When the Young Convert the Old

This is the extraordinary story of the young teenage son who was a youthful prodigy of sanctity and the extraordinarily late flourishing of his elder brother.  Born eight years after St John of the Cross at the castle of Rostkovo (Poland), the son of a senator, today’s saint Stanislaus Kostka (1550-1568) was educated first by a private tutor and then, with his older brother Paul, at the Jesuit college in Vienna. His piety irritated his brother, who bullied and beat him. Stanislaus warned him, “This will end in my running away and not coming back. Then you will have to explain to our father and mother.”  Eventually he made his way to Rome where he was accepted by the Jesuits who admitted him on his seventeenth birthday.  He very soon fell gravely ill, and Paul was sent by his father to demand that his son return home. However, by the time he arrived in Rome, he was overwhelmed by hearing stories of his brother’s sanctity. Later when he was sixty, Paul himself became a Jesuit in his turn and attended Stanislaus’s beatification ceremony in 1605. Stanislaus was canonised in 1726 – which of course was in the same year as St John of the Cross.  So you have the youngest of young men dying in an aura of sanctity and his elder brother as an extraordinarily late developer!  The contrast is very striking.

Intercessions

RIP Clare, died aged 42 from cancer.

Cancer: Brian Davis, Bernard (and wife Angela caring for him), Catherine, Alex (43 with five children), Theresa K, Elena

Ivy – sick child

Brian (recovering from Pneumonia)

Kevin (heart attack)

William Gove (in recovery)

Illness:  Katy Keeling, Noreen

David OCDS – housebound

Mark – brain infection

Michael, Kira – vulnerable youngsters

Defence of the unborn and the elderly