September Saints Trivia Quiz

Answer: A doe

The story goes that St. Giles was once sustained by the milk of a doe, and the grateful hermit later saved her from a royal hunt. She had been shot, but when the king searched for her, he found St. Giles instead -- with the arrow wound miraculously transferred to his own person.

The king, impressed, founded an abbey and placed the hermit at its head. Beloved for his compassion when hearing confessions, St. Giles was widely honored both before and after his death in about the year 710. As a patron of lepers, disabled people, nursing mothers, and beggars, he became the namesake for hundreds of churches and hospitals.

Answer: Pope St. Gregory I

St. Gregory the Great (circa 540-604) was a child of privilege in the fading Roman Empire and began his adult life as a prefect of Rome, but he soon turned to a monastic life, selling his considerable assets to found monasteries and feed the poor. In 590, though he protested mightily, he became pope, and the Church was never the same again.

He insisted that the Church's wealth belonged not to clerics but to the poor, made several reforms to the Mass (including the regular recitation of the Lord's Prayer), and encouraged the use of plain melodic chant (now called Gregorian chant in his honor). During his reign, however, the Church became ever more entangled in the worldly affairs of Rome: an energetic administrator, St. Gregory found it impossible to stand idly by while the city declined. Soon, as pope, he was negotiating Rome's peace treaties and even paying its troops.

He set a standard that most later popes struggled to uphold; his assumption of so many temporal powers turned out to be a booby prize for the papacy.

Answer: Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award

Born Agnesë Gonxhe Bojaxhiu to an Albanian family in what is now Macedonia, Blessed Teresa (1910-1997) knew from an early age that she wanted to be a missionary; in fact, she chose her name in honor of the patron saint of missionaries, St. Thérèse de Lisieux. She was already living as a nun in India when she received "the call within the call" to work with the poor. "To fail," she later said, "would have been to break the faith." In 1950, she founded the Missionaries of Charity, whose efforts were diverse: they built schools and orphanages, hospices and homes for lepers. The rest of her long life was spent in this service.

Blessed Teresa was tremendously popular in India and in the world at large. Among many other national and international honors, she was awarded the Albert Schweitzer International Prize in 1975, the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979, and the Bharat Ratna -- India's highest civilian honor -- in 1980. She was a darling of Hollywood, but never received the Jean Hersholt Award (an Oscar for humanitarianism), which is generally reserved for people in the movie industry.

Answer: Slaves

In St. Peter Claver's time (1580-1654), Cartagena was a major port of call for slave ships. The arduous trip across the Atlantic, with unfortunate Africans packed belowdecks in wholly inhumane conditions, would have been bad enough, but slave labor conditions in Colombia were torturous too. Too many colonists and clergymen regarded the African slaves as less than human, but St. Peter Claver knew they were children of God, and that was how he treated them.

He preached the love of Christ, and better yet, he lived it -- bringing them food, bringing them medicine, interceding for them with their so-called "masters." He was a model of Christian behavior in a time and place where the values taught by Christ seemed almost wholly forgotten, and he is beloved for it.

Answer: Golden mouth

St. John Chrysostom (347-407) picked up that appellation because of his singular eloquence. The patron saint of preachers, he gained fame for sermons both scholarly (such as his discourses on the Gospels of John and Matthew) and worldly (such as his efforts to preserve civic order, despite turbulent relationships between emperors and nobles).

He backed his sermons with a profound devotion to charity and social justice: as patriarch of Constantinople, he gave extensive alms out of his household budget while denouncing the excesses of clergy and courtiers alike. Sadly, his reforms made him many enemies, and he died during a long, hard journey to a place of exile.

Answer: Blessed Hildegard von Bingen

Blessed Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was a Benedictine nun and abbess whose reach extended far beyond the walls of her convent. Her great work describing her visions, "Scivias," takes its title from a Latin phrase meaning "know the ways of the Lord," and this she was confident she could do.

In her study, she wrote on everything from everything from the Gospels to natural history; in her letters, she never hesitated to scold powerful people when they fell short of her ideals. In one famous episode, she faced off against an archbishop over a question of charity toward the dead: a local had died while excommunicated from the Church, and she had nevertheless buried the body in the hallowed ground of her convent cemetery.

When her archbishop objected, she told him he could exhume the body himself -- and by the time he arrived, she had made sure that the new grave looked like any other.

Answer: An account of the life and teachings of Jesus

The work in question is the Gospel according to Matthew, the first of four accounts of Jesus's life in the canonical New Testament. The word "Gospel" signifies the "good news" inside, and, for their role in sharing that good news, St. Matthew and the three other Gospel writers are often known as the Evangelists.

Not much is known about St. Matthew's life. According to the Gospel that carries his name, he was "sitting at the tax booth" when Jesus, passing by, said, "Follow Me." And St. Matthew followed, though many used his devotion to criticize Jesus (Matthew 9:9-13). Then, as now, tax collectors were not popular folk.

Answer: Charity to the poor and sick

The patron saint of all charitable organizations, St. Vincent de Paul (1581-1660) saw great need wherever he went. His plan was to form groups of people who could take it in turns to help the needy of their areas, and the project quickly expanded: every village and parish priest could see the benefits of helping a Charité get off the ground. St. Vincent told his followers to direct their devotion to God into care for His children: "When you leave your prayer to care for a sick person," he said, "you leave God for God. To care for a sick person IS to pray."

Answer: A Christmas carol

"Good King Wenceslaus went out on the feast of Stephen, when the snow lay all about, deep and crisp and even." J. M. Neale's Victorian carol goes on to describe how the sainted ruler encountered a poor man on that bitterly cold night, and showered him with royal gifts -- firewood and a feast. Even his footsteps emanated warmth. This lovely tale is a variation on old legends, that the Duke of Bohemia would go barefoot in the night to give alms.

What we know for sure about St. Wenceslaus -- who was really a duke, not a king -- shows that he hardly lived in a pretty tale. He was brought up in the Catholic faith by his grandmother, St. Ludmilla, but she was murdered on his mother's orders when he was still a boy. His own reign was cut brutally short, too: his younger brother murdered him on the way to chapel in the year 929, when he was only 22 years old.

Answer: The Vulgate Bible

The Vulgate Bible is so named because it was written in what was then the language of most Christian people; "Vulgate" comes from the same root word as "vulgar," meaning popular or belonging to the people. For 1500 years it was the official Bible of the Catholic Church.

St. Jerome (345-420) was not always at home among people, though. For years, he lived as a hermit in the deserts of Syria; one memorable legend had him befriend a lion there, after removing a thorn from its paw. Later he lived in Rome, and then near Bethlehem, where with his friend St. Paula he had founded a convent and a monastery. Through it all he studied and thought and wrote: the Bible translation, commentaries on the Scriptures, translations of what other theologians were thinking and writing. Brilliant and hard-working, but also acerbic and judgmental, he is honored today as a Doctor of the Church and as the patron saint of librarians and scholars.