A joyous Independence Day to all our American readers – this marking the 250th anniversary of the founding of the United States of America back in 1776. There are any number of factions developing in the once-United States, but all can be traced back to those who accept the Christian principles that hold the republic together – in God we trust –Â from those who have rejected them, and are more or less Nietzschean nihilists. We can only be independent if we are free, and only free if we live in the truth which ‘sets us free’. As the Didache, the early teaching of the Apostles, echoing Moses, states clearly: there is a way of life, and a way of death, and a great divide exists between the two, as we are tragically discovering. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live. Here’s hoping and praying the way of life wins out in the hearts of many.
On that note, we have this July the 4th at least two saints, we should mention, besides the newly-minted Pier Giorgio Frassati, Elizabeth of Portugal (+1336), queen, wife, mother, widow, peacemaker, third order Franciscan who, after her fractious husband’s death (whom she sanctified, as much as his coarser soul could take, it seems), retired to an hidden life of prayer and penitence in a convent, feeding the poor and tending the sick. She twice placed herself physically between her warring family, specifically, her husband’s forces against those of his sons, and the second time was too much strain, bringing on a moribund fever. Elizabeth was immediately hailed as a saint, and canonized by Pope Urban VIII in 1625, the same Pontiff who would condemn Galileo seven or so years later, but who also sent the Jesuit missionaries to New France, later named, of course, Canada – eight of them future martyrs, including Jean de Brebeuf, as well as Antoine Daniel, who was put to death on this day. His courage echoes through the ages, as he stood before his church near what is now Mount Saint Louis, confronting the attacking Iroquois in his stole and surplice, so that his beloved flock could escape. His body was pierced with arrows, then thrown into the burning church. A priest and I visited the site years ago, now in a farmer’s field. He said that school buses used to visit regularly on pilgrimage, but no more. May we remember his example, and beg his intercession for Canada.
