Footnotes: 1. Meaning the Boswethe, which runs through Sirmisch, and falls into the sea five leagues lower.
ST. SIMON, AN INFANT, MARTYR AT TRENT.
IN the year 1472, when the Jews of Trent (famous for the last general council held there) met in their synagogue on Tuesday in Holy Week, to deliberate on the preparations for the approaching festival of the Passover, which fell that year on the Thursday following, they came to a resolution of sacrificing to their inveterate hatred of the Christian name, some Christian infant on the Friday following, or Good Friday. A Jewish physician undertook to procure such an infant for the horrid purpose. And while the Christians were at the office of Tenebræ on Wednesday evening, he found a child called Simon, about two years old, whom, by caresses, and by showing him a piece of money, he decoyed from the door of a house, the master and mistress whereof were gone to church, and carried him off. On Thursday evening the principal Jews shut themselves up in a chamber adjoining to their synagogue, and at midnight began their cruel butchery of this innocent victim. Having stopped his mouth with an apron, to prevent his crying out, they made several incisions in his body, gathering his blood in a basin. Some, all this while, held his arms stretched out in the form of a cross: others held his legs. The child being half dead, they raised him on his feet, and while two of them held him by the arms, the rest pierced his body on all sides with their awls and bodkins. When they saw the child had expired, they sung round it: "In the same manner did we treat Jesus, the God of the Christians: thus may our enemies be confounded forever." The magistrates and parents making strict search after the lost child, the Jews hid it first in a barn of hay, then in a cellar, and at last threw it into the river. But God confounded all their endeavors to prevent the discovery of the fact, which being fully proved upon them, with its several circumstances, they were put to death: the principal actors in the tragedy being broke upon the wheel and burnt. The synagogue was destroyed, and a chapel was erected on the spot where the child was martyred. God honored this innocent victim with many miracles. The relics lie in a stately tomb in St. Peter's church at Trent: and his name occurs in the Roman Martyrology. See the authentic account of Tiberinus, the physician who inspected the child's body; and the juridical acts in Surius and the Bollandists, with Henschenius's notes on this day: also Martenne, Ampl. Collectio Vet. t. 2, p. 1516, and Bened. XIV. de Canoniz. l. 1, c. 14, p. 105.
ST. WILLIAM OF NORWICH, M.
THIS martyr was another victim of the implacable rage of the Jews against our holy religion. He suffered in the twelfth year of his age. Having been not long bound an apprentice to a tanner in Norwich, a little before Easter, in 1137, the Jews of that city having enticed him into their houses, seized and gagged him: then they bound, mocked, and crucified him, in derision of Christ: they also pierced his left side. On Easter-day they put the body into a sack, and carried it into Thorp-wood, now a heath, near the gates of the city, there to bury it; but being discovered, left it hinging on a tree. The body was honored with miracles, and, in 1144, {654} removed into the churchyard of the cathedral of the Holy Trinity, by the monks of that abbey; and in 1150, into the choir. On the place in Thorpwood, where the body of the martyred child was found, a chapel was built, called St. William in the wood. Mr. Weever writes, that "the Jews in the principal cities of the kingdom, did use sometimes to steal away, circumcise, crown with thorns, whip, torture, and crucify some neighbor's male-child, in mockery and scorn of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. St. Richard of Pontoise, in France, was martyred by them in that manner. As also St. Hugh, (according to Matthew Paris and John Capgrave,) a child crucified at Lincoln, in 1255." Nevertheless, it is a notorious slander of some authors, who, from these singular and extraordinary instances, infer this to have been at any time the custom or maxim of that people. The English calendars commemorated St. William on the 24th of March. See the history of his martyrdom and miracles by Thomas of Monmouth, a contemporary monk; also the Saxon Chronicle of the same age, and Bloomfield's History of Norfolk.[1]
Footnotes:
1. Pope Benedict XIV., l. 1, de Canon. c. 14, p. 103, shows that
children who die after baptism before the use of reason, though
saints, ought not to be canonized, because they never practised any
heroic degree of virtue; and because this was never authorized by
tradition in the church. Martyrs only, or infants, whether baptized
or not, which were slain out of hatred to the name of Christ, are to
be accepted, as is clear from the example of the Holy Innocents, who
are styled martyrs by St. Irenæus, Origen, and other fathers; and
the most ancient missals and homilies of fathers on their festival,
prove them to have been honored as such from the primitive ages.
Hence infants murdered by Jews, out of hatred to Christ, have been
ranked among the martyrs, as St. Simon of Trent, by the authority of
the bishop of that city, afterwards confirmed by the decrees of the
popes Sixtus V. and Gregory XIII.; also St. William of Norwich in
England, (though this child having attained to the use of reason, is
rather to be called an adult martyr.) And St. Richard of Pontoise,
also about twelve years old, murdered in 1182 by certain Jews in the
reign of Philip Augustus, who for this and other crimes banished the
Jews out of France, in April, that same year. The body of St.
Richard was translated to Paris, and enshrined in the parish church
of the Holy Innocents, where his feast is kept on the 30th of March,
but at Pontoise on the 25th. The celebrated F. Gaguin has written
the history of his martyrdom, with an account of several miracles
wrought at his shrine. His head is still shown in that church; the
rest of his relics are said to have been carried off by the English,
when they were masters of Paris.
MARCH XXV.
THE ANNUNCIATION OF THE BLESSED VIRGIN MARY.
THIS great festival takes its name from the happy tidings brought by the angel Gabriel to the Blessed Virgin Mary, concerning the incarnation of the Son of God. It commemorates the most important embassy that was ever known: an embassy sent by the King of kings, performed by one of the chief princes of his heavenly court; directed, not to the kings or emperors of the earth, but to a poor, unknown, retired virgin, who, being endowed with the most angelic purity of soul and body, being withal perfectly humble and devoted to God, was greater in his eyes than all the sceptres in the world could make a universal monarch. Indeed God, by the choice which he is pleased to make of a poor virgin, for the accomplishment of the greatest of all mysteries and graces, clearly demonstrates that earthly diadems, dignities, and treasures are of no consideration with him; and that perfect humility and sanctity alone constitute true greatness. God, who is almighty, can do all things by himself, without making use of the concurrence of creatures Nevertheless he vouchsafes, in his exterior works, {655} most frequently to use their co-operation. If he reveals his will and speaks to men, it is by the intervention of his prophets, and these he then enlightens by the ministry of angels. Many of the ancient patriarchs were honored by him with the most sublime commissions. By Moses he delivered his people from the Egyptian slavery, by him he gave them his law, and he appointed him mediator in his alliance with them. When the Son of God became man, he could have taken upon him our nature without the co-operation of any creature; but was pleased to be born of a woman. In the choice of her whom he raised to this most sublime of all dignities to which any pure creature could be exalted, he pitched upon her who, by the riches of his grace and virtues, was of all others the most holy and the most perfect. The design of this embassy of the archangel is as extraordinary as the persons concerned in it. It is to give a Saviour to the world, a victim of propitiation to the sinner, a model to the just, a son to this Virgin, remaining still a virgin, and a new nature to the Son of God, the nature of man, capable of suffering pain and anguish in order to the satisfaction of God's justice for our transgressions. And the Son of God being to take a human body formed of her substance, the Holy Ghost, who, by a power all-divine, was to her in place of a spouse, was not content to render her body capable of giving life to a Man-God, but likewise enriched her soul with a fulness of grace, that there might be a sort of proportion between the cause and the effect, and she the better qualified to co-operate towards this mystery of sanctity.
The angel begins his address to her with Hail! full of grace.[1] This is not the first time that angels appeared to women. But we find not that they were ever treated with that respect which the angel Gabriel shows to Mary. Sarah and Agar were visited by these celestial spirits, but not with an honor like that wherewith the angel on this occasion addresses the Blessed Virgin, saying, Hail! full of grace. He considers her as the greatest object among creatures of God's favor, affection, and complacency. He admires in her those wonderful effects of the divine liberality, those magnificent gifts and graces, those exalted virtues, which have placed the very foundation of her spiritual edifice on the holy mountains,[2] in a degree of perfection surpassing that of all pure creatures. He admires that perfect gratitude with which she always received God's grace, and her perfect fidelity in corresponding with it, and advancing in sanctity by the help thereof, with a solicitude answerable to her love and gratitude for the preservation and increase of so inestimable a treasure. Full of grace. The first encomium which St. John gives us of the glory of the Word made flesh is, that he was full of grace and truth.[3] God forbid that we should say that Mary was full of grace in the same manner as her Son; for he is the very source and origin of it, from whose fulness all the saints, Mary not excepted, have received[4] whatever degree they possess of grace and sanctity. St. Luke assures us also, that St. Stephen was full of grace and the Holy Ghost,[5] but it was a fulness in regard to a less capacity, and in relation to a lower function. Moreover, to St. Stephen and other saints, who have received large portions of heavenly grace, we may say, in those other words of the angel, You have found favor with God; but those very favors, though very great in themselves, were not to be compared with that which from all eternity was reserved for Mary. God made the saints the object of his gratuitous election, and he qualified them with his graces to be the messengers of his Son, the preachers and witnesses of his gospel; but Mary, was his choice, and was furnished with his graces to bear the most illustrious, {656} the most exalted title of honor that heaven could bestow on a pure creature to conceive of her proper substance the divine Word made man. If then the grace of God so raises a person in worth and merit, that there is not any prince on earth who deserves to be compared with a soul that is dignified with the lowest degree of sanctifying grace; what shall we say or think of Mary, in whom the fulness of grace was only a preparation to her maternity? What shall we think of ourselves, (but in an opposite light,) who wilfully expose this greatest of all treasures on so many occasions to be lost, whereas we ought wilfully to forego and renounce all the advantages and pleasures of this world, rather than hazard the loss of the least degree of it, and be most fervent in our supplications to God for the gaining, preserving, and increasing so great a treasure: forasmuch as it is a pledge of God's love, a participation of his Spirit, and a title to the possession of his heavenly kingdom.