April 12th - Blessed Catherine of St. Augustine and St. Julius I

[Elizabeth]

Blessed Catherine of St. Augustine
Virgin
(1632-1668)

A young future missionary to New France, Catherine de Longpré, in religion Sister Marie-Catherine of Saint Augustine, was a nursing nun in the community of the Hospitaler Sisters of Saint Augustine in Evreux. Born in France in 1632, she went to Quebec at the age of sixteen. Having offered her life for the sick and the sanctification of souls, she found in Quebec City a newly-established and very poor hospital, where she would labor for twenty years with unfailing devotion and courage.

Blessed Catherine's physical and moral sufferings increased to a measure which few Saints have surpassed; she was chosen as a victim by God for the expiation of sins, in this territory which He destined for Himself in a particular way. To sustain her in the terrible obsessions which she endured, to preserve other souls who could not have withstood hell's assaults, she was given for her heavenly spiritual director, Saint John de Brebeuf, the North American martyr who had died not long before, in what is now Ontario. The entire history of her interior life was written by her confessor, the Jesuit Paul Ragueneau, who had been a friend of the great Martyr and had labored with him. Father Ragueneau recognized as authentic his fellow Jesuit's spiritual role in the life of this remarkable religious.

The sale of alcoholic beverages to the Indians in exchange for furs was a grievous abuse which the saintly first bishop of Quebec, Monsignor Francis Montmorency de Laval, was striving to abolish; sins of the tongue, immodesty and impiety were rampant in the city and surroundings. Monsignor de Laval recognized in Sister Catherine a soul of predilection, and he often asked her intercession for particular persons, for the colony and the Indians, whose souls were his great concern, as they were also of his clergy and missionaries. She, for her part, complied by her prayers and sacrifices, and saw in vision how the demons of hell were working for the ruin of the colony, in various places and in various ways. A spiritual battle of great proportions was underway, to win Canada for Christ.

Blessed Catherine died at the age of 36, saying shortly before she expired: My God, I adore Your divine perfections; I adore Your divine Justice; I abandon myself to it with my whole heart. One of the great mystics of the Church, her life remains a prodigy of sacrifice and love, a gold mine of doctrine for those who seek understanding of God's ways with His Saints and His people.

Saint Julius I
Pope
(† 352)

Saint Julius was by birth a Roman; he was chosen Pope on the 6th of February in 337, and was remarkable for the sanctity of his life and his zeal in strengthening the Christian faith.
The impious heresy of Arius was progressing dangerously everywhere in the East, and many holy bishops were obliged to leave their sees. Saint Julius received them warmly in Rome, Saint Athanasius in particular, and he defended them to the end against their adversaries. He condemned the synods which the Arians had assembled in Tyre and in Antioch, with the intention of abolishing the faith of Nicea. He assembled two councils in Rome, where he heard the exiled bishops and proclaimed their innocence.

By his counsel, the Emperor Constans, the pious prince of the West, influenced his brother Constantius to recall Saint Athanasius from exile.

Saint Julius rejected a deceptive formula of faith, imagined by the Eusebians, who were partisans of Arius at the second council of Antioch. He assembled the second Council of Sardica, composed of both Western and Oriental bishops. His legates presided there, and he saw to it that useful measures for the maintenance of the Catholic faith and the re-establishment of ecclesiastical discipline were drafted and implemented.

He built two basilicas in Rome and adorned them with sacred paintings. He had three cemeteries constructed, on the Flaminian and Aurelian ways, and at Porto. He regulated legal questions concerning the clergy, ordaining that they would plead nowhere but in ecclesiastical courts.
Saint Julius reigned for fifteen years, and died on the 12th of April, 352.