Catholic Fire

Totus Tuus Totus tuus ego sum, et omnia meatua sunt, O Virgo, super omnia benedicta. Translates as: I am all yours, and all that is mine is yours, O Virgin, blessed above all. Louis de Montfort's life is inseparable from his efforts to promote genuine devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus and mother of the church. Totus tuus was Louis's personal motto; Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul the Great) chose it as his episcopal motto. Born to a poor family in 1673 in the Breton village of Montfort, as an adult, Louis identified himself by the place of his baptism instead of his family name, Grignion. After being educated by the Jesuits and the Sulpicians, he was ordained as a diocesan priest in 1700. He preached parish missions throughout western France, walking from city to city. His years of ministering to the poor prompted him to travel and live very simply, sometimes getting him into trouble with church authorities. In his preaching, which attracted thousands of people back to t...

Today is the feast of St. Martin de Porres, the first black American Saint. He was the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a young freed slave woman from Panama, who may have been black or of Indian blood. His father was repelled by the darkness of his son's skin at birth and abandoned him, leaving the child-raising to his mother. At age 12, Martin was apprenticed to a "surgeon," at that time a combination of barber, druggist, physician and surgeon. Once trained, he began to use his skills to serve the poor. At fifteen, he became a lay brother at the Dominican Friary in Lima, where he worked as a barber, a farm laborer, a clothier, and a care-giver for the sick. Each day Martin distributed food to the hungry, he was doctor to the sick, and he helped to establish an orphanage and a hospice for abandoned babies. Martin devoted himself to severe penances. In turn, God endowed him with many graces and an abundance of spiritual gifts: visions, ecstasies, bilocation (be...