Tag: Married Saints

Blessed Karl of Austria (1887-1922) was undeterred in his commitment to follow Christ, and the circumstances of his life provided numerous opportunities for the Austro-Hungarian emperor to take up his cross and do just that. Karl’s young adulthood was spent pursuing education in politics and law alongside training as a military officer. He had become comfortable with a life of a prince who was not destined for high office.

From his earliest years, Blessed Karl was formed in the ways of faith, which only grew in his young adult years. Personally, he was known to be kind, humble and modest — a quintessential gentleman. A man of prayer, Blessed Karl was devoted to the Lord, especially in the Blessed Sacrament, and he was known to make several visits to the chapel daily.

The faith of Blessed Karl was well-matched in the young Princess Zita of Bourbon-Parma. Together they recognized the most important service spouses perform for each other, as Blessed Karl told the future empress on their wedding day in 1911: “Now, we must help each other to get to heaven.” After his 2004 beatification, Blessed Karl’s feast day was set for their wedding anniversary, Oct. 21. There is now an open cause for his wife’s canonization.

As is so in God’s ways, the course of Blessed Karl’s life unfolded in an unexpected manner. He was not supposed to inherit the throne from his great-uncle. Rather, the crown was destined for his uncle, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. But his death in 1914 — which was the impetus for World War I — caused the crown to fall upon Blessed Karl.

As a Catholic monarch, he embraced his office as the will of God. Informed by the Church’s social teaching, the emperor sought at all costs to promote peace, equality and justice in the midst of a world at war. This came along with a great personal price.

Blessed Karl abhorred war; he could not understand why anyone would desire it. The merciless greed and quenchless thirst for power that fuels war’s desire for conquest and domination was foreign to him. He was a gentle soul, one who thirsted above all for true and lasting peace. That dedication was unpopular and eventually cost him his life.

As his empire unraveled at the conclusion of the war in 1918, Blessed Karl did not greedily cling to the power of his office and relinquished any role he had in the government. He knew, above all, that God’s providence entrusted him with the office to be of service to his people.

This was no failure on the part of Blessed Karl. The world tragically rejected his prophetic voice of conscience as the modernist and secular winds of society — post Enlightenment — were shifting its aim to eliminate the Church’s voice, especially in temporal affairs.

Blessed Karl never abdicated, for that he saw as a rejection of God’s will, but he twice attempted to regain his office. As democracy took hold of his realm, he was forced into exile. The royal family was exiled first to Switzerland and then eventually to the Portuguese island of Madeira. This remote location was chosen to prevent a third attempt to reclaim his realm.

His final years of suffering were embraced by Blessed Karl as an opportunity for him to offer up for the good of his peoples. He united himself to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, who knew what it was like to be mistreated, looked down upon and slandered. His new-found poverty came with a price on his health. Weakened by two heart attacks, Blessed Karl died at age 34 after a final bout with pneumonia that was brought on by his weakened health and the cold and damp climate of his exile.

His feast day is Oct. 21.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter at @HeinleinMichael.

According to tradition, the Blessed Mother revealed the Rosary to St. Dominic as the threats of error and falsehood propagated by the Albigensian heresy grew. That and several other episodes in the history of the Church have illustrated that the Rosary is most definitely a spiritual weapon to be used to defeat what is false and evil in the world.

Blessed Bartolo Longo found that out firsthand in his late 20s when introduced to the Rosary. Having grown up Catholic, Longo grew away from the Faith in his young adult years and gave into the pressures of the culture.

Back then, the Church became the target of various attacks because the pope maintained a certain portion of the territory that is now Italy. Although the pope eventually lost it — removing any political power from the papacy after nearly a millennium — Italy saw his attempts to maintain control as something akin to an enemy of the state.

Unification was en vogue as Italy was being formed from various disparate territories. As a young law student, Longo joined that cause.

Later Longo was swept into another cultural trend: experimenting with spiritualism, particularly the occult and satanic worship. He found himself involved so much in a satanic cult that he claimed he was eventually ordained a priest of Satan.

That changed when he was introduced to the power of the Rosary by a Dominican priest. Longo had become acquainted with the priest through a boyhood friend who convinced him to leave Satanism. He had confided in that friend how his life was filled with anxiety; he was depressed and confused.

For the rest of his life he would go on unceasingly to work to foster devotion to the Rosary, leading to his renown as “a true apostle of the Rosary” as Pope St. John Paul II called him in a 2002 apostolic letter on the Rosary (Rosarium Virginis Mariae, No. 8).

Why did the Rosary have such a major impact on Longo? By his own admission, the depression and anxiety by which he found himself plagued eventually led to thoughts of suicide. He was successful in rejecting the temptation by recalling one of the promises held by tradition that Our Lady made to St. Dominic about the Rosary: “He who propagates my Rosary will be saved.” He believed the Rosary saved his life, and he knew it could do the same for others.

All the while, Longo had kept up the practice of law. He eventually came to Pompeii, Italy — site of the ancient volcanic eruption — and took up work for a young, widowed Countess Mariana De Fusco. The darkness she experienced at the time of her husband’s death was brightened by a renewed and deepened prayer life. It was at this time, around the time of Longo’s conversion, that he met Countess De Fusco.

The two began to collaborate on a project to bring about greater devotion to the Rosary. They established a shrine at an old, deteriorating church in Pompeii. Longo repaired it and established a confraternity of the Rosary. Each year a festival would be held at the shrine.

Over the years, miracles allegedly began to occur at the shrine. The shrine was consecrated by a delegate of Pope Leo XIII in 1879.

The same pope convinced the countess and Longo to marry in 1885. They remained celibate in their marriage. Theirs was a marriage of spiritual parenthood where they cared for the spiritual and material needs of the poor and disadvantaged.

Together they cared for orphans and gave assistance to the imprisoned — most of all they continued promoting the Rosary, even after donating the Pompeii shrine to the Holy See in 1906.

His feast day is Oct. 5.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter at @HeinleinMichael.

Blessed Anna Maria Taigi exemplifies how someone can climb to the heights of mysticism and extraordinary holiness while living the vocation of a wife and mother.

Hailing from Siena, Italy, Taigi’s family moved to Rome when her pharmacist father needed to find employment after financial ruin. Poverty, although unchosen then, later in life would be embraced as one of her defining characteristics.

Unsure of her vocation as a young woman, Taigi considered religious life, but because she was too ambivalent to it, a confessor suggested marriage. Her future husband’s path crossed hers while both were engaged in service work in the homes of Italian nobility. Domenico Taigi was a rough and tumble man, prone to making life difficult for those around him in word and deed. And his wife got the brunt of his temperament. But Taigi softened him, showing love when least expected. A hardened heart almost assuredly will melt over time from love’s gentleness — such as an unwarranted smile. Taigi models how one takes seriously the marriage vows as a means to one’s own sanctification and growth in holiness.

This self-denial that Taigi became known for was not always what defined her. In the early years of their marriage, her life was marked by vanity and luxury. It has been disputed that she engaged in an adulterous affair.

But a conversion experience led Taigi to embrace a Gospel way of life that came to define her. Baptized the day after her birth, Taigi’s faith had not blossomed until after her marriage. A chance encounter with a priest in St. Peter’s Square prompted her to subsequently make a fruitful confession, in which Taigi renounced the life of mixed-up priorities she had been living. That night, Taigi had been moved by an inner voice that said God desired more from her. Her husband described years later how, as a first step in this new life, his wife “took to wearing the plainest possible clothes,” noting that, in obedience to her spouse, she asked for his consent. He gave it completely, he said, for he saw “she was entirely given to the love of God.”

All this had kept her from giving her all to Christ, which took place while in prayer before a crucifix. She heard Jesus ask from the cross, “What is your wish? To follow Jesus poor and naked and stripped of all, or to follow him in his triumph and glory? Which do you choose?” To which she replied, “I embrace the cross of my Jesus. I will carry it like him in pain and ignominy. I await at his hands triumph and glory in the hereafter.”

Single-minded dedication to Christ defined the rest of Taigi’s life, which was a constant display of the closeness to Christ she experienced in the sacraments and in those who sought him. She worked to serve Christ in the sick and poor as a Third Order Trinitarian while keeping up with the duties of a wife and mother. A gift of prophesying the future was the spiritual fruit of visions and ecstasies — all the more incredible that this came to an ordinary housewife, not the likes of a cloistered nun. Her prophetic abilities caused her to become sought after by many notable figures, including Napoleon’s mother and the pope.

Upon her death in 1837, the future St. Vincent Pallotti praised her holiness. This was reiterated by Venerable Bernardo Clausi who said, “If she is not in heaven, there is no room there for anybody.” She was beatified by Pope Benedict XV in 1920.

Her feast day is June 9.

Michael R. Heinlein is editor of Simply Catholic. Follow him on Twitter at @HeinleinMichael.