Catholicly speaking October is a month rich with beloved Saints. Tonight we pass from grumpy old St. Jerome to the young sweet spiritual giant St. Therese. Tonight her Basilica in San Antonio has 1900 roses ready for the “mass of the roses..”
There will be roses all over the world tomorrow because of something she said when she was dying at the age of 24; “Oh I will come down! I will spend my Heaven doing good on earth! I will let fall a shower of roses from heaven!” And she will, too. Somewhere in all those roses ready for her feast day, there is one for you. Maybe she is already holding it close to her heart.
July 6 is the feast of St. Maria Goretti, a Saint I love very much.
Loving her was not immediate for me. My appreciation of her has been more of a journey. I had to take a prayerful look at her life and my own life too. She became a good friend and has always been there for me.
As a survivor of child rape the way her story has most often been interpreted is disturbing to me. Holding her up to young people as a “model of purity” does not fit out current understanding of the dynamics of sexual abuse. I often read she “resisted a challenge to her purity.” She was eleven. She did not want to be raped. No one does. Abuse is not the child’s choice or fault. We know that though usually that is not how the child feels. Those feelings are hard to get over and can last a lifetime. Saying she was pure because she managed not to be raped and was murdered… instead? Can sound twisted to us survivors and not only to us, to anyone who knows much about these things.
Maria had survived the death of her father. Her mother had to go out and work the fields by herself. They had to share a house with another family. The other family had a disturbed young adult son. Maria had to take care of the house and the younger children. She was very gentle and kind. The young man thought she would be silent about his advances (most children are) and he was right. He thought she could be cowed into doing what he wanted. He was wrong. It’s not that I’m not proud of her for resisting, and for the way her thoughts even in those moments were on God. It’s amazing. She tried to persuade him with concern for his soul. He was angry with her for this and certainly for her noncooperation. So he murdered her, stabbing her fourteen times.
At the hospital her priest asked if she forgave her killer. She said she did. A lot of us are asked to forgive our abusers. It’s inappropriate for someone to ask that of us. I understand she was dying but that still bothers me. So many of us are asked to do this so we don’t make other people uncomfortable or mess up the status quo. So we are expected to carry the load alone so nobody has to deal with the relational and systemic consequences of us telling the truth. So I don’t like that he asked her that.
Later she appears to her killer in prison with fourteen lilies, one for each of her wounds. I love this. I love it because it shows that she did have the wounds. They are real and have meaning. He is confronted with that truth. However in Heaven her wounds are transformed and can become a gift to transform others; even the one who did the wounding. And he is transformed. He is converted and joins a monastery. He testified in the investigation for her cause of sainthood.
Something that moves me is that when she was exhumed her body was (and still is) incorrupt. Like Snow White she lies in a glass casket now. People come and pray and look at her.
What is God saying by this?
St. Eulogius wrote to St. Flora when she was about to be sent as punishment for being a Christian into a brothel, that even if her body was violated, her soul would remain pure. When I read about that I was very struck by it and I have remembered it for years. Abuse survivors don’t feel pure. We feel gross. I felt deeply flawed and somehow dirty all through childhood. It has taken years of work not to feel intense shame all the time. The idea and the trust that my soul is still pure regardless was profound for me.
I am sure that St. Maria felt violated by what happened to her. She was groomed and sexually propositioned at eleven years old. She was afraid of that man. That is already not OK. Just because he didn’t succeed in penetrating her doesn’t mean what she endured was not a sexual assault. He assumed like the “incels” of today that he was entitled to the bodies of women and girls, that they owed him access. He didn’t see her as a person deserving dignity and sexual autonomy. Her refusals enraged him and he brutally murdered her.
And that beautiful girl found healing in the arms of Jesus. She had been extremely devout. The love she always had with God carried her to Heaven and she was given the work of healing, real healing where the truth is brought to light and with God’s touch becomes a light for others.
He left her little body free of corruption to reveal to us the beauty of her bright soul treasured and healed in his heart, in his light.
Yes she is pure. She was always pure whether a man sexually assaulted her or not. Her body is holy and precious to God. He wants to show her to us. He wants us to know.
Once upon a time in Rome, during the reign of the Emperor Diocletian (in the third century), a young girl gave her life in witness to Christ under harrowing circumstances hard to imagine. She did this in spite of frightened parents, repeated and successively more cruel tortures, threats and even persuasive words and temptations from those around her. She also spent some time chained, bleeding, and broken in the Emperor’s dungeon. There Mary is said to have appeared to her and healed her, strengthening her resolve with the promise of victory and the hope of Heaven. Some of her tormenters were converted to Christ by this child’s astonishing courage, faith and perseverance through punishment after punishment.
Quite a long time later, in the year 2002, in a little chapel in San Antonio, a profoundly wounded young widow (that would be me) knelt to pray for healing for herself and her family as she faced another traumatic trial in life. I wasn’t sure I was going to make it sometimes. I had come on a day trip pilgrimage to the Lourdes grotto of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate to ask the intercession of Mary and for her motherly protection and wisdom for myself and my family.
On a small table at the end of my pew in the Eucharistic chapel there was a statue of an intense looking young saint that interested me. Her little pedestal said, “St. Philomena, Patroness of the Children of Mary.” Well then, she was the patroness of me.
Later at home I found a holy card of St. Philomena under our family Bible. I had no idea where it had come from. Did this girl saint have something to say to me in my painful struggle? I felt compelled to try to find out more about her.
I started to research her life and the devotion to her. Frankly some of the material about her was a little weird, even for me. She sounded like a fairy tale. But I eventually found the official web site of her shrine in Mugnano, Italy where her body is venerated. This site had a lot of solid information and beautiful art. It was Church sanctioned. The resting place of St. Philomena had even been visited by an impressive list of Popes.
St. Philomena’s body was found in 1802 in the catacomb of St. Pricilla in Rome. Her epitaph said, “Peace be with you, Philomena,” and showed the martyr’s palm, a drawing of arrows and an anchor; the instruments of the torture she had undergone for her faithfulness to Christ. Inside were the bones of a 13-15 year old girl. Present also was the phial of blood often collected by the early Christians when one of them was martyred. Miracles and signs surrounded the opening of her tomb, and even of the opening of the phial of blood that day in May, 1802, wonders which were witnessed by many.
It seemed God was saying to the world, “Get to know this young woman. She is very close to Me, and I have given her great works to do in My Name.”
It was hard to know anything more about her. The only accounts we have are private revelation that is approved but not as certain as written testimony from her contemporaries would be of course. According to this private revelation and the hints from the drawings on her tomb, she had been through and survived one martyrdom after another. She sounded like my kind of girl.
St. Philomena is the only saint ever to be canonized solely on the basis of her numerous miracles, some of them spectacular and public. She came to be called “The Wonder Worker,” and it was commonly said, “to St. Philomena, nothing is refused.” Among the countless people healed by her intercession is Ven. Pauline Jaricot who arrived at the shrine on the verge of death. She was dramatically healed amid shouts and rapping on the saint’s tomb from the crowd that was there. Philomena was St. John Vianney’s favorite saint. He talked to her every day, and had a small chapel built for the relic of her he was given. He encouraged devotion to her. Endearingly, he attributed all his miracles to her intercession.
I decided she definitely had something to teach me, and I began to cultivate a relationship with this mysterious little saint; thinking of her and speaking to her often, doing small things to honor her. I felt like she was with me and understood my darkness, fear, grief and trauma, very well. It seemed she was compassionate to me and laid a prayerful hand on me when I really felt I couldn’t take the suffering anymore. I think she helped me remember that in Christ I can do anything.
My daughter, Maire, took to St. Philomena so much after we read the book I Ask St. Philomena by Rick Medina, that she made her her patroness when she was 13. Maire’s eventual Confirmation name was Philomena. She always wore Philomena’s cord wound around her ankle or wrist as a kid. She still does. (It’s supposed to go around the waist but Maire never does anything the normal way.) Last year she had an anchor tattooed to her shoulder in her saints’ honor. “Look, Mom! It’s for St. Philomena!”
St. Philomena has been a good friend to us and accompanied our family through many crises and hardships. Her intercession even brought back two people who left the family. One of them, a young run-away, was found staying only a few miles from a church that had a bone chip of St. Philomena’s. It was like a wink from her. During family prayer of a novena to her we even heard a sudden knocking sound we couldn’t find the origin of. We wondered about it. Then we read that this happened all over the world to other friends of St. Philomena, too, and that it was a sign of her intercession. Another wink.
Other times she seems to have worked the even greater miracle of obtaining for us the grace and strength to accept whatever Christ asked of us, no matter how hard it was, no matter how many times He asked it, and to do it with love, faithfulness and trust in Him, as she did.
A tiny 2nd class relic of hers went with us to every radiation and chemotherapy treatment, scary doctor’s appointment and MRI my husband, Bob, had during his fight with the aggressive brain cancer, GBM. I anointed him with her holy oil before every procedure and prayed her chaplet during each one.
Bob made it two and a half years, which is an unusually long time for GBM, from his diagnosis to his death in 2012. As he often said, those years were the happiest of his life. He had an excellent quality of life almost to the end of it. He kept working. He kept helping people. He bloomed beautifully as a human being, started painting (very well, too), learned more about love than ever before, and inspired many people with his outrageous courage, sense of humor, undying hope and growth in charity during his struggles. He also fulfilled his heart’s desire of becoming a Catholic during that time. He died a beautiful, holy, love filled death.
St. Philomena has taught our family through her life and spiritual friendship over the years, that no matter what, it will be OK, and even if it’s not OK, it will be OK. Our lives are God’s. And we are going to Him. What else is there? As Bob said, “We love we, walk on”. And no matter what, “God is it.”
One way we honor St. Philomena in our family (besides having named Bob’s cat after her) is for all of us, and whoever wants to come along, to dress in red and/or white and go out for Italian food every year on her feast day, August11. Red and white are her colors. Red is for her martyrdom, the white for her purity. People sometimes ask what team we are from when they see us. ☺Here is St. Philomena Day in 2010.
In thanksgiving, we also try to let people know about her. No matter what your troubles are, and if you are suffering very much, St. Philomena will intercede for you in a special way and companion you on your journey. She never gave up. She will help you never give up either and follow Christ to the end. She may bring a miracle that is more than you asked for, or she might help you accept the martyrs’ crown, even with love and joy. She knows better than most that our tears become jewels on our garments in God’s Kingdom and that every one of our trials suffered with Christ helps us grow in the knowledge and love of Him.
We recommend to you her friendship in Christ, and we pray you find comfort in your sufferings and trials, that you receive more grace than you ever thought you could by the intercession and example of our good friend St. Philomena.
Bethany Hang Out 