This week is filled with those great saints who preached the True Faith, and kept it going in the early years. Divine wisdom has willed that on the way which leads to the Messias, our great High Priest, there should be many pontiffs to pay Him the honour due to Him alone. Two Popes, St. Melchiades and St. Damasus; two holy doctors, St. Peter Chrysologus and St. Ambrose; two holy bishops, St. Nicholas and St. Eusebius; these are the glorious pontiffs who have been entrusted with the charge of preparing, by their prayers, the way of the Christian people towards Him, who is the sovereign Priest according to the order of Melchisedech. As each of their feasts comes we will show their right to have been thus admitted into the court of Jesus. Today the Church celebrates with joy the feast of the great thaumaturgus(miracle worker), Nicholas. Notice that this is NOT Santa Clause!
SAINT NICHOLAS
Archbishop of Myra in Lycia
(†342)
Saint Nicholas, the patron Saint of Russia, has won the warmest of praises from other Saints such as Saint John Chrysostom and Saint Peter Damian, who called him the glory of young men, the honor of the elderly, the splendor of priests and the light of Pontiffs. All the world was filled with his praises, Saint Peter added. The universal Church, in the Collect of his office, claims that God made known his nobility by an infinite number of miracles.
He was born during the third century, nephew of the Archbishop of Myra. He had lost his parents while still very young, and he desired not to conserve his rich heritage. Gradually he gave away everything of which he could dispose, establishing dowries for poor maidens and seeking out the needy wherever they could be found. The Archbishop, his uncle, already aware of his vocation to sanctity, ordained Saint Nicholas priest and appointed him Abbot of the monastery of Holy Sion near Myra. He undertook a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, resurrecting a sailor who fell from a mast during the voyage; he prayed for the frightened passengers in a near-fatal tempest and calmed it. He visited Saint Anthony of the Desert and healed many sick persons in Alexandria during a stopover in Egypt.
On the death of the Archbishop of Myra, he was elected to the vacant see. Immediately after the pontifical Mass, he resurrected an infant who had fallen into a fire. During his episcopate, he never got tired retaining the virtues looked for a in a bishop; chastity, which indeed he had always preserved, gravity, assiduity in prayer, watchings, abstinence, generosity, and hospitality, meekness in exhortations, severity in reproving those who needed it. He befriended widows and orphans by money, by advice, and by every service in his power. He was a zealous defender of all who suffered oppression.
Throughout his life he retained the bright and simple manners of his early years; no one could converse with him without finding himself spiritually renewed. Saint Nicholas was the special protector of the innocent and the wronged. He is usually represented at the side of a container in which a cruel butcher had concealed the bodies of three young persons, whom he had killed and was intending to use in his commerce, but who were restored to life by the Saint. This miracle was reported by Saint Bonaventure in a sermon.
Saint Nicholas rejoiced when God made known to him that the end of his pilgrimage was near. He retired to his Monastery of Holy Sion, and after a short but intense episode of fever. When he knew his time was at an end, he looked up to heaven, and seeing angels coming to meet him, he began the psalm: 'In Thee. O Lord, have I hoped'; and having come to those words, 'Into thy hands I commend my spirit', and his soul took its flight to the heavenly country. He died in the year 342. He is the patron of schoolchildren, sailors, travelers and pilgrims, prisoners and many others. His relics were translated in 1087 to Bari, Italy, where a church was built in their honor. And there, after fifteen centuries, the manna of Saint Nicholas still flows from his bones and heals all kinds of illnesses.
Reflection: Those who would enter heaven must become like little children, whose greatest glory is their innocence. Two duties impose themselves on Christians: first, either to preserve our innocence by sage precautions or regain it by penance; secondly, to love and shield it in others.
Let us end with the Sequence for today:
The sick are restored to health by the miraculous oil.
They who are in danger of shipwreck are delivered by Nicholas' prayers.
He raised from amongst the dead a corpse which lay on the road.
A Jew asks for Baptism, on witnessing the miraculous recovery of his money.
A vase that had sunk in the deep sea, and a child that was lost to his father, are both recovered.
Oh how great a saint did he appear by multiplying corn in a famine!
Let, then, this congregation sing the hymns of Nicholas' praise;
For all who pray to him with earnest hearts, will go back cured of their spiritual ailments.
Amen.
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