St. Stanislaus Kostka: Extraordinary Love

I wrote this talk on St. Stanislaus Kostka on November 11th, 2013. At the time I was a Jesuit novice and being the youngest in the community, I was asked to offer a panegyric on the Feast of St. Stanislaus, patron saint of novices and one of the youngest canonized saints of the Church. I came across this talk just the other day and thought it might be a good introduction to the life of the saint for those who had never heard of him and perhaps a helpful reflection for those who had not.

In some ways, St. Stanislaus is a surprising candidate for sainthood, first of all because he had only 17 years to pull it off. When one thinks of the years of trial and error the likes of St. Ignatius and St. Augustine took before finding God or the years it took the likes of Brebeuf and Jogues to grow in holiness and go to such a noble martyrdom, 17 years doesn’t allow much time for maturing in holiness.

Nor do 17 years allow much room for great works. Mother Cabrini spent decades founding hospitals and orphanages; Francis Xavier spent his life preaching the gospel to the far corners of the world; Peter Claver devoted himself as apostle to the slaves in South America; all these works take time. Stanislaus had no such time. God gave him the lot in life of many other boys his age: that of a son, a student and later a novice. In the basic facts, his life was profoundly ordinary.

And yet, when we look at Stanislaus Kotska, we see something far from ordinary as did the people of his time, for in his ordinary life as a student and a novice, an extraordinary love of God broke through.

After growing up in Poland as the son of a minor noble family, Stanislaus was sent to school in Vienna with his older brother Paul to study at the Jesuit school there. On the surface, Stanislaus’ activities were that of an ordinary student. But underneath something else was going on: Stanislaus was falling in love with Our Lord.

Even as his prayer life grew and deepened, his brother Paul still saw an ordinary school boy, albeit the son of a nobleman and one who was becoming an annoying goody-goody. Stanislaus was beaten regularly by Paul for what Paul considered false piety. And yet when all else appeared ordinary, there were still glimpses of an intense and amazing love of God.

While still a student, Stanislaus fell ill. As his fever grew worse, he felt himself dying and begged his family to send for a priest to bring him Viaticum. They refused. They were renting their rooms from a Lutheran and his brother and servant feared that by bringing a priest in the house, their landlord would throw them out. Thus in what seemed to be his dying moments, Stanislaus was on his own. Here his servant got a glimpse of that intense love of God which touched so many lives.

While I was near his bed, he told me in clear and explicit words to kneel down. The Blessed Sacrament was being brought to him at that moment in the presence of St. Barbara. As soon as he had said this, he grew quite composed and remained with his whole body in an attitude of reverence. I myself saw and heard all this, and I’m certain that Stanislaus was not at all out of his mind from the violence of his sickness.

If that was the first glimpse of this extraordinary love of God, more incredible things were still to happen. Our Lady appeared to him with the Christ child. She laid the infant Jesus by his side and then spoke to him: it was her wish that he serve her Son by becoming a Jesuit.

Stanislaus recovered and on the surface returned to the ordinary life of a student. What he was to do next was not extraordinary in the sense of being miraculous or supernatural. Instead it was extraordinary insofar as it reflected an amazingly intense, all consuming love of Christ and Our Lady. He knew his father would never consent to him entering the Society and his brother would do all in his power to prevent him. The Society of Jesus in Austria and Poland, afraid of the wrath of his noble father, would not accept him there. Ordinary people would accept defeat at this point, but Stanislaus had too great a love of Christ to let His wishes go unfulfilled. So, armed with a reference from Peter Canisus, Stanislaus stole away from Vienna and walked all the way to office of St. Francis Borgia to seek entrance into the Society of Jesus in Rome.

Stanislaus was admitted to the novitiate. As fate would have it, that was all God called him to. After ten months in the novitiate, Stanislaus fell ill again and as he died, he pointed with a smile in front of him, to the Blessed Mother calling him to Heaven. He would never be a great Jesuit missionary like Xavier or a sage spiritual director like Claude de la Columbiere. He would be a novice, but not just any novice: a holy novice. His intense love of God was lived out in all the little things he did and that was his greatest service. When people looked at him, they saw not merely Stanislaus Kotska, they got a glimpse of Christ. And in the end that is the greatest thing we can give: Christ.

What we give to others is God’s love. No matter what form we give it in, we can give nothing greater. This is important for us as novices because we have little else to give. We are rough material in the hands of God. We bring certain experiences with us from the world, but we are as yet unformed. We are at the beginning of our training in prayer, we have yet to do any formal studies, and our experiences are limited. We have few tools under our belt to help anyone in a pastoral situation. We simply haven’t seen a lot of pastoral situations yet. And yet, God can work through us even in our rough state. This we can learn from Stanislaus Kostka. God doesn’t ask for our works, He asks for our love. What touches people most deeply is not our works, but the love which drives them. We need only look at the countless lives St. Stanislaus touched, never being fully formed, never performing the great acts of charity like other great Jesuits, only living the life of simple novice driven by a deep love of God.

Let us pray to Stanislaus, that we might run to Jesus waiting for us in the chapel. Let us pray to Stanislaus, that in the ups and downs of the novitiate, we might be consoled by that same Blessed Mother he knew so well. Let us pray to Stanislaus, that our lives as novices may be holy, that in all we do it is Christ’s love that shines through us. In the end that is all there is: to love Christ and in so doing to radiate his love out to the whole world.