September 5 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

event · TRIER, Gaul, 385 AD

St. Martin walks into the emperor's court to stop a manhunt

The bishop of Tours, sixty-nine, came into Trier by night to ask the emperor to call back the officers he was sending into Spain with power over life and property.

A medieval fresco showing a haloed bishop in gold vestments and a white mitre laying his hand on a kneeling crowned figure in an arched courtyard, with two onlookers at the edges. — St. Martin of Tours raises a bishop's hand in blessing over a kneeling figure, in a scene from the fresco cycle of his life painted by Simone Martini between 1312 and 1317 in the Chapel of St. Martin, Lower Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi.

Saint Martin of Tours entered Trier during the night, after the bishops at the emperor's court had him forbidden the city unless he made peace with them. He came to plead for two condemned men and to stop the tribunes the emperor was sending into the Spanish provinces to hunt heretics. He got everything he asked, and paid for it by taking communion with bishops he had refused.

5 min read

A painting of an empty paved forecourt before a large plain brick basilica with tall arched windows, a tiled portico on columns to one side with a wooden bench beneath it, and no people anywhere in the scene. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian trecento fresco, from the paper's reference portrait based on Miracle of Fire (scene 8) (Simone Martini (1284-1344), between 1312 and 1317, Chapel of St. Martin, Lower Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi) View source artwork.

event · TRIER, Gaul, 385 AD

A dispute over doctrine ends at Trier with five beheadings

The emperor Maximus, who holds the West from Trier, has put Priscillian, the bishop of Ávila, to death with two of his clerks, a layman and a woman named Euchrocia. They were tried not by bishops but by a civil judge the emperor put in charge of the case, and convicted of magic rather than heresy. Saint Martin of Tours had come to the city to argue that a church case did not belong before a secular court, and left with the emperor's promise that no blood would be shed.

4 min read

More in this edition

A young nun in a white Cistercian habit and black veil stands alone and still at the doorway of a small whitewashed building, her head slightly bowed and her hands folded; to the right, on the grass at the edge of a beech wood, the bare timber frame of an unroofed house stands on a low stone footing beside dressed stone and a pile of thatch, with a plain church in the distance at the left. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a fifteenth-century Netherlandish oil on oak panel, from the paper's reference portrait based on Edelheere Triptych (Descent from the Cross), right wing: Aleydis Cappuyns and her daughters Aleydis and Catharina presented by Saint Aleydis (Unknown Brabantine master, after Rogier van der Weyden, 1443 AD, Sint-Pieterskerk, Leuven, Belgium) View source artwork.

profile · LA CAMBRE, Duchy of Brabant, 1242 AD

Leprosy takes St. Alice out of her own convent at twenty-two

Leprosy struck St. Alice of Schaerbeek this year, at twenty-two. She has been taken out of the choir and the common table at the abbey where she has lived since she was seven, and a house is being built for her alone on the abbey grounds. On the first night apart she broke down; afterwards she said she would refuse her old health if it were offered her.

3 min read

A grayscale portrait of an older, balding, bearded man in a black cassock and biretta, haloed, gazing to the side.

feature · PARIS, September 1529 AD

St. Ignatius walks barefoot to nurse the man who took his money

Saint Ignatius of Loyola, a Basque student at Paris living on alms, learned this month that the Spaniard who had spent the money entrusted to him had set out for Spain and fallen sick at Rouen. He walked there in three days, barefoot and taking nothing to eat or drink. He nursed the man, put him aboard a ship for Spain and gave him letters to his friends at Salamanca.

4 min read

A Tudor gentleman in a black fur-collared gown and gold collar of esses stands in a riverside courtyard holding a folded letter, his travelling chests set down around him and two servants lifting a chest behind, the Thames flat and empty beyond. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of an oil and tempera panel by Hans Holbein the Younger, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of Sir Thomas More (Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/1498-1543), 1527, The Frick Collection, New York (acc. 1912.1.77)) View source artwork.

writings · CHELSEA, Middlesex, March 5, 1534 AD

Under investigation, St. Thomas More sets down the King's first question

St. Thomas More, Lord Chancellor of England until he resigned two years ago, is under investigation, his name in a bill before the House of Lords. Today he has written to Thomas Cromwell, the King's secretary, answering the charges. In that letter he sets down what King Henry VIII asked him in September 1527 AD about the King's marriage to Queen Catherine of Aragon, and how he answered.

4 min read

Today in the Church

Saturday of the 22nd week in Ordinary Time; optional memorial of St. Teresa of Calcutta

On this day in the Church

1523 The day after he was brought into Jerusalem, St. Ignatius of Loyola went round the holy places of the city.Our report Source
1581 St. Teresa of Ávila reached Ávila after three weeks on the road from Soria, where she had founded the fifteenth monastery of her reform and left Catherine of Christ as prioress.Source
1911 At the end of his novitiate year at Lwów, St. Maximilian Kolbe, seventeen, made the vows of obedience, poverty and chastity and promised to keep the Rule of St. Francis.Our report Source

Quote of the day

“The report then ran through the whole palace that Martin had done, at the king's dinner, what no bishop had dared to do at the banquets of the lowest judges.”

— Sulpicius Severus, on St. Martin of Tours at the table of the emperor Maximus at Trier, Sulpicius Severus, On the Life of St. Martin, ch. 20, trans. Alexander Roberts (Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 11, 1894)