Site Type
Featured
Fonts
Skins
[powerpress]
The story and history of Saint Clement.
First, start with the podcast above featuring the son of the Fathers, Mike Aquilina talking about St. Clement, then…
Clemens Romanus was born in Rome in Italy during the time that the Christian faith was being spread and Christians were being persecuted by the Roman Emperors. He is believed to be of Jewish descent and a freeman of Rome. He worked as a tanner
during the early part of his life. He was then converted to Christianity and became a disciple of St. Peter and of St. Paul. Following the death of Saint Peter he took over his position and became the fourth Pope and Bishop of Rome continuing to convert Romans from the religion of the old Roman gods to Christianity.
Saint Clement was banished from Rome during the reign of the Emperor Trajan (September 18, 53 – August 9, 117) due to his beliefs and unpopularity with the Roman rabble. He was banished to Chersonesus, which was an ancient Greek colony under Roman rule, in the south western part of Crimea (part of the Ukraine). In Chersonesus he was sentenced to work with other prisoners in a sto
ne quarry where he continued to convert people. The number and success of his conversions attracted the attention of the Roman prefect who sentenced him to death. Clement was he was bound to an anchor and cast into the sea. He died in A.D.100.
How blessed and amazing are God’s gifts, dear friends Life with immortality, splendor with righteousness, truth with confidence, faith with assurance, self-control with holiness And all these things are within our comprehension. Clement of Rome
Basilica of Saint Clement
The Basilica di San Clemente is an early Christian basilica in Rome dedicated to Pope St. Clement. Its beautiful interior is especially notable for its three historical layers.
The main upper church is one of the most richly decorated churches in Rome. The vast majority of its architecture and art dates from its construction in the early 12th century. The entrance is on the left aisle.
The most striking sight is the 12th-century apse mosaic, in a golden-bronze color and featuring a large cross in the center. In the center of the apse is a throne, whose back is part of a martyr’s tomb.
The high altar contains the relics of St. Clement of Rome and St. Ignatius of Antioch. Faded frescoes decorate many of the walls, and date from the 6th to 11th centuries. They depict New Testament scenes and lives of several saints.
Tags: basilica di san clemente, Church, churches in rome, clement of rome, emperor trajan, father of the church, fathers mike, mike aquilina, rome, saint clement, st clement of rome
This entry was posted on Saturday, November 23rd, 2013 at 12:02 am
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
St. Cecilia, her story is an extraordinary one of faithulness and commitment. Some would have you believe it was all “legend”, but the discovery of her incorrupt body in 1599 would bear otherwise. It seems to me the Lord is encouraging us to believe the witness of this courageous virgin martyr.
In St. Cecilia’s in Rome, Â I had one of the most peaceful and prayerful experiences while on pilgrimage to the “City of the Saints”.
It is said that Saint Cecilia was born of a patrician family in Rome and raised as a Christian. She wore a coarse horsehair garment beneath her clothes of rank, fasted, and vowed herself to God.
Against her will she was married by her father to a young, pagan patrician named Valerian. While everyone sang and danced at their wedding, Cecilia sat apart, saying only the Psalms. Valerian turned out to be a man of great understanding. On their wedding night, she told Valerian, “I have an angel of God watching over me. If you touch me in the way of marriage, he will be angry and you will suffer. But if you respect my maidenhood, he will love you as he loves me.”
Valerian replied, “Show me this angel.” She told him that if he believed in the living and one true God and was baptized, he would see the angel. Thus, she persuaded Valerian to respect her vow of virginity.
He was impressed and attracted by his wife’s Christian graces, and so Valerian was baptized by Pope Saint Urban (which would be c. 222-230). When he returned to Cecilia, he found her standing by the side of an angel as she promised. The angel told him: “I have a crown of flowers for each of you. They have been sent from paradise as a sign of the life you are both to lead. If you are faithful to God, He will reward you with the everlasting perfumes of heaven.”
The angel then crowned Cecilia with roses, and Valerian with a wreath of lilies. The delightful fragrance of the flowers filled the whole house. At this point Valerian’s brother, Tiburtius, appeared. He, too, was offered salvation if he would renounce false gods. Cecilia converted him, and he was baptized.
From that time the two young men dedicated themselves to good works. Because of their ardor in burying the bodies of martyred Christians, they were arrested. The prefect Almachius told them that if they would sacrifice to the gods, they could go free. They refused, and Valerian rejoiced when he was handed over to be scourged.
The prefect wanted to give them another chance, but his assessor warned him that they would simply use the interim to give away their possessions so that they couldn’t be confiscated. They were beheaded in Pagus Triopius, four miles from Rome. With them was an officer named Maximus, who had declared himself a Christian after witnessing their fortitude.
Cecilia buried the three and then decided to turn her home into a place of worship. Her religion was discovered and she herself asked to refute her faith. She converted those who were sent to convince her to sacrifice to the gods. When Pope Urban visited her at home, he baptized over 400 people.
In court, Almachius debated with her for some time. She was sentenced to be suffocated to death in the bathroom of her own house. The furnace was fed seven times its normal amount of fuel, but the steam and heat failed to stifle her. 
A soldier sent to behead her struck at her neck three times, and she was left dying on the floor. She lingered for three days, during which time the Christians thronged to her side, and she formally made over her house to Urban and committed her household to his care.
She was buried next to the papal crypt in the catacombs of Saint Callixtus. In 817, Pope Saint Paschal I discovered her grave, which had been concealed 
from the Lombard invader Aistulf in 756, and translated her body to beneath the main altar of what was later called the titulus Sanctae Caeciliae, which translates as “the church founded by a lady named Cecilia.” In 1599, during the renovation of the church, Cardinal Sfondrati opened her tomb and found her holy remains incorrupt. Even the green and gold of her rich robe had not been injured by time. Thousands had the privilege of seeing her in her coffin, and many have been blessed by miracles. The body disintegrated quickly after meeting with the air.
Under the high altar in Saint Cecilia’s Church is a beautiful marble statue by Maderna portraying the “martyr” bathed in her own blood as she fell after the stroke of the 
sword. A replica of this statue occupies the the original resting place of the saint in the catacomb of Callixtus. Other artists were allowed to paint pictures of her after her tomb was opened.
Until the middle ages, Pope Saint Gregory had been the patron of music and musicians, but when the Roman Academy of Music was established in 1584, it was put under the protection of Saint Cecilia; thus, her patronage of music originated. Dryden wrote a “Song for Saint Cecilia Day” and Pope an “Ode for Music on Saint Cecilia Day.”
Valerian, Tiburtius, and Maximus are historical characters; they were Roman martyrs, buried in the cemetery of Praetextatus, but nothing else is known of them. Her story was the basis for the Second Nun’s Tale in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.
St. Cecilia is regarded as the patroness of music [because of the story that she heard heavenly music in her heart when she was married], and is represented in art with an organ or organ-pipes in her hand.– From The Lives of the Saints by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, M.A., published in 1914 in Edinburgh.
 
Dear Saint Cecilia, one thing we know for certain about you is that you became a heroic martyr in fidelity to your divine Bridegroom.
We do not know that you were a musician but we are told that you heard Angels sing.
Inspire musicians to gladden the hearts of people by filling the air with God’s gift of music and reminding them of the divine Musician who created all beauty.
Amen.
Tags: angel, catholic, catholic podcast, catholic prayer, cathollc spirituality, churches in rome, martyr, music, prayer, rome, st cecilia, valerian, virgin martyr, virginity
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2011 at 12:32 am
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
In my book, every missionary is great. It takes a great amount of courage and zeal, along with a great deal of faith, hope, and love, to proclaim Christ
crucified to the world no matter what age you live in, no matter where you travel…whether next door or to a far away land. One of those who has inspired so many is St. Francis Xavier. Omar Gutierrez does another fine job bringing this saint’s witness deeper into our hearts….
For the Love of Neighbor…
by Omar F. A. Gutierrez 
Along a rather busy street in Rome, as one walks along with various-colored motorini passing by in the typical Italian nonchalance, there stands a rather impressive façade of a Church. Churches in Rome are not rarities. Edifices of worship, shrines and even bits of images of the Blessed Virgin dot the city’s corners and crevices throughout. Here, though, with buildings rising tightly upward, is a church with a piazza that stands resolute. The Church is named after Jesus and is referred to by the Italian Gesù.
Inside the Gesù, amidst the distracting busyness of the Baroque interior, one will find the remains of St. Ignatius of Loyola, the punctilious and perceptive Spaniard who founded the order known as the Society of Jesus, the Jesuits. Across the nave, though, is an oddly obvious glass display case gilt with gold and silver. Above this floats the golden form of an angel whose wings and flowing robes give a good deal of attention to the case, for inside the case, in that only-too-Catholic fashion, is… a forearm.
The forearm belonged, or I suppose I should say that it still belongs to another Spaniard who met St. Ignatius at the University of Paris whilst the two of them studied theology. The forearm is on display not in mere virtue of its owner’s friendship with Ignatius. It is on display because its owner, St. Francis Xavier, was one of the most successful missionaries in the history of Christianity. That forearm, black and no doubt by now quite brittle, baptized more souls than perhaps any since the early baptisms of thousands one reads about in the Scriptures.
St. Francis Xavier was born in 1506. When he met St. Ignatius of Loyola, it did not take long for him and five others to join Ignatius in 1534 and be those magnificent seven souls to start the Jesuit order that would transform the world. Nor did it take long, after their order had found some grounding, for St. Francis to be sent by St. Ignatius to go and preach to the world, as Jesus had commanded. St. Francis and his companions, Fr. Paul of Camarino and Francis Mansilhas, sailed from Portugal for India in 1541.
The story of his work in India is dazzling. Certainly Christianity had already been in parts of India, and been there for over a thousand years. However, large swaths of the land were still not evangelized, and anyway the Christians there needed the catechetical and spiritual support of ones like St. Francis, who traveled extensively regardless of danger, time, or geography. What is more astonishing is that the zeal which St. Francis held in that fiery heart of his was not quenched by the successes of India, Ceylon, and the nearby regions. St. Francis heard of a land in which Christianity had never come, Japan, and was compelled to do something about it.
In 1549, he and some companions set out for Japan and landed in Kagoshima. In a year they had 100 converts. Considering this a pittance, Francis pressed onward. At Hirado he was well received and converts came in the droves. His forearm tired at the effort of so many baptisms. Still he pressed on. By the time he left Japan in 1551 at least 2,000 Japanese had been baptized. But there were more lands to be given the Gospel.
I
n August of 1552, St. Francis was off again, this time to China. Unfortunately, he fell ill there and died a short time after, on December 3, 1552.
Some of the marks of St. Francis’ story are truly wonderful to relate, not the least of these is the sheer number of baptisms he performed during his eleven years of service in Asia. Modern estimates of his work put him at about 30,000 baptisms. To put that in perspective a bit, that means that St. Francis Xavier would have baptized between 7 and 8 people every day for eleven straight years.
Though he worked to learn the many languages of the lands in which he preached, of course keeping in mind that he would have already known Basque, Spanish, Latin, French, Italian, and Portuguese, he did not have the gift of tongues. The languages he picked up on in India and elsewhere were the result of grueling work on his part. He was not gifted as some are with languages. He had to work hard. This therefore meant that he got creative. He used art a good deal in the attempt to communicate the fundamentals of the faith and as a tool to remember creeds. He also met the people “where they were at,†as the saying goes these days. To the Indians he lived as they did in extreme poverty, eating only rice and water, sleeping on the ground in a hut. In Japan, this would not do. So he dressed richly and presented the local magistrate with fine gifts. This was well received, and he gained instant respect and thus an audience with attentive ears.
Just a couple of last points about St. Francis: first, his travels throughout the world included missionary work not just for the unbaptized but almost especially to already baptized Catholics. Imagine you’ve just sailed the seas for over a year in order to do work in a land far stranger to you than any you’ve ever visited. Upon arriving you discover that the port town is largely Christian. But then you witness what Fr. Butler will describe as the “ambition, avarice, usury, and debauchery†of the Christians there.
The sacraments were neglected, there were not four preachers and no priests outside the walls of Goa; when slaves were atrociously beaten, their masters counted the blows on the beads of their rosaries.
Fr. H. J. Colerdige, S.J. one of the biographers of St. Francis relates the following,
There has probably never yet been a zealous European missionary in any part of the heathen world in which Christians from his own country have been settled, or which they have occasionally visited for purposes of commerce, who has not found among them the worst enemies to his work. No exception can be made as to this lamentable truth in favour of Catholic nations: Spaniards, Frenchmen, Portuguese have as much to answer for in this respect as Dutchmen and Englishmen.
In other words, no Christian missionary has been spared the embarrassment of having to explain to the prospective flock the atrocious behavior of Christians. St. Francis had clearly a lot to do for the Christians already there in Goa. Normally, we…normally I would have thrown in the towel at that point. What is the purpose of preaching the Gospel when the very people who are supposed to be living it are behaving so poorly? Have you not asked yourself thi
s question?
The rest of St. Francis Xavier in the Basilica of Bom Gesu in Goa, India
I dare say that we’ve all experienced something like this in our lives. Have we heard the line that the Church is in more danger of corruption from Catholics within than from non-Catholics without? There is something true in that saying I think. Yet St. Francis pressed on. His dedication to Christ Jesus was so deeply ingrained in him, that he did not need to know that all Catholics would behave properly for him to fulfill his vocation. All he needed to do was to listen to God, to press on living for Him.
Lastly, I don’t want to suggest that St. Francis was callously dismissive of the atrocities he found. Of them he wrote that they became “a permanent bruise on my soul.†He allowed the love for Christ to inform his care for his neighbor, over against those of his own faith. He wrote once, when an Indian was abducted for the slave trade,
Would the Portuguese be pleased if one of the Hindus were to take a Portuguese by force and carry him up country? The Indians must have the same feelings.
This ability of St. Francis Xavier to be driven by his compassion for his 
neighbor well enough to see beyond the natural affinities of nation, ethnicity, and faith… this ability to defend the rights of these downtrodden strangers, only brings me to wonder how we can be Catholic, today in the U.S., and not desire for ourselves more largeness of heart for the immigrant. Immigration is too large an issue to enter into here, but given the life of St. Francis presented above, how do we really think he would behave in our current time? Would he deny prenatal care to a woman because her proximity is illegal? Would he demand his neighbor produce proof of eligibility before offering them something as simple as shelter from the storm? No, St. Francis Xavier wouldn’t, not the great missionary, not the grand heart, not the forearm that helped to reconcile strangers in his valley of tears to the God of our homeland in the heavens.
Perhaps, then, take time this day of St. Francis Xavier and consider the immigrant in our midst, the stranger in a strange land. If you find your heart hardened by the vituperative rhetoric that so dominates our political culture, then I ask you only to pray to St. Francis the Spaniard, St. Francis the missionary, St. Francis the lover who allowed that love to bring Jesus to the world. Perhaps we might raise a forearm, glass in hand of course, and toast with a friend the same love that saved a wretch like me.
In that spirit: St. Francis Xavier…pray for us!
Thanks Omar for another great post!!! visit Regnum Novum for more by Omar
Tags: catholic, catholic podcast, catholic prayer, cathollc spirituality, china, churches in rome, india, martyr, missionary, society of jesus, st francis xavier, st. ignatius of loyola
This entry was posted on Friday, December 3rd, 2010 at 9:06 am
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Today is the feast of one of my favorite “sister” saints, St. Praxedes. I found out about her when I went a pilgrimage a couple of years ago to Rome led by Scott and Kimberly Hahn and Mike Aquilina. It is believed that she, and her sister St. Pudentiana, were the daughters of St. Pudens (from 2 Timothy 4:21). She and her sister are remembered as saints of true mercy.Â
They lived in those early years of the Church, at a time of extreme Christian persecution. They hid Christians in their homes and visited the imprisioned. They even gathered the bodies of the dead after they were brutalized in the Coliesuum, and hid them in a well until they could be properly buried. St. Praxedes is 
often depicted in art with a sponge soaked in blood; recalling how they cared for the precious blood of the martyrs after their awful executions. Their heoic virtue during these horrific years was so great that almost 2000 years later we still remember them.
Their home was one of the first “house churches” in Rome. It is named after her sister, St. Pudentiana. Later another church was built and dedicated to St. Praxedes. Both are located near St. Mary Major in Rome. Click on the pictures to have a better look…
Crypt where St. Praxedes relics are kept along with her sisters
Entrance (very unassuming by Rome standards...blink and you'd walk past it)
Glorious asp, you can see the entrance to crypt at lower center of picture
Interior
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Pudentiana…what fun that was   Tags: catholic, catholic podcast, catholic prayer, cathollc spirituality, churches in rome, martyrs, pilgrimage, saints
This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 8:07 am
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.