• November 14th – Bl. John Liccio, Seer of Angels

[Weedy]

• November 14th – Bl. John Liccio, Seer of Angels

Born in Sicily in 1400; died 1511; beatified in 1733.The man who holds
the all-time record for wearing the Dominican habit--96 years--was
also a person about whom some delightful stories are told. Perhaps
only in Sicily could so many wonderful things have happened to one
man.

John was born to a poor family. His mother died at his birth and his
father, too poor to hire a nurse for the baby, fed him on crushed
pomegranates and other odds and ends. He was obliged to leave the baby
alone when he went out to work in the fields, and a neighbor women,
who heard the child crying, took the baby over to her house and fed
him properly. She laid the baby in bed beside her sick husband, who
had been paralyzed for a long time. Her husband rose up--cured, and
the woman began to proclaim the saintly quality of the baby she had
taken in. When John's father came home, however, he was not only
unimpressed by her pious remarks, he was downright furious that she
had interfered in his household. He took the baby home again and fed
it more pomegranates.

At this point, the sick man next door fell ill again, and his wife
came to John's father and begged to be allowed to care for the child.
Begrudgingly, the father let the wonderful child go. The good woman
took care of him for several years, and never ceased to marvel that
her husband had been cured a second time--and that he remained well.

Even as a tiny baby, John gave every evidence that he was an unusual
person. At an age when most children are just beginning to read, he
was already reciting the daily Office of the Blessed Virgin, the
Office of the Dead, and the Penitential Psalms. He was frequently in
ecstasy, and was what might be called an "easy weeper"; any strong
emotion caused him to dissolve in floods of tears.

At the age of 15, John went to Palermo on a business trip for his
father, and he happened to go to confession to Blessed Peter Geremia,
at the church of Saint Zita. The friar suggested that he become a
religious. John believed himself quite unworthy, but the priest
managed to convince him to give it a try. The habit, which he put on
for the first time in 1415, he was to wear with distinction for nearly
a century.

Humble, pure, and a model of every observance, Brother John finished
his studies and was ordained. He and two brothers were sent to Caccamo
to found a convent, and John resumed his career of miracle-working,
which was to bring fame to the order, and to the convent of Saint
Zita.

As the three friars walked along the road, a group of young men began
ridiculing them and finally attacked them with daggers. One boy
attempted to stab John, but his hand withered and refused to move.
After the friars had gone on, the boys huddled together and decided
that they had better ask pardon. They ran after the Dominicans and
begged their forgiveness. John made the Sign of the Cross, and the
withered hand was made whole.

The story of the building at Caccamo reads like a fairy tale. There
was, first of all, no money. Since the friars never had any, that did
not deter John Liccio, but he knew it would be necessary to get enough
to pay the workmen to begin the foundations.

John went into the parish church at Caccamo and prayed. An angel told
him to "build on the foundations that were already built." All he had
to do was to find them. The next day, he went into the woods with a
party of young woodcutters and found the place the angel had
described: foundations, strongly and beautifully laid out, for a large
church and convent. It had been designed for a church called Saint
Mary of the Angels, but was never finished. John moved his base of
operations to the woods where the angel had furnished him with the
foundations. One day, in the course of the construction, the workmen
ran out of materials. They pointed this out to John, who told them to
come back tomorrow anyway. The next day at dawn a large wagon, drawn
by two oxen, appeared with a load of stone, lime, and sand. The driver
politely inquired where the fathers would like the material put; he
capably unloaded the wagon, and disappeared, leaving John with a fine
team of oxen--and giving us a fascinating story of an angel
truck-driver.

These oxen figured at least once more in the legends of John Liccio.
Near Christmas time, when there was little fodder, a neighbor insisted
on taking the oxen home with him "because they were too much care for
the fathers." John refused, saying that they were not too heavy a
burden, and that they had come a long way. The man took them anyway,
and put them into a pasture with his own oxen. They promptly
disappeared, and, when he went shamefacedly to report to the fathers,
the man found the team contentedly munching on practically nothing in
the fathers' yard. "You see, it takes very little to feed them," John
said.

During the construction, John blessed a well and dried it up, until
they were finished with the building. Whereupon, he blessed it again,
and once more it began to give fine sweet water, which had curative
properties. Beams that were too short for the roof, he simply
stretched. Sometimes he had to multiply bread and wine to feed his
workers, and once he raised from the dead a venturesome little boy who
had fallen off the roof while watching his uncle setting stones.

Word of his miraculous gift soon spread, of course, and all the
neighbors came to John with their problems. One man had sowed a field
with good grain, only to have it grow up full of weeds. John advised
him to do as the Scriptures had suggested—let it grow until the
harvest. When the harvest came, it still looked pretty bad, but it
took the man ten days to thresh the enormous crop of grain that he
reaped from that one field.

John never let a day pass without doing something for some neighbor.
Visiting a widow whose six small children were crying for food, John
blessed them, and he told her to be sure to look in the bread box
after he had gone. Knowing there had been nothing in it for days, she
looked anyway; it was full, and it stayed full for as long as the need
lasted. Once when a plague had struck most of the cattle of the
vicinity, one of John's good friends came to him in tears, telling him
that he would be ruined if anything happened to his cattle. "Don't
worry," John said, "yours won't get sick." They didn't.....


Saint Quote:
Think well. Speak well. Do well. These three things, through the mercy
of God, will make a man go to Heaven.
-- St. Camillus de Lellis

Bible Quote:
"Wise people store up knowledge, But the mouth of the foolish is near
destruction." (Proverbs 10:14)


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Angels--Their Present Sinlessness

Can the Angels sin? No, it is impossible for them to sin, because they
behold the face of God. They continually contemplate His infinite
goodness, and derive thence a perfect happiness which satisfies every
portion of their nature. Outside God there is nothing which has any
attraction for them. There is no good possible for them except in
doing His will; hence they cannot sin. Whenever I sin it is because I
grasp at some temporal good instead of God, and this though I know in
the end it will bring me misery.

Are the Angels free if they cannot sin? Yes, perfectly free. He who
freely chooses evil instead of good abuses his freedom. He does his
best to make himself a slave instead of free. Perfect freedom is the
freedom of those who choose only out of various ends all leading to
God. God is the end at which the angels always aim, but they are free
to choose the means which lead to that end. We do not always choose
God, but our own pleasure, as the end at which we aim. Hence we are
always impairing our freedom. How can we choose right means when our
end is not rightly chosen?

Hence the Angels are far more free than we are in their choice. They
always choose means which lead to God. We get in a state of confusion
because our intention is not pure. We seek self, not God; this hampers
us and ties us down. We are conscious of something that hinders our
liberty; this is nothing but self-will preventing us from always
seeking God.