St. Paul of Thebes

Feast date: Jan 15

On Jan. 15, the Catholic Church remembers Saint Paul of Thebes, whose life of solitude and penance gave inspiration to the monastic movement during its early years.

Surviving in the Egyptian desert on a small amount of daily food, St. Paul the Hermit lived in close communion with God. Before the end of his life at age 113, he met with St. Anthony the Great, who led an early community of monks elsewhere in the Egyptian desert.

Born in approximately 230, the future hermit Paul received a solid religious and secular education, but lost his parents at age 15. During the year 250, the Roman Emperor Decius carried out a notorious persecution of the Church, executing clergy and forcing laypersons to prove their loyalty by worshiping idols. The state used torture, as well as the threat of death to coerce believers into making pagan sacrifices.

Paul went into hiding during the Decian persecution, but became aware of a family member's plan to betray him to the authorities. The young man retreated to a remote desert location, where he discovered a large abandoned cave that had once been used as a facility for making counterfeit coins. He found that he could survive on water from a spring. A raven brought him half a loaf of bread daily.

Forced into the wilderness by circumstance, Paul found he loved the life of prayer and simplicity that it made possible. Thus, he never returned to the outside world, even though he lived well into the era of the Church's legalization and acceptance by the Roman Empire. Later on, his way of life inspired Catholics who sought a deeper relationship with God through spiritual discipline and isolation from the outside world.

One of these faithful was Anthony of Egypt, born in the vicinity of Cairo around 251, who also lived to an old age after deciding during his youth to live in the desert out of devotion to God. Paul of Thebes is known to posterity because Anthony, around the year 342, was told in a dream about the older hermit's existence, and went to find him.

A similar knowledge about Anthony had been mysteriously given to the earlier hermit. Thus, when he appeared at Paul's cave, they greeted each other by name, though they had never met. Out of contact with the Roman Empire for almost a century, Paul asked about its condition, and whether paganism was still practiced. He told Anthony how, for the last 60 years, a bird had brought him a ration of bread each day – a mode of subsistence also granted to the Old Testament prophet Elijah.

After 113 years, most of them spent in solitary devotion, Paul understood that he was nearing the end of his earthly life. He asked Anthony to return to his own hermitage, and bring back a cloak that had been given to the younger monk by the bishop St. Athanasius. That heroically orthodox bishop had not yet been born when Paul first fled to the desert, and Anthony had never mentioned him or the cloak in question. Amazed, Anthony paid reverence to Paul and set out to fulfill his request.

During the return trip, Anthony was shown a vision of St. Paul of Thebes' soul, glorified and ascending toward Heaven. On returning to the first hermit's cave, he venerated the body of its inhabitant, wrapped him in Athanasius' cloak, and carried him outdoors. Saint Jerome, in his “Life of St. Paul the First Hermit,” attests that two lions arrived, demonstrated their reverence, and dug a grave for the saint.

Having given him Athanasius' cloak, St. Anthony took back to his hermitage the garment which St. Paul of Thebes had woven for himself from palm leaves. Anthony passed on the account of his journey and the saint's life to his own growing group of monastic disciples, and it was written down by St. Jerome around the year 375 – approximately 33 years after the death of the first hermit.

Venerated on the same day by Roman Catholics, Eastern Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians, St. Paul of Thebes is also the namesake of a Catholic monastic order – the Order of Saint Paul the First Hermit – founded in Hungary during the 13th century and still in operation.

At the beginning of his new series of Wednesday general audiences on the Second Vatican Council and its documents, Pope Leo XIV spoke this morning about Dei Verbum, the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation (1965).

“The laws prohibit males—including males who ‘identify’ as females—from participating on female-only teams,” the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops noted in its brief in support of the state laws.

“These cases ask whether the Equal Protection Clause or Title IX forbids the States to create female-only athletic competitions,” the brief continued. “Neither does, and any other answer could prove catastrophic to Catholic institutions.”

SCOTUSblog reported that “a majority of the justices appeared to agree with the states that the laws can remain in place, even if it was not clear how broadly their ruling might sweep.”

Under a 1995 agreement, the Canadian province permits faith-based hospitals to operate in accord with their religious identity. A mother whose 34-year-old daughter suffered from cancer testified that a Catholic hospital’s refusal to euthanize her daughter was akin to watching a child being beaten up on a playground.

After a year of care at the Catholic hospital, her daughter was transferred to a hospice, where “the same day a doctor there helped her die,” the Vancouver Sun reported.

One parish was defaced with feces during a Christmas Mass; the rectory of a second parish was broken into. At a third parish, an assailant interrupted Mass “by breaking an angel statue, snatching the missal and a cross from the altar, tearing down flowers, and damaging the sanctuary’s marble floor,” CNA reported.

“Dr. King’s sermon encouraged people to be leaders in the priorities that Christ gave us: to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, care for the sick, and visit those in prison,” Archbishop Paul Coakley of Oklahoma City wrote in his reflection for Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, released yesterday.

“I encourage you to take time to reflect on how the Holy Spirit may be inviting you to join with others in addressing challenges within our families, neighborhoods, or communities,” Archbishop Coakley added. “May we lead the way in building a society rooted in justice, peace, righteousness, and the dignity of every human person.”

Msgr. Nazir-Ali, the former Anglican bishop of Raiwind (Pakistan) and Rochester (England), was received into the Church and ordained a priest of the Ordinariate of Our Lady of Walsingham in 2021.

Lazzarini, the commissioner-general of the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA), told the Vatican newspaper that “today, in the Gaza Strip, all universities have been destroyed, 80% of our schools have been damaged or completely destroyed. Furthermore, we have more than 600,000 boys and girls of primary and secondary school age who are currently living among the rubble.”

Lazzarini added:

It’s not new that international law is trampled upon. What is new is the claim to systematically trample upon it so openly, without even trying to deny it. And that is exactly what happened in the context of Gaza ...

Today, international law is ailing, and we must stand by its bedside. But we must not abandon it, because the alternative, if we no longer had rules to refer to, would be barbarism.

Lazzarini described the Pope’s words of support for suffering Palestinians as “extremely important ... The Palestinian population has the impression that, in a sense, the international community has turned its back on them. And I think that this message of compassion and solidarity from the Holy Father radiates far beyond the Christian populations of the region.”

Archbishop Alberto Uy said that the festival “should remain a celebration that truly reflects the joy, purity, and light of the Santo Niño [Holy Child]. We can honor him not only with our dances, prayers, and celebrations, but also through the moral choices we make in organizing this sacred event.”

“The problem is not the numbers—which, of course, make one reflect—but the increasingly evident lack of awareness in feeling part of the Church, that is, of being living members of the Body of Christ, all with unique gifts and roles, and not merely users of the sacred, of the sacraments, perhaps out of mere habit,” Pope Leo continued.

The exchange was published in Piazza San Pietro, a magazine published under the Vatican basilica’s auspices. Pope Leo has continued his predecessor’s custom of answering one letter in each issue.