presiding over the "elect" who were always superior to the mere auditors, as elders over their Puritan congregations. An angel consoled her in a vision that her son was with her, but he wisecracked that this meant she would join his cult. "No", she said, "The angel did not say that I was with you; he said that you were with me." And she prayed constantly for him and nagged him into orthodoxy. She followed him to Milan, where after studying rhetoric, he opted for Christian instruction by Bishop Ambrose and was baptized. Having got her son into the Church, she said the one reason for her life was now fulfilled, and asked "What is left for me to do in this world?" and fell sick. He asked her if she did not fear dying so far from home, and she replied, "Nothing is far from God." And left him without further guidance by dying at age 55.

"And what more should I say? Time would fail me to tell" of this harvest of August saints--"who through faith conquered empires, administered justice, obtained promies, shut the mouths of lions. . . women who received their dead by resurrection. Yet God has provided something better, so that they would not apart from us be made perfect." (Hebrews 11.)

GRANT GALLUP
CASA AVE MARIA
MANAGUA, NICARAGUA C.A.
gallup@tmx.com.ni

• The Series: Father Gallup's "Homily Grits": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/grits.html
• The Series "Joy Anyway!": http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/joy.html
• Louie Crew's Anglican pages: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew/rel.html
• Louie Crew's home page: http://newark.rutgers.edu/~lcrew
• Send mail to: lcrew@newark.rutgers.edu

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