Hello everyone! Heyo! Welcome back to Scattering Flowers with Elise and Miles, a podcast where you read the daily gospels and the saint of the day.
Let’s get started! Today is Thursday, July 9th, and for the summer weeks we are going to do the ABCs of our Catholic faith and saints.
Today is the letter X for Xpiotak, and the scripture to reflect on is Matthew 16, 16.
Simon Peter replied, You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.
Xpiotak is the ancient Greek word for Christ, meaning the anointed one.
The X is the Greek letter chi, and the P is rho.
Together they form the sacred chi-rho monogram used by early Christians to represent Jesus.
Early Christians facing persecution used the letter chi and rho as a discrete symbol to mark meeting places and tombs.
Today’s saint of the day is X, St.
Francis Xavier.
He was born 1506 and died 1552.
He is the patron saint of fortune missions.
Francis was born in 1506 in Spain of noble parents.
He was sent to the College of St.
Barbara in Paris and became a teacher.
He joined St.
Ignatius Loyola and four other young men who vowed to work for the congregation of souls.
They formed the Society of Jesus.
Before his ordination to priesthood in Venice, he cared for the sick in the hospital.
The King of Portugal wanted six missionaries to preach in the faith in India.
One of these was Francis.
He journeyed to Gaul.
There he comforted the sick and walked through the streets ringing a bell, asking the children to come to catechism in the church.
Later he preached in public, and soon the whole city was converted.
Flame coming forth from his heart is a sign of his burning love for souls.
The globe reminds us that he has traveled great distances to save them.
He’s a patron saint of fortune missions.
The idea of an X is an abbreviation for the name of Christ came into use in our culture not to show any disrespect for Jesus.
The church has used the symbol of the fish historically because it’s an acronym.
Fish in Greek involved the use of the first letter for the Greek phrase, Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior.
So the early Christians would take the first letter of those words and put those letters together to spell the Greek word for fish.
That’s how the fish became the universal symbol for Christendom.
There’s a long and sacred history of the use of X, the symbol of the name of Christ.
Francis sailed to Japan in 1549.
Other missionaries joined him there.
He converted many thousands of people.
While on a ship going to China, he became very ill on a high fever.
The ship stopped at an island off the coast.
He died in an old cabin on December 2, 1552.
Let’s pray.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Jesus, you are the Christ, the Son of God.
Thank you for coming into the world to save me.
And help us to inspire the faithful today, just like St.
Francis Xavier did.
St.
Francis Xavier, pray for us.
Amen.
In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
Thank you so much for listening.
We’ll be back tomorrow, scattering more flowers.
See ya!