February XXII

The Chair of St. Peter at Antioch

See Baronius, Annot. in Martyrol. ad 18. Januarii, the Bollandists, ib. t. 2, p. 182, sect. 5 and 6, and especially Jos. Bianchini, Dissert. De Romanâ Cathedrâ in notis in Anastatlum Biblioth. t. 4, p. 150.

That Saint Peter, before he went to Rome, founded the see of Antioch, is attested by Eusebius,¹ Origen,² St. Jerom,³ St. Innocent,⁴ Pope Gelasius, in his Roman Council,⁵ Saint Chrysostom, and others. It was just that the prince of the apostles should take this city under his particular care and inspection, which was then the capital of the East, and in which the faith took so early and so deep root as to give birth in it to the name of Christians. St. Chrysostom says, that St. Peter made there a long stay: St. Gregory the Great,⁶ that he was seven years bishop of Antioch; not that he resided there all that time, but only that he had a particular care over that church. If he sat twenty-five years at Rome, the date of his establishing his chair at Antioch must be within three years after our Saviour’s ascension; for in that supposition he must have gone to Rome in the second year of Claudius.

The festival of St. Peter’s chair in general, Natale Petri de Cathedrâ, is marked on this day in the most ancient calendar extant, made in the time of pope Liberius, about the year 354.* It also occurs in Gregory’s sacramentary, and in all the martyrologics. It was kept in France in the sixth century, as appears from the council of Tours,⁷ and from Le Cointe.⁸

In the first ages it was customary, especially in the East, for every Christian to keep the anniversary of his baptism, on which he renewed his baptismal vows, and gave thanks to God for his heavenly adoption: this they called their spiritual birthday. The bishops in like manner kept the anniversary of their own consecration, as appears from four sermons of St. Leo on the anniversary of his accession or assumption to the pontifical dignity; and this was frequently continued by the people after their decease, out of respect to their memory. St. Leo says, we ought to celebrate the chair of St. Peter with no less joy than the day of his martyrdom; for as in this he was exalted to a throne of glory in heaven, so by the former he was installed head of the church on earth.⁹

On this festival we are especially bound to adore and thank the divine goodness for the establishment and propagation of his church, and earnestly to pray that in his mercy he preserve the same, and dilate its pale, that his name may be glorified by all nations, and by all hearts, to the boundaries of the earth, for his divine honor and the salvation of souls, framed to his divine image, and the price of his adorable blood. The church of Christ is his spiritual kingdom: he is not only the architect and founder, but continues to govern it, and by his spirit to animate its members to the end of the world as its invisible head: though he has left in St. Peter and his successors a vicar, or lieutenant, as a visible head, with an established hierarchy for its exterior government. If we love him and desire his honor, if we love men on so many titles linked with us, can we cease weeping and praying, that by his sweet omnipotent grace he subdue all the enemies of his church, converting to it all infidels and apostates? In its very bosom sinners fight against him. Though these continue his members by faith, they are dead members, because he lives not in them by his grace and charity, reigns not in their hearts, animates them not with his spirit. He will indeed always live by grace and sanctity in many members of his mystical body. Let us pray that by the destruction of the tyranny of sin all souls may subject themselves to the reign of his holy love. Good Jesus! for your mercy’s sake, hear me in this above all other petitions: never suffer me to be separated from you by forfeiting your holy love: may I remain always rooted and grounded in your charity, as is the will of your Father. Eph. 3.

St. Margaret of Cortona, Penitent

From her life written by her confessor, in the Acta Sanctorum; by Bollandus, p. 298. Wadding, Annal. FF. Minorum ad an. 1297; and the Lives of the SS. of Third Ord. by Barb. t. l, p. 508.

A. D. 1297

Margaret was a native of Alviano, in Tuscany. The harshness of a stepmother, and her own indulged propension to vice, cast her headlong into the greatest disorders. The sight of the carcass of a man, half putrefied, who had been her gallant, struck her with so great a fear of the divine judgments, and with so deep a sense of the treachery of this world, that she in a moment became a perfect penitent. The first thing she did was to throw herself at her father’s feet, bathed in tears, to beg his pardon for her contempt of his authority and fatherly admonitions. She spent the days and nights in tears: and to repair the scandal she had given by her crimes, she went to the parish church of Alviano, with a rope about her neck, and there asked public pardon for them. After this she repaired to Cortona, and made her most penitent confession to a father of the Order of St. Francis, who admired the great sentiments of compunction with which she was filled, and prescribed her austerities and practices suitable to her fervor. Her conversion happened in the year 1274, the twenty-fifth of her age. She was assaulted by violent temptations of various kinds, but courageously overcame them, and after a trial of three years, was admitted to her profession among the penitents of the third Order of St. Francis, in Cortona. The extraordinary austerities with which she punished her criminal flesh soon disfigured her body. To exterior mortification she joined all sorts of humiliations; and the confusion with which she was covered at the sight of her own sins, pushed her on continually to invent many extraordinary means of drawing upon herself all manner of confusion before men. This model of true penitents, after twenty-three years spent in severe penance, and twenty of them in the religious habit, being worn out by austerities, and consumed by the fire of divine love, died on the 22d of February, in 1297. After the proof of many miracles, Leo X. granted an office in her honor to the city of Cortona, which Urban VIII. extended to the whole Franciscan Order, in 1623, and she was canonized by Benedict XIII. in 1728.

SS. Thalassius and Limneus, CC.

They were cotemporaries with the great Theodoret, bishop of Cyr, and lived in his diocese. The former dwelt in a cavern in a neighboring mountain, and was endowed with extraordinary gifts of the Holy Ghost, but was a treasure unknown to the world. His disciple St. Limneus was famous for miraculous cures of the sick, while he himself bore patiently the sharpest colics and other distempers without any human succor. He opened his enclosure only to Theodoret, his bishop, but spoke to others through a window. See Theodoret, Phil. c. 22.

St. Baradat, C.

He lived in the same diocese, in a solitary hut, made of wood in trellis, like windows, says Theodoret,* exposed to all the severities of the weather. He was clothed with the skins of wild beasts, and by conversing continually with God, he attained to an eminent degree of wisdom, and knowledge of heavenly things. He left his wooden prison by the order of the patriarch of Antioch, giving a proof of his humility by his ready obedience. He studied to imitate all the practices of penance, which all the other solitaries of those parts exercised, though of a tender constitution himself. The fervor of his soul, and the fire of divine love, supported him under his incredible labors though his body was weak and infirm. It is sloth that makes us so often allege a pretended weakness of constitution, in the practice of penance and the exercises of devotion, which courage and fervor would not even feel. See Theodoret, Phil. c. 22, t. 3, p. 868, and c. 27.

¹ Chron. and Hist. l. 3, c. 30.

² Hom. 6, in Luc.

³ In Catai. c. 1.

⁴ Ep. 18, t. 2, Conc. p. 1269.

⁵ Conc. t. 4, p. 1262.

⁶ Ep. 40, l. 7, t. 2, p. 888, Ed. Ben.

* Some have Imagined that the feast of the chair of St. Peter was not known, at least in Africa, in the fifth century, because it occurs not in the ancient calendar of Carthage. But how should the eighth day before the calends of March now appear in it, since the part is lost from the fourteenth before the calends of March to the eleventh before the calends of May? Hence St. Pontius, deacon and martyr, on the eighth before the ideas of March; St. Donatus, and some other African martyrs are not there found. At least it is certain that it was kept at Rome long before that time. St. Leo preached a sermon on St. Peter’s chair. (Serm. 100. t. 1, p. 285, ed. Rom.) Quesnel denied it to be genuine in his first edition; but in the second at Lyons, in 1700, he corrected this mistake, and proved this sermon to be St. Leo’s; which is more fully demonstrated by Cacciari in his late Roman edition of St. Leo’s works, t. 1, p. 285.

⁷ Can. 22.

⁸ Ad an. 566.

⁹ St. Leo, Serm. 100, in Cathedrâ S. Petri, t. 1, p. 285, ed. Romanæ.

* This passage of Theodoret shows, that the windows of the ancients were made of trellis or wicker, before the invention of glass: though not universally: for in the ruins of Herculaneum, near Portichi, were found windows of a diaphanous thin slate, such as the rich in Rome sometimes used.

 Butler, A., The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (New York 1903) I, 442-445.