It was a day like today.
Born on November 22 in 1869 was French writer André Gide. In 1913 was born British composer Benjamin Britten. Death anniversaries for this date include Jack London, author of White Fang, in 1916.
The Christian Church marks today the feast of St. Cecilia, an early Roman martyr who has since become regarded as the patron saint of musicians. It is thought that she died a martyr’s death during the reign of Emperor Alexander 222-235 AD. Married against her will to Valerian, she convinced him to accept the Christian faith and to respect her virginity. She also convinced her brother-in-law Tiburtius. The two men devoted themselves to charitable works and burying the bodies of martyred Christians. When they refused to sacrifice to Roman gods, they were scourged and beheaded along with another martyr, Maximus. Cecilia was in turn arrested. When her sentence of suffocation was miraculously unsuccessful, her captors decided to behead the virgin. Her executioner bungled the job and she then lay in agony for three days before expiring on September 16.
The Catholic Church today commemorates the life and martydom of Jesuit Father Miguel Agustin Pro. Born in 1891, the priest was active during the government of Elias Calles in Mexico when priests and laity of the Catholic faith were persecuted by the revolutionary movement. Father Miguel utilized various disguises and a piquant humor to evade his captors until he was finally apprehended in November 1927. Taken to the execution place to face a firing squad, he asked to pray before the sentence was carried out. Then standing before the wall of his prison his stretched out his arms in imitation of his Crucified Saviour and was shot. A coup de grace was necessary to make him expire. The government took photographs of the proceedings in hopes of detering further heroism on the part of priests and faithul. This had the opposite effect, galvanizing opposition to the secular government and immortalizing a saint. It is sometimes said that his last words were "Long live Christ the King." Graham Greene, the author of The Power and the Glory, was to describe the period as the "fiercest persecution of religion anywhere since the reign of Elizabeth." Miguel Pro was beatified in 1988 by Pope John Paul II.
Words of Wisdom:
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen wrote in Moods and Truth in 1950 of Judgement Day, “For when the curtain goes down on the Last Day, and we respond to the curtain call of judgement, we will not be asked what part we played, but how well we played the part that was assigned to us.”
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