News Briefs

Blood of St. Januarius ‘completely liquefied’ on feast day

September 19, 2023 Catholic News Agency 2
Archbishop Domenico Battaglia holds up the reliquary with the liquefied blood of St. Januarius on the martyr bishop’s feast day Sept. 19, 2023. The announcement that the blood had liquefied was made at the start of Mass in the Naples Cathedral by Abbot Vincenzo De Gregorio. / Screenshot / YouTube channel Chiesa di Napoli

Rome Newsroom, Sep 19, 2023 / 06:10 am (CNA).

The blood of the martyr St. Januarius again liquefied in Naples on Tuesday.

“We have just taken from the safe the reliquary with the blood of our patron saint, which immediately completely liquefied,” the abbot of the chapel of the treasury of the Naples Cathedral announced on Sept. 19.

The declaration that the miracle had again taken place was made at the start of Mass by Abbot Vincenzo De Gregorio.

The archbishop of Naples, Domenico Battaglia, held the relic of the blood, moving the glass ampoules to demonstrate the liquid state of the blood to the sounds of strong applause, while the deputy of the wisdom of the people waved a white cloth.

On Sept. 19, the Catholic Church celebrates the feast of St. Januarius, bishop, martyr, and patron saint of Naples, Italy. Traditionally, on this day and on two other occasions a year, his blood, which is kept in a glass ampoule in the shape of a rounded cruet, liquifies.

It is believed the miracle has taken place since at least 1389, the first instance on record.

The liquefaction process sometimes takes hours or even days, and sometimes it does not happen at all. In local lore, the failure of the blood to liquefy signals war, famine, disease, or other disaster.

At Mass Sept. 19, Archbishop Battaglia of Naples, spoke about the miracle and what it is and is not.

“Every year we see first-hand how the witness of a man who generously gave his life for the Gospel, until his last breath, until his last drop of blood, is not something of the past, a historic event useful only to write about in some pages of a book,” he said.

“No,” Battaglia continued, “it’s a testimony that is present, living, current, and capable of speaking to the heart of every believer, pushing him to more consistency, beyond courage, to a life of giving, steeped in sharing.”

He reminded those present that the blood of St. Januarius “is not an oracle to consult and even less a city horoscope whose function is to predict misfortune or fortune for the city. No, the relic we bless is simply a road sign, a finger that points us to the necessity, the urgency, the requirement to follow the Gospel in a radical way, being unreservedly attracted by its liberating beauty, listening with an open heart and mind to its word of life and hope.”

Battaglia said the blood of St. Januarius makes him think of the unjust bloodshed that happens every day “whenever a person is wounded, humiliated, not respected in his dignity.”

“I believe that the real miracle will take place the day this blood [of St. Januarius] is forever hard, compact, clotted!” the archbishop said. ”Yes, I believe that the real miracle will happen when justice kisses peace, when good overpowers evil forever, when the good news of Jesus Christ dries up the pain of the world, illuminates the darkness for good, brings all things to completion, enters so deeply into the hearts of men and women that their words, their deeds, their thoughts will be nothing but goodness, benevolence, beauty.”

After the Mass, the relic of St. Januarius’ blood will remain on display for veneration in the Cathedral of Naples until Sept. 26 in thanksgiving for the miracle.

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Bishop Robert Barron speaks at Harvard University: ‘The glory of God is man fully alive!’

September 18, 2023 Catholic News Agency 9
Winona-Rochester Bishop Robert Barron, with Deacon Tim O’Donnell to his left, answers questions from the crowd following his lecture “The Catholic Intellectual Tradition” on Harvard University’s campus on Sept. 17, 2023. / Credit: Joe Bukuras/CNA

Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sep 18, 2023 / 16:00 pm (CNA).

Addressing a packed audience of approximately 1,000 on the campus of Harvard University on Sunday, Bishop Robert Barron offered those in attendance a window into the “Catholic intellectual tradition” by emphatically proclaiming: “The glory of God is man fully alive!”

The founder of the Catholic media apostolate Word on Fire, Barron is one of the most outspoken American prelates against the errors of “secularism” and its ever-increasing presence in Western society. Harvard, the first college established in the American colonies, was originally founded to train and educate Puritan clergy members in the New World and is completely secular today.

Barron said in his lecture that secularism is a reaction to what others perceive as a “threatening God” but said that “the world is most itself when it has found a relationship to the supreme good, which is God.”

Barron, who serves as bishop of the Diocese of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, spoke at the school’s Memorial Church, an interdenominational Protestant church dedicated in 1932.

Deacon Tim O’Donnell, executive director of the Harvard Catholic Center — which co-sponsored the event — told CNA that “Harvard’s church” was the chosen destination for the lecture because it would attract “more non-Catholics, seekers, and inquirers” than St. Paul’s Parish, the Catholic church where Barron celebrated Mass and offered a homily earlier in the day.

Memorial Church’s larger capacity, he said, is better suited for the “spoken word.” What’s more, its location was highly symbolic.

“We wanted to place Bishop Barron’s message about the Catholic intellectual tradition right in the center of the secular university, and in the center of Harvard in particular,” O’Donnell said.

Barron began his talk by saying that the “most fundamental claim” of the Catholic intellectual tradition is that “Jesus Christ is epistemically basic.”

In other words, Barron said, Jesus Christ is the “privileged lens through which the whole of reality is read.”

That claim is not “imperialistic,” as some may think, he said. Every intellectual system establishes an idea as epistemically (related to knowledge or the study of knowledge) basic, he added. 

“What I mean is that he’s not presented to us as simply one prophet among many, one religious spokesperson among many,” he said.

“Rather, we hear that he is the Word. He is Logos,” Barron said, adding that “the various sciences and perspectives have to be read from the standpoint of the Logos.”

Looking through the lens of Jesus, some aspects of life are seen “more clearly” such as God, humanity, and creation, he said. 

God is not competing with the world, as was made evident when he took on human form, Barron explained.

“God and a creature come together in such a way that neither one is compromised. How’s that possible? It’s possible only if God is not a competitive being among many,” he said.

“God is the sheer act of ‘to be’ itself,” he proclaimed.

Barron said that the closer God comes to humanity, “the more alive we are, the more ourselves we are.”

Barron pointed to the prophet Moses’ encounter with God in the burning bush as an example. 

“How does Moses see God but in this great image of the burning bush, which is on fire but not consumed? The closer God gets to creation, the more luminous and beautiful it becomes without being consumed,” he said.

Offering what he called a “bold claim,” Barron said: “There is no humanism anywhere, East or West, anywhere across the ages, greater than Christian theology.”

Barron said that “divine freedom can come intimately close to human freedom and not compromise it, not crush it.”

Distinguishing between two views of freedom, Barron said the “modern sense” is that “freedom is fundamentally indifference in the face of the yes and the no.”

But in the “biblical sense,” freedom is “the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless.”

Barron told the crowd that his talk could be summed up in the simple words of one of his heroes, the second-century bishop St. Irenaeus of Lyons, who said: “The glory of God is man fully alive.”

“That’s a God who glories in our being fully human,” he said.

Speaking on creation, Barron said that anything that exists apart from God has come “fully and utterly from God.”

If everything comes from God, it must “be marked” by “intelligible form,” he said.

He said “this is precisely why the modern physical sciences emerged out of a Christian university matrix.”

“It’s the theological doctrine of creation which teaches this truth that we should expect finite reality in every detail to be marked by intelligibility that makes the sciences possible,” he said. 

Before answering several questions from the crowd, Barron concluded his lecture by saying that the Catholic intellectual tradition “stubbornly looks at God, the world, ourselves, and the way we organize our societies through the lens of Jesus Christ, and it sees them according to a divine light.”

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