On the Feast of Stephen

The Catholic Thing

By Stephen P. White.
Duke Václav the First, sometimes called Václav the Good, ruled over Bohemia during the first half of the tenth century. Christianity was still very new to that part of the world (the modern-day Czech Republic), and Václav did a great deal to help Christianity - specifically Latin Christianity - take root. During his short life, he was renowned for his piety and love for the poor. He built a small Romanesque church within the walls of his castle to house the relics of St. Vitus; the small church would eventually be expanded into what is today Prague's great, gothic Cathedral of St. Vitus.
Václav only lived to be about 30 years old, give or take. He was assassinated - martyred, really - by his younger brother, Bolesłav. The murderous Bolesłav later repented of his fratricide and lived to see his own son-in-law, Mieszko I, establish Latin Christianity in a newly unified Poland in 966.
As for poor martyred Václav, it wasn't long after his death that the late duke received, by general acclamation, the title of "saint" and even (the Holy Roman Emperor conferring upon him posthumously the royal dignity and title) the honorific title of "king."
More than a millennium later, King Václav is still widely revered as a national and religious hero in central Europe, especially among the Western Slavs. In this part of the world, most of us remember him by the anglicized form of his Latin name and the nineteenth-century Christmas carol by which we know him as Good King Wenceslas.
Good King Wenceslas looked out,
on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
deep and crisp and even.
The words of this carol were written by an Anglican priest, John Mason Neale, in the early 1850s. (Neale, as it happens, also gave us the standard English translation of "O Come, O Come Emmanuel.") The lyrics were based on an old episode from the life of Wenceslas and the tune was borrowed from a much older song about, of all things, the arrival of flowers in springtime.
And so a tenth-century Bohemian duke came to be associated with the feast day of a martyred first-century Hellenistic Jew on account of a nineteenth-century English carol based on a thirteenth-century Latin tune.
The lyrical connection may be purely serendipitous: the story of Wenceslaus is set on a snowy night, St. Stephen's Day falls on December 26th, so it makes sense to set the one story against the backdrop of the other. Still, I'm sure I'm not alone in being unable to remember a time when I did not associate the name Wenceslaus instantly with Stephen.
As for my dear patron, Stephen, his feast has been celebrated on this date, the day after Christmas, since the early fifth century. He, of course, was a deacon and the first martyr. His story is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. One of the seven men "filled with the Spirit and wisdom" chosen by the community to serve as deacons, Stephen was ordained for that ministry by the Apostles themselves.
Stephen's speech before the Sanhedrin, which immediately precedes his martyrdom, is the longest disputation in the book of Acts. Reflecting on this speech, Pope Benedict XVI wrote that Stephen, "reinterprets the whole of the biblical narrative, the itinerary contained in Sacred Scripture, in order to show that it leads to the 'place', of the definitive presence of God that is Jesus Christ, and in particular his Passion, death and Resurrection."
This 'place' is the new temple, the temple not made by human hands (as idols are fashioned), the temple that Jesus promised to destroy and raise up again in three days, the very body of God Incarnate.
Just as Stephen's preaching was an imitation of Christ's own preaching, so his death became an imitation of Christ's as well. Pope Benedict observes:
Indeed, before dying, Stephen cries out: "Lord Jesus, receive my spirit" (Acts 7:59), making his own the words of Psalm 31:6 and repeating Jesus' last words on Calvary: "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." (Luke 23:46) Lastly...