September 10 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

event · CARTAGENA DE INDIAS, Colombia, September 10, 2017 AD

Pope Francis says Mass in the port where the slave ships landed

Pope Francis said the closing Mass of his Colombian journey among the cranes of a working container terminal, the harbour where St. Peter Claver met the slave ships.

An ink-and-wash drawing of a container terminal on a wide bay: gantry cranes stand along the quay above a moored container ship, rows of stacked shipping containers fill the left of the sheet, and the empty concrete apron runs out towards the water, with no people anywhere in the scene. — The Contecar container terminal on the bay of Cartagena de Indias, Colombia, drawn as it stands. Pope Francis celebrated the closing Mass of his journey to Colombia here on September 10, 2017 AD, and the slave ships St. Peter Claver went down to meet came into this harbour.
About this picture
AI-generated image, an ink-and-wash drawing of the container terminal on the bay of Cartagena. No person appears in it.

Pope Francis celebrated the closing Mass of his six-day journey to Colombia at the Port of Contecar, the working container terminal on the bay of Cartagena de Indias, and preached there on Saint Peter Claver. Between 1580 and 1640 AD this was the chief slave port of Spanish America, and St. Peter Claver went down to the ships to baptise the people landed from them. The Pope asked Colombians to take a first step towards those who had harmed them, and ended by telling them to be 'slaves of peace, forever'.

5 min read

In a sunlit market square ringed by arcaded brick and plaster houses, a small, balding, bearded man in a plain black cassock and cloak stands on a low wooden bench, his mouth open in a shout and a black hat raised above his head, while market women, tradesmen and a running boy turn towards him among tables of bread and cheese. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of mid-sixteenth-century Roman and Spanish oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of Ignatius of Loyola (Jacopino del Conte (1510/1515-1598), 1556 AD, painted on the day of his death, 31 July, Curia Generalizia of the Society of Jesus, Rome; catalogued by the Fondazione Federico Zeri, Bologna) View source artwork.

event · VICENZA, Republic of Venice, September 1537 AD

St. Ignatius and three priests shout in four squares of Vicenza

St. Ignatius of Loyola and three companions preached in four different squares of Vicenza on the same day and at the same hour this month, each of them first shouting and waving his hat to gather a crowd. All four had been priests for ten weeks and had no parish and no pulpit, kept from the voyage to Jerusalem they had vowed by the war between Venice and the Turkish Sultan Suleiman. The sermons set the city talking, brought townspeople to a more devout life, and brought in more food.

4 min read

More in this edition

A painted view along a banded Roman town wall with squat tiled towers, a small newly built stone church and low convent ranges standing on the empty grass between the wall and a shallow river, with a single white bird high in the sky. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of Italian panel painting in egg tempera, from the paper's reference portrait based on De dood van de heilige Scholastica (The Death of Saint Scholastica), RP-P-OB-5367 (Francesco Bartolozzi, engraver, after the painting by Luca Giordano, 1739–1780, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) View source artwork.

place · LE MANS, Gaul, in these years, about 660 AD

Le Mans carries St. Scholastica's body home on its own shoulders

A body brought north from the ruins of Monte Cassino as St. Scholastica's reached Le Mans in these years, and the people of the city lifted it onto their own shoulders to carry it in. St. Berarius, their bishop, met them outside the walls and brought it on with litanies, hymns and psalms to a church of St. Peter he had built for it on the ground between the Roman wall and the river. Within a short time a hundred and fifty noblewomen had left the world and gathered there as a monastery.

4 min read

An empty whitewashed room in a Roman African church: a large parchment codex lies open on a plain wooden desk with reed pens, an inkwell and wax tablets beside it, wicker book-boxes of codices stand on the tiled floor, and a round-arched doorway opens on a sunlit courtyard with an olive tree. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a buon fresco on lime plaster, from the paper's reference image based on St Augustine's Vision of St Jerome (scene 16, east wall), from the Life of St Augustine (Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-1465, apsidal chapel, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano) View source artwork.

writings · NUMIDIA, Roman Africa, 432 AD

Bishop who lived beside Saint Augustine for forty years writes his life

Saint Possidius, bishop of Calama, has finished a life of Saint Augustine of Hippo, who died two years ago during a Vandal siege. He kept to what he saw and heard in the nearly forty years he spent beside him, and left out the early years St. Augustine had already written about himself. At the end he added a catalogue of St. Augustine's books, homilies and letters, with directions on where the best copies could be found.

4 min read

A panel painting of the unfinished cathedral of Cologne seen from the south: at the right the completed stone choir with its steep roof, flying buttresses and tall windows; at the left the south tower standing as a squared stump ringed with timber scaffolding, a wooden lifting crane on its flat top; between them a low boarded wall under a red tiled roof closing off the western end, with a yard of stacked stone blocks, a lime pit and sawn timber below, and beyond, the tiled roofs of the city and the grey Rhine with two barges at the bank. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of an early-fifteenth-century Cologne school panel painting, tempera on oak — a view of the city and its unfinished cathedral only, with no likeness of any person and no reference image used.

column · COLOGNE, 1413 AD

Cologne bishops answer broken images with a feast of Our Lady's sorrow

The bishops of Cologne and the dioceses under it met in synod this year and put a new day into their calendars: a feast of the Compassion of the Blessed Virgin Mary, kept on the Friday after the third Sunday after Easter. They ordered it to make amends for the crimes of the Hussites, who break images of Christ and the saints in Bohemia. What such a meeting enacts binds the dioceses of its own province and no others.

3 min read

Today in the Church

Thursday of the twenty-third week in Ordinary Time

Saint of the day

Saint Nicholas of Tolentino

The Roman Martyrology enters Saint Nicholas of Tolentino for this day with a single word: priest.

On this day in the Church

2017 Pope Francis prayed the Angelus before the Church of Saint Peter Claver at Cartagena de Indias, where the saint's relics are kept, and described how he had waited on the quay for the ships coming from Africa.Our report Saint Peter Claver Source
2017 Pope Francis celebrated the closing Mass of his journey to Colombia at the Port of Contecar, the working container terminal on the bay of Cartagena de Indias, and preached there on St. Peter Claver.Our report Source

Quote of the day

“See, I asked you, and you would not listen to me; I asked my Lord, and He heard me. Now then, if you can, go out and leave me behind, and return to the monastery.”

— St. Scholastica, to her brother St. Benedict, at their last meeting, Acta Sanctorum, Februarii tomus II, 10 February: De S. Scholastica Virgine, Section I ¶86 (q-0005)