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September 22 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

event · JERUSALEM, September 22, 1523 AD

Ordered out of Jerusalem, St. Ignatius climbs the Mount of Olives twice more

Threatened with excommunication if he stays, the thirty-two-year-old pilgrim obeys, then pays the guards with a knife and his scissors to see the rock of the Ascension again.

A painting of a gaunt, dark-bearded pilgrim in a coarse rope-belted robe, with a staff, one sandal and one bare foot, being led down a stony hillside path by a man in a turban and long robe who holds his arm, with the walled city of Jerusalem and a grey dome on the ridge beyond. — St. Ignatius of Loyola is led down the Mount of Olives by a Christian servant of the Franciscan monastery, Jerusalem, 1523 AD.
About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of mid-sixteenth-century Spanish oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait of Ignatius of Loyola (Jacopino del Conte, 1556 AD, Curia Generalizia of the Society of Jesus, Rome) View source artwork.

Saint Ignatius of Loyola came to Jerusalem meaning to stay for life, but the superior of the Franciscan friars ordered him to leave with the other pilgrims, citing his authority from the Pope to excommunicate anyone who stayed. St. Ignatius obeyed. Before he went, he slipped out alone twice to the Mount of Olives, and a servant of the friars led him back down by the arm.

4 min read

Black-and-white photograph of a young nun in a dark habit with a white coif and collar and a long black veil, her face turned slightly to one side.

event · NEVERS, France, September 22, 1878 AD

St. Bernadette, nearly bedridden, makes her final vows at Nevers

Saint Bernadette Soubirous made her final vows at Saint-Gildard, the mother house of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, after twelve years in the convent and most of a year almost confined to bed. Her first vows had been said for her months after she arrived, when she was thought to be dying. Her last illness took hold that December.

4 min read

More in this edition

A painting in the style of an early Italian panel. On a country road beside a stone spring, a young tonsured friar in a white habit and dark cloak stands still and holds his habit closed while a man in mail and a red surcoat pulls at it. Two friars draw back on the left, mounted soldiers with lances wait on the right, and a walled hill town stands behind. — About this picture
AI-generated image in the manner of a Trecento tempera panel, based on The Temptation of St Thomas Aquinas (Bernardo Daddi, 1338 AD, Gemäldegalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) View source artwork.

profile · ACQUAPENDENTE, 1243 AD

His soldier brothers seize St. Thomas Aquinas and lock him in a tower

Saint Thomas Aquinas, a son of Count Landulf of Aquino, took the habit of a new order of begging friars at Naples against his family's wishes. On his mother's orders his soldier brothers seized him on the road north of Rome and locked him in a castle tower. St. Thomas refused every offer to leave the order, escaped from a window in a basket and made his vows in January 1245 AD.

4 min read

An old priest in a black soutane, white collar and black skullcap sits at a plain wooden table in a bare grey room and looks down at a sheet of handwritten parchment with a red wax seal; an inkstand and a quill lie to one side. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of seventeenth-century French oil portraiture, from the paper's reference portrait based on Portrait de saint Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) (anonymous, after a model by Simon François de Tours, circa 1660, Musée Carnavalet - Histoire de Paris) View source artwork.

column · ROME, September 22, 1655 AD

Pope approves St. Vincent de Paul's plan: vows, but no religious order

Pope Alexander VII has approved vows for the Congregation of the Mission, the priests Saint Vincent de Paul founded to preach to the poor of the French countryside. Each man vows poverty, chastity and obedience, yet his priests stay secular priests and do not become a religious order. Older cardinals had refused the plan for years; a commission of cardinals examined it before the Pope approved it.

3 min read

A mosaic roundel on a gold ground of a haloed bishop in white vestments with dark crosses, holding a gospel book, with his name in Greek letters beside him.

place · CONSTANTINOPLE, September 403 AD

St. John Chrysostom protests the noise at the empress's new silver statue

This month a silver statue of the Empress Eudoxia went up on a porphyry column in the square outside the cathedral of St. Sophia in Constantinople, and the noise of the games held there reached the services inside. Saint John Chrysostom, the city's archbishop, spoke against the celebrations in church. The empress took his words as an insult and set about having him tried by a council of bishops for the second time this year.

3 min read

Today in the Church

Tuesday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time

Saint of the day

Saint Maurice and companions

Saint Maurice and his companions were soldiers of the Theban Legion of the Roman army, whom the Church honours as martyrs.

On this day in the Church

1220 Pope Honorius III, at Viterbo, imposed a year's novitiate on everyone entering the Friars Minor of St. Francis of Assisi, after which no friar could leave the order.Our report Source
1878 St. Bernadette Soubirous made her final vows at Saint-Gildard, the mother house of the Sisters of Charity of Nevers, twelve years after she entered the convent.Our report Source
1887 St. Frances Xavier Cabrini set out for Rome to ask the Holy See to approve her Institute, found a house in the city and let her sisters go on mission.Source

Quote of the day

“Alas! the country is large, and there are thousands perishing. All the secular and religious bodies are not enough to meet this misfortune.”

— St. Vincent de Paul, to those who said no more missioners were needed, Mgr Émile Bougaud, History of St. Vincent de Paul, vol. 1, trans. Joseph Brady C.M. (1899)