Monday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time
Today we recall Blaise, fourth century Armenian bishop and martyr, intercessor for illnesses related to the throat.
Legend has it that on his way to prison under the persecution of Diocletian, Blaise commanded a wolf to release an animal belonging to an old woman. She later brought candles to his cell so he would have light to read the holy scrolls and celebrate the Eucharist. While impressed with Blaise’s miracles, the authorities demanded he renounce his faith and when he wouldn’t, he was beaten, tortured and beheaded.
How appropriate, then, that on his feast day we hear the author of Hebrews recall heroes of the first covenant who out of suffering were made more powerful, enduring “mockery, scourging, chains and imprisonment.”
In time, the ritual blessing of throats developed on February 3, with two tapered candles in the form of a St. Andrew’s cross held below the supplicant’s throat. It comes from the legend that Blaise healed a boy choking on a fish bone. The blessing is given the day after Candlemas, the Feast of the Presentation of the Lord (February 2). It was known as “little Candlemas” and many lit bonfires (“blazes”) in his honor, given his name— to be “ablaze” on Saint Blaise during the bleakest time of the year.
As a Catholic school baby boomer, I recall freezing northeast Ohio winter mornings at 8am mass on St. Blaise Day. This period would come to be called “Winter Ordinary Time,” sort of a liturgical no-man's-land, sandwiched between the end of the Christmas season (in those days on Candlemas February 2) and the not-yet start of Lent.
After the Gospel, children, sisters, teachers and faithful in the jammed Sacred Heart Church would come forward for the blessing of throats: “Through the intercession of Saint Blaise may God relieve you from ills of the throat and other ills.” With the coronavirus and flu lurking about, the “blaze” of St. Blaise is needed as much as ever.
In the mid ‘80s I served on a parish staff in Cincinnati. One freezing February 3 morning our associate pastor received a telephone call from a distraught parishioner who, because of a snowstorm, couldn’t get to the service for the blessing of throats. An elderly woman who was frequently sick, she was most distraught. “What can I do,” she pleaded. “Well,” responded the young clergyman, “I guess you could always gargle with holy water.”
Gargling aside, better yet pray this prayer: “May God relieve us from the ills of the throat and other ills.”
—Timothy J. Cronin