May Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: Jeremiah

"To whom can I speak and give warning?" Jeremiah asked in Jeremiah 6:10-11. "Who will listen to me? Their ears are closed so they cannot hear. The word of the Lord is offensive to them; they find no pleasure in it. But I am full of the wrath of the Lord, and I cannot hold it in." Few Biblical prophets had an easy life, and Jeremiah's was harder than most. His messages of defeat and doom did not make him popular; he was actually in prison when the Babylonians came. The Book of Jeremiah tells the story of his life, his prophecies and his vain attempts to persuade the people to turn toward God and God to have mercy on the people; the Book of Lamentations is his heart-breaking poem about the fate of the conquered Jerusalem.

The Babylonian conquest of Jersualem took place in 586 BC; Jeremiah is thought to have begun preaching some forty or fifty years before that. He is said to have been murdered in Egypt as an old man.

Answer: He asked Jesus to show the Apostles the Father.

During the Last Supper, prompted by questions from St. Thomas and Philip, Jesus explained that He and the Father were one and the same, a critical aspect of the mystery of the Holy Trinity - how three "persons" (Father, Son and Holy Ghost) can nevertheless be one God. His sermon began after Thomas asked Him how best to follow Him, and contains one of the most famous lines of the Gospels:

"Jesus said to him [Thomas], 'I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known my Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him.' Philip said to him, 'Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us,'" after which Jesus explained further that He was "'in the Father, and the Father is in'" Him. (John 14:6-10).

St. Philip is said to have spent the latter part of his life preaching in various places around the Mediterranean, including Syria and Greece, before he was martyred by being crucified upside-down (a fate which is reminiscent of St. Peter's). St. James the Apostle, son of Alphaeus, is not much mentioned in the Gospels, but the Roman Catholic Church teaches that he was probably the same man as James the Just, whose achievements include authoring the Epistle of James (a book in the New Testament) and helping found the church in Jerusalem. St. James was eventually stoned to death for his beliefs.

Answer: Job

"Behold," wrote James in the New Testament, "we count them happy which endure. Ye have heard of the patience of Job..." (James 5:11). Job, the wealthy and pious man who is the protagonist of the Old Testament book that bears his name, was gradually stripped of the things that were dear to him as a result of an argument between God and Satan.

In order to prove that Job was not faithful solely because of God's ample blessings on him, God allowed Satan to take those blessings away. Job lost his fortune.

He lost his children. He lost his health. Yet he maintained his faith in God, saying, "I know that my redeemer lives" (Job 19:25), and was eventually rewarded. "The patience of Job" is a reference to perseverance and trust in the face of extreme trials.

Answer: Blessed Julian of Norwich

We don't know much about Blessed Julian of Norwich, save that she lived between about 1342 and about 1416; even the name we give her is really that of the church where she lived as a hermit. (She was an anchoress, living in a cell built along the church wall.) She grew up during the time of the Black Death and the Hundred Years' War between England and France, a time when the common view of God was that the great suffering he was inflicting on wicked people also overflowed onto the common folk. On the strength of a series of visions she had while ill, Julian insisted that God was loving and compassionate, wishing perhaps to save all people. She compared God, and especially Jesus, to mothers - loving their children even when they do wrong.

"All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well," she wrote, in a faith and a trust that has echoed through the ages.

Answer: The twelfth Apostle had been Judas Iscariot; there was an opening after Judas's betrayal of Jesus and subsequent suicide.

Twelve was a number of some significance for the Apostles. It was the number of tribes there were in Israel; it was the number of Apostles that Jesus Christ Himself had originally selected to carry out His ministry. Faced with a great work after Christ's return to Heaven, the Apostles did not want to begin their work shorthanded. They needed a twelfth man to be a witness to Jesus Christ's teachings, death, and resurrection. Jesus had many followers besides the Twelve, and from these they chose two men: Joseph, also known as Barsabbas, and Matthias. The Apostles prayed: "Lord, you know everyone's heart. Show us which of these two you have chosen to take over this apostolic ministry, which Judas left to go where he belongs." They made the final selection by casting lots, trusting in the Holy Spirit to guide them, and St. Matthias was the one selected.

This story, told in Acts 1:12-26, is the first and only time that Matthias appears in the Bible. Other sources - early historians and apocryphal Gospels - tell of his life in the service of the Lord, in Jerusalem according to some and in Ethiopia according to others. They disagree as to his fate - did he die of old age? Was he stoned to death? Or was he crucified? Despite these disagreements, his fervor in accepting his task is not in doubt.

Answer: Her father, a chieftain named Damon

Damon was crazed with grief when his wife, Dymphna's mother, perished. He was desperate to find a queen to replace her, and after a time, he came to believe in his madness that only his fourteen-year-old daughter - who was as lovely as her mother - would do. For many reasons, his Christian daughter Dymphna would have none of it, and she fled with her confessor (St. Gerebernus) to the town of Gheel in Belgium. They were followed by Damon, who martyred them both in anger.

From the time of her death in the seventh century, the people of the area around Gheel honored St. Dymphna as a patron of sufferers from mental illness or from incest. Her memory inspired the founding of an asylum at Gheel in the 1200s, which became famous for its humane and loving treatment of the insane - which was, sadly, a rarity in those days.

Answer: The Garden of Eden

St. Brendan of Clonfert, who lived from about 484 to 577, was an early supporter of traditional monasticism, wherein monks live as hermits in isolated cells. Somewhere along the line, however, he got grander ideas, and literally set sail for Paradise with a number of followers. (The precise number varies between sixteen and sixty, depending on which telling of the legend you hear.) He did not quite reach the Garden of Eden, but he did see a fabled blessed isle that now bears his name in song and story, as well as the inevitable sea monsters. Some credit him with discovering Iceland and even America! But, given the limitations of seafaring technology in his day, perhaps the single most miraculous thing is that he and his companions returned. Brendan spent the rest of his life closer to home, founding monasteries and spreading the Gospel in Ireland and in Wales.

Some fourteen hundred years after St. Brendan's legendary voyage, Tim Severin, a modern explorer, attempted to duplicate it in a replica of an ancient boat. He made it all the way to Newfoundland in North America, and proposed that there were enough whales, icebergs, and other alarming natural phenomena to amply explain the miraculous and fantastic sites Brendan is supposed to have seen.

Answer: St. Bede

St. Bede, popularly called "The Venerable Bede," was the first person from Great Britain to be named a Doctor of the Church. Widely regarded as one of the most learned men of his era, he wrote on a wide range of themes, from commentary on the Bible to how to tell time and determine the correct date for Easter. (This last was the subject of great theological controversy in his day.) His "Ecclesiastical History" covers nearly 800 years of English history, from the land's first glimpse of Julius Caesar to Bede's own time. It focuses more on church history than on secular history, and its accounts of miracles give modern historians pause -- but, as one of the earliest surviving histories of England, it has proven invaluable to modern scholarship, both for what it says and for what it does not say.

One of his most enduring contributions is his development of a system for reporting dates in years since the time of Christ (similar to the modern AD, or Anno Domini, system) -- although, unlike modern calendar-keepers, he began counting at Jesus' conception rather than at His birth!

Answer: The Congregation of the Oratory

St. Philip Neri, scion of a wealthy family, was dissuaded several times from going far from home to serve God: Rome would be his desert, he was told by his confessor, and Rome would be his India. He threw himself into the work with creativity and dedication, treating this nominally Catholic city like the site of any mission; he and his followers went to all parts of the city to encourage greater piety, and went from church to church to preach their sermons.

In the evenings, they met up to discuss their ministry, to hear sermons and draw strength from their community.

In 1575, with permission from the Pope, he formalized their arrangement by founding the Congregation of the Oratory. Unlike most religious orders, Oratorians do not take vows and thus remain "secular" (or uncloistered) priests, which does not seem to have affected their dedication over the centuries.

Answer: She was a peasant from a farming family.

St. Joan of Arc was born in about the year 1412, in a village called Domrémy in what is now the province of Lorraine. Her family were peasants, although they did fairly well for themselves; her father was a minor landowner and tax collector. But their village was touched, like most of France, by the Hundred Years' War with the English, an on-and-off struggle that was in its eighty-fifth year at the time of Joan's birth. She began having visions at the age of 12, seeing Saint Margaret, Saint Michael, and Saint Catherine, all of whom instructed her to fight the English and help the future Charles VII be crowned at Reims - a great distance away, through enemy territory.

The French forces of Charles VII were in disarray; it was probably out of desperation that he consented to give Joan a position of leadership. Yet she turned out to be a clever tactician, bolder and more confident than the other leaders of her army. She fought through wounds to the leg and neck, took fortresses and cities, and led her king to be crowned - but, after being captured by the English in a later battle, she was eventually put to death for heresy after a show trial, at the age of only 19. When their efforts to brand her a witch failed due to her virginity (which meant that she could not have had sex with the devil), they had her burned at the stake for wearing men's clothing. Years later, she was cleared by an appellate court which was called at the request of Charles VII, who had not done much to help her in life but who did not wish to seem to owe his position to a heretic.

Canonized in 1920, St. Joan - an illiterate teenager who nevertheless displayed subtlety and nuanced theological knowledge at her trial - is honored as the patron saint of France, of soldiers (women especially) and prisoners.

Thank you for joining me in this look at the women and men honored as saints in the month of May. I hope that you've enjoyed the quiz!