El Greco, St. Louis of France with His Son Philip III; at the Louvre, Paris

Rex Christianissimus

A happy (and slightly belated) St. Louis's Day to all, especially Franciscans, Missouri residents, and French kings in our audience. St. Louis IX, son of Bl. Blanche of Castille (whose strong personality irritated him), was a noble paragon of Christian monarchy, a friend of St. Thomas Aquinas, an exemplar of chivalry in his crusading spirit, and notable for his humility. After building the gem-like court chapel of Ste. Chapelle to house the holy relics of Christ's passion he brought back from the Levant, St. Louis walked in procession in sackcloth, bearing the reliquary on his shoulder. St. Louis also once said, to an impious courtier who posed him the question of whether it would be worse to be a leper or a mortal sinner, "he is healed of leprosy in his body; but when a man who has committed a mortal sin dies he cannot know of a certainty that he has in his lifetime repented in such sort that God has forgiven him; wherefore he must stand in great fear lest that leprosy of sin last as long as God is in Paradise." Thus St. Louis. He died today in the year 1270 at Tunis on the Barbary coast, and is invoked by parishioners of the archdiocese of St. Louis, barbers, builders, button makers, construction workers, Crusaders, dying children, those in difficult marriages, distillers, embroiderers, French monarchs, grooms, haberdashers, hairdressers, hair stylists, kings, masons, needle workers, parents, parents of large families, prisoners, sculptors, sick people, soldiers, stone masons, stonecutters and tertiaries. Charpentier wrote a splendid hymn in his honor entitled Dies Tubae. St. Louis was also the patron of a shortlived Spanish mission, San Luis de Talimali, situated near my hometown of Tallahassee, which was burned to the ground in 1704 by British soldiers and their Creek allies.

Today is also the feast of St. Genesius the Comedian, the noted legendary martyr who converted to Christianity while on stage in the midst of a pagan Roman farce mocking the Church. He is patron of, among other things, comedians, torture victims, and lawyers, which perhaps suggests the Church has a bigger sense of humor than that She is usually credited with. Today is also the feast of St. Genesius of Arles, another martyr; the nun St. Hunegund; St. Joseph Calasanz, founder of the Piarists; Bl. Maria of the Translation of the Holy Sacrament, from Argentina; and lastly the Constantinopolitan nun St. Patricia, whose blood is preserved in Naples and liquefies miraculously around the time of her feast-day. Naples and environs are a site of many blood relic prodigies; the most famous is St. Januarius, whose blood liquefies several times yearly. In addition to St. Patricia's, the blood of St. Pantaleon kept at Ravello (also, unfortunately, the adopted hometown of Gore Vidal) changes from brown to red on his feast-day. I actually saw the blood with my own eyes on my travels; it is kept in a glass phial and remains liquid much of the year, a dark, murky brown, and dew often fogs the upper part of the container. It is a strange thing to see.