November XXVIII

St. Stephen the Younger, M.

From his authentic Acts, carefully complied forty-two years after his death by Stephen of Constantinople; also from Cedrenus and Theophanes. See Celliler, t. 18, p. 521, and Jos. Assemant in Calend. Univ. t. 5, p. 389.

a. d. 764.

St. Stephen, surnamed the Younger, or of St. Auxentius’s Mount, one of the most renowned martyrs in the persecution of the Iconoclasts, was born at Constantinople in 714, and dedicated to God by his parents before he came into the world. They were rich in temporal possessions, but much richer in virtue; and took special care to see their son provided with proper masters, and grounded in pious sentiments from his infancy. Thus he was instructed in the perfect knowledge of the Catholic Faith, and his tender breast was fortified by the love and practice of the duties of religion; by which antidotes he was afterwards preserved from the poison of profane novelties. Leo the Isaurian, who was infamous for the sacrilegious plunder of many churches, and for several other crimes, as Theophanes relates, to the vices of impiety and tyranny, added that of heresy, being prevailed upon by the Jews whom he had persecuted a little before, to oppose the respect paid by the faithful to holy images. The tyrant endeavored to establish his error by a cruel persecution, and the parents of our saint with many others left their country, that they might not be exposed to the danger of offending God by staying there. To dispose of their son in a way suitable to his pious inclinations, and their own views in his education, they placed him when he was fifteen years old in the monastery of St. Auxentius, not far from Chalcedon, and the abbot admitted him in the year following to the monastic habit and profession. Our saint entered into all the penitential exercises of the community with incredible ardor, and his first employment was to fetch in the daily provisions for the monastery. The death of his father, which happened some time after, obliged him to make a journey to Constantinople, where he sold his whole fortune, and distributed the price among the poor. He had two sisters; one of which was already a nun at Constantinople; the other he took with his mother into Bithynia, where he placed them in a monastery. Stephen made sacred studies and meditation on the holy scriptures, his principal employment, and the works of St. Chrysostom were his Commentary on the Divine Oracles. John the abbot dying, the saint, though but thirty years of age, was unanimously placed at the head of the monastery. This was only a number of small cells scattered up and down the mountain, one of the highest in that province; and the new abbot succeeded his predecessor in a very small cave on the summit, where he joined labor with prayer, copying books, and making nets; by which he gained his own subsistence, and increased the stock of his monastery for the relief of the poor. His only garment was a thin sheep’s skin, and he wore an iron girdle round his loins. Great numbers renounced the world to serve God under his direction. And a young widow of great quality, who changed her name to that of Anne, became his spiritual daughter, and took the religious veil in a nunnery situate at the foot of his mountain. After some years, Stephen, out of a love of closer retirement, and a severer course of life, resigned his abbacy to one Marinus, built himself a remote cell, much narrower than his cave, so that it was impossible for him to lie or stand up in it at his ease, and shut himself up in this sepulchre in the forty-second year of his age.

Constantine Copronymus carried on for twenty years the war which his father Leo had begun against holy images. In 754 he caused a pretended council of three hundred and thirty-eight Iconoclast bishops to meet at Constantinople, and to condemn the use of holy images as a remnant of idolatry,¹ and in all parts of the empire persecuted the Catholics to compel them to subscribe to this decree. His malice was chiefly levelled against the monks, from whom he apprehended the most resolute opposition. Being sensible of the influence of the example of our saint, and the weight which the reputation of his sanctity gave to his actions, he was particularly solicitous to engage his subscription. Callistus, a patrician, was dispatched to him on that errand, and used all the arts in his power to prevail with the saint to consent to the emperor’s desire: but he was obliged to return full of confusion at a miscarriage where he had promised himself certain success. Constantine, incensed at St. Stephen’s resolute answers, which the patrician reported to him, sent Callistus back with a party of soldiers with an order to drag him out of his cell. They found him so wasted with fasting and his limbs so much weakened by the straitness of his cell, that they were obliged to carry him on their shoulders to the bottom of the mountain, and there they kept him under a strong guard. Witnesses were suborned to accuse the saint, and he was charged with having criminally conversed with the holy widow Anne. This lady protested he was innocent, and called him a holy man; and because she would not come into the emperor’s measures, she was severely whipped, and then confined to a monastery at Constantinople, where she died soon after of the hard usage she suffered.

The emperor, seeking a new occasion to put Stephen to death, persuade I one of his courtiers, called George Syncletus, to draw him into a scare Constantine had forbil the monasteries to receive any novice to the habit George, going to Mount St. Auxentius, fell on his knees to St. Stephen and begged to receive the monastic habit. The saint knew him to belong to the court, because he was shaved: the emperor having forbid any at his court to wear beards. But the more St. Stephen urged the emperor’s prohibition, the more earnestly the impostor pressed him to admit him to the habit, pretending that both his temporal safety from the persecutors, and his eternal salvation depended upon it. Soon after he had received the habit he ran with it to the court, and the next day the emperor produced him in that garb in the amphitheatre before the people, who were assembled by his order for that purpose. The emperor inflamed them by a violent invective against the saint and the monastic order: then publicly tore his habit off his back, and the populace trampled upon it. The emperor immediately sent a body of armed men to St. Auxentius’s Mount, who dispersed all the monks, and burnt down the monastery and church to the very foundation. They took St. Stephen from the place of his confinement there, and carried him to the seaside, striking him with clubs, taking him by the throat, tearing his legs in the thorns, and treating him with injurious language. In the port of Chalcedon they put him on board of a small vessel, and carried him to a monastery at Chrysopolis, a small town not very far from Constantinople, where Callistus and several Iconoclast bishops, with a secretary of state, and another officer, came to visit and examine him. They treated him first with civility, and afterwards with extreme harshness. He boldly asked them how they could call that a general council which was not approved by the pope of Rome, without whose participation the regulation of ecclesiastical affairs was forbid by a canon. Neither had the patriarchs of Alexandria, Antioch, or Jerusalem approved of that assembly. He, with the liberty of a martyr, defended the honor due to holy images, insomuch that Caliistus, when they returned to Constantinople, said to the emperor: “My lord, we are overcome: this man is very powerful in argument and learning; and despises death.” The emperor, transported with rage, condemned the holy man to be carried into banishment into the island of Proconesus, in the Propontis. In that place he was joined by many of his monks, and his miracles increased the reputation of his sanctity, and multiplied the defenders of holy images. This circumstance mortified the tyrant, who, two years after, ordered him to be removed to a prison in Constantinople, and loaded with irons. Some days after the saint was carried before the emperor, who asked him whether he believed that men trampled on Christ by trampling on his image. “God forbid,” said the martyr. Then taking a piece of money in his hand, he asked what treatment he should deserve who should stamp upon that image of the emperor. The assembly cried out that he ought to be severely punished. “Is it then,” said the saint, “so great a crimo to insult the image of the emperor of the earth, and none to cast into the fire that of the king of heaven?” Some days after this examination the emperor commanded that he should be beheaded, but recalled the sentence before the martyr arrived at the place of execution, resolving to reserve him for a more cruel death; and, after some deliberation, sent an order that he should be scourged to death in prison. They who undertook this barbarous execution left the work imperfect. The tyrant, understanding that he was yet alive, cried out, “Will no one rid me of this monk?” Whereupon certain courtiers stirred up a mob of impious wretches, who running to the jail, seized the martyr, dragged him through the streets of the city, with his feet tied with cords, and many struck him with stones and staves, till one dispatched him by dashing out his brains with a club The rest continued their insults on his dead body till his limbs were torn asunder, and his brains and bowels left on the ground. Cedrenus places his martyrdom in the year 764, who seems to have been better informed than Theophanes, who mentions it in 757

The martyrs under their torments and the ignominy of a barbarous death, seem the most miserable of men to carnal eyes, but to those of faith nothing is more glorious, nothing more happy. What can be greater or more noble than for a man to love those who most unjustly hate and persecute him, and only to wish and pray for their temporal and eternal happiness? To bear the loss of all that the world can enjoy, and to suffer all pains rather than to depart in the least tittle from his duty to God? What marks do we show of this heroic fortitude, of this complete victory over our passions, of this steady adherence to God and the cause of virtue? This heroic disposition of true virtue would appear in smaller trials, such as we daily meet with, if we inherited the spirit of our holy faith. Let us take a review of our own hearts, and of our conduct, and examine whether this meekness, this humility, this charity, and this fortitude appear to be the spirit by which our souls are governed? if not, it behooves us without loss of time to neglect nothing for attaining that grace by which our affections will be moulded into this heavenly frame, the great fruit of our divine religion.

St. James of La Marca of Ancona, C.

The small town of Montbrandon, in the Marca of Ancona, the ancient Picenum, a province of the ecclesiastical state in Italy, gave birth to this saint. His parents, though of low condition, were very virtuous, and educated him in sentiments of true piety and religion. A neighboring priest taught him Latin, and he was young when he was sent to the university of Perugia, where his progress in learning soon qualified him to be chosen preceptor to a young gentleman of Florence. This student’s father, who was a magistrate in that city, was much taken with the virtue and prudence of our saint, engaged him to accompany his son to Florence, and procured him a considerable post in that republic. St. James observed, that in the hurry of worldly business, men easily forget to converse sufficiently with God and themselves, and that shutting themselves up in it, they become part of that vortex which hurries time and the world away without looking any further, also, that while we hear continually the discourse of men, we are apt insensibly to take in, and freight ourselves with the vices of men. Against these dangers, persons who live in the world, must use the antidote of conversing much with God. This James did by assiduous prayer and recollection, in which exercises he found such charms that he resolved to embrace a religious and penitential life. These were the dispositions of his soul when travelling near Assisium, he went into the great church of the Portiuncula to pray, and being animated by the fervor of the holy religious men who there served God, and by the example of their blessed founder St. Francis, he determined to petition in that very place for the habit of the order. The brethren received him with open arms, and he was sent to perform his novitiate in a small austere convent near Assisium, called, Of the Prisons He began his spiritual war against the devil, the world, and the flesh, with assiduous prayer, and extraordinary fasts and watchings; and the fervor of his first beginnings was, by his fidelity in corresponding with divine grace, crowned with such constancy and perseverance as never to suffer any abatement. After the year of his probation was completed, he returned to the Portiuncula, and by his solemn vows offered himself a holocaust to God. For forty years he never passed a day without taking the discipline; be always wore either a rough hair shirt, or an iron coat of mail armed with short sharp spikes; allowing himself only three hours for sleep, he spent the rest of the night in holy meditation and prayer; flesh-meat he never touched, and he ate so little that it seemed a miracle how he could live. He said mass every day with wonderful devotion. Out of a true spirit of humility and penance he was a great lover of poverty, and it was a subject of joy to him to see himself often destitute of the most necessary things. He copied for himself most of the few books he allowed himself the use of, and he always wore a mean threadbare habit. His purity during the course of his whole life was spotless; and he shunned as much as possible all conversation with persons of the other sex, and made this very short, when it was necessary for their spiritual direction; and he never looked any woman in the face. In the practice of obedience he was so exact, that, once having received an order to go abroad, when he had lifted up the cup near his mouth to drink he set it down again, and went out immediately without drinking; for he was afraid to lose the merit of obedience by the least delay.

His zeal for the salvation of souls seemed to have no bounds, and for forty years together he never passed a single day without preaching the word of God either to the people or to the religious of his own order. His exhortations were vehement and efficacious; by one sermon at Milan he converted thirty-six lewd women to a most fervent course of penance. Being chosen archbishop of that city he fled, and being taken, he prevailed by entreaties and persuasions to be allowed to pursue his call in the functions of a private religious missionary. He accompanied St. John Capistran in some of his missions in Germany, Bohemia, and Hungary, and was sent thrice by the popes Eugenius IV., Nicholas V., and Calixtus III. into this last kingdom. He wrought several miracles at Venice, and at other places, and raised from dangerous sicknesses the duke of Calabria, and king of Naples. A question was at that time agitated with great warmth, particularly between the Franciscan and Dominican friars, whether the precious blood of Christ, which was separated from the body during his passion, remained always hypostatically united to the divine word; and St. James was accused in the inquisition of having advanced the negative, but was dismissed with honor. The saint died of a most painful colic in the convent of the Holy Trinity of his order, near Naples, on the 28th of November, in the year 1476, being ninety years old, of which he had spent seventy in a religious state. His body is enshrined in a rich chapel which bears his name in the church called our Lady’s the New, at Naples. He was beatified by Urban VIII., and canonized in 1726, by Benedict XIII., who had been himself an eye-witness to a miracle performed in favor of a person that had recourse to his intercession. See his life by Mark of Lisbon, bishop of Porto, and in verse be Sanazar; also the life of Benedict XIII. by Touron, t. 6

¹ Conc. t. 7, p. 401.

 Butler, A., The Lives of the Fathers, Martyrs and Other Principal Saints (New York 1903) IV, 574-578.