July Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: Doubting Thomas

"Doubting Thomas" is best known for his skepticism after Jesus's resurrection. Told by the other apostles that Christ had risen from the dead, he thought this a false hope: "Unless I see in His hands the print of the nails, and put my finger into the print of the nails, and put my hand into his side, I will not believe" (John 20:25). Eight days later, Jesus came to St. Thomas, showed him His wounds, and let him touch them. A true scientist, the apostle considered the evidence and reached his conclusion, "and said to him, 'My Lord and my God!' Jesus said to him, 'Thomas, because you have seen Me, you have believed. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed'" (John 20:28-29).

After Christ's ascension into Heaven, St. Thomas went out to spread the Gospel, just as the other apostles did. He is believed to have traveled the farthest of any of them, making it as far as Chennai (in India) before he was martyred with a spear or lance.

Answer: Isaiah

Jews regard Isaiah as one of the great prophets; Catholics believe him to be a saint as well, known to be in Heaven. He preached during the reigns of four kings of Judah in the eighth century BC; his message was generally pessimistic. "Hear, O heavens, and give ear, O earth: for the Lord hath spoken, I have nourished and brought up children, and they have rebelled against me," he said of Judah and Jerusalem (Isaiah 1:2), and it only gets worse from there. Even the names of his children speak to the pain he predicted: "Shear-jashub" means "A remnant will return," and "Maher-shalal-hash-baz" means "Hurry to spoil! He has made haste to the plunder!"

Yet the long book of Isaiah also contains words of hope. He predicted that the Jews, conquered and carried off by the Babylonians, would return to Israel. He even prophesied an eventual time of perfect peace, a paradise where "the wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them" (Isaiah 11:6). Devastation and promise, beauty and terror, joy and lamentation, all coexist in this prophet's work.

Answer: Papua New Guinea

Blessed Peter ToRot (1912-1945) was the son of a chief in Papua New Guinea, which was then a British possession administered by Australia. His family was Catholic, and he considered going into the priesthood, but became a lay catechist instead.

When World War II arrived, and with it an invading Japanese army, Blessed Peter -- by then married with young children -- carried on with his work of ministering to his neighbors in Rakunai and helping run the parish. When the priests and nuns among the missionaries were imprisoned in an internment camp, he smuggled them food -- and smuggled out consecrated Communion bread for the parish. And when the Japanese demanded that he stop his work for the Church -- his baptisms, his visitations, his counseling -- he refused. He was executed in July 1945, a little over a month before the end of the war.

"I am not afraid and I will not give up God, and my work for him," Blessed Peter ToRot told his uncle, while he was in prison. "It is better to die for the faith then to die with the bullets."

Answer: Her veil

St. Veronica is not mentioned in the Gospel accounts of Jesus's suffering, but she has since become indelibly linked with the crucifixion in the minds of Catholics.

The story goes that she was just an ordinary woman of Jerusalem, until Jesus passed her on the way to the place of His execution. He was being made to carry the cross, and it was heavy; He had been whipped, and crowned with thorns; He was bloody and exhausted. St. Veronica, deeply moved by his plight, reached forward with her veil to wipe away the sweat, blood and tears. When the cloth came away, it bore the image of Christ's face, a miraculous relic in repayment for her kindness.

Answer: Mohawk

The Seminoles lived far to the south, in what is now Florida; the Navajo were clear across the continent in what is now known as the Four Corners region of the U.S. Southwest. The Dutch did settle what is now New York, but Blessed Káteri's people, the Mohawks, were there first.

European colonists and missionaries brought joy to Blessed Káteri's life, in the form of the Gospel which she came to love so well, but they also brought tragedy and pain. In 1660, when she was just four years old, an epidemic of smallpox -- a disease native to the Old World and brought to the Americas by Europeans -- killed her parents, her brother, and many of her neighbors. She was adopted by her uncle, a clan chief, but even this did not bring safety: a French army swept through the area in 1666, burning her hometown and several nearby villages, and forcing her family to resettle. It is a testament to her strength of will that she found it in her heart to accept and forgive the French, and to travel to Quebec to pursue a life of prayer. Her early death was probably due to the extreme self-mortification that was fashionable at the time as a sign of piety; Blessed Káteri's preferred penance was with thorns.

Answer: Swithun

St. Swithun was a ninth-century bishop, based at Winchester. His reputation for predicting the weather is usually traced to a miracle that is said to have occurred when his bones were moved from an outdoor grave (where he had originally arranged to be buried) to an indoor shrine; the saint's anger was apparently reflected in a long, torrential downpour. His abilities can be (perhaps unflatteringly) compared to those of the North American groundhog, which is said to be able to predict the end of winter based on whether or not he sees his shadow on February 2.

The weather is not St. Swithun's only bailiwick; his other famous miracles include the mending of a poor old woman's basket of broken eggs, and the saving of a queen from the humiliating ordeals imposed on her by her angry son. (This queen was Emma, widow both of Ethelred the Unready and of Cnut the Great, who was one of the Vikings Ethelred was unready for.)

Answer: She is never identified by name as having been a prostitute.

St. Mary Magdalene's rescue from seven demons is one of the first things we know about her; Luke 8:2 includes her in a list of people accompanying Christ in his travels through Israel, describing her as "Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven demons had gone out."

Standing as a witness to Jesus's torture and death was no doubt very emotionally difficult, but the saint was there, alongside Jesus's family: "Meanwhile, standing near the cross of Jesus were his mother, and his mother's sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene" (John 19:25). And when Jesus rose from the dead, the Gospel of John tells us that it was St. Mary Magdalene who saw Him first, after weeping outside His empty tomb; Jesus told her to bring word to the disciples, and she did. "Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, 'I have seen the Lord'..." (John 20:18).

Yet nowhere in the Bible is St. Mary Magdalene identified, by name, as having been a prostitute; neither does it show her as washing Jesus's feet with her hair. Rather, the "sinful woman" who did these things is unnamed in Luke 7:37-50. Catholic tradition has identified her with St. Mary Magdalene since the time of Pope Gregory the Great, in the sixth century; the Eastern Orthodox tradition has been equally clear that she was virtuous her whole life long.

Answer: Saving the souls of those consigned to Purgatory

Blessed Christina, a Belgian, was born in 1150. When she was 21, she suffered from a terrible seizure, which left her unconscious and with the appearance of death. So you can imagine the surprise of the mourners at her funeral when she recovered in the middle of the Mass, announcing that she had been to Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory -- and that she had returned to Earth solely to help the souls of those in Purgatory, many of whom she had recognized. These souls had been sentenced to some finite time of punishment before they could enter Heaven cleansed of their sin, and their suffering moved Blessed Christina deeply.

For the rest of her 74 years of life, Blessed Christina's life revolved around saving these souls. She had ecstatic periods, wherein she led those freed from Purgatory into Heaven; she went through times of torment, where she tortured herself (through fire, through dragging herself on a mill-wheel or through standing in ice-cold water for hours) in an effort to take on the burdens of these condemned souls. Souls on Earth, however, she avoided; she said that she could smell their sin, and she is said to have gone so far as to levitate in order to escape the stink. Some thought her insane, which is why she is honored as a patron saint of mental illness; others admired her faith, devotion and obedience to the local abbess.

Answer: The Virgin Mary

Tradition tells us that St. Anne and St. Joachim were heartbroken over their inability to conceive a child, and -- when an angel appeared to tell them that a child would be theirs -- they rejoiced and promised that the child would serve God. The Catholic Church teaches that their daughter Mary was born without original sin, through a miracle known as the Immaculate Conception; it was this sinlessness, combined with her avoidance of worldly sin through her vow of virginity, that earned her the honor of giving birth to God in the person of Jesus Christ.

The Blessed Virgin's parents, grandparents of the Lord, have taken on a variety of patronage roles, often related to fertility: grandparents and pregnant women turn to them, as do those struggling to conceive.

Answer: Spain

Íńigo López de Loyola (1491-1556) was born in the Basque region of northern Spain. He was a son of a noble family, and he became a knight for the Duke of Duke of Nájera when he was little more than a boy. But when he was badly injured in a battle in Pamplona, he had a long convalescence and only religious texts to read, and his life was changed. Deeply moved by his experiences with meditation and contemplation, he wrote "Spiritual Exercises" as a workbook for becoming closer to God.

St. Ignatius became devoted to God at a time when the Protestant Reformation was causing great turmoil in Europe. He -- with the Society of Jesus (or Jesuit Order), which he founded with his friends -- became a leader in the Counter-Reformation, wherein the Catholic Church tried to address some Protestant concerns by reforming itself and other concerns through theological debate. As the Jesuits' first Father General, St. Ignatius placed them on the path of dedication to the Pope and to scholarship ("for the greater glory of God") for which they are still known today.