January 29 - Jacques Bunel, Martyr, Priest, Opponent of the Nazis,

We know that Jacques Bunel was born Lucien Bunel but we know remarkably little else about his childhood. We know that he became a Roman Catholic priest and member of the Carmelite order and took the name Jacques de Jesus.Jacques served as a minister of the Faith he confessed and loved by becoming headmaster of a school in Avon, France. This school was known as Petit Collège Sainte-Thérèse de l' Enfant-Jésus. From this refuge he would engage in the activities that make him laudable but also cost him his life. As the Nazi scourge swept through Europe, Jacques found a way to resist the Nazi empire nonviolently and in a way that would save lives. Jacques began his revolutionary life saving by offering three spots at his school to three Jewish boys whom he helped assume false identities and names. These three boys were named Hans-Helmut Michel, Jacques-France Halpern, and Maurice Schlosser and would be part of the reason that the Nazis would eventually murder Jacques. Had Jacques known that protecting these three boys would cost him his life it seems that he would have done it anyway. Unlike many other clerics and Christians, Jacques was not blind to the atrocities being perpetrated and was willing to risk everything to be on the side of the righteous and loving. Looking at the faces of the children he protected, Jacques knew he was offering refuge to his savior.

Jacques' sacred work did not end with the three students--like any holy work Jacques' life saving gathered momentum and soon pushed him onward toward more of the same. He found a way to shelter a boy named Maurice Bas by providing him with a job at the school and a new identity.Maurice Schlosser's father was running out of places to hide and so Jacques found a home in the village that would serve as a nearby but disconnected refuge for the man. Finally, he dared another sacred moment when he brought Lucien Weil--a famous Jewish botanist--onto the faculty of his school. Having brought at least six people within his protective power, he knew that it was only a time until the Nazis cracked down upon him. That day came on January 15, 1944 when the Gestapo arrested Jacques and the first three boys he protected. Within the next month they had arrested the others that Jacques had worked to hard to protect. All were shipped away to work and death camps. When told he was being arrested for disobeying the law, Jacque responded: "I know only one law: that of the Gospel and Charity."

The boys and Lucien Weil died in Auschwitz. Jacques was transferred from camp to camp before ending up in Mauthausen in May of 1945. Wherever he went he was known as optimistic and hopeful for liberation. Further, he encouraged his fellow prisoners to share their food and encourage each other. Often, he would go without food so that others might eat. This was near the end of the war and liberation was steadily coming to the camps as the Allied forces beat back the Nazi empire. When Mauthausen was liberated Jacques did a curious thing. He was suffering from tuberculosis and weighed less than 80 pounds when the liberating forces came but he insisted that the others be liberated first. He waited until he knew that all others had gone before him before he consented to be liberated from the hell that the Nazis had engineered for him and other innocents. He died from his illness before he ever made it back to France. His body was shipped back to the school he loved and buried on the grounds of the refuge God had gifted him so that he might try to protect others. Those whom Jacques protected were still murdered by those whom Jacques resisted but he offered love and protection as a testament to the right place of the Church in opposition to great evil. Jacques died a martyr whose death confessed greater allegiance to the Kingdom than to himself.

January 28 - Thomas Aquinas, Doctor, Theologian, Monastic

Thomas' parents had especially high expectations for how his life should proceed. As members of the southern Italian nobility, their several sons all had very precise blueprints for how their lives and ambitions should flow. Thomas was one of the youngest of his brothers and they all shared an uncle who was an abbot in a Benedictine monastery. Without every considering questions of calling and how Thomas felt about it, his family simply assumed that young Thomas would become a Benedictine abbot and monk. They provided him with an exemplary education in a great institution but a war broke out and it became necessary to send Thomas to a school in Naples where he was introduced to the works of Aristotle, Averroes, and Maimonides. Further--and to the eventual dismay of his mother and father--he was introduced to a Dominican preacher by the name of John. As Thomas heard the stories of the Faith again from the lips of John, he felt a buzzing within him that seemed to call him inexorably toward service to God. This much had been expected but to serve in a Dominican monastery would have been considered unacceptable. Their plan had been made and there was no room for God's calling within it.

The Dominicans were pleased to have an able mind like Thomas and knew well that his family would resist his desire to become a Dominican monk. Consequently, they arranged for him to be taken to Rome and sent to Paris from Rome. The plan was mapped out and executed but Thomas' mother had a plan of her own. A few of Thomas' brothers were waiting for him in Rome and they seized him and dragged him back to the home of their mother and father so that he might be dissuaded from following after God's leading. It's easy to look back and wonder why Thomas insisted on the Dominicans over the Benedictines if both are monastic groups that devote themselves to God. It's easy for our minds to think that it would have been better for Thomas to give in and become a Benedictine because it would be "close enough." But, this falls into the same trap that Thomas' family fell into: a feeling that if we can our own will "close enough" to God's will, then that will be good enough without actually having to turn over our lives and wills to God. They imprisoned their own son and brother and did everything within their power to bend his will to theirs and away from God's.

At one point, his brothers decided that it would be better to ruin Thomas then see him become a Dominican. Their dehumanization of their brother had reached its completion and they now saw him as a commodity to be traded for family honor and influence. They paid a prostitute to seduce Thomas and led her into his room where Thomas could not escape. He refused to be seduced and ran the woman out of his room with a burning stick from the fireplace. All the while, he was a tutor and teacher to his family--specifically his sisters. Eventually, Thomas' mother arranged for him to escape and leave the home because she wanted to be rid of him but did not want to go through the indignity of disowning and abandoning her own son. Thomas escaped and eventually became a Dominican monk and theologian. He served the Church as a writer and thinker. His answers to theological questions--memorialized in his master work: Summa Theologica--informed and educated not only audiences of his day but also Christians of all subsequent generations. The one who had been imprisoned and persecuted for his call became a teacher and wise man whose words and works would carry God's message into the hearts of many discerning the first inklings of God's call upon their lives.

January 27 - Marcella, Martyr, Widow, Monastic

Marcella was born to wealthy parents of considerable influence in Roman society. Further, she married a man of affluence and influence, as well. She was primed for a life of pleasure, recreation, and relaxation. Yet she had only been married for seven to nine months before her husband died and she became a widow. Of course, she was a widow who lived very comfortably thanks to the wealth she had inherited but she was a widow nonetheless. This event became the catalyst that pushed her onward to consider what was truly valuable in life and what of the Roman culture and life was nothing more than illusion and delusion. She devoted herself to a brand of ascetic joy that involved renouncing herself and her own ambitions in favor of taking care of the poor and hungry. She soon found herself with plenty of work to do and many demands on her time and she couldn't have been happier.

At one point, a wealthy man became enamored with Marcella. By this time, Marcella had become a leader in the Roman Church and had become an inspiration to other women to live lives of daring faith. He decided he would woo her and make the widow his wife and he assumed it would be an easy thing since she had been widowed and widows were often of little influence and power in Roman society because of their sex. He went to her and he proposed marriage saying that she could inherit all of his fortune when he died if she would only marry him. He was a wealthy political leader and his fortune was considerable but Marcella responded: “If I wished to marry, I should look for a husband, not an inheritance.” He went away without a wife and with a new understanding of Marcella's devotion to the ministry to which she had been called.

She started a school for women to study scripture and pray. It was rather successful and soon she wasspiritual mother to many younger women who sought to follow after the same Christ who had captivated Marcella. Then the Goths came to Rome. The Goths looted and plundered the riches of Rome under the direction of Alaric and soon found their way to Marcella's school. Likely, they had heard that the old widow was a wealthy woman and that her school was highly respected. To the Goths, this meant she was an ideal target for their terror inducing savagery. They forced their way into the school and demanded all of the valuables that Marcella had. She insisted that she had nothing to offer them as she had spent her life giving herself and her things away to the poor. Her wealth, she declared, was in the stomachs of the poor people in the city. The Goths tortured her to get her to reveal her hidden stores of valuables but were not successful since she had nothing but her clothes and a few meager possessions to offer them. The soldiers seized one of her students--Principia--and informed Marcella that they would rape and kill the woman if Marcella did not give them what they wanted. Marcella dropped to her hands and knees and begged mercy from Alaric insisting that she had nothing to give and begging them to leave the woman alone. Seeing the once wealthy and powerful old woman on her knees in tears with blood streaming down her back begging for the welfare of another, their hearts were turned at last to mercy. They took Marcella and her students to a nearby sanctuary--even carrying the weakened Marcella--so that they might not be victimized any further. Marcella died from her wounds shortly thereafter with her head resting on the lap of Principia whom she had saved.

January 26 - John Bradford, Martyr, Roving Chaplain, Reformer

While John Bradford was confined to the royal prison--the Tower of London to be precise--he was far away from his books and academic world but that is where all of this had started. Born to a wealthy family,he was given the gift of a good and comprehensive education. From there, John went on to study more and pursue an intellectual career emphasizing his greatest strength: accounting and mathematics. He served as an officer in King Henry VIII's army and was in the position of accounting for payroll for the soldiers who fought Henry's wars. After this, he pursued a career in law as a legal professional but while studying he had the mixed fortune of befriending a man who supported the English reformation. As he studied and talked with his new friend he found himself slowly but steadily being won over to the Anglican church in particular and the teachings of the Church in general. The earnest eagerness of his friend convinced John to take his faith ever more seriously. He could stand it no longer and so hestopped studying law and started studying theology so he might become a minister of the faith he had been infected with.

When he had received his education he began his clerical career first as a teaching fellow and secondly as an ordained priest who was given a region to rove and preach in. With Anglican leaders in control of Britain, he was not under immediate threat but tensions were high with other Christians--Roman Catholic Christians in particular. He preached and taught and served the Faith as best he knew how until Mary Tudor took control of the throne and fortunes were reversed. Soon thereafter he was arrested on charges of attempting to incite mob activity. These trumped up charges took away his freedom and imprisoned him in the Tower of London. It was from his window in the tower that he looked down upon some anonymous criminal going off to die for his crimes and remarked, "There but for the grace of God goes John Bradford." John had not lost his connection with God's grace and his need for God's forgiveness even as he had gained honor and received suffering. He knew well that it was only the grace of God that separated him from a life of unrepentant corruption. One thing he would share with that criminal, though, was a state-sponsored death.

Some time after his famous remark, he was charged and tried before a court disposed toward execution. Predictably, he was found guilty and condemned to death at the hands of an Empire that would not accept his brand of resistance. He was tied to a stake with another man and wood was piled around his feet and body. As they brought the torch, he asked for forgiveness for any that he might have wronged and publicly offered forgiveness to those who had wronged him.Enveloped in forgiveness on all sides, he was set ablaze by murderous hands. He died a martyr of the reformation of the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. There with the grace of God went John Bradford.