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St. Louis IX
00:30:43
Dr. Ben Akers and Dr. Christopher Blum discuss the only king of France to be canonized, St. Louis IX.
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You're listening to a podcast on Catholic Saints. This podcast is produced by the Augustine Institute, an apostolate helping Catholics understand, live, and share their faith.
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My name is Dr. Ben Akers, and I'm the executive director of Formed. And joining me today is Dr. Christopher Bloom, the academic dean at the Graduate School of Theology at the Augusta Institute. The 13th century is sometimes called the greatest of Christian centuries. It's known for its great saints that we're familiar with. St. Dominic, St. Francis, King St. Louis. It's also known for its boom in education and the formation of the clergy. Think of St. Thomas Aquinas writing a summa theologica, teaching at the University of Paris. Another great achievement during the 13th century is in architecture. We have the building of Sainte chapelle by King St. Louis. We have the Chartres Cathedral being built as well, and the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. It's known for so many great things, and today we'd like to focus in on one of the great figures of this century, which is King St. Louis. And so what we'd like to do is talk about. Have a conversation about his. His history, his story, and then what we can draw from it today, because we might be familiar. Some of you might even be watching from a little town in Missouri named after him. King St. Louis. St. Louis, Missouri. And why do we have cities that are named after him, chapels that are named after him? What made him so great, not just only as a king, but also as a saint that's canonized by the Church? Can you imagine having a president that's canonized that just is out of our mind? And to have a king, a ruler of a secular country, a secular ruler that's canonized by the Church. There's some lessons for us to learn today. And so let's begin, Dr. Bloom, and talk about what can we kind of the history of St. Louis.
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Well, thank you. Thank you, Ben. It's great to be here. And it's a wonderful day for me, personally. I belong to a family with an interesting connection to St. Louis. I'm the one male member of my family in six generations who's not named after St. Louis. So, yeah, my son's middle name is Louis, and then my father, and way back to the mists of time. So it's a special day for me. And I've learned a lot about him over the years. And I was thinking about how best to say something about St. Louis that would connect him to our experience of the church today. And I'm going to kind of turn the Tables on you a little bit. Because I think that we can actually helpfully enter into St. Louis significance by comparing him to John Paul II. And that may seem a little strange, right, because John Paul II was a priest and a bishop. But there actually is a very significant similarity here, which is that both men in effect gave up their private lives in order to live completely public lives that were absolutely open to view and completely at the service of the roles which God had given to them providentially. And I think that's a great way for us to enter into what it means for a king to be canonized. So let's just remember with John Paul II that he became an auxiliary bishop in Krakow at what, 34 years old or something like this. You know, it's astonishing, right? And then 46 years of Bishop, most of that time of course, as pope. And to be the archbishop of Krakow in Poland was not a, in itself a small job, so very, very public life. And as we all know, when we think about his pontificate, we think about the big things he did, right? Going off to Poland and having these high level diplomatic confrontations with communist rulers and so forth. Or again, the way in which he's traveling around the world for these World Youth days, which was for what reason exactly? Well, to teach and to call the youth to a mission. And I think we can see something similar in St. Louis case. He was a king from a very young age, about 8 years old or 9 years old when his father died. Of course he didn't really rule until he came to his majority, so until he was about 20 or so. And then at that point he's entirely dedicated to the office and uses that office very creatively to call for the moral reformation of his kingdom. So it'll be fun to unpack that. But I think that's where I want to frame it is the similarity with John Paul ii.
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That's fascinating. I would not have. I didn't see that coming. I love that. That's great. Well, and it makes sense, right, that there would be similarities in saints. The way that the saints live out their vocation is different clergy versus not ordained laity in the case of John Paul ii to King St. Louis. But also when you started talking about that, that made me think, well, they also had a similarity, I think in the faith formation of growing up, that at the very beginning of their lives they were born into a faith filled family and, and faith was important for them. And that's where they really learned from their mothers, the faith.
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Well, that's Absolutely right. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And with John Paul ii, of course, we're inclined to think quickly not only of his parents, but of Jan Tyranowski, the tailor there in Krakow, who had him read the works of St. John of the Cross. And they had a rosary group and it was like a men's group and so forth. And there is a resonance there with St. Louis. So his mother was a very stern, pious woman, Blanche of Castile, Castile, Blanca of Castile, who famously said that she'd rather see her son die than commit a single mortal sin. Right. Which when we first hear that, it takes us back a little bit, then we realize, no, a Christian really should say that that's fair enough. Right. So that gives her the measure of the woman. And she was actually ruling France as regent for about 12 years while he was going through his adolescence and had to set down a rebellion from the barons. And she was, of course, courted. There were various high ranking barons who wanted to marry her because even though they wouldn't have become king, they would have had access to power and so forth. Nope. So he has this very impressive mother, but then what she does is she makes sure that he has teachers and tutors and moral guides from the, as it were, new ecclesial movements of the 13th century.
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Which would these be?
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The Dominicans and the Franciscans. Right. So ever since his death and then subsequent canonization, these two orders have had a kind of rivalry over his influence. You know, was he more partial to the Dominicans, but wasn't he buried in the robe of a third order of St. Francis? So that doesn't make him a Franciscan and so forth. And there's evidence on both sides, but it's clear that he loved both orders and imbibed the idealism. Right. Which was an idealism around evangelization. Right. And that's again, that's where the similarity is with John Paul II. When we look at the 20th century popes, we would have to say this is the pope of the new evangelization. This is the Pope of taking the word out to the world. Right. And that's what St. Louis did. He did it in his kingdom by reforming the laws and by reforming the administration of his kingdom. And he did it in the world by leading to crusades, which, of course we'll need to unpack that, because that sounds paradoxical, but here's a man who understood crusade to be at the service of evangelization.
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So it's hard enough to raise children and keep them Catholic or hope that they become stay Catholic in their life, but also to raise a king with all the duties that have to go with ruling. And what a brilliant move on her part to take a chance on these new ecclesial movements, the Dominicans and the Franciscans, and that he was a docile student, that he was willing to learn from them and fully imbibe it, as you mentioned, into the way that he lives out his life. Are there any other indications? So once he comes into the majority to rule, what are some of the first things that he does as king?
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Yeah, well, you know, it's within a year or so that a particular tribe from Asia Minor, present day Turkey, comes in and conquers Jerusalem. Okay, so from right about the beginning of his reign, 1239, 1240, he's thinking about getting to Jerusalem. And now I may have my dates a little bit wrong there. It might have been 1243 that Jerusalem fell, but in any event, it's from within a few years of the beginning. And the Crusade actually starts in 1248. But the planning for it was about a four year process. And at that very same period of time is when he's commissioning the Sainte Chapelle of Paris. That's an interesting story. But the relics of the Passion had been in Constantinople for centuries. And Constantinople was ruled over at that point by a French baron as a result of the disastrous and really unjust fourth Crusade that resulted in the French conquest of Constantinople, a Greek city. And so this baron put the relics of the Passion in hoc, as it were. It was illegal to sell relics. Okay. But you could pledge them as security for a loan. All right, so the relics were pledged as security for an enormous loan. St. Louis then paid off the balance of the loan and received the relics which were pledged on security and had them brought from Constantinople. This included the Crown of Thorns, one of the holy nails, the Holy sponge, a fragment from the lance and so forth. Lots of different relics from the Passion. And the Sainte Chapelle was dedicated in 1248, just before he left for his Crusade. So the first eight years of his time in office there, worrying about there were some domestic problems with some barons revolting, but other than that, it was worrying about the Crusade and building the Sainte Chapelle.
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Talk about the Sainte Chapelle for a moment. For those who aren't familiar with it, can you explain what this is and kind of its feet and why people still visit it today?
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Yeah, so it's. Right, so it's a private chapel inside what is today the Palais de Justice. But then was part of the royal household and it was private to the household of the king, which, of course, is dozens of people. And there were canons who were set up to hold the liturgies and so forth. But in effect, this chapel, in addition to being a private oratory for the royal family, was itself a giant reliquary to hold the relics of the Passion. It's an interesting building. We marvel at it today because two thirds of it is glass. Right. It's very tall, narrow, thin structure that has these beautiful stained glass windows around it. At the time, the ornate work there, which is sculpture and medallions that are made of enameled bronze and the stained glass and all kinds of other things. The stonework itself was reasonably expensive, but it was one fifth the cost. All the architectural work was 1/5 the cost of the gold and silver reliquary case that the king commissioned to hold the relics themselves, which is unbelievable. Wow. Yeah. Now the reliquary case is long gone. When the French Revolution came and grabbed the ecclesiastical buildings, they didn't care a whit about the relics. And so the canons, the priests, were able to take the relics and spirit them away and hide them. But they knew that if they took that reliquary case, that the bad guys would come find them because it was worth so much money. Right. So this is interesting. It shows you the priorities of the king here. Yes. From our 21st century perspective, it's this wonderful work of artistic creation. But what the king really cared about was that the relics of the Passion be suitably displayed.
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And these are the relics that were just saved in the fire.
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That's correct. They were just saved.
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They're in Notre Dame. And the priest went and saved. Heroically saved the relics.
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That's exactly right.
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So there's a history of the crown of thorns being honored and revered. And we see this in, what, a great devotion that he has to build this incredible reliquary. And then this jeweled case of a church that we could still visit today. If you go to Paris, you can still visit it today. But what it indicates for us is his great faith, that he really believed that God became man and dwelt among us, and that he walked a particular land at a particular time, and he wanted the remains. That's what relics means. Just the remainder of what we had from the time of the Passion of Christ. The crown of thorns, the sponge, the nails, these various objects to build a church for and then. But to go and also create a crusade, to construct a crusade. And am I correct that he participates in two crusades that's right.
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Yes. He died on crusade in 1270. Yeah. So the. And that's an interesting one because it was in North Africa. But the thing about the Crusade, which we often don't think about is, or perhaps don't think about enough. Right. Is that the fundamental motivation here on the part of the various leaders of the various Crusades, most of whom were French, but some of whom were English, you know, Richard Lionheart, although he's more French than English, but in any event, the leaders, they didn't just want to conquer a piece of land or win some battle or overturn some particular invader or something like this. No, no, no. The goal was twofold. It was to protect Christians who were already living there and had been living there for centuries upon centuries. Right. And to keep the pilgrimage routes open in perpetuity. Right. So in other words, not the Crusade is not an adventure for one month or one summer. It's meant to be a peacekeeping mission sustained over time. Okay. And it's because that's what the Crusades were envisioned as being really from 1095 when they were called, that. The Crusade always has one eye on Constantinople because the Greek whatever efforts are done to keep the Holy Land open for Christian pilgrims and Christian faithful living there, Constantinople is going to have to play a big role in that to support that effort. And then the other eye is on Egypt because Egypt is the great Muslim political power at the time. And. And of course it's just right there. Right. So that if Egypt isn't held at bay, then there's no point in going to Jerusalem because as soon as you leave, they're just going to take it back. Right. So the Crusade was always this big geopolitical thing, which explains why a French king would take four years to prepare for it. Build a port de novo on the coast of the Mediterranean Aigue Mortes, which is now inland because of silting up of the estuary, but was a tremendous feast. Right. Build an enormous fleet. It's the largest military endeavor since the fall of the Roman Empire. Wow. Oh yeah. So it's just this incredible four year project which then leads to a six year expedition. When he stays in the Holy Land, he doesn't reconquer Jerusalem, but he stays on the coast of the Holy Land, fortifying Christian cities there and helping to rule them and to adjudicate the various boundary disputes from. They're basically city states and helping them to hold it together. And then he finally comes back to France in 1254.
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Were there while he's in the Holy Land. Are there people back in France complaining that he's absent?
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Well, yeah. Oh, for sure there were. And in fact, there's a wonderful controversy about six or nine months into his Crusade, okay, Because first thing they do is they go to Egypt and they fight a battle in Egypt. And then St. Louis actually gets captured in Egypt and he has to be ransomed from captivity and so forth. So months are wasted in something of a futile effort there. Then he finally gets to the Holy Land and makes his pilgrimage to where he can see the holy city of Jerusalem, right, But can't enter it. And then at that point, the royal brothers all want to, okay, we're done. Time to go back. You know, we got a job to do. Let's go back to France. We've all got estates and we've got families that we're raising and so forth. And this is, you know, this is ridiculous, you know. And so he takes a week to deliberate about it. And all of the French barons, the high ranking French barons are insisting that he owes it to his kingdom to go back to France. And one young man, one young knight or baron from the eastern part of France, from the Champagne province, Jean de Joinville appeals to the King with youthful idealism. If you leave the whole project of the Crusade, the whole Christian Holy Land is going to be snuffed out in a matter of months. You must stay here and help fortify these cities and help bind them together and so forth. You are their only chance. And St. Louis took the advice of Jean de Joinville over all of these ranking barons. And it's this very memorable story. And what I'm holding in my hands here is, is The Life of St. Louis written by Jean de Joinville many, many years later, when Joinville was an 80 year old and St. Louis had been dead for 10 years. And Joinville. And this is one of the most precious medieval texts that we have, because most medieval texts are written by highly educated monks who are very keen to take their saints and to press them onto biblical typologies, right? So the other lives of St. Louis present him as the new Joshua or the new David or whatever, new Solomon, right? And what Joinville does is he just tells what it was like to be on crusade with St. Louis and what it was like to listen to this man and to watch him make decisions and so forth. And it's just, it's an unforgettable read. So it's in a Penguin paperback here. Chronicles of the Crusade by Joinville. And the other book is written by A man named Ville Hadouin. So it's great, great reading.
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Were they able to use some of this testimony for his canonization?
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Yes. Okay. Yeah.
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So that's how we have some of these stories about St. Louis. Because what I've heard is that he. Not only. So he's his public life, but his private life that he was very austere, doing penances, making sacrifices. So is that from Joinville?
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It's from lots of different testimonials. Testimonies. Joinville has some wonderful things to say. One of the things that, I mean, you know, this is France, right? I mean, it's the garden of Europe. It's a lovely place. Right. And there's parts of France that have been under continuous cultivation from the second or third century, you know, and there's vineyards that go all the way back to Roman times and so forth. So when Jean de Charainville is talking about St. Louis, he's just amazed that he never heard St. Louis order a special dish. He never dictated the menu. For a Frenchman, this is astonishing.
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Well, especially who has so much money, too. Whatever he wants at his fingertip, at the snap of a finger, and yet.
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He chooses to just let the cooks decide.
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Let the cooks decide.
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Right.
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So I want to go back to the. We're talking about the Crusades. So he.
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Oh, let me tell you about the wine.
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Yes. Oh, please. Okay.
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So there's a different. There's a different. There's a different testimony from some other Frenchman who's frankly kind of appalled at the situation. Right. He says this king added water to his wine, and he added so much water to his wine that you could see through it. Right. This is like heresy for a Frenchman, you know. So, yes, he was highly mortified in his.
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His personal life, which clearly helped him to become the saint.
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Yes.
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Right. So some saints are known for their great deeds of heroism and martyrdom, but they still had to put their pants on one leg at a time. They did this. They lived their daily life. They made daily sacrifices, not adding water to their wine, not choosing the prerogatives that they might have a right to, but giving those up for the greater glory of God. So King St. Louis decides that, listens to this young man, this idealistic man, and decides that it's better for the sake of all of Christian Europe and the Christian world than even just his own country that he do this good act.
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Yes.
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So he makes a decision for the common good.
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Yes. No, it's very true. And he is, you know, if we're to ask why the Church canonized Louis ix, okay, a short period of time after his death. I mean, it was something like 27 years after his death. So it's a pretty quick canonization. And there was a formal process in the whole thing, you know, and the papal statements and then subsequently the liturgical evidence, the prayers that are associated with his feast day and so forth are portraying him as a peacemaker. Okay? So it's blessed are the peacemakers, Rex pacificus and this sort of thing. And from the domestic point of view, okay, France didn't have any civil strife after 1243 until his death in 1270. And that moment in 1243 was an uprising on the part of some barons in the southern France that was actually a assisted by Henry III of England who brought some soldiers down through Bordeaux. And so St. Louis had to oppose that. And from 1243 until the death of his son in 1285, a period of 42 years, France was completely at peace with all of her neighbors. Okay? There is not another 42 year period in the history of France when there's not a war with. With somebody, except for the post World War II period here. And even that's complicated because of the story of Algeria and so forth. Right? So the peacemaking was for the sake of Crusade, as you suggest here, but the Crusade was for the sake of evangelization. Now, it's important to understand here that that does not mean forcing people to convert at the edge of the sword. Okay? That was not going on. That was not what St. Louis had in mind. No, what it meant was taking teams of Dominicans and Franciscans to the Holy Land and sending missionaries out from the Mediterranean coast of Lebanon, of Israel, out into the hinterland. Right. A couple of these Dominicans went all the way to China from there. Yeah. So it's really amazing. And then his second crusade in 1269-1270, which went to Tunisia, and that's its own sort of interesting story, had 200 Franciscans along for the ride. Okay, that's a sad one, because what happened was Tunisia, you know, is just right below Sicily. Okay. So it's at the choke point of the Mediterranean here. And the thought was, if Tunisia becomes a Christian country, then the western part of the Mediterranean is totally. We can forget about it and we can just go east and we can bring this Crusade. We can tie up the Crusade with a bow, okay? And the Bey of Tunis, the prince down in Tunis, sent emissaries to Paris claiming that he was ready to convert and become a Christian. And it turns out that was a ploy. Now, there's so few documents that remain from the 13th century, it's very hard to know what he thought he was going to achieve by this. But the French did come down thinking that Tunisia was looking for a French show of power so that the ruler could convert and then pacify his country, that it wouldn't rise up against him and then set these Franciscans free to evangelize. And none of that happened. And what instead happened is that St. Louis got ill on the shore there, caught amoebic dysentery, and they killed him off very quickly. Wow.
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So this is in King St. Louis, we see an incredible example of using the crown to glorify the cross, to spread the good news of Jesus Christ. And he's trying to be strategic about it. So not just trying to make a land grab in the Holy Land. He's actually trying to establish peace so that missionaries can go out and. Sounds like they did. And it was effective in that.
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Yeah.
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He's also known for, if you look at his life, his service to the poor, creating hospitals for young, poor women so they don't have to enter a life of destitution. Hospital for the blind. He himself, I remember reading that would serve 100 people a day. Poor people at his table every day, and eat their scraps, whatever was left over, even wash their feet. And remember reading that people opposed him. This is not befitting a king. But he says, I find Christ in the poor. I find Christ in these people. So we have a great example today of the feast that we're celebrating of King St. Louis. He reminds me, since we began with your connection to John Paul ii, that John Paul II was a great evangelist going to the ends of the earth to share the good news. We consider him a patron here at the Augustine Institute. And he famously said, we need to propose the gospel, not impose the gospel. Sounds like King St. Louis was a model for him in this of. We do our best in proposing the gospel by the witness of our life, by the witness of our words. And this is what the saints are. They give us great models of charity, the perfection of holiness. The holiness is the perfection of charity. They completely love God with their whole mind, heart and soul, and love their neighbor as themselves. Any passing story that you'd like to share of King St. Louis?
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Yeah, well, just to connect the dots here a little bit with John Paul II, so you mentioned the criticism of St. Louis, uncanny kingly behavior. This was a common thread throughout his reign. And the refrain is that you don't want to be king, you want to be a monk. Okay, this is actually true. He asked his confessor at a certain point after his crusade, can I lay down the crown? I would like to retire to a private life of prayer and let my son take up the kingdom. And his confessor said, no, that is not what God is asking you to do. Right. So he lived out his life and he lived it out unbesmirched. Right now his public record, the only claim here really is, I mean, some would say he was stern, right. As a king in terms of enforcing the law and this sort of thing. Fine. Right. But as far as his own personal moral life, the claim is he's too pious, he's too religious. Right. Well, if that's the worst thing that we can say about our rulers, you know, after they live their whole life out in the public eye, well, that's pretty good. And of course, John Paul has that same legacy for us.
- [29:47]
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He does. And we need to pray for our rulers. We need to pray for the people, wherever we live, of our municipality and pray for those people that make decisions for our life. Ask King St. Louis to bless them. Thank you for joining us today and we ask you to join the Mission circle if you'd like to continue to see shows like this and support the work of the Augusta Institute. Thank you and God bless.
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