Saint Peter Verona, Martyr A.D. 1252
by VP
Posted on Wednesday April 29, 2026 at 12:00AM in Saints
"In his youth he was singularly protected and preserved from heresy and licentiousness of morals. To fly more effectually from the danger of sin, he addressed himself to St. Dominic, and received from him the habit of his order. He practiced his rule with the most scrupulous exactness and fidelity, and even went beyond it. He was the admiration of his brethren for his profound humility, incessant prayer, exact silence, and general mortification of his senses and inclinations. He was a professed enemy of idleness, which he knew to be the bane of all virtues. After he was promoted to the holy order of priesthood, he entirely devoted himself to preaching. He converted an incredible number of heretics and sinners. He suffered much from false accusations; but after some months his innocence was cleared, and his humility drew on his labors an increase of graces and benedictions. He had ever been the terror of the Manichean heretics; who at length hired two assassins to murder him. They lay in ambush for him, and martyred him on the road to Milan, in the year 1252, he being forty-six years old.
Join with the charity of this holy man this day. Fail not to offer up your daily prayers for all that are engaged in sin or error. Their ill state demands your compassion; and if you had a true sense of it, you would never be wanting in this charity. To live in sin, in the displeasure of God, and in the way to eternal misery, and that this is the case of such numbers of your fellow-members and brethren, is a thought which, in as many as have one spark of Christian charity and faith, must be followed by prayers and tears. My soul fainted away, says David, because of sinners that forsake Thy law. Let your charitable compassion have the same effect on you, and oblige you to bewail their misery. Such daily fainting of your soul may be a means of giving them life, and the best security of your own." The Catholic Year by Fr. John Gother
Prayer to St. Peter Verona, by Dom Gueranger:
"Obtain for us, O holy Martyr, a keen appreciation of the precious gift of Faith — that element which keeps us in the way of salvation. May we zealously do everything that lies in our power to preserve it, both in ourselves and in them that are under our care.
The love of this holy Faith has grown cold in so many hearts, and frequent intercourse with heretics or free-thinkers has made them think and speak of matters of Faith in a very loose way. Pray for them, O Peter, that they may recover that fearless love of the Truths of Religion which should be one of the chief traits of the Christian character. If they be living in a country where the modern system is introduced of treating all religions alike, that is, of giving equal rights to error and to truth, let them be all the more courageous in professing the truth and detesting the errors opposed to the truth.
Pray for us, O holy Martyr, that there may be kindled within us an ardent love of that Faith without which, it is impossible to please God (Hebrews xi. 6). Pray that we may become all earnestness in this duty which is of vital importance to salvation, that thus our Faith may daily gain strength within us, till at length we will merit to see in Heaven what we have believed unhesitatingly on Earth." Dom GuerangerNOVENA PRAYER FOR THE RETURN OF LAPSED CATHOLICS:
O
Good Shepherd, You never cease to seek out the lost, to call home the
stray, to comfort the frightened, and to bind up the wounded. I
ask You to bring (mention names)….. back to the practice of the Faith,
and to remove all obstacles that prevent them from receiving Your
abundant mercy, which flows sacramentally through the heart of Your Holy
Church.
Through the intercession of Mary, the Mother
of God, their Guardian Angel(s), their Patron Saint(s) and the
ever-prayerful Saint Monica, may You pardon their sins and unshackle
them from whatever hinders their freedom to come Home. For You, O Good
Shepherd, loved us to the end and offered Yourself to the Father For the
salvation of all. Amen
It is we, who are priests, who have been the cause of this desolation in the Church.
by VP
Posted on Wednesday April 29, 2026 at 12:00AM in Sermons
Rue du Bac, Paris.©VP
Saint Vincent de Paul to the Congregation of the Mission, serving the clergy by means of spiritual exercises for those about to be ordained, and by the direction of seminaries:
" To be employed in training good priests and to contribute thereto, as a second efficient instrumental cause, is to perform the work of Jesus Christ, Who, during His mortal life, seems to have assumed the task of making twelve good priests, who were the apostles; have deigned to live with them for years in order to instruct and form them in the Divine Ministry.
What is there in the world so grand as the ecclesiastical state? Principalities and kingdoms bear no comparison to it. Kings cannot, like the priests, change bread into the body of our Lord, forgive sins, or do the other wonders whereby priests surpass all temporal greatness."
It such be the greatness of the priest, judge of his action whether beneficent or fatal according as he is faithful or otherwise to his vocation. "As is the pastor, so will be the people. To the officers of the army is attributed the good or evil success of war. In like manner we can say that if the ministers of the Church are good, if they perform their duty, all will be well; but if, on the contrary, they are unfaithful, they are the cause of all disorders... Yes, we are the cause of the desolation that at present ravages the Church, of the deplorable diminution it has suffered in so many places....(...)
Yes, O Lord, we, it is, who have provoked Thy wrath; our sins have drawn down these calamities. Yes, it is the clerics and those who aspire to the ecclesiastical state, it is the sub-deacons, the deacons, the priests, it is we, who are priests, who have been the cause of this desolation in the Church."
O, my God, what a power! Oh, what a dignity! Is there anything greater or more admirable? Oh, gentlemen, how great a thing is a good priest! What can a good ecclesiastic not do? What conversions can he not procure? Upon the priests depends the happiness of Christendom. This consideration, then, obliges us to serve the ecclesiastical state which is so holy and so elevated, and still more the need the Church has of good priests to remedy the immense ignorance and the innumerable vices with which the earth is covered, and for which pious souls ought to shed tears of blood.
There is question whether all the disorders we witness be not attributable to the priests. This may scandalize some, but the subject requires that by the magnitude of the evil the importance of the remedy be shown. For sometime back, this question has been the subject of several conferences, and it has been thoroughly treated, in order to discover the sources of so many evils; and the conclusion arrived at was that the Church had not greater enemies than bad priests. Heresies sprang form them. We have the instance of the last heresies in those two great heresiarchs, Luther and Calvin. They were priests. It is by priests that heresy has prevailed, vice has reigned, and ignorance established its throne among the poor people; and this, because of their own disorders and their neglect to oppose with all their strength, as was their bounden duty, these three torrents that inundated the earth. What sacrifice, then, gentlemen, will you not make to God, in order to labor for their reformation so that they may live conformably to the sanctity of their state, and that the Church may rise from out her shame and desolation?"
Source: Virtues and spiritual doctrine of St. Vincent de Paul, by a priest of the Congregation of the Mission 1877; (Internet Archive)
