April Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: She became a hermit in the desert.

St. Mary of Egypt, who lived from about 344 to about 421 AD, ran away from a loving home when she was only twelve years old. Guided "by an insatiable desire and an irrepressible passion," she spent almost two decades wandering from man to man, interested only in her pleasure and supporting herself by begging. This life satisfied her until she traveled to Jerusalem, hoping to entertain herself among the pilgrims; when she tried to enter a church out of curiosity and view a piece of the True Cross, an invisible, supernatural force kept her out. Overcome with sorrow, she begged God for forgiveness and swore to become a hermit, giving up the world she loved so much. The invisible barrier vanished, and she kept her word after venerating the True Cross, guided to the desert across the River Jordan by the voice of the Virgin Mary.

Aside from the three loaves of bread that were the only things she took into the desert, her next contact with human beings or with the fruits of civilization was with St. Zosimas, a monk whom she met in the desert and to whom she told her story. (He is the source of her legend, which was later set to paper by St. Sophronius; the resulting hagiography is the source of the quotation above.) He arranged to meet her again a year later and give her Communion; she died that very night, after receiving the Sacrament.

Answer: St. Isidore of Seville

The nineteenth-century historian Charles Forbes de Montalembert, in "The Monks of the West," called St. Isidore "the last philosopher of the ancient world," and when you look at the saint's publication list, you can see why. His "Etymologiae," also known to scholars as "Origines," is one of the earliest encyclopedias to have survived to the modern day, and its twenty volumes have served as a time capsule for a variety of ancient writings that would otherwise have been lost. He also penned a history of the Gothic peoples and treatises on such theological topics as the nature of Heaven and of the Holy Trinity, in between converting the Visigoths who ruled Spain from Arianism (an early Christian belief which denied the Holy Trinity and held that God the Father was superior to Jesus Christ) to Roman Catholicism.

St. Isidore was not canonized (that is, officially recognized as a saint) until 1598 -- nearly a thousand years after his death in 630 -- but his scholarship and patronage of students (and, unofficially, the worldwide web) assure him a prominent place in the calendar of saints.

Answer: St. Stanislaus had excommunicated the king.

Born in southern Poland in 1130, St. Stanislaus was one of the first Polish bishops who was actually a native Pole. From his seat in Kraków, he helped the Benedictines found monasteries and strengthened ties between Poland and the Vatican. In a famous example of his stubbornness in defending the rights of the Church, it is said that he refused to accept the verdict of King Boleslaw II in a land dispute wherein the Church's chief witness (the man he had purchased the land from) was dead -- and he actually went to the graveyard and resurrected the man to testify to the court.

St. Stanislaus was less successful in his last dispute with the king. The particulars of their argument are lost to history -- it may have been that the bishop objected to the king's sexual practices, or to his treatment of deserting soldiers and their families, or it may have been part of a rather more secular power play. However it started, it ended with Stanislaus excommunicating Boleslaw (and thereby excluding him from the Church and its sacraments), and with Boleslaw murdering Stanislaus as he was saying Mass. (The king soon was forced to abdicate his throne and flee, due to popular outrage over the slaying.) The first Pole to be canonized, St. Stanislaus became a potent symbol of Polish patriotism.

Answer: They were embarrassed by her numerous birth defects.

Blessed Margaret was born with many disadvantages. She was a dwarf. She had a hunchback. She was blind. Her "noble" parents were horrified by her appearance, and took extreme measures so that the outside world would not think her theirs. First they hid her at home; then they had a cell built next to the church, and locked her up in it. She loved to receive the Sacraments, and was heartbroken when her parents later took her away. Their last, rather pathetic effort to do right by their daughter involved taking her to the town of Castello, where miracles were reported in the local church -- but, when there was no healing miracle for Margaret, her parents simply left their blind daughter there in the church, alone.

Luckily, the people of Castello were touched by Margaret's plight. She lived with them, moving from house to house every few weeks or months, for a few years before becoming a nun. When she died at the age of 33, she was already considered a saint by her neighbors, who insisted that she be buried within the church itself -- and, when a crippled child was cured after her stretcher was brought near Margaret's body, the priest had to agree! Blessed Margaret was beatified in 1609, but has not yet been canonized.

Answer: The Virgin Mary

St. Bernadette (1844-1879), a poor and deeply religious girl, was gathering firewood on February 11, 1858, when she had the first of eighteen visions of "a small young lady" wearing a white veil and a blue girdle. Her sister, as well as a friend who was with them, saw nothing, but Bernadette persisted in her story and soon saw the lady again. Asked by the apparition to return to the location daily, the girl complied, despite the sometimes harsh doubts and criticisms expressed by the other people of the town of Lourdes -- including the village priest. The lady asked that a chapel be built on the site; directed Bernadette to dig up a hitherto unknown spring; and identified herself as "the Immaculate Conception." This doctrine, stating that the Virgin Mary had, alone of mankind, been born without original sin, had only been formally defined by the Church four years previously -- and this child from the south of France had never heard the phrase. She went on to become a nun, shunning publicity, and died of tuberculosis.

The grotto where St. Bernadette had her visions and dug up her spring has become one of the most popular pilgrimage destinations in the world. Millions of Catholics come to Lourdes every year, mainly seeking healing; the Church reports that some three score have received miraculous cures. My own grandmother was one pilgrim in her last year on Earth; she was not cured, but was blessed afterward with a sense of peace and grace.

Answer: The existence of God

St. Anselm (1093-1109) spent the early part of his clerical career at the Abbey of Bec, in Normandy, where he was first a novice; then a Benedictine monk; then a prior; and finally the abbot. A strong proponent of scholarship, he set an example for his students with his philosophical treatises, of which the "Proslogion" (also known as the "Proslogium") is the most enduring. In this work, St. Anselm made the first attempt to ontologically prove the existence of God -- that is, to prove His existence through reason alone.

His argument took the following tack: By definition, nothing can be imagined which is greater than God. God cannot then be a solely figment of the imagination because then things that are both imagined and real would be greater; therefore, God must exist. It is this argument that has sealed St. Anselm's fame, although it has been noted that the argument is most persuasive for Christians trying to validate their pre-existing belief in God.

Answer: Soldier

St. George was born in the late third century (the exact year is uncertain) to parents who were both Christian and nobles. As a young man, he decided to join the army as his father had before him, and he eventually rose to a position of trust in Diocletian's Imperial Guard. Then, at the turn of the fourth century, Diocletian -- believing that the old gods of Rome had to be appeased in order for the Empire to survive -- launched the last great Roman persecution of the Christians. One of his early edicts demanded the arrest of Christians serving in the military, and St. George -- a trusted Guardsman -- responded by presenting himself to the Emperor and declaring his faith. Diocletian is said to have offered him untold riches if he agreed to worship the old gods, but St. George never faltered, and he was tortured and executed in the year 303.

The famous tale of George and the dragon is probably a transplant from earlier mythology. He is said to have been traveling through the land when he came across a princess, bound, terrified, and waiting for a dragon to come and eat her. In exchange for not eating the entire city, you see, the dragon feasted on a maiden every day, and on this day the princess had drawn the short straw. After a brief prayer, St. George slew the dragon, saved the princess, and converted the entire grateful populace to Christianity. Not bad for a morning's work!

Answer: He was dragged by horses in the streets of Alexandria.

Though scholars believe that the Gospel of Mark was the first Gospel to be written, it is usually placed third in the New Testament. St. Mark himself is not mentioned by name in his eponymous work, although some identify him with various unnamed characters -- including, most embarrassingly, the mysterious man in the Garden of Gethsemane who lost his clothes and ran away when the Romans came to arrest Jesus Christ (Mark 14:51-52). The Book of Acts brings a stronger candidate, one John Mark, who began his ministry by accompanying Saul and Barnabas to Antioch (Acts 12:25).

In the course of his missionary work, St. Mark is said to have wound up in Alexandria, in Egypt, where he founded a church and, perhaps, became a bishop there. Tradition says that it was in that city that he was executed, and his remains stayed in that city for 750 years -- until a pair of intrepid Venetians stole them, packing them in salt pork to discourage Muslim customs inspectors and using them to found the famous Basilica di San Marco.

The other choices of gruesome fate belonged to other martyrs from the same era. St. Peter was crucified upside-down in Rome; St. Stephen was stoned to death in Jerusalem, as described in the Book of Acts; and St. Bartholomew was flayed, or skinned, in Albania, after which he was crucified just to make sure.

Answer: Bringing the Papacy back to Rome (from Avignon)

St. Catherine's efforts were central in ending the Avignon Papacy, which lasted from 1308 to 1377 and spanned the reigns of seven popes. In that time, the papacy was at the center of a number of power struggles -- much more violently than it is today! -- and the key players in this drama included the King of France and a number of noble Italian families. Pope Clement V, a French cleric who was elected as Pope in 1305, moved the whole papal court to Avignon in 1309 for unclear reasons -- was he concerned for the safety of the Church in Rome? Or was he beholden to the French king? The Popes' claims to be Christianity's universal bishops were undermined by this move, especially when the influences of the French court led the upper levels of the Church to ever greater levels of luxury.

The situation broke St. Catherine's heart, and she devoted a great deal of time and impassioned argument to ending it. Her correspondence with heads of state, including with Pope Gregory XI (whom she called Papa), helped lead to the restoration of the Roman papacy (which was not without its own problems). She also worked hard on behalf of the poor, the sick, and peace generally, and her mystical visions and writings have formed an enduring legacy.

Answer: Charity

Saint Giuseppe Benedetto Cottolengo, known to English speakers by the anglicized name Joseph Benedict, lived from 1786 to 1842; his feast day, April 30, is the anniversary of his death from typhus. The story goes that, as a young priest in the Order of the Corpus Christi, St. Joseph was going through the motions until he was called to visit a woman going through a difficult labor. She had been sick, and she needed a doctor's attention -- but she was also poor, and all she had was her family, her friends, and this one priest. He heard her confession, he gave her Communion, he gave her the last rites, and he baptized her newborn daughter -- but four sacraments were not enough to keep either mother or daughter in this world.

After that night, St. Joseph was a changed man. He devoted the remainder of his life toward serving the poor, the sick, the homeless, the orphans, and anyone else who was in need. His charitable network was based in his Little House of Divine Providence, or Piccola Casa, which he founded in Turin in 1832; he attracted hundreds of followers, priests, nuns, monks, and laypeople, to help him in his efforts. The Piccola Casa is still active today, as are Cottolengo's followers throughout the world.

Thank you for joining me in this look at the saints of April! I hope you've enjoyed this page of the calendar.