August Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: He brought vast quantities of spices with which to anoint the body.

John 19:38-42 tells the story of Jesus's burial. After St. Joseph of Arimathea (another prominent man and secret disciple) had taken the body down, St. Nicodemus arrived with "a mixture of myrrh and aloes, weighing about a hundred pounds." (That's 45 kilograms!) Jesus was buried in a shroud of spices and linen.

Earlier, St. Nicodemus had visited Jesus in secret, and their exchange (John 3:1-21) became one of the more famous passages in the New Testament. Told that a man must be "born again" to enter Heaven, St. Nicodemus was confused, and asked just what that meant; when he doubted again, and asked how such things could be, Jesus preached a sermon with a tremendous climax. "For God so loved the world," Jesus explained, "that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him may not perish but may have eternal life."

Answer: She was briefly excommunicated from the Catholic Church by her bishop.

The first Australian ever to be beatified by the Roman Catholic Church, Blessed Mary MacKillop (1842-1909) was a woman who knew her own mind. When she realized there was an unmet need for schools, orphanages, and women's shelters throughout southern Australia, she consulted with her priest, Father Julian Woods, and founded an order of nuns to solve the problem.

When her bishop protested that the rule of poverty she imposed on her order was too strict, she held firm even when he excommunicated her; after five months, he revoked his order, telling her he had been badly advised. Blessed Mary then took the wise precaution of traveling to Rome and securing papal backing for her order, the Sisters of Joseph of the Sacred Heart.

Answer: The Poor Clares

St. Clare (circa 1193-1253) was only a teenager when she heard St. Francis speak, and her old life ended. She gave up her wealth, her belongings, and her marriage prospects, and insisted on becoming a nun. At her friend's urging, she soon reluctantly became an abbess, founding the Second Order of St. Francis.

The Poor Clares, as this Order of Poor Ladies is popularly known, set about a life of hard work, poverty, and penance, with much of the day spent in near-total silence. After St. Clare's hard personal penances resulted in chronic illness, she urged her nuns to an easier path, with their "sacrifice seasoned with the salt of prudence." She devoted herself to writing a Rule for her order that would make their lifestyle of poverty official; when this Rule was finally approved by the Pope, just two days before her death, it was the first time the Church had ever approved a Rule written for women, by a woman.

Answer: At Auschwitz, a concentration camp

St. Maximilian worked hard in his 47-year lifetime; he published bulletins full of Marian devotion, traveled to Japan and India for missionary work, and wound up leading nearly 800 monks outside Kraków. But he is celebrated for the events of the summer of 1941, after he was arrested by the occupying Nazis (probably because of his pro-Polish, anti-Nazi writings) and taken to the death camp at Auschwitz.

In late July, several men from St. Maximilian's cell block were taken to be executed, as punishment for their blockmates' escape attempt. The saint volunteered to take the place of one of the men who had been selected, a man whom he knew to have a wife and children. "I wish to die for that man," he said, and so he did -- over two weeks of slow starvation, followed by a lethal injection. When he was canonized forty-one years later, the man he had saved was at the ceremony.

Answer: Abraham

Sarah (like other Old Testament figures honored as saints, it is customary to call her "St. Sarah" only on her feast day) married Abraham when she was young and beautiful; back then, they went by the names Sarai and Abram. In fact, she was so lovely that her husband made her lie repeatedly on their travels: Abram worried that the local leaders would be so taken with her beauty that they would kill him to take his wife, and so he wanted to pose as brother and sister. (Genesis 12:10-20 and 20:1-18)

The birth of Isaac was the partial fulfillment of God's covenant with Abraham: God had promised to make Abraham "a father of many nations" (Genesis 17:5), and Isaac was to be the ancestor of the Jewish people. Unfortunately, his birth also set nations against each other: a jealous Sarah cast out Ishmael, Isaac's older half-brother and the ancestor of the Ishmaelites, and his mother (her servant). It was only through the intervention of an angel that the pair survived in the desert. (Genesis 21:9-21)

Answer: Clairvaux

St. Bernard of Clairvaux was an energetic man, and he left both the Cistercian Order and the Church different in his wake. A nobleman, he did not want to enter monastic life alone, and so -- in the first known exercise of his considerable persuasive powers -- he convinced four of his brothers and more than two dozen of his friends to join him in taking vows. Even when he had the leadership of hundreds of monks at Clairvaux, he kept busy in the world at large.

His support was vital to Innocent II's victory in a disputed papal succession; he also took an interest in the naming of bishops.

He urged monks to make mysticism a part of their daily routines, and preached and wrote on ways of loving God. For his eloquence, energy and holiness, there were some who venerated him before he was even dead!

Answer: Lima, Peru

St. Rose of Lima (1586-1617) was the daughter of a prosperous family of Spanish colonists in Peru. She took a personal vow of virginity at a young age, refusing her parents' attempts to marry her off. She is said to have disfigured herself with lye in order to deter her suitors, and this was only one of her self-punishments, which ranged from bulimia to her famous thorny crown.

She cared for the sick (especially for children and the elderly) in between her penances; given their physical toll, it is no wonder that she died young, at 31.

Answer: St. Bartholomew

St. Bartholomew is thought to have been the same man as Nathaniel, a companion of St. Philip described in the Gospel of John. (Nathaniel would have been his given name, while Bartholomew -- Bar-Talmai in Hebrew -- gave the name of his father.) He was described n glowing terms by Jesus Christ Himself, as "an Israelite ... in whom there is no guile" (John 1:47).

If only the 16th-century French Catholic leadership had followed his example. Eager to destroy the threat they thought was posed by the Huguenots -- Calvinist Protestants -- they pretended to offer peace, suggesting that the Huguenot leader, Prince Henry of Navarre (later King Henry IV of France), marry the Catholic Princess Marguerite de Valois. A few days after the wedding, on St. Bartholomew's Day 1572, there was blood instead of peace, as thousands of the bridegroom's followers were murdered. (Henry was spared when he pretended to convert to Catholicism.) It is hard to fathom why an offering of martyrs might please the martyred St. Bartholomew.

Answer: St. Augustine of Hippo

St. Monica (332-387) had a difficult life. A devout Christian from an early age, she was married to a man named Patricius who shared neither her faith nor her values: he was, in fact, a violent alcoholic who would probably have been a poor husband for anyone. Nevertheless, her options were few and she was determined to show him Christian love, and he was finally baptized not long before his death.

With her son, St. Augustine (354-430), St. Monica had a more difficult task. He had been a pious boy, but as a teenager, his prayer was, "Lord, make me chaste, but not yet!" He took a concubine and was a father by the age of twenty. Drawn to Manicheism, which taught that the power of evil was equal to the power of God, he left Algeria for Italy without telling his mother when he was going. She followed him there, and it was her friend, the bishop St. Ambrose, who eventually brought St. Augustine into the fold of Christianity. She died a happy woman soon after her son's baptism, fulfilled even though she had not yet seen him as Bishop of Hippo or as a theologian honored for such seminal works as "Confessions" and "On the City of God."

Answer: Herod's stepdaughter asked for St. John's head on a platter.

St. John the Baptist was the cousin of Jesus Christ, and was very close to Him in age; a beautiful passage in Luke 1, the basis for part of the Hail Mary prayer, tells of a meeting between their pregnant mothers.

When he grew to manhood, St. John preached of the coming of the Messiah, which would have been unpopular enough with Herod Antipas -- but he also preached against Herod's marriage to Herodias, who was both his niece and his brother's wife. (And not, note, his brother's widow.) Herodias demanded that St. John be arrested, and her husband agreed. The prophet's fate was sealed when Herod, boggled by his stepdaughter's exotic dance, promised her anything she wanted; prompted by her mother, she asked for St. John's head on a platter. (Matthew 14:3-11)

St. John the Baptist is a popular figure in art and takes three roles: a cherubic child playing with the infant Jesus; a desert prophet dressed in camel hide; and a martyr, in gruesome detail. August 29 is only one of his feast days: his birth is commemorated on June 24.