Feast date: Dec 14

Dec. 14 is the liturgical memorial of Saint John of the Cross, a 16th century Carmelite priest best known for reforming his order together with Saint Teresa of Avila, and for writing the classic spiritual treatise “The Dark Night of the Soul.”

Honored as a Doctor of the Church since 1926, he is sometimes called the “Mystical Doctor,” as a tribute to the depth of his teaching on the soul's union with God.

The youngest child of parents in the silk-weaving trade, John de Yepes was born during 1542 in Fontiveros near the Spanish city of Avila. His father Gonzalo died at a relatively young age, and his mother Catalina struggled to provide for the family. John found academic success from his early years, but failed in his effort to learn a trade as an apprentice. Instead he spent several years working in a hospital for the poor, and continuing his studies at a Jesuit college in the town of Medina del Campo.

After discerning a calling to monastic life, John entered the Carmlite Order in 1563. He had been practicing severe physical asceticism even before joining the Carmelites, and got permission to live according to their original rule of life – which stressed solitude, silence, poverty, work, and contemplative prayer. John received ordination as a priest in 1567 after studying in Salamanca, but considered transferring to the more austere Carthusian order rather than remaining with the Carmelites.

Before he could take such a step, however, he met the Carmelite nun later canonized as Saint Teresa of Avila. Born in 1515, Teresa had joined the order in 1535, regarding consecrated religious life as the most secure road to salvation. Since that time she had made remarkable spiritual progress, and during the 1560s she began a movement to return the Carmelites to the strict observance of their original way of life. She convinced John not to leave the order, but to work for its reform.

Changing his religious name from “John of St. Matthias” to “John of the Cross,” the priest began this work in November of 1568, accompanied by two other men of the order with whom he shared a small and austere house. For a time, John was in charge of the new recruits to the “Discalced Carmelites” – the name adopted by the reformed group, since they wore sandals rather than ordinary shoes as sign of poverty. He also spent five years as the confessor at a monastery in Avila led by St. Teresa.

Their reforming movement grew quickly, but also met with severe opposition that jeopardized its future during the 1570s. Early in December of 1577, during a dispute over John's assignment within the order, opponents of the strict observance seized and imprisoned him in a tiny cell. His ordeal lasted nine months and included regular public floggings along with other harsh punishments. Yet it was during this very period that he composed the poetry that would serve as the basis for his spiritual writings.

John managed to escape from prison in August of 1578, after which he resumed the work of founding and directing Discalced Carmelite communities. Over the course of a decade he set out his spiritual teachings in works such as “The Ascent of Mount Carmel,” “The Spiritual Canticle” and “The Living Flame of Love” as well as “The Dark Night of the Soul.” But intrigue within the order eventually cost him his leadership position, and his last years were marked by illness along with further mistreatment.

St. John of the Cross died in the early hours of Dec. 14, 1591, nine years after St. Teresa of Avila's death in October 1582. Suspicion, mistreatment, and humiliation had characterized much of his time in religious life, but these trials are understood as having brought him closer to God by breaking his dependence on the things of this world. Accordingly, his writings stress the need to love God above all things – being held back by nothing, and likewise holding nothing back.

Only near the end of his life had St. John's monastic superior recognized his wisdom and holiness. Though his reputation had suffered unjustly for years, this situation reversed soon after his death. He was beatified in 1675, canonized in 1726, and named a Doctor of the Church in the 20th century by Pope Pius XI. In a letter marking the 400th anniversary of St. John's death, Pope John Paul II – who had written a doctoral thesis on the saint's writings – recommended the study of the Spanish mystic, whom he called a “master in the faith and witness to the living God.”

Cardinal Gerhard Ludwig Müller, who served as prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith from 2012 to 2017, said in a new interview that “since the 18th century, Islam has been regarded—by the philosophy of deism and of ‘natural religion’—as an ally in the struggle against Christianity.”

“Even today, it is instrumentalized by the so-called fighters against ‘Islamophobia,’ who hope that this religion will eventually secularize itself and ultimately tolerate—against its own truth—the atheistic woke anthropology,” Cardinal Müller added.

Stating that “there is no way around recognizing the Second Vatican Council as the 21st ecumenical council of the Catholic Church,” Cardinal Müller added:

The foolish talk of a “sede vacante” of the Chair of Peter, calls for a revision of the Council, and the claim that the Lefebvrists are the last bastion of true Catholicity must finally come to an end. Even if they are right to place their finger on the wounds inflicted on the Body of Christ by self-appointed reformers in the style of Modernism, there is never a justification for distancing oneself from the Catholic Church—even though the Church is a mixture of saints and sinners, as St Augustine emphasised against the strict and self-righteous Donatist sect.

Cardinal Stephen Chow, SJ, of Hong Kong preached that “I think AI is not from the devil. AI comes from God.”

The prelate made his remarks during the opening Mass of a December 10-12 gathering organized by the Office of Social Communications of the Federation of Asian Bishops’ Conferences. Cardinal Chow added, “I pray that this meeting will help us, liberate us, and inspire us to work with AI to achieve the blessings God intends for us.”

Addressing the bishops and other participants in the gathering, Paolo Ruffini, the prefect of the Dicastery for Communication, offered a more cautious approach. He “cautioned against deepfakes, unverifiable sources, algorithmic filtering, and the opaque logic by which digital platforms shape information flows,” Vatican News reported.

Citing the right to freedom of speech, a federal appeals court has sided with Florida Preborn and four sidewalk counselors in their lawsuit against a buffer-zone ordinance enacted by the city of Clearwater.

In its decision, the court noted that the “buffer zone applied to most pedestrians, forbidding entrance to a 38-foot stretch of public sidewalk (28 feet of which cross the clinic’s driveway) during business hours.”

The prefect of the Dicastery for Culture and Education said that “Chapel of Liberation,” a new exhibit in his dicastery’s contemporary art museum, is not about liberation theology.

In a December 10 speech introducing two exhibits by Brazilian artist Jonathas De Andrade, Cardinal José Tolentino de Mendonça said that the artist shows “strength of prophetic aspiration,” as well as “the opportunity and complexity of the Church-World dialogue, religion and secularization, mystical dimension, and political commitment.”

“Jonathan de Andrade’s aim in ‘The Chapel of Liberation’ is not to validate a particular aesthetic or create a monument to a specific theological movement—namely, liberation theology, because monumentalizing is freezing time in an image—but rather to make us reflect on the social responsibility of Christians today, which will have different expressions than those of yesterday,” the cardinal added.

During a papal audience that took place yesterday, the officers of the Polish Episcopal Conference invited Pope Leo XIV to visit Poland—a visit that the bishops described as “eagerly awaited and needed.”

The Pope, in turn, said that “he already has a lot of things on his calendar in 2026 and 2027, but that he will take [the invitation] into consideration,” according to the episcopal conference.

The Pope and the prelates also discussed Church-state relations, the sexual abuse crisis, and the current activities of the Polish episcopate.

Libreria Editrice Vaticana, the Vatican publishing house, has published Dio è la vera realtà [God Is the True Reality], a collection of 82 previously unpublished homilies by Pope Benedict XVI.

The Pontiff delivered the homilies both before and after his resignation, between 2005 and 2017; all were delivered during Ordinary Time.

Archbishop Georg Gänswein, Pope Benedict’s private secretary and current apostolic nuncio to three Baltic nations, spoke at yesterday’s presentation of the book.

Pope Leo XIV received Mäulen Äşimbaev, president of the Senate of Kazakhstan and head of the Secretariat of the Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions, in an audience yesterday.

Pope Leo XIV “commended Kazakhstan’s contribution to global peacebuilding,” The Astana Times reported. “According to him, Kazakhstan’s initiatives in interreligious dialogue reflect an important ‘commitment to peace and global well-being,’ and he reaffirmed the Holy See’s support for the congress and its mission.”

Äşimbaev also delivered an official invitation from the nation’s president to visit the central Asian nation.

Pope Leo XIV received Riccardo Di Segni, the chief rabbi of Rome, and Rav Alfonso Arbib, chief rabbi of Milan and president of the Assembly of Rabbis of Italy, in an audience yesterday.

Pope Leo and the rabbis discussed the urgent need to combat anti-Semitism, according to the Jewish Community of Rome. The community described the “reciprocal respect” during the meeting as “profound.”