I have been neglecting this page of late. No excuse, sir. Events of no particular moment impeded my keyboard time.

I missed St. Catherine of Alexandria, the patroness of philosophers, on Monday the 25th. We used to get her day off, many moons ago when I was a struggling scholar. Except those who were in the philosophy debate. It was far from a holiday for them.

Today is the 27th of November and the old feast of Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. My weekday parish is run by the Oblates of the Virgin Mary (the best congregation in the church? Possibly. Certainly in the running.) and our Mass today was a votive Mass of Our Lady in honour of her old feast day.

Also honoured on this day are the English martyrs, the Venerable Hugh Taylor and the Venerable Marmaduke Bowes. This is Bowden’s relation of their story:

Bowes was a Yorkshire gentleman who was a Catholic at heart but, for fear of losing his property, conformed from time to time by putting in an appearance at his parish church. For all that, he gave shelter to priests and engaged a Catholic tutor for his children. In 1585 this tutor was arrested, and by ill usage and bribery was induced to apostatize and turn informer; he denounced his master a harbourer of priests. Bowes and his wife were arrested. She seems to have been released; but her husband was found guilty on the sole evidence of the tutor, who, as a contemporary remarked, “could be bought for sixpence.” Bowes was the first layman to be executed under the statute that made helping priests a felony. He was hanged at York on 27 November 1585, openly confessing his real faith. There suffered on the day before him Hugh Taylor, a Durham priest who had absolved Bowes in prison. He was the first priest to suffer under the Act against “Jesuits, seminary priests and other such like disobedient persons”; he had been a seminarist at Rheims, ordained only the year before.

In the diocese of Clifton in England this was the feast of St. Cungar who led the life of a hermit in Somerset. He built a church in honour of the blessed Trinity, and founded a monastery near Yatton. He afterwards founded a monastery in Glamorganshire, known as the abbey of St. Docunus, where he died, c. 520.

In Aberdeen in Scotland is kept the day of St. Fergus. The Aberdeen Breviary states that St. Fergus (in Latin: Fergustus) a bishop, left Ireland to preach the Gospel to the Picts. He evangelized parts of Perthshire and Aberdeenshire. He was known as ‘Fergus the Pict’. He died c. 730, and was buried in the church of Glamis. His head was afterwards enshrined in the abbey church of Scone.

In Ireland the feast is that of St. Fergal or Virgil, an Irish missionary who became Archbishop of Salzburg. He spent his life in the evangelization of Germany, and was helped in his apostolate by the king Pepin, and afterwards by the emperor Charlemagne. He rebuilt the abbey of St. Peter in his cathedral city, and translated thither the relics of St. Rupert, the founder of that see. He baptized two successive dukes of Carinthia, and sent thither missionaries under the conduct of the bishop, St. Modestus, who planted the faith in that country. Full of labours and merits, he entered into his eternal rest on November 27, 784. His relics are enshrined in his cathedral.

The brief lives of Ss. Fergal, Fergus, and Cungar are from the old 4 volume St. Andrew’s Missal which uses "thither" a lot more than I realized.