San vicente ferrer biography of michael

I am not worthy to loosen the thongs With a bit of tech know-how, and a couple hours a week of free time, folks can share their opinions for anyone with a smartphone to hear A stay at home wife and mother from New Mexico, Melissa is determined to worship God through the dark times in her life as easily as she does during the good times. Her greatest pleasures in life are the Holy Eucharist, her husband, her children, and endless amounts of piping hot coffee.

Search Catholic-Link. Search for:. Keep Searching, Keep Learning. Our Newest Articles:. There is another marvelous fact which is beyond normal explanation. However far away people might be, everyone heard every syllable. He could make himself heard literally about three miles away, when it was of importance that he should be heard. He warned lazy Christians who sloppily made a circular sign of the Cross that they were using a sign of the Devil instead!

The Moorish king had heard of him; the multitude of his miracles was startling, and for a good Moslem, upsetting. He could not get Vincent out of his head. Finally he decided he must see the man who worked the miracles. He sent for him. The saint arrived lame from a great sore in the leg and rode on his moth-eaten old donkey through all the splendors of the Alhambra grounds under the fixed stare of the marble lions.

The King wanted to hear him preach. That in itself was a revolution. They murmured, they listened, and doubtless they understood though he spoke no Arabic. For, after three sermons, eight thousand Moors asked for baptism. Some of the nobles, fearing the total subversion of their religion, obliged the king to dismiss him. He then labored in the kingdom of Aragon and again in Catalonia, especially in the diocese of Gironne and Vich; in a borough of the latter, he renewed the miracle of the multiplication of loaves, related at length in his life.

At Barcelona, inhe foretold to Martin, King of Aragon, the death of his son, Martin, the King of Sicily, who was snatched away in the middle of his triumphs in the month of July. Vincent comforted the afflicted father and persuaded him to a second marriage to secure the public peace by an heir to his crown. He cured innumerable sick everywhere and, at Valencia, made a dumb woman speak but told her she should ever remain dumb and that this was for the good of her soul, charging her always to praise and thank God in spirit, to which instructions she promised obedience.

He converted the Jews in great numbers in the diocese of Valencia, in the kingdom of Leon, as Mariana relates.

San vicente ferrer biography of michael

It is difficult to arrive at a figure. The most cautious of his historians give twenty-five thousand converts among the Jews and eight thousand among the Moors. All the Jews and many of the Moors of Valladolid are converted. It met in and was the occasion of interminable arguments — sixty-seven sessions — between rabbis and religious.

Vincent, who took part in the Congress, collaborated in a Treatise on the Jews which served as a base for his further labors among them; in it all the proofs of the Dogma of the Incarnation were magisterially set forth. The Pope presided. The populace were massed on the river bank; Master Vincent had taken up his stand to preach on the roof of a house surrounded by trees on the far side of the Ebro.

One day he stopped suddenly in his sermon. The people were startled. Of sixteen rabbis, fourteen were converted. How he loved these new children of his; he loved to remind Christians who too readily forgot the fact that Jesus and Mary were of the Jewish race. He was invited to Pisa, Sienna, Florence and Lucca inwhence, after having reconciled the dissensions that prevailed in those parts, he was recalled by John II, King of Castille.

Inhe visited the sans vicente ferrer biography of michael of Castille, Leon, Murcia, Andalusia, Asturias and other countries; in all of these places the power of God was manifested in His enabling him to work miracles and effect the conversion of an incredible number of Jews and sinners. The Jews of Toledo, embracing the faith, changed their synagogue into a church under the name of Our Lady's.

From Valadolid, the saint went to Salamanca in the beginning of the year There he met a procession with a bier and the corpse of a man who had been murdered. In the presence of a great multitude, he commanded the deceased to arise and the dead man instantly revived. For a monument of this miracle a wooden cross was erected and is yet to be seen on the spot.

In the same city, the saint entered the Jewish synagogue with a cross in his hand. Filled with the Holy Ghost, he made so moving a sermon that the Jews, who were at first surprised, all desired baptism at the end of his discourse and changed their synagogue into a church to which they gave the title of the Holy Cross. As a good Dominican, Master Vincent loved to proclaim the all-powerfulness of the Rosary.

One day he was captured by brigands and, knowing that his hour was come, he humbly asked for a little moment to pray. Hardly had he begun when the Blessed Virgin came to him accompanied by St. Catherine carrying a tray of roses and St. Agnes with a needle and a ball of thread. The brigands, needless to say, opened their eyes wide.

At each Ave the prisoner recited, the Blessed Virgin took a rose from the plate, pierced it with the needle, slipped it on to the thread. Thus, she made a wreath which she placed on the prisoner's brow. As he happened to have his eyes closed, he did not see the wreath, but he smelt its fragrance. The Virgin and the two saints went off and the merchant offered them his neck, saying, " Now you can strangle me.

You must be a holy man; remember us in your prayers. When he spoke of the Mother of Men, Vincent was transfigured. He used to tell the case of a schoolboy who wanted at all costs to see her. An angel warned him that if he did so, he would lose an eye. He accepted and lost an eye. Then he asked to see her again, though it meant the san vicente ferrer biography of michael of the other eye, which also took place.

But when he was thus completely blind, the Blessed Virgin restored both eyes. The people had recourse to him in every difficulty: The smallest villages fought to have him. In one place they took his hat, which assured pregnant women of a safe and easy delivery; in others, he drove away a cloud of grasshoppers and a whole army of weevils with holy water.

Once he came to the point of utter exhaustion. He could go no further. And heaven came to his aid. In the very heart of a wild lonely forest an excellent hotel appeared suddenly from nowhere to shelter him; leaving it the next day, he happened to forget his hat. One of the penitents went back to the inn to get it, but there was no inn — the hat was hanging on the branch of a tree at the very spot where the inn had stood.

The following year he came to Murcia. According to the Bishop's report, which has come down to us, almost no one remained untouched by the grace of the Spirit that filled all the air. In that province there was an end for that time of gambling, debauchery, conspiracy, quarreling, and murder. How could anyone fail to follow the example of a Moor who promised to embrace the faith if the pyre he had lighted in the main square was extinguished at Vincent's prayer?

Vincent prayed; the flames went out. Consider the framework of his days. He rose usually at two in the morning for the night office, recited his psalms, prayed, meditated, went to confession — each morning — and scourged himself, thus purging his soul and chastising his body. Mass was at six o'clock, then three hours preaching, visits to the sick, mediations between parties in lawsuits and families at odds, final words of advice to souls he had just converted or brought back to grace: Then once more on the road.

Picture him on the road: In rain or sunshine, his feet in wooden stirrups attached to the saddle by cords which cut into his legs, the unending dust from the trampling of the crowd, the chanting of psalms and the never ending crunch of feet, and the incidents and the accidents and the care he must have for all his vast company. There was one meal a day — soup and a tiny piece of fish, washed down with wine liberally watered.

He never had an evening meal. Then he arrives at the next village to be won to our Lord, the next town to be set in order. The usual tumult and acclamations and idle questions and plain annoyances besieged him — clipping pieces out of his habit, kissing his hands — and everybody taking possession of him — a hundred people if there were a hundred, a thousand if there were a thousand, more if there were more, as many as there might be.

Then there was the usual platform where he must say in the evening what he had said in the morning, differently phrased but just as fresh and convincing, and the usual miracles which he must always be asking of God when his eloquence gained nothing or not enough — for unless it gained everything, there always remained something still to gain: God must attend to it — and that meant miracles.

The crowd was at last disposed of, but, before going to bed — five hours sleep, never more, and no siesta, not even in Spain — he still had to make his meditation, get his office said, instruct and direct his companions, prepare tomorrow's sermons, deal with his post, get off answers to bishops, princes, city magistrates, directors of confraternities, priors of convents, the Pope himself and any number of mere nuisances — on every conceivable subject, by no means always concerned with religion.

And, in addition, you should reckon the time he loved to devote to religious ceremonies — for he was a convinced liturgist and would have his ceremonies as correct and as magnificent as possible. This gives some idea of the routine of his days — week after week, month after month, for twenty years. And he held and did not break. He said one day to a group of priests, " The moment you wake, to God's work!

He refused all ecclesiastical dignities, even the cardinal's hat, and only craved to be appointed apostolical missionary. Now began those labors that made him the famous missionary of the fourteenth century. Numerous conversions followed his preaching, which God Himself assisted by the gift of miracles. Though the Church was then divided by the great schism, the saint was honorably received in the districts subject to the two claimants to the Papacy.

He was even invited to Mohammedan Granada, where he preached the gospel with much success. He lived to behold the end of the great schism and the election of Pope Martin V. Finally, crowned with labors, he died April 5, His feast day is April 5. Copyright Catholic Online. All materials contained on this site, whether written, audible or visual are the exclusive property of Catholic Online and are protected under U.

Any unauthorized use, without prior written consent of Catholic Online is strictly forbidden and prohibited. Federal Tax Identification Number: My son almost used your site for his All Saints day report on the saint he was named after. Fortunately we noticed the incorrect information before he turned in the report. Jennifer, great catch. So Sorry about the error.

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