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August 31 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

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event · TIVOLI, Papal States, this week, September 1539 AD

Pope Paul III approves the rule of a new order at Tivoli

Cardinal Gasparo Contarini read the ten priests' five-chapter rule aloud at the summer residence, and the Pope ordered a bull or brief drawn up at Rome.

A bust-length portrait in dark oil tones of an elderly bald man with a short grey beard, wearing a black cap and dark cassock, a faint halo outlined behind his head, gazing slightly to the side.
St. Ignatius of Loyola, painted by Jacopino del Conte in Rome on the day of his death, July 31, 1556 AD.

Pope Paul III has given his spoken approval to the Formula of the Institute, the five-chapter rule of the order that ten priests are asking his permission to found. Cardinal Gasparo Contarini read it to him at Tivoli this week and wrote out an attestation of what happened in his own hand. Saint Ignatius of Loyola, who drafted the text, was not in the room, and nothing has been sealed.

6 min read

In a bare whitewashed vaulted room, two nuns in black habits settle a black veil on a young woman in the same habit while a third looks on; through an open stone doorway lie the roofs of a walled hill town and bare mountains.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of Umbrian quattrocento tempera on gessoed panel, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of St. Rita, detail from the painted sarcophagus (cassa solenne) that held her body (unknown Umbrian painter, 1457, Monastery and Sanctuary of Santa Rita, Cascia, Umbria). View source artwork.

St. Rita of Cascia, a widow of twenty-six from Roccaporena, has been clothed in the penitential habit of the Augustinian nuns of Saint Mary Magdalene at Cascia and admitted to the novitiate. The house had refused her three times, on the ground that it took virgins and not widows. Her husband was killed in the feuds of the valley about a year ago, and both her sons died within the year after him.

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More in this edition

A medieval Italian painting of a barefoot friar in a patched grey-brown tunic and knotted rope girdle sitting on straw inside a low round hut of reeds in a walled garden, with two tonsured companions on the grass beside him, one of them writing on a sheet of parchment, a small stone church and an Umbrian hill town behind, and brown birds standing on the ground nearby.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of buon fresco of the Assisi cycle, from the paper's reference portrait based on Legend of St. Francis, scene 19: Stigmatization of St. Francis (Giotto di Bondone, 1297–1300 AD, Upper Church, Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi) View source artwork.

writings · SAN DAMIANO, below Assisi, September 1225 AD

Blind at San Damiano, St. Francis makes the Praises of the Creatures

Saint Francis of Assisi has composed the Praises of the Creatures, the poem now called the Canticle of the Sun, in a hut of reeds in the monastery garden at San Damiano below Assisi. He is almost completely blind from a disease of the eyes and has been at San Damiano since the end of July. The poem praises God through brother sun, sister moon, brother wind, sister water, brother fire and our sister mother earth, and he has taught his companions to sing it.

4 min read

A painted view over a walled Roman North African port: an empty blue-green harbour with no ship on it, fishing boats hauled up on the shingle, a stone quay of idle jars, baskets and a hand-cart with four men in plain tunics looking out at the water, and behind them a whitewashed town with a tiled basilica and two columns of smoke rising over the dry hills inland.
About this picture

AI-generated image, in the manner of a buon fresco on lime plaster, from the paper's reference portrait based on Fresco of Augustine, Lateran, Rome (Anonymous, c. 550-600 AD, The Lateran, Rome) View source artwork.

Monica and Augustine at Ostia · Part 4 · HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, August 31, 430 AD

Hippo Regius, three months blockaded: an empty harbour and a crowded house

Hippo Regius has been shut in by the Vandals since about the end of May, its sea coast closed by blockade and the trade its harbour lives on stopped. Three days ago the people of the city buried their bishop, Saint Augustine. The bishops who fled the towns inland are still living in his house and still meeting every day.

4 min read

Today in the Church

Monday of the Twenty-second Week in Ordinary Time

On this day in the Church

  • 1523 St. Ignatius of Loyola disembarked at Jaffa, having sailed from Venice by way of Cyprus; he entered Jerusalem four days later.Our reportSource
  • 1670 The first feast of the Sacred Heart was celebrated with great solemnity in the Grand Seminary of Rennes, three years before the revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque began at Paray-le-Monial.Source
  • 1552 The German College at Rome was founded by the bull Dum sollicita; with the Roman College it was the work nearest to St. Ignatius of Loyola, who begged and borrowed for both until his death.Source

Quote of the day

“The Spirit of God is here.”
— Pope Paul III, on the form of life offered him for confirmation by St. Ignatius of Loyola and his companions, 1539 AD, Jerónimo Nadal, in Fontes narrativi de S. Ignatio de Loyola et de Societatis Iesu initiis, tomus I (Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu 66)