October Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Little Flower

"The Little Flower of Jesus" was how St. Thérèse (1873-1897) liked to think of herself, as revealed in her autobiography, "The Story of a Soul." The appellation arises from a beautiful metaphor. She wrote in her memoir, "[T]he splendor of the rose and the whiteness of the lily do not take away the perfume of the little violet ... if all flowers wanted to be roses, nature would lose her springtime beauty, and the fields would no longer be decked out with little wildflowers. And so it is in the world of souls, Jesus' garden. He willed to create great souls comparable to lilies and roses, but He has created smaller ones and these must be content to be daisies or violets destined to give joy to God's glances when He looks down at His feet."

St. Thérèse viewed herself as one of those violets, and her theology was founded on a childlike sense of wonder. Sadly, she died of tuberculosis when she was not much more than a child, at only 24.

Answer: Stigmata

St. Francis (1181-1226) was the first person known to have received the stigmata, a mystical recreation of the wounds suffered by Jesus Christ at His crucifixion. This was taken as one more mark of holiness in the life of a famously holy man, who went from a rich and dissolute youth to a life of poverty, charity, and menial work. So humble that he refused to become a priest, a calling for which he felt himself unworthy, he nevertheless founded one of the Catholic Church's most popular orders of monks and nuns, the Franciscan order.

He is often depicted preaching the Gospel to animals, a token of his complete love for God's creation.

Answer: A community of hermits

St. Bruno (1032-1101) was a German priest and teacher who sought a monastic life after becoming disillusioned with Church politics. He began, with friends, as a hermit near a Cistercian abbey, but wanted a stricter and more solitary life. This desire led him to found the Carthusian order, named for the Chartreuse Mountains where it began.

Each Carthusian monk lives in his own small hermitage on the grounds of the monastery, with rooms for work, sleep, and prayer, as well as a walled garden. The monks pray the Divine Office individually each day, except for the nighttime prayers. Community meals are silent, but some conversation is allowed on other occasions. Thus Carthusians are hermits together.

Answer: France

St. Denis, who died in about the year 258, spent around eight years preaching in Paris before he and his companions were murdered in the persecution of Emperor Valerian. According to legend, a mere beheading couldn't stop the saint: he didn't like his resting place, so he tucked his head under his arm and strolled to Montmartre -- two miles (three kilometers) away! Tradition identifies St. Denis with Dionysius, whose conversion by St. Paul is recounted in Acts of the Apostles 17:34, but the two lives span too many centuries to belong to one man.

Answer: Westminster Abbey

St. Edward (1003-1066) is styled "the Confessor" because he died a natural death, which distinguished him from an earlier sainted English royal, St. Edward the Martyr. St. Edward's spiritual life was shaped profoundly by politics. As a young prince disinherited by Viking lords, he swore that he would make a pilgrimage of thanks if God brought him to the throne -- but, when he was crowned in 1042, his position was too insecure for him to venture far. The Pope gave him a special dispensation to break that solemn promise, in exchange for largesse to an English monastery with St. Peter as its patron. St. Edward went above and beyond this requirement, and thus the small community at Thorney became the great Westminster Abbey. The saint who built it is buried there, as are many of his successors.

Though he was beloved for his charitable giving and for his healing touch, his canonization as a saint was hurried along by politics. In the twelfth century, King Henry II was anxious for his predecessor to be declared a saint, but the Pope had problems of his own. It was only when King Henry declared against the antipope that King Edward was canonized.

Answer: Barefoot

St. Teresa (1515-1582) faced a number of obstacles to her reform efforts. She was a woman in a time when women's ideas were generally dismissed. In a time and place of horrific bigotry toward anyone of Semitic descent, she was the granddaughter of a Jew who had been forced to convert to Christianity. And reformers are never popular with the powerful people they're trying to reform!

Yet St. Teresa persevered, and the Discalced Carmelites -- whose vows, symbolized by bare or sandaled feet, were a return to the original Carmelite promise of poverty and asceticism -- are still active today. Her contributions to her order, her famous ecstatic visions, and her beautiful, mystical writings (notably "The Way of Perfection" and "The Interior Castle") led to her being named a Doctor of the Church in 1970.

Answer: The Grey Nuns

The Order of Sisters of Charity of Montreal picked up their nickname from the taunts they endured: the fine citizens of Montreal called them "les grises," a phrase with the double meaning of "the gray women" and "the drunken women." This last was a slur on their founder, St. Marguerite d'Youville (1701-1771), whose late husband's occupation is most charitably described as "unlicensed liquor salesman." Despite their rough start, the Grey Nuns are still active throughout the world.

St. Marguerite's strong drive to assist the poor arose from her own hardships: she was not yet thirty years old when she lost her husband and four children (two more survived babyhood). Through it all, she trusted ever more in God, and was able to achieve great things in her widowhood.

Answer: Missionary trips

St. Luke, whom tradition holds to have been a doctor from Syria, had a busy life in the first century. In addition to his writings (a Gospel meant to spread the Christian message to non-Jews, and an account of the early development of the Church), he seems to have traveled far and wide with St. Paul as one of Christianity's first missionaries.

They went together from Troas to Philippi (Acts 16:10-17) and from Philippi to Jerusalem (Acts 20:5-24); later, they went to Rome (Colossians 4:14), where St. Paul was imprisoned.

Answer: He was married.

St. John (1386-1456) had led a successful secular life before embarking seriously on his religious one. Trained as a lawyer, he became governor of Perugia at the age of only 26. But when he was taken prisoner in the midst of a civil war, he had a vision of St. Francis that made his old life seem meaningless. Once freed, he parted from his wife, obtained a dispensation from the Pope, and joined the Franciscans; he became a priest in 1419.

His passion made him a renowned preacher, although he sometimes overstepped: he was once tried (and acquitted) for heresy, and his involvement in a Hungarian battle with the Turks is thought to have sped his death.

Answer: The Zealot

Not much is known about St. Simon the Zealot. In fact, even his nickname initially caused confusion: "Kananaios" ("Zealot") was often mistaken for "Kanaios" (from Cana), leading to a legend that he was from the town where Jesus performed His first miracle. Other legends sprang up about his death; he is usually said to have been martyred, but no one can agree on where. (Guesses range from Persia to Spain to Great Britain.) Nor is it known what, precisely, St. Simon was so zealous about. (Presumably, zeal for Christianity would not have differentiated him from St. Simon Peter.)

Personally, when I think of St. Simon Zealot, I think of the scene in "Jesus Christ Superstar" wherein the saint's rock-opera counterpart unsuccessfully urges Christ to go to war against Rome and thereby rule the world.