Here’s the saint’s calendar for March 18, 2019, and some versions, each focusing on individual saints, (all St. Cyril—Bishop, Confessor and Doctor of the Church—today) all wonderful; for they are the Church Triumphant.
The Catholic Church has many saints and reading about their lives has been a spiritual journey Catholics have been on since the publication of the Golden Legend, http://sourcebooks.web.fordham.edu/basis/goldenlegend/
From Butler’s Calendar of the Saints listing all of the saints of today. https://web.archive.org/web/20061020190006/http://www.catholic-forum.com/saintS/day0318.htm
From Butler’s Lives of the Saints, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Bishop, Doctor of the Church, “CYRIL was born at or near the city of Jerusalem, about the year 315. He was ordained priest by St. Maximus, who gave him the important charge of instructing and preparing the candidates for Baptism. This charge he held for several years, and we still have one series of his instructions, given in the year 347 or 318. They are of singular interest as being the earliest record of the systematic teaching of the Church on the creed and sacraments, and as having been given in the church built by Constantine on Mount Calvary. They are solid, simple, profound; saturated with Holy Scripture; exact, precise, and terse; and, as a witness and exposition of the Catholic faith, invaluable.” http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/lots/lots093.htm
From Franciscan Media, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, (c. 315 – March 18, 386), “The crises that the Church faces today may seem minor when compared with the threat posed by the Arian heresy, which denied the divinity of Christ and almost overcame Christianity in the fourth century. Cyril was to be caught up in the controversy, accused of Arianism by Saint Jerome, and ultimately vindicated both by the men of his own time and by being declared a Doctor of the Church in 1822.” https://www.franciscanmedia.org/saint-cyril-of-jerusalem/
From a most lovely site, really a daily devotional site offering much more than just saint of the day, Anastpaul https://anastpaul.wordpress.com/
One of my personal favorites, Tradition in Action, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “The Fathers and the Doctors of the Church – St. Cyril is one of them – played an enormous role in setting the foundations for Scholasticism and establishing the Catholic State in the Middle Ages. They were received with ingratitude by their contemporaries, but they formed the basis for the great triumph of Catholic Civilization.” https://traditioninaction.org/SOD/j171sd_CyrilJerusalem_3-18.html
Here is what the 1962 Roman Missal says about St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor of the Church: “When he was a simple priest, St. Cyril used to instruct the Catechumens during Lent. He is still renowned for these admirable homilies, full of divine wisdom, precious documents for Catholic theology. The Arians exiled him thrice. He died A.D. 386.” (p. 1205) The Daily Missal and Liturgical Manual. (2004). Baronius Press: London: https://www.baroniuspress.com/book.php?wid=56&bid=4#tab=tab-1
The Supernatural Church
The following is excellent material for prison ministry, and especially for men doing natural life sentences.
Jacques Maritain—and his wife Raissa, a powerful and influential Catholic couple whose writings I really love, especially their joint written classic, Liturgy and Contemplation, which is available online at http://www.ewtn.com/library/THEOLOGY/LITCOM.HTM and whose celibate marriage was reminiscent of syneisactism (defined here, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syneisaktism ) —describes it wonderfully:
“The Church Considered in Her Unity and Her Universality Has a Supernatural Personality Which Transcends That of Her Members
“1. No community of the merely natural order can be a person at the same time as a multitude of human beings. A nation subsists with the subsistence of all its individual citizens; it has a history, it has typical characteristics, common customs, it pursues a common end and has common interests: this history, these typical characteristics, these customs, this common end, these common interests are purely and simply those of its citizens, or of the great mass of them. And it has no divine mission, nor any promise of lasting always and of being constantly assisted by God.
“It is altogether different with the Church. The Church has a double subsistence: a natural subsistence like every human community,–that of the human persons who are her members; if all Christians were exterminated there would no longer be a Church here on earth. And she has, insofar precisely as she is the whole one and universal, of the organized multitude of those who live with her life, a supernatural subsistence, which presupposes but transcends the natural subsistence of the individual persons who are her members.” (p. 18)
Jacques Maritain. (1973). On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her Personnel. (Translator: Joseph W. Evans).University of Notre Dame Press: Notre Dame
A review of Maritain’s book in The Wanderer Newspaper is helpful:
An excerpt.
At a time of when strong ecclesiastical leadership is warranted as the West drifts further from its historical anchorage, the voice of Church seems to be muted or confused. With reason, Pope Francis has been accused of deliberate ambiguity, given that he has not responded to repeated calls for clarification of his teaching in Amoris Laetitia, and now as reported in the pages of this newspaper [see story by LifeSiteNews, The Wanderer, March 2, 2017, p. 1], the new head of the Jesuit Order, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, seems to call into question the literal meaning of Christ’s teaching on the indissolubility of marriage (Matt. 19:3-6).
“The words of Jesus must be contextualized,” he has said in an interview. “Over the last century in the Church there has been a great blossoming of studies that seek to understand what Jesus meant to say.”
If doctrine must be replaced in favor of the “discernment” of the true meaning of the words of Sacred Scripture, what are we to make of Christ’s words at the Last Supper?
Given that the Church seems to be unsure of itself under its present leadership, Jacques Maritain’s treatise on the Church and her personnel is worth revisiting. “To speak of the ‘person’ of the Church,” Maritain says, “is to recognize a certain transcendence in time of a body that remains essentially the same. Just as a human being is not to be identified with the personality it manifests on a given day or at a given period in life, the visible Church cannot be identified with one council or one papacy.”
Maritain’s reflections on the subject are to be found in his last complete book, On the Church of Christ: The Person of the Church and Her Personnel. Published in English translation from the French in the year of his death (1973), it was ignored by the secular media and given scant attention in the Catholic press.
It followed by seven years the publication of Le Paysan de la Garonne, which had earned Maritain the enmity of the Catholic left for its critique of some of the theology developing in the wake of Vatican II. John Courtney Murray in We Hold These Truths (1960) noted happily that the Church in North America was not divided between left and right as it was with destructive consequences in Europe.
By the close of Vatican II, the European virus had spread to North America. Maritain, who had been the darling of the liberal Catholic intelligentsia because of his social philosophy, was suddenly ostracized, his later work ignored. For Maritain, a liberal social policy did not presuppose a liberal Catholic theology, certainly not one at war with the intellectual heritage of the Church. Many American scholars, otherwise cognizant of Maritain’s vast oeuvre, remain unaware of the publication of De l’Église du Christ.
In On the Church of Christ, Maritain speaks of the “profoundly troubled moment” at which he was writing. He calls himself “an old Christian philosopher who has thought about the mystery of the Church for sixty years.”
He is appalled by the appreciable number of Catholic intellectuals who in his judgment employ themselves to destroy the treasure of truth which is the Church’s responsibility to transmit. He would “have done with the tempest of widely diffused foolish ideas that have caused confusion among the faithful.” He would “have done with the demythization of doctrine and the secularization or profanization of a Christianity which our new doctors and spiritual guides would like to entrust to the hands of the sociologist, of the psychoanalysts, of the structuralists, of the Marcusists, of the phenomenologists, and of the pioneers of technocracy.”
The subtitle of On the Church of Christ is indicative of a distinction that is crucial to an understanding of the Church. “Churchmen will never be the Church,” writes Maritain. “One can take a detached view, making positive and negative assessments of the activity of Churchmen throughout the centuries while remaining confident of the holiness of the Church itself.”
This distinction runs through the work, that is, the difference between the “person of the Church” and “her personnel,” the difference between the Church visible to the intellect and the Church as visible, one can say, in the eyes of the public who know it only through the media.
“The Church visible to the intellect” is seen in the writings of Catholic scholars, laymen and laywomen, both on the Continent and throughout the English-speaking world, who have joined Raymond Cardinal Burke and other members of the hierarchy in calling for clarification from the Vatican. Many of these lay scholars, professors, for the most part, may be counted as disciples of Maritain.
Almost as if he were writing today, Maritain acknowledges that inexactness of language often leads some to attribute to the Church an act or decision of her directing personnel without distinguishing whether the act belongs properly to the perpetrator as its sole cause or as an instrument of the Church herself.
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