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Our Patron Saints

- Saint Anselm of Canterbury
  
  Saint Anselm of Canterbury was born in Aosta in northwestern Italy in the year 1033. Saint Anselm's parents died when he was a relatively young age. At age fifteen he tried to enter the monastic life but faced opposition from his father. he lost interest in religion for a period of time in his life until his twenties, when he entered the Abbey of Bec in Normandy, France. Three years after entering the monastic life, he was appointed prior of the monastery. And fifteen years later he was unanimously elected Abbot.
  Saint Anselm would become one of the Church's greatest thinkers and philosophers. He is known as the "father of scholasticism." He is also said to be the most prolific and gifted writer between Saint Augustine (d. 430) and Saint Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274). He is known for his writings including but not limited to Cur Deus Homo ("Why God became Man"), Monologium, rationalizing the proof for the existence of God, and his Proslogium, discussing the idea that God exists according to the human notion of a perfect being in whom nothing is lacking.
  
  Saint Anselm is most famous for his development of the Ontological Argument for the existence of God. This is what Saint Anselm teaches us.
  
  "That, than which nothing greater can be conceived, exists in the understanding alone, the very being, than which nothing can be conceived, is one, than which a greater can be convinced. But obviously this is impossible. Hence, there is no doubt that there exists a being, than which nothing greater can be conceived, and it exists both in the understanding and in reality."
  
  Got that? You don't? Isn't it clear as mud? The gifted Catholic apologist Jimmy Akin says it this way.
- Instead of being too good to be true, God turns out to be too good not to be true. - Jimmy Akin -
  What does this mean? Saint Anselm says God is the kind of being who must exist; therefore, he does exist. Other thinkers have argued the existence of God first by what we can see and observe in the world. When we observe the stars, sun, moon, laws of mortality and nature, and other great wonders of creating, science can take us so far. So, God answers the rest. But the ontological argument starts with the very idea of God and says this idea shows God must actually exist.
  Saint Anselm's contributions to the Church extended outside the monastery and study. In 1093 Saint Anselm was made Archbishop of Canterbury by popular acclaim except his own. There is a painting depicting Saint Anselm being dragged to the throne of Archbishop by the English bishops. He was preceded as Archbishop by the great Lanfranc. Lanfranc was another exemplary figure from this period in the history of the Church. He was a gifted lawyer who renounced his life to become a monk at the Abbey of Bec. He was a contemporary of Saint Anselm in the monastic life.
  Saint Anselm found himself in various ecclesial and political quandaries. He justly resisted King William II and Henry I and was exiled in France for the first time from 1097 to 1100 and again from 1105 to 1107. When Saint Anselm entered his first period of exile, he asked to be relieved of his office as Archbishop, but the Holy Father refused. During the first exile Pope Urban II called Saint Anselm to Rome to prepare writings clearly defining the doctrine of the Holy Spirit.
  After his second exile, Saint Anselm spent the remaining years of his life serving as Archbishop of Canterbury. There's much history we haven't offered here to be discovered about this period of exile. There was much back and forth between, the Pope, Saint Anselm, and the kings of England. The controversy was settled with the Concordat of London in 1107.
  Saint Anselm died on Holy Wednesday April 2, 1109. His remains were laid to rest at Canterbury Cathedral near Lanfranc in Saint Thomas' Chapel. Saint Anselm was canonized a saint by Pope Alexander III in 1163 and declared a Doctor of the Church by Pope Clement XI in 1720.
- Saint Benedict
  
  Saint Benedict's times (c.480-547) were as turbulent as our own, though for very different reasons. Benedict lived in sixth-century Italy when the great Roman Empire was disintegrating. He left his native Nursia to attend school in Rome, but became disgusted with the paganism he saw, and renounced the world to live in solitude in a cave at Subiaco, some thirty miles east of Rome.
  
  In time, some monks asked him to be their abbot, but after experiencing how strictly Benedict lived, the recalcitrant monks sought to poison him. By a miracle, they failed, and Benedict left them, eventually founding twelve monasteries of twelve monks each.
  
  Benedict intended his Rule to be "a little rule for beginners." It contains directions for all aspects of monastic life, from establishing the abbot as superior to the arrangement of psalms for prayers, from correction of faults to details of clothing and the amount of food and drink allotted to each. While some of these instructions have been modified by necessity in modern monasteries, the majority remain as the saint first wrote them.