Feast Day: December 6th | Bishop, Wonderworker | Patronage: Children, Sailors, Merchants, Broadcasters, Repentant Thieves, Brewers, Pharmacists, Unmarried | Attributes: Vested as a Bishop, Holding Gospel-Book, Three Gold Coins/Balls; Blessing with Right Hand.

There is an amazing tale told of St. Nicholas, who, being bishop of Myra (in southwest Turkey, a port-city visited by St. Paul 300 years before), attended the Council of Nicaea in 325 A.D., and at one particularly strident moment stood before Arius, the priest from Alexandria, who argued that Christ was not fully divine, unequal to God the Father, not eternally begotten, but the first and highest of the Father’s Creation. Nicholas, it is said, stood before the heretic and slapped him in the face. Or maybe punched him. Or maybe it had been that Nicholas knocked Arius to the floor and was stripped of his episcopal regalia and imprisoned by the other bishops for such an unseemly outburst during a Church council. But then, the following morning, he was found in his cell not only wearing his vestments again (in particular, art often depicts him wearing the omophorion, an ancient precursor to the pallium that archbishops now receive) but also carrying the book of the Gospels. It is said that Mary appeared to him restoring his vestments, with Our Lord Himself placing in Nicholas’ trustworthy hands the Holy Gospels. The other bishops were admonished, Nicholas was exonerated, and Arius condemned as a heretic.

Now, this particular story was not written down until a thousand years after the Council of Nicaea, and different lists that date back closer to the time of that council differ on whether Nicholas is included among the bishops in attendance. Of course, since he lived until 345 A.D., Nicholas would have lived during the tumultuous years before and after that great convocation of bishops.  Also, with Athanasius (himself quite the strident defender of the faith) and others considered the leaders of the council, perhaps it is not surprising, especially given the lack (and costliness) of documents at that time, that there would be disagreement between the few, and fragmentary, documentation we do have. (This is true not only of Church documents, but also in the Roman Empire at large. Our records of those years are spotty.)

But perhaps we can uphold the core of this tradition without ever tracking down a parchment that recounts Arius getting knocked flat by a righteously angered Bp. Nicholas. Nicholas’ parents died while he was a priest, or early in his episcopal care, for the people of Myra. Already known for his holiness and generosity, he turned to the Scriptures to find what the Lord was calling him to do with the large inheritance he received from his parents. Hearing “give to the poor and come follow me”, he began his famous incognito visits, distributing funds and food to those who needed them under cover of darkness. This was how he saved the three sisters from prostitution – tossing bags of gold through their window in the middle of the night. Not only does this kind of charity fit with a Church known across the ancient world for its defense of the dignity of women, but it is also told of no other character in antiquity. It stands out among many other stories of the heroism of saints, and so must link back to the actual heroic generosity of Good St. Nicholas. Other legends with similar distinctiveness speak of Nicholas’ being imprisoned before the legalization of Christianity under Constantine, and also providing for the city during famines whether by miracles or plain, audacious, leadership.

One thing is irrefutable. Nicholas was loved and heralded as a saint very soon after his death. Within a century or two pilgrimages were taking place to his tomb, and other priests were taking his name as their own, choosing him as their patron. If I may link a few things together, though we have no writing of St. Nicholas himself, it is eminently logical that as daring, sacrificial, and Christ-like a bishop as Nicholas, would have spoken and acted much like his more famous confrere, Athanasius. Defending the divinity and humanity of Christ, Whom He emulated with a boldness that has not dimmed through the long centuries since.

– Fr. Dominic Rankin cannot help but notice that Nicholas’ risking his own life, his livelihood, even his episcopacy, is itself only an emulation of Christ, Who not only risked, but truly gave away his own life, livelihood, and all earthly esteem in order to give His followers eternal life. When I receive Christ’s Body and Blood am I similarly disposed to risk my own body and blood to love in that same way?

If you have been paying attention to the Catholic media in the United States over the past year or so, you are probably aware of the three-year Eucharistic Revival that is underway here in our county.  But perhaps it is not so clear why this effort is underway.  I found the following description from the official Eucharistic Revival website to be an excellent summary:

The difficulties and challenges over the last few years have shed lights on the Church’s need for healing, unity, formation, and conversion. More than 30 percent of Catholics have not returned to the pews post-pandemic, and recent data reveals that the majority of Mass-going Catholics do not believe in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The past decade has also seen the rise of the “nones” among the millennial generation, with more than 40 percent now self-identifying as “unaffiliated” with any religion. Many young Catholics find the faith to be irrelevant to the meaning of their lives and challenges.

Since the Eucharist is the source and summit of our faith, we have great faith that a renewal of our understanding and love for the Eucharist is necessary for the Church as we move forward.

The first year of the Eucharistic Revival is to be a Year of Diocesan Revival, and it officially began on Corpus Christi this past June.  In our diocese, we have chosen to make a slight adjustment to the timeline and have decided to have our diocesan Year of the Eucharist begin this coming Thursday, December 8.  Given that our diocese is under the patronage of the Immaculate Conception, this seems to be a fitting time for us to begin.  It also just so happens that this coming year will mark the 100^th Anniversary of the transfer of the See city of our diocese from Alton to Springfield.  To mark that milestone, Bishop Paprocki will kick off our diocesan Year of the Eucharist with Mass at Ss. Peter and Paul Parish in Alton, the church that served as the Cathedral when the diocese was located in Alton.  The year will conclude with Mass at our own Cathedral Church on December 8, 2023.  Please also mark your calendars for October 28, 2023, as we will be hosting an all-day diocesan Eucharistic Congress at the BOS Center here in Springfield.  That day will highlight various activities and speakers, including Bishop Robert Barron and Dr. Scott Hahn.  The day will conclude with a grand Eucharistic celebration involving thousands from throughout our diocese.

As we begin this year, I acknowledge there is a lot that is yet to be determined about how we will observe this special time.  But we know that the Lord will bless it since the goal is for us to draw closer to His greatest gift of Himself in the Eucharist.  Perhaps the most important thing for us to do now is to pray for the success of this year, and who better to turn to than to our Blessed Mother whose feast day on December 8 will mark the bookends of this Year of the Eucharist.  I am therefore issuing an invitation to add an additional Hail Mary to the three that so many of you have been saying for our parish since last January.  As a reminder, those three Hail Mary’s are for: 1) the clergy of the Cathedral Parish, 2) for the parishioners of the Cathedral Parish, and 3) for yourself individually.  With this 4^th Hail Mary, let us ask Mary’s intercession that this Year of the Eucharist might be fruitful for our diocese, our parish, and ourselves!

Father Alford     

This is a great question, and one that Christians have been talking about since the beginning of the Church. St. Paul tells us that we are justified by faith, and Christ himself told us that unless we are born again of water and the Spirit, one cannot enter the kingdom of God (John 3:5). Here Jesus refers to the sacrament of baptism. But, at the same time, Jesus told the good thief on the cross, “Today, you will be with me in paradise.” The good thief was probably never baptized, but he did express explicit faith in Jesus. This example proves that even if someone has not received the sacrament of baptism, God is able to give sanctifying and saving grace by another means. In the early Church, there were many martyrs who died as Catechumens, meaning they were still in the preparation phase and had not yet been baptized. The Church has said that these martyrs received a “baptism of blood.” They were not literally baptized, but received salvation by their faith and their witness to Christ. Other people, such as the good thief already mentioned, have received a “baptism of desire” in which they explicitly expressed faith, but for some reason, had not actually been baptized. 

A related question is what happened to the Jews who lived before Jesus. After all, they never received the sacrament of baptism, either! I think St. Joseph is a good example to consider. The Scriptures calls him a “just man,” and considering that he was entrusted with caring for God himself, he must have been very holy. However, it is likely that he died before Jesus instituted the sacrament of baptism. Sometimes Church authors refer to the “sacraments” of the Old Covenant. This refers to the rituals and symbols that God gave the Israelites in the various covenants of the Old Testament. For Jews, a major symbol of the Covenant was circumcision, and it has been understood that God also gave sanctifying grace through these “sacraments.” They are not in the same category as the seven sacraments which Christ gave the Church, but they were still occasions on which God gave grace to his people. The sacrifices were only a prefigurement of the ultimate sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross. God gave grace in the Old Testament, because he foresaw the merits of Christ’s death on the cross. The Jews were (and can be today) justified by faith, through the Covenants that God has given their people. So, St. Joseph is certainly in heaven, as are all of our Fathers in the faith such as Abraham, Moses, and David. 

When faithful Jews died, the gates of heaven were not yet open, so they went to some sort of spiritual “waiting area” until the Savior would open the gates of heaven again. The event of Jesus coming to retrieve these just ones is sometimes called the “harrowing of hell,” referring to the line in the Creed when we say that Jesus “descended into hell.” This is not the same hell that we typically think of today, which is a state of eternal separation from God. Rather, it was the place the dead went while heaven was not accessible. 

A more challenging question to consider is about those who have never known about Jesus, or have known about the Gospel, but not in a compelling way. Plus, what about babies who died without the benefit of baptism? In short, the Church hopes and prays for the salvation of all people, even those who do not explicitly know Christ. They too can be saved by a sort of “baptism of desire,” although only in an implicit way, because they do not know that baptism and faith are necessary for salvation. Some people are seeking to live the truth in their lives, but have not yet seen that Jesus is the Truth. God can give graces in ways that we are not aware of. Other religious traditions such as indigenous religions, Buddhism, and Hinduism are not completely devoid of truth or goodness. They can be understood as a preparation to receive the fullness of religious truth through Jesus Christ. God can certainly use these other religious practices as occasions to give saving grace. 

A traditional way of understanding the Church’s role in salvation is in this Latin phrase: “Extra ecclesiam nulla salus.” This translates as, “Outside the Church, there is no salvation.” A few have incorrectly interpreted this to mean that only baptized Catholics can be saved. This is obviously not true, based on the story of the good thief. This phrase means that whenever God gives grace to a person, it always comes through the Church, the Body of Christ. Ideally, this is through the seven sacraments. But if God were to give grace to a truth-seeking atheist, this grace also comes through Christ and the Church. In every Mass, the Church prays for the salvation of the whole world. I like Eucharist Prayer IV, which includes this prayer to God the Father: “Lord, remember now all for whom we offer this sacrifice: Francis our Pope, … your entire people, and all who seek you with a sincere heart. Remember also those … whose faith you alone have known.” 

The Catechism says in #994, “It is Jesus himself who on the last day will raise up those who have believed in him, who have eaten his body and drunk his blood.” We can understand this to mean that even people who implicitly believed in him can also be raised up on the last day. Of course, I do not mean to diminish in any way the value of the sacraments that Jesus gave us. He especially gave us Baptism as a systematic way to receive his sanctifying grace and forgiveness of our sins. In a world as big and messy as it is, the structured sacramental economy that we have can give us reassurance that we indeed are in the state of grace, and that we have concrete encounters with Christ through the Church. 

Feast Day: December 13^th | Virgin and Martyr | Patronage: Writers; Salesmen; Martyrs; the Blind; Throat Infection; Epidemics; Mtarfa, Malta; and Perugia, Italy | Imagery: Holding a cord, eyes on a dish, a lamp, or swords. A woman: hitched to a yoke of oxen; in the company of Saints Agatha, Agnes of Rome, Barbara, Catherine of Alexandria, and/or Thecla; kneeling before the tomb of Saint Agatha.

This coming year in our diocese, and in all the dioceses of our country, we are setting out on a renewal based on the Eucharist, a Eucharistic Revival, as the USCCB has called it. This first year in the diocese of Springfield, IL, we will begin on December 8^th, (asking the patroness of our diocese, Our Lady in her Immaculate Conception, to bring us to Jesus). By starting on that day, we beg Mary to teach us to “do whatever He [Jesus] tells” us, to “show unto us the Blessed Fruit of thy womb, Jesus”, Our Lord Jesus present personally, truly, in the Blessed Sacrament. Mary, of course, is the Queen of all the saints and angels, and the more we come to know and befriend the saints, the more we find that they also only ever point us towards Jesus. So, this coming year, we are going to take the saints as our guides and encouragers in this great project of our Church, that each of us would encounter Jesus anew and ever more deeply in His gift to us of Himself in the Eucharist.

Most of the saints I will look at this year will be those specifically mentioned in the Roman Canon, the Eucharistic Prayer given the most prominence, and having an amazing pedigree, in our Church. Before seminary I had not paid much attention to the different Eucharistic Prayers that the Church gives the priest to pray. There are four primary ones and multiple others for various occasions, though we are probably most familiar with the Second Eucharistic Prayer (the one that compares the calling-down/overshadowing/epiclesis of the Holy Spirit upon the offerings to “the dewfall”) and the Third Eucharistic Prayer (the one that begins “You are indeed Holy, O Lord, and all you have created rightly gives you praise”, and allows the priest to include after Mary, Joseph, and “Your blessed Apostles and glorious Martyrs” the Saint of the day or a Patron Saint).

But the First Eucharistic Prayer (called the Roman Canon, because it was the prayer that developed especially in Rome during the first five hundred years of the Church’s history), is the one that has had the longest history in the Roman Catholic Church (though there are similarly longstanding Canons/Eucharistic Prayers/Anaphora’s [a word meaning “carrying-up”] found in Eastern Rite Liturgies and the Eastern Churches). Some parts of this prayer stretch back to the very beginning of the Church, as we will find throughout this year, and it has been said by every Roman Catholic priest who celebrated the Mass since Gregory the Great in 590 A.D.! This same prayer was recited by Augustine of Canterbury when he brought England to Christ, and Boniface went to Germany. St. Stephen and later St. Elizabeth, heard it at Mass in Hungary, St. Francis in Italy, and St. Margaret in Scotland. It was this same prayer that was offered to God if you had gone to Mass with Thomas Aquinas, Joan of Ark, John Fisher, Isaac Jogues, Andrew dun Lac and his Companions in Vietnam, Alphonsus Liguori, Maria Goretti, Therésè of Lisieux, Padre Pio, or Mother Theresa. 

But this great and ancient prayer is not marked as much by all of those saints, but double listing of some of the saints of the early church (think of “… John and Paul, Cosmas and Damien …”) and this week we celebrate one of the women listed in the second such litany: St. Lucy. Named after the Latin word for light, [“lux/lucis”, compare with the English words “lux”, “lucid”, “lucifer”, “lumen”], we beautifully begin this year-long project with a saint of light. St. Lucy was a young woman living in the 300s in Sicily. She and her mother, Eutychia, took a pilgrimage to Catania to visit the tomb and shrine of St. Agatha (there Eutychia was cured of her lengthy illness, and Lucy found that she, like Agatha, was being called to consecrate herself as a virgin to Christ). Like Agatha, who had been martyred 50 years before Lucy only 50 miles away, that decision angered the suitors who wanted Lucy’s hand (and dowry) in marriage, and when persecution against Christians arose in that Roman territory in the 3^rd century A.D., Lucy was also maltreated and then martyred. 

How can Lucy begin our delving into the mystery and gift of the Eucharist? Perhaps she teaches us the simplest, but most profound, of truths: the Eucharist is a gift, and must be received. If we receive a gift but never unwrap it, have we really received it?! If we receive Christ, but never return the favor, have we really opened our heart to Him?! When you or I receive Holy Communion, do we listen to Christ then and there to hear how He asks us to give ourselves back? Or do we go on with our day just exactly as we were planning to before?

– Fr. Dominic Rankin often asks himself, and the Lord in prayer, why receiving Holy Communion does not seem to do much to him? Shouldn’t there be results? Where is the joy? Why haven’t I been transformed yet? St. Lucy shows us that the fault lies not with Christ’s gift to me, but my lackluster self-gift back to Him.