December Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: England

These days, the Anglican and Roman Catholic churches seem more similar than different, but in those days the differences were bound up in worldly power and matters of state. When Queen Mary ruled England and Wales, you risked your life if you were an Anglican; when her sister Elizabeth I succeeded her, you risked your life if you weren't. St. Edmund Campion (1540-1581) was a charismatic young man who was ordained as an Anglican deacon, then fled across the English Channel to rejoin the Catholic Church. As a newly minted Jesuit priest, he returned to England, where he ministered to secret Catholics and distributed clandestine pamphlets against Anglicanism. After a little over a year, he was caught and executed after torture.

His Church commemorates him today as one of the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales, complements of the Anglican Church's own set of founding martyrs.

Answer: North Africa

St. Crispina was a prosperous woman from the town of Thagara, in what is now Tunisia, with a large family. Yet in 304, when she was accused of being a Christian during the persecutions of Emperor Diocletian, she sacrificed it all to proclaim a faith she had held from childhood.

The possibly apocryphal transcript of her trial shows a confident and unflappable woman. "My God," she told the proconsul Anullinus, "... willed that I be born. He brought me to salvation through the waters of baptism. And He is with me to stay my soul from committing the sacrilege that you require."

Answer: Myra, in what is now Turkey

St. Nicholas (ca. 270-343) was orphaned early and raised by an uncle, who ensured that he was educated for a career in the Church. He was, by all accounts, a good and respected bishop, but it was his generosity that made him loved -- and that gave rise to the legend of Santa Claus.

In one famous story, he heard of three young sisters whose father could not afford to give them dowries, which in their culture doomed them to spinsterhood and probable prostitution. His solution was to toss three bags of money, each an ample dowry, through the window.

This, along with the story of how he resurrected three murdered boys, gave him a reputation of caring for children.

Answer: Antiphonal chant

In antiphonal chant, the choir is divided into two opposing groups (hence the "anti"): one side sings a chant, and the other responds. A variant of this is commonly used during ordinary Catholic masses today: a cantor will sing the verses of a psalm, and in between the verses the congregation responds with a refrain. While no antiphonal chants written by St. Ambrose survive, it does appear that he introduced the general concept of hymns to the western church, and antiphonal chant is also called "Ambrosian chant" in his honor.

Born around the year 340 or perhaps a little earlier in what is now Germany, St. Ambrose was an energetic and well-spoken man who was elected Bishop of Milan by popular acclaim - despite being neither baptized nor ordained. (He soon corrected both problems.) He was beloved for his personal generosity and for his patience and clarity in explaining complex theological issues; perhaps it was this last trait that allowed him his most famous success, the conversion of St. Augustine to Christianity. He died in 397 - and his body is still on display in a Milanese church.

Answer: Tepeyac Hill, near Mexico City

St. Juan Diego was born Cuauhtlatoatzin in an Aztec village in 1474. He was 47 years old when the Spanish conquered Mexico and 50 when he and his wife, impressed by Franciscan missionaries, were baptized as Catholics; as was common then, they changed their names when they converted, to Juan Diego and Maria Lucia. On the ninth of December, 1531, he was on his way to Mass when he saw the Virgin Mary. She was aged about fourteen, dark-skinned like him, and dressed as a princess of the Aztecs. She told him that she wanted a shrine at the spot so as to better protect the native people of Mexico: "Here I will hear their weeping, their sorrow..." At first, the local bishop did not believe St. Juan, but at a later apparition he received a miracle: the Virgin instructed him to pick roses that were, oddly, blooming in December. She arranged them inside his cloak, and when he opened the bundle for the bishop, an image of her had appeared on the cloth.

This vision of Our Lady of Guadalupe, as this apparition quickly became known, set fire to the hearts and minds of people all over Mexico. By the time St. Juan Diego died in 1548, pilgrims were already beginning to come to the site; today, millions of people still make that visit to the Lady's shrine at Tepeyac Hill. St. Juan Diego was officially canonized in 2002, and remains much beloved in Mexico for his faith and his humility in addition to his historical impact.

Answer: Her eyes

The story goes that St. Lucy was born in Sicily in 283, and that her eyes were strikingly beautiful. Her captors put them out when it became clear that she wouldn't recant her beliefs, but then a miracle occurred: God gave the girl new eyes, more beautiful than the original orbs. In her legend, more miracles followed; for example, she is said to have suddenly become as heavy as a mountain when they tried to carry her to a brothel. In the end, they stabbed her to death.

In art, St. Lucy can usually be recognized by the eyes she's carrying on a platter. Her feast is especially important in Scandinavia, where girls dress in white gowns to remember her on that day. One girl, chosen to represent the saint, wears a wreath with candles set in it to symbolize the imminent return of light to the world.

Answer: St. Teresa of Avila

The Carmelite Order, of which St. John of the Cross (1542-1591) was already a member, had tremendous wealth and power. Many Carmelite convents and monasteries were not exactly the austere, holy places their founders had envisioned. St. John and St. Teresa of Ávila sought to change all this by starting a new Carmelite order whose nuns and monks would be truer to the original rule. They called their followers "Discalced" (Barefoot) Carmelites to distinguish them from their more opulent brethren and sistren. The idea caught on, except among the old-order Carmelites. St. John was actually kidnapped by his superiors and held prisoner for months before he escaped.

In addition to his feats of derring-do, St. John was also a mystic and a skilled poet. His "Long Dark Night of the Soul" and "Canticle of the Soul" are still much read, and earned him recognition as a Doctor of the Church.

Answer: The first Christian martyred for faith

St. Stephen lived in Jerusalem in the first century AD, and may well have known Jesus Christ personally. The story of his martyrdom is told in Chapters 6 and 7 of the Biblical Book of Acts. He is described there in the most glowing of terms: chosen by the fledgling Christian community to ensure that all its widows were treated equally, he was "full of faith and the Holy Spirit" (Acts 6:5) and "did great wonders and signs among the people" (Acts 6:8). Falsely accused of blaspheming against God and Moses, he delivered a harsh speech on the historical mistreatment of prophets, and was promptly stoned to death. Just before being dragged out of the city, St. Stephen announced that he'd had a vision of Heaven.

With St. Stephen's execution, the Book of Acts takes a darker turn: the danger of arrest, mobs and death is always lurking. Yet even in this dark moment there is a ray of light for the early Church: Saul, the young man who watches the coats of the executioners in Acts 7 and throws Christians into prison in Acts 8, converts to Christianity in Acts 9 and becomes an extraordinary preacher and theologian.

Answer: "The disciple whom Jesus loved"

Throughout the text of this Gospel one disciple is not given a name, but is called very simply "the disciple whom Jesus loved." It is this man, John 21:24 says, "who is testifying to these things and has written them." Scholarship and tradition agree that the beloved disciple was St. John, son of Zebedee, who was called to follow Christ while fishing with his brother St. James and their friend Simon, a.k.a. St. Peter (Luke 5:10). Later, he took care of the Virgin Mary after Jesus' death (John 19:26-27).

The Book of Revelation indicates that its author was exiled to the island of Patmos "because of the word of God and the testimony of Jesus" (Revelation 1:9). Tradition has it that St. John did not suffer much other persecution: after an embarrassing failure when they tried to boil him alive, the authorities left him alone and he died of old age, in Ephesus. He is thought to have been the only one of the twelve apostles not to die a martyr.

Answer: In his cathedral at Canterbury

St. Thomas was born to respected Londoners in 1118; his rise to power in the Church was speedy, but evidently richly deserved. In 1155, his close friend Henry II of England named him Chancellor, and the archdeacon served the king loyally. In 1162, when St. Thomas became Archbishop of Canterbury -- then the highest English position in the Roman Catholic Church -- King Henry assumed that he would remain equally devoted to the Crown. But the saint's loyalties had shifted, and he resisted efforts to control the movements and actions of English clergy. (In modern times, it is sometimes forgotten that separating church and state protects the church.)

The dispute dragged on for years; both the Pope and the King of France became involved. Finally, soon after St. Thomas' return to England, four of the king's knights (perhaps egged on by the king himself) attacked him savagely in his cathedral. He had let his murderers in after monks had barred the door; "a church is not a castle," he insisted.

St. Thomas' murder shocked Europe. He was immediately renowned as a martyr and a saint, and (ironically) the king had no choice but to back down from his positions and perform several public and humiliating penances.