Quote:
Originally Posted by
Catsmine
I count two Popes, a Cardinal, and a Canonized Pope as well as the Bible vereses.
If we want to be punctilious lets get it right. Blessed Pope John XXIII and Blessed Pope John Paul II are to be canonized as Saints on April 27, 2014. Of the two I only mentioned John Paul II. Technically, only two Popes were mentioned, one of which is blessed (not yet canonized) and St. Thomas Aquinas who is canonized a Saint but wasn't a Cardinal.
St. Thomas Aquinas was so devoted to his works he turned down offers to be made bishop or abbot. In the last days of his life he is said to have had a vision or an epiphany of sorts. Josef Pieper writes in The Silence of St. Thomas of St. Thomas Aquinas’ last days, A friend asked why he didn’t continue to write. After the third urging of his friend, St. Thomas Aquinas said, “All that I have hitherto written seems to me nothing but straw . . . compared to what I have seen and has been revealed to me" (Pieper, PP. 39-40). G.K Chesterton also wrote of St. Thomas Aquinas’ mystic like love of divine wisdom,
Then he could be compared with other saints or theologians, as mystic rather than dogmatic. For he was, like a sensible man, a mystic in private and a philosopher in public. He had “religious experience” all right; but he did not, in the modern manner, ask other people to reason from his experience. He only asked them to reason from their own experience. His experiences included well-attested cases of levitation in ecstasy; and the Blessed Virgin appeared to him, comforting him with the welcome news that he would never be a Bishop G.K. Chesterton, The Spectator, Feb. 27, 1932
And we almost missed Cyprian of Carthage, he is indeed a martyred Saint and a bishop. And then there was five New Testament verses from St. Paul.
I think it was a fairly even mix.
JoeT