Summary: Today I spoke with Stephanie Mann, author of Supremacy and Survival about Catholic life during the English Reformation and Andrew Jones, product manager for Catholic products at Logos Bible software about Verbum, the new Catholic version of their famous software package. This show is pre-recorded but you can still leave comments about this and upcoming shows on our comment line at 719-235-5045 You can also subscribe to our show on iTunes. Just search for the Behind the Counter under podcasts. Today is November 3rd, feast of St. Martin de Porres. Juan Martin de Porres was born in the city of Lima, in the Viceroyalty of Peru, on December 9, 1579, the illegitimate son of a Spanish nobleman and a black former slave. He had a sister, Juana who was born three years later. His family lived in poverty and his mother sent him to school for a couple of years before he was sent to work for a surgeon / barber (if he cut your throat shaving you, he could sew you up after) to learn medicine. When he was 15 he applied for entry to the Dominican Convent of the Rosary in Lima as a servant and eventually entered the Dominican order as a tertiary. His holiness and miracles convinced his superiors to drop racial limitations to entering the friars and he became a full Dominican. When he was 34 he was assigned to work in the infirmary where he would spend the next 25 years caring for the sick and working many miraculous cures. During an epidemic, Martin brought so many sick to the convent for care that the superior forbade him from bringing any more victims for fear of spreading illness to all of the brothers. His sister offered her own house to help care for the overflow of patients. During his life St. Martin founded a home for orphans and abandoned children as well as a hospital for animals. He dreamed of being a missionary his whole life but never left Lima. In spite of this, he seems to have had the gift of bilocation, being seen all over the world during his lifetime as far away as Africa and Japan. He was friends with St. Rose of Lima and St. John de Massias and upon his death on November 3, 1939, was already considered a saint by those in Peru. He was beatified by Pope Gregory XVI in 1837 but wasn't canonized until 1962 by John XXIII. You can typically recognize St. Martin de Porres in art because he wears a Dominican habit, holds a broom and is also surrounded by animals. Other upcoming events and feasts include Daylight savings ends (11/4) Election Day (11/6) Dedication of St. John Lateran (11/9) St. Leo (11/10) OF Veterans' Day (11/11) - St. Martin of Tours I mention at the beginning of our show that we take a “no bull, just the Truth” approach at our store. This has been our unofficial slogan since we first opened for a couple of reasons. First, because we want our customers to actually trust that what they get at our store will help them learn the Catholic Faith. Secondly, St. Thomas Aquinas was a very large, quiet student in school and his peers referred to him as a “dumb ox”. One of his professors, St. Albert the Great, is famed for saying that “This dumb ox will one day make a bellow that will be heard around the world.” The reason I mention this today is because of a book. For some reason, finding the documents of Vatican II in print is kind of like looking for orthodoxy in the pages of the National Catholic Register – fabled to exist, almost impossible to find. The Daughters of St. Paul used to produce booklets with each of the documents and at one point had them all in one volume. All of those are out of print. There was also a collection edited by Austin Flannery that was the only game in town for many years but the collection was not the official translation of the texts. Now, Image books has released a new book called Vatican II the Essential Texts. We were happy to see that someone was bringing out a collection in time for the Year of Faith and started selling it.
