I’m closing in on 25 percent complete on Brotherhood of Saints: Daily Guidance and Inspiration (think Sisterhood of Saints, only guys). That’s a good thing, since it’s due to the publisher on May 10 (to be published in October!).
Each day, I listen to whoever wants to talk. I’m waiting for the Doctors of the Church to be ready; they aren’t yet, but I know they will be. After all, they’re wise teachers, correct? And their feast days are saved for slots in the page-a-day format.
But lately, a lot of martyrs have been coming to tell their stories, and they are, well, intense. In fact, two of them, James Intercisus and William of Norwich, had such disturbing stories that they will not be in the book.
But I had to include José Sánchez del Río, the fourteen-year-old who was martyred in 1928 in Mexico’s Cristero rebellion, even though I just
said he was tortured, not the complete story about how a layer of skin was cut from his soles and he was forced to walk on glass, and then to the cemetery where he would be shot, shouting “Long live Christ the King” amid his tears. I had to include Isaac Jogues, a seventeenth century missionary to what is now Canada. Again, I just said he was brutally tortured–not that his fingernails were removed, a thumb cut off, his fingertips so gnawed that the bones showed–and after a year of this, miraculously got back to France. And I noted, the biggest takeaway of all for me, that after all this, he felt called to return to Canada–where he was killed after a few months.
So you’ll understand why I was so grateful that at the end of the day yesterday, it was Gaetano Catanoso, an Italian priest 
who died in 1963, who came to talk. You’ve probably never heard of him. I hadn’t. He was a parish priest for sixty-one years, serving in two parishes. He didn’t win a lot of wars; he wasn’t a gifted writer or preacher; he didn’t die a martyr’s death. He just showed up, every day, wherever his parishioners were, and did his best to see that that day was better than the day before for them. That takes a lot of sacrifice too–not to say it compares in terms of physical pain to having the skin cut off your soles or having your fingers gnawed. But I think of Gaetano and all those days he must have wanted to just stay in bed, or maybe tell a whining parishioner just what he thought of him or her. Instead, he comforted them, and talked with them about the Holy Face of Jesus.
Thanks, Gaetano–and Isaac, and José , and James, and William. I look forward to hearing from more of your heavenly friends.
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