Saint for the Day

• April 17 – St. Anicetus, Pope, Martyr

  April 17

   St. Anicetus, Pope, Martyr

  St. Anicetus succeeded St. Pius, and sat about eight years, from 165 to 173.  If he did not shed his blood for the faith, he at least purchased the title of martyr by great sufferings and dangers.  He received a visit from St. Polycarp, and tolerated the custom of the Asiatics in celebrating Easter on the 14^th day of the first moon after the vernal equinox, with the Jews.  His vigilance protected his flock from the wiles of the heretics, Valentine and Marcion, who sought to corrupt the faith in the capital of the world. The thirty-six first bishops at Rome, down to Liberius, and, this one excepted, all the popes to Symmachus, the fifty-second, in 498, are honored among the Saints; and out of two hundred and forty-eight popes, from St. Peter to Clement XIII seventy-eight are named in the Roman Martyrology.  In the primitive ages, the spirit of fervor and perfect sanctity, which is nowadays so rarely to be found, was conspicuous in most of the faithful, and especially in their pastors.  The whole tenor of their lives breathed it in such a manner as to render then the miracles of the world, angels on earth, living copies of their divine Redeemer, the odor of whose virtues and holy law and religion they spread on every side. Reflection—If, after making the most solemn protestations of inviolable friendship and affection for a fellow-creature, we should the next moment revile and contemn him, without having received any provocation or affront, and this habitually, would not the whole world justly call our protestations hypocrisy, and our pretended friendship a mockery?  Let us by this rule judge if our love of God be sovereign, so long as our inconstancy betrays the insincerity of our hearts.

  

   

  Taken from the “Pictorial Lives of the Saints: with Reflections for Everyday in the year

  

Sunday Sermon

• Low Sunday

  

  For this is the charity of God, that we keep his commandments.
  —1 St. John v. 3.

  We have in these words the infallible test of a true Christian life. He alone truly loves God who keeps his commandments. I once heard of a man who used to get down on his knees every morning and recite the Ten Commandments as a part of his morning prayers. I believe that that man’s religion was practical. He certainly had in his mind the right idea of what religion meant. We are apt to keep the commandments too much in the background. True, we have them and know them well enough, but they don’t shine out in our lives as they should. Here is a man that prays, but don’t pay his honest debts. Here is another that always goes to Mass, but has the habit of cursing. Another is honest and just with his neighbors, but, as everybody knows, gets drunk.

  People sometimes talk about the difficulties of having faith; but this is not where the trouble lies. The real struggle and conflict of religion is to correct the morals of men. True religion insists upon the keeping of the commandments, and that is why it is so repugnant to men. Faith is easy to the virtuous; if men wished to be moral there would be no difficulties about faith. We sometimes hear people say: “Your religion is a perfect tyranny.” Yes, if you choose to call the Ten Commandments tyranny. This is the only tyranny that I have ever found. I think, also, that every Catholic will testify that these Ten Commandments are what really make religion hard, and that if these could only be set aside men would never complain of its being hard. I never heard of a Catholic who was willing to keep the Ten Commandments who thought that anything else connected with his religion was hard. Here we have, then, in a nutshell, the whole secret of the opposition of men to the true religion; but, inconsistent as it may seem and really is, men, while they hate, have yet to admire what they hate. An apostate monk may set himself up as a reformer and talk about “justification by faith alone,” but the world laughs at such nonsense. It trembles, though, when it hears our Lord say: “Every tree, therefore, that bringeth not forth good fruit shall be cut down and cast into the fire.” “If any man loves me he will keep my commandments.” This pretended reformer, Doctor Martin Luther, who called that wonderful Epistle of St. James, in which we are taught that “faith without good works is dead,” “an epistle of straw,” proved, however, to the world by his own life that it was this straw of being obliged to keep the commandments which broke his back, as it has broken the backs of so many others. But people do not have to leave the church to be thus broken, for we have in the bosom of the church, also, those who try to have piety without morality; but they are the hypocrites, the sham followers of Christ. They will some day, unless they speedily change their lives, hear our Lord saying to them: “I never knew you; depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” Ah! may we not some of us have good reason to fear that we shall one day be judged as hypocrites? The bankrupt merchant is afraid to look at his books, and trembles at the thought of attempting to calculate his liabilities; so those false Christians dare not look at the law of God to examine their lives by it. But, to their shame and grief, the day of reckoning will come. The devil may whisper to such, “Soul, take thy ease,” but, thank God! there is the voice of God’s church, which will not allow us to delude ourselves.

  If we Catholics go to hell it will be with our eyes wide open. The waves of passion can never drown that voice. It will always tell us of our sins, and will never let us be content in being hearers of the law, unless we are also doers. This is the way which is certainly pointed out to us; “and it shall be called the holy way.”

  Five Minute Sermons for Low Masses on All Sundays of the Year  Volume 2
  Imprimatur 1886