Today November 23

Today there is a veritable plethora of great saints: St. Clement I, third successor of St. Peter; Blessed Miguel Pro, he of the Cristeros movement and who greeted the firing squad with his hands outstretched and proclaiming "Viva Cristo Rey!" (I always tear up when I read that), but we are going to go with the great Irish missionary-monk, St. Columban (died 615). He was a strong man, both in words and in deeds -- he told off not only a king (of Burgundy, not Ireland -- for he was first a missionary in France, then in Switzerland and Northern Italy [Lombardy]), but bishops and even the pope -- and when he was forced out of yet another monastery and had to build a new one, he did so, even to carrying logs on his shoulders . . . and at the age of 70! This intrepid man was born in Ireland (in Leinster) and well educated; he came to Gaul to pray and to instruct the pagans. This he did and as the movie says, "If you build it, they will come." He built a monastery in Annegray and soon it was too small for all the postulants, so he built another at Luxeuil. He really loved that one, so it was with a heavy heart that he was forced out -- ostensibly because he celebrated Easter on the wrong date. But he knew the real reason and told the bishops "that there are more important matters than the date of Easter which they ought to attend to." - Butler's Lives. He knew it was because of the king of Burgundy's licentious life (he had concubines -- no wife -- and four natural children) and "The fact that the bishops frequented his court and never adverted to the scandal shows to what a low state Christianity had fallen." Columban called them on it and they were miffed. They were more than miffed -- they were furious and threw him and every Irishman out of the monastery and the country. Columban wrote a letter to his successor while he was being shoved onto a ship on the dock at Nantes, "I have desired to serve everybody, I have trusted everybody, and it has made me almost mad. Be thou wiser than I . . . "

But God works in mysterious ways. Deported to Ireland, they instead ended up in a storm that blew them back to the mainland. They traveled up the Rhine to Zurich and finally Lake Constance, but the pagans kicked them out. They finally ended up in Bobbio in Lombardy in Northern Italy and built the great monastery there. He lived a peaceful life -- praying and preaching -- he even tamed wolves, a bear and her cub, and countless squirrels, who ate out of his hand and slept in his cowl.

The problem with the pope was a thorny one. He was asked (by locals) to take the side of some bishops who defended some writings (the so-called "Three Chapters") that were condemned as favoring Nestorianism. These bishops went so far as to go into schism. Columban wrote to Pope Vigilius with great passion (boldly calling him a "cause of scandal"), but defended the authority of the pope with equal warmth: "All we Irish living in the furthest parts of the earth are followers of Saints Peter and Paul and of the disciples who wrote the sacred canon under the Holy Ghost. We accept nothing outside this evangelical and apostolic teaching . . . We are bound to the chair of Saint Peter. For, though Rome is great and known afar, she is great and honored with us only because of this chair." Amen brother. We Irish are nothing if not loyal to the Faith!

Poor Columban would be sad to know his beloved Luxeuil, thriving through til the end of the 18th century was disbanded completely in the French Revolution. And even Bobbio, whose library was the rival of any in medieval Europe, was dispersed by 1803. But Columban's memory lives on and his mission continued and continues in the souls of the many Irish missionaries who came after him. St. Columban, pray for us.