September 24 across 2,026 years of Catholic history

event · LISIEUX, Normandy, September 24, 1890 AD

Saint Thérèse receives the black veil at seventeen, and cannot stop crying

The veil settles her as a Carmelite for life, but her father was too ill to bless her and the bishop who was to preside could not come.

A black-and-white photograph of a young novice in a long white cloak and white veil standing beside a stone crucifix pillar, holding a small spray of flowers, in a brick arcaded cloister garden. — St. Thérèse of Lisieux as a novice of sixteen, in the white veil, beside the cloister crucifix of the Carmel, Lisieux, January 1889 AD.

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux received the black veil of a professed Carmelite this morning at the Carmel of Lisieux, at seventeen. The rite opens the grille so that a father can bless his daughter through it, but St. Louis Martin was in an asylum at Caen and not in the church. She wrote that she could not restrain her tears, and that the tears were not understood.

4 min read

A thin white-haired old man in a plain tunic sits in a wooden armchair at the head of a long table, speaking to seven older men in tunics and cloaks who have stopped eating a sparse meal of lentils, herbs and bread to listen; an open codex, a reed pen and an inkwell lie at the far end, and beyond a window and an arched doorway are sunlit roofs, the sea and two columns of smoke. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a buon fresco on lime plaster, from the paper's reference portrait based on Funerali di sant'Agostino (Funeral of St Augustine, scene 17), from the Life of St Augustine (Benozzo Gozzoli, 1464-1465, apsidal chapel, Sant'Agostino, San Gimignano) View source artwork.

event · HIPPO REGIUS, Numidia, these weeks, 430 AD

In besieged Hippo, St. Augustine asks God for his own death

The Vandals shut Hippo in at the end of May and have cut the city off from the sea. Saint Augustine, seventy-five and a priest or bishop here for almost forty years, has taken the bishops of the province into his own house. At a meal there he told them he has asked God for three things: that the city be freed, that God make his servants brave to endure, or that God take him out of this world.

More in this edition

An oil painting of a dark carved Spanish table in a whitewashed room: a thick handwritten volume lies open on a red cloth, its left leaf covered in close brown ink and its right leaf blank but for one short line in a larger, hastier hand; quills, an inkwell, a sand caster, a stick of red sealing wax, a stack of folios and a leather-bound book lie about it, an empty leather chair stands behind, and through a shuttered window beyond are a lake, a plain, a bare hill and a small white chapel at its foot. No person appears in it. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of New Spanish colonial baroque oil painting, from the paper's reference portrait based on The Virgin of Guadalupe with the Four Apparitions (Nicolas Enriquez, 1773, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) View source artwork.

The quarrel over Tepeyac · Part 3 · MEXICO, New Spain, September 24, 1556 AD

Archbishop halts the sworn enquiry he ordered into the sermon against Tepeyac

The Archbishop of Mexico, Fray Alonso de Montúfar, has stopped the sworn enquiry he opened fifteen days ago into a sermon preached against the chapel at Tepeyac, where the Blessed Virgin Mary appeared to Saint Juan Diego. Nine men had been put on oath and questioned before he set the whole proceeding aside with six words in his own hand. He did not say which party he meant by them, and the viceroy has had to step into the quarrel.

A painted icon panel of an Egyptian village: a straight canal of green water running between pale desert gravel and black tilled fields planted with grain and herbs, date palms along the far bank, three barefoot villagers in undyed linen tunics working a water-lift, a yoke of oxen and a stack of cut reed, and a flat-roofed mud-brick house with its plank door closed. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of a Byzantine and Coptic narrative icon in egg tempera on a gesso panel. No person appears in it.

profile · COMA, Middle Egypt, about 270 AD

St. Anthony, about nineteen, gives three hundred acres to his village

Saint Anthony of Egypt was about nineteen when both his parents died at Coma, in Middle Egypt, leaving him the house, three hundred acres of good land and a little sister. Inside six months he had handed the fields to the men of the village, sold everything movable in the house and given the money to the poor. His sister was put in the care of women of the district who had vowed their virginity to God, and St. Anthony moved to a house just outside Coma.

3 min read

Five barefoot friars in patched grey-brown habits tied with knotted ropes stand and crouch around a small table in a bare white room, reading an opened sheet of parchment with a round lead seal hanging from it, an arched opening on the right showing a hill town and green country. — About this picture
AI-generated image, in the manner of buon fresco at Assisi, from the paper's reference portrait based on Legend of St. Francis, scene 13: Institution of the Crib at Greccio (Giotto di Bondone and workshop, 1296–1298 AD, Upper Church, Basilica of San Francesco, Assisi) View source artwork.

writings · VITERBO, Papal States, September 22, 1220 AD

Pope Honorius III sets a year's wait on joining St. Francis's friars

A letter of Pope Honorius III, sealed at Viterbo on September 22, orders the Friars Minor to admit no one to vows until he has spent a year on trial. It forbids any friar who has taken vows to leave, and any man in their habit to travel without permission. Until now a man joined by telling Saint Francis of Assisi he wanted to live the Gospel with him and giving away everything he owned.

4 min read

Today in the Church

Thursday of the 25th week in Ordinary Time

Saint of the day

Our Lady of Ransom

Our Lady of Ransom is the title under which the Roman Martyrology honours the Blessed Virgin Mary as patroness of the ransomers of captives, the Christians taken and held in slavery whose redemption was undertaken in her name.

On this day in the Church

1660 Father René Alméras reached Saint-Lazare in Paris so worn out that he was carried straight to the infirmary; St. Vincent de Paul had himself carried there the next morning for a long last interview with him.Source
1815 Father Louis William Dubourg was consecrated Bishop of New Orleans at Rome, and set about gathering the missionaries, among them Vincentians, who would carry St. Vincent de Paul's Congregation of the Mission into the United States.Source
1829 Bishop John England visited St. Joseph's at Emmitsburg and told the sisters his early impressions of St. Elizabeth Ann Seton, whose rule he had carried south to a community he had founded himself.Source

Quote of the day

“At last my desires were realised, and I cannot describe the deep sweet peace which filled my soul. This peace has remained with me during the eight and a half years of my life here, and has never left me even amid the greatest trials.”

— St. Thérèse of Lisieux, on entering the Carmel of Lisieux at fifteen, Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul, ch. VII (trans. Thomas Taylor)