Saint Philip Benizi. Confessor. General Superior Of The Servites. Feast Day 23 August. White Vestments.

Saint Philip Benizi.

Illustration: LIVES OF THE SAINTS

Text from “The Liturgical Year”.
   By: Abbot Guéranger, O.S.B.
   Volume 14.
   Time After Pentecost.
   Book V.

Our Lady is now reigning in Heaven. Her triumph over death cost her no labour; and yet it was through suffering that she, like Jesus, entered into her glory.

We, too, cannot attain eternal happiness otherwise than did the Son and the Mother.

Let us keep in mind the sweet joys we have been tasting during the past week; but let us not forget that our own journey to Heaven is not yet completed.

“Why stand ye looking up into Heaven ?” said the Angels to the Disciples on Ascension Day, in the name of the Lord Who had gone up in a cloud; for the Disciples, who had for an instant beheld the threshold of Heaven, could not resign themselves to turn their eyes once more down to this valley of exile.

Mary, in her turn, sends us a message today from the bright land whither we are to follow her, and where we shall surround her after having in the sorrows of exile merited to form her Court: Without distracting us from her, the Apostle of her dolours, Philip Benizi, reminds us of our true condition of strangers and Pilgrims upon Earth.

Combats without, fears within: Such for the most part was Philip’s life, as it was also the history of his native City of Florence; of Italy, too, and indeed of the whole Christian World, in the 13th-Century.

At the time of his birth, the City of Flowers [Editor: Florence] seemed a new Eden for the blossoms of Sanctity that flourished there; nevertheless, it was a prey to bloody factions, to the assaults of heresy, and to the extremity of every misery.

Never is Hell so near us as when Heaven manifests itself with greatest intensity; this was clearly seen in that age, when the serpent’s head came in closest contact with the heel of the woman.

The old enemy, by creating new sects, had shaken the Faith in the very centre of the Provinces surrounding the Eternal City.

While, in the East, Islam was driving back the last Crusaders, in the West, the Papacy was struggling with the Holy Roman Empire, which Emperor Frederick III had made as a fief of Satan.

Throughout Christendom, social union was undone, Faith had grown weak, and love cold; but the old enemy was soon to discover the power of the reaction Heaven was preparing for the relief of the aged World.

Then it was that Our Lady presented to her angered Son, Dominic, and Francis, that, by uniting science with self-abnegation, they migh counterbalance the ignorance and luxury of the World; then, too, Philip Benizi, the Servite of The Mother of God, received from her the Mission of Preaching through Italy, France, and Germany, the unspeakable sufferings whereby she became the Co-Redemptress of the human race.