Martyrs of Damascus

Feast date: Jul 10

Beatified by Pope Pius XI in 1926, these eight Franciscan friars and three Maronite laymen were offered the choice of converting to Islam or suffering death in Damascus on July 9, 1860.

Thousands of Maronite Christians had already been killed by the Druz in Southern Lebanon in that year and the Druz, an offshoot sect of Shiite Islam, had turned their attention to Damascus where they killed nearly two thousand more.

When they had reached the Franciscan convent there, the superior, a spaniard named Fr. Emmanuel Ruiz, who had sheltered the Christians that lived around the convent inside the chapel, was threatened with death if he did not convert immediately.

He refused and they cut him to pieces and killed the rest of his community and the three Maronites who, refusing to flee with the other Christians, chose to die rather than deny their faith.

Bl. Jane of Toulouse

Feast date: Mar 31

Blessed Jane lived in the French town of Toulouse during the 13th century. A Carmelite monastery was founded in the same town in 1240 which exposed Jane to the Carmelite lifestyle and spirituality.

In 1265 when St. Simon Stock, a 13th century reformer of the Carmelites, was passing through Toulouse, Jane met him and requested to be affiliated with the Carmelites. Simon agreed and Jane became the first Third Order Carmelite.

Jane vowed herself to perpetual chastity and applied herself completely to the Carmelite Rule. In addition to many daily holy practices and penances, she reached out to the community and worked to help the sick and poor. One of Jane’s primary missions was encouraging the boys of the town to help her serve the poor and help them discern whether or not they were called to be Carmelites. 

Blessed Jane is considered to be a founder of the Carmelite tertiary order and is considered to be its first member.

She died in 1286.

St. Pachomius

Feast date: May 09

St. Pachomius can justifiabley be called the founder of cenobitic monasticism, monks who live in community. Even though St. Antony the Great was the first to go into the desert to live a life of seclusion pursuing evangelical perfection, he lived a heremitic life, that is, a primarily solitary life.

Pachomius first started out as a hermit in the desert, like many of the other men and women in the third and fourth centuries who sought the most radical expression of Christian life. There he developed a very strong bond of friendship with the hermit Palemon. One day during prayer, he had a vision in which he was called to build a monastery, and was told in the vision that many people who were eager to live an ascetic life in the desert, but were not inclined to the solitary life of a hermit, would come and join him.  His hermit friend, Palemon, helped him to build the monastery and Pachomius insisted that his cenobites were to aspire to the austerity of the hermits.

However, Pchomius knew that his idea was a radical one, because most of the men who came to live in his monastery had only ever conceived of the eremitic lifestyle. His great accomplishment was to reconcile this desire for austere perfection with an openness to fulfilling the mundane requirements of community life as an expression of Christian love and service. He spent most of his first years as a cenobitic doing all the menial work on his own, knowing that his brother monks needed to be gently inducted into serving their brothers in the same manner.  He therefore allowed them to devote all their time to spiritual exercises in those first years.  At his death, there were eleven Pachomian monasteries: nine for men and two for women.

The rule that Pachomius drew up was said to have been dictated to him by an angel, and it is this rule that both St. Benedict in the west and St. Basil in the east drew upon to develop their better known rules of cenobitic life. St. Pachomius died in the year 346.