It’s the Feast of St. Martin I, 3rd Class, with the color of Red. In this episode: today in Church History: “Catholic Austria’s Habsburg Monarchy Comes to an End (1918)”, the meditation: “The Sufferings of Purgatory”, a preview of the Sermon: “Kindness, the Flower of Charity”, and today’s thought from the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre.
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Sources Used Today:
- “The Sufferings of Purgatory” — From the Assumption to Advent
- “Kindness, the Flower of Charity” (SSPX Sermons)
- Spiritual Journey — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (Angelus Press)
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In exile on the far side of the Black Sea, a pope wrote to his friends asking for bread. People talked about bread where he was, he said, but he’d yet to see any. A few years earlier, he’d presided over a council at the Lateran in Rome. Now he was waiting to see whether anyone would send him something to eat.
That was Pope Saint Martin the First, whose feast we celebrate today, November twelfth, on the traditional Roman calendar.
We were at the Lateran just a few days ago for the feast of its dedication. In the year 649, Martin gathered bishops there to settle a question about Christ. If Jesus is truly God and truly man, does He have a human will as well as a divine will? The emperor, Constans the Second, had issued an edict forbidding discussion of the question. Martin went ahead with the council.
Think of Our Lord in Gethsemane. He recoils from the suffering ahead of Him and freely accepts what His Father asks. His human will is real, and so is His human obedience. That’s what Martin and the bishops defended at the Lateran, with the help of the monk we know as Saint Maximus the Confessor.
The emperor eventually had Martin arrested in Rome and taken to Constantinople. He spent months in prison before being tried on political charges. He was stripped of much of his clothing, put in chains, and led through the streets. Finally he was sent into exile at Cherson, on the Crimean coast, where he died in 655.
His letters give us a sense of what exile felt like. Bread, wine, and oil were hard to come by. He wondered why people he’d counted on had sent so little help. After everything that had been taken from him, he still cared what happened to the Church and prayed that his supporters would stand firm.
Martin died in exile rather than on an executioner’s block, and the Church honors him as a martyr. I keep coming back to that letter about the bread. We can talk about the courage it took to stand up to an emperor. There was also the courage it took to get through another day in Cherson, hungry and far from home, and still find it in himself to pray for the people he’d left behind.
Pope Saint Martin the First, pray for us.
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