Friday of the 7th week of Eastertide

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When you were young you walked when you liked

“When you were young
you walked where you liked;
but when you grow old
you will stretch out your hands,
and somebody else will take you where you would rather not go”
Christ’s prophecy seemed to the evangelist to be speaking merely of Peter’s martyrdom, but today it has much more to say to us.
In the bad old days people died young and they died, on the whole, quickly. In today’s kind world such things are receding into the past. Now we deprived, one by one, of our faculties and all the achievements that made us adult and made us human. We are taken into hospitals and imprisoned there by our weakness. We are subjected to systematic humiliation and daily petty cruelty from those who should be caring for us. We are infected with revolting diseases but prevented from dying of them. No wonder that it has been said that Purgatory contains no-one who has died in a British hospital.
Let us pray for carers, that they may lay their frustrations before Jesus and, by his grace, not take them out on those they should be caring for; or let us pray to St Peter for a death as quick and easy as his own.

Saturday of the 7th week of Eastertide

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Pentecost

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The fiftieth day

The name “Pentecost” comes from the Greek word meaning “fiftieth”. Like Easter, it is tied to a Jewish feast. 49 days (7 weeks, or “a week of weeks”) after the second day of Passover, the Jews celebrated the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot).
Passover celebrates the freeing of the Jews from slavery; Shavuot celebrates their becoming God’s holy people by the gift and acceptance of the Law; and the counting of the days to Shavuot symbolises their yearning for the Law.
From a strictly practical point of view, Shavuot was a very good time for the Holy Spirit to come down and inspire the Apostles to preach to all nations because, being a pilgrimage festival, it was an occasion when Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims from many countries.
Symbolically, the parallel with the Jews is exact. We are freed from the slavery of death and sin by Easter; with the Apostles, we spend some time as toddlers under the tutelage of the risen Jesus; and when he has left, the Spirit comes down on us and we become a Church.

Monday of week 6 of the year, or Saints Nereus and Achilleus, Martyrs , or Saint Pancras, Martyr

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Saints Nereus and Achilleus, Martyrs

Many saints and martyrs died forgotten, and intercede for us anonymously in Heaven: we shall not know them until the day of judgement. Others are one degree less anonymous: we know their names, and we know that people whose judgement we trust regarded them as saints, but that is all.
Such are Saints Nereus and Achilleus. Pope St Damasus I dedicated his life to establishing and strengthening the Church after the great persecutions, and took much care over the restoration of the Roman catacombs and the proper burial of the martyrs there. He composed a funerary inscription for Nereus and Achilleus, which is too literary to be of much use as an historical document, but does say that they were Roman soldiers who became Christians, refused to serve any longer, and were therefore executed. They were buried in Rome, in the catacomb of St Domitilla. The fact that enough was known about them to identify them suggests that there must still have been a living memory of their martyrdom, which would put their deaths early in the fourth century.
Some legendary “Acts” of the martyrs exist, which make them servants of Flavia Domitilla, a noble Christian woman of the late first century. On the whole, it is likely that the composer of these Acts sought to fill in the gaps in history with what seemed most plausible and most edifying. We, who have a more bureaucratic idea of history, find it difficult to accept such motives, and so we are thrown back on saying that Nereus and Achilleus did exist, did die for their faith, are truly to be venerated as saints – and that this is all that we really need to know. As we pray to be given the strength of purpose that they had, we should be reminded that our own acts of witness are still valuable even if they are not spectacular, even if they do not result in every detail of our biographies being passed down through the ages.
See the articles in the Catholic Encyclopaedia and Wikipedia.

Saint Pancras, Martyr

This Roman martyr is buried on the Aurelian Way just outside Rome. Some legends say that he was born in the East, orphaned, brought to Rome by an uncle, and martyred at the age of fourteen, but there is no particular reason to believe them.
The cult of St Pancras spread widely in the sixth century: in England, the first church that St Augustine built in Canterbury was dedicated to him.
In England today, St Pancras is not much revered, and people no longer name their children after him (as they still do, for instance, in Poland and Italy). This is not due to any major theological shift: it is simply that St Pancras gave his name to a parish in central London, and the parish gave its name to a major railway terminus next to King’s Cross. And who would want to be named after a railway station?
We do not suggest that English parents should inflict on their children the continuing humiliation of a name whose associations have become so bathetic; but all of us, everywhere, can honour the memory of St Pancras (about whom so little is known) by not letting the fear of ridicule dissuade us from doing what is right.
See the articles in Wikipedia and the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

Tuesday of week 6 of the year, or Our Lady of Fátima

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Our Lady of Fátima

This feast commemorates the visions of Our Lady seen near Fátima in Portugal in 1917 by three shepherd children, Lúcia dos Santos and her cousins Jacinta and Francisco Marto. The visions occurred on the 13th day of each month from May to October, and by October huge crowds were gathering at the site of the visions and reporting visions and miraculous occurrences themselves.
Pope John Paul II was devoted to Our Lady of Fátima and attributed his survival of an assassin’s bullet on 13 May 1981 to her intervention. Jacinta and Francisco Marto, who died in the great Spanish Flu pandemic of 1919-20, were beatified on 13 May 2000.
The Wikipedia article on Fátima has a useful collection of links.

Saint Matthias, Apostle

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St Matthias, Apostle

He was not one of the Twelve; but after the treachery and death of Judas Iscariot, someone was needed to take his place. Two candidates were selected, and lots were drawn to see which of them should be made one of the Twelve: the choice fell on Matthias. Nothing is known for certain about his subsequent history.
Drawing lots to select a candidate for an office sounds strange to us, but it was a recognised Jewish custom: for example, the priest who was to enter the Temple sanctuary and burn incense there was not chosen by some rota but by lot. Random events, independent of any obvious natural or human cause, were seen as a direct expression of God’s will. Drawing lots was not a substitute for human decision – human beings had chosen Matthias as a candidate, human beings decided which priests were eligible on which days – but a way of putting the final choice into the hands of God.
When we attain some high or responsible position, we may be tempted to congratulate ourselves on being the best candidate for the job. We would do well to remember that we have got there because of the people we have met and the things we have found ourselves doing, and, more fundamentally, because of the gifts and talents that God has given us. These things are essentially random: like Matthias, we have been chosen by lot.
See the articles in Wikipedia and the Catholic Encyclopaedia.

Thursday of week 6 of the year, or Saint Isidore the Farmer

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St Isidore the Farmer (1070 - 1130)

He was born near Madrid to very poor parents. He was a labourer and later a bailiff on the estates of a landowner called Juan de Vargas. He was noted for his piety. He died on 15 May 1130.
The biographical sources are unreliable, being essentially a catalogue of miracles. There is no reason, however, to doubt that he was a saint: devotion to him started shortly after his death, when many people who had known him were still alive. He is patron saint of Madrid.
See the articles in Wikipedia and the Catholic Encyclopaedia.