Bl Niels Steensen
“By your endurance you will gain your souls”, says our Lord. Many of us will have ascertained that the times in our lives that have deeply formed us were not necessarily times at which we did lots of stuff, but times during which we endured through something difficult or hard: tensions or conflicts or uncertainty or whatever. Christ uses the melting pot as an image of salvation. It takes patience for all dross to be smelted away. But what remains is durable. The saint we commemorate examples this process. Niels Steensen, born in Copenhagen in 1638, was an internationally renowned physician. Having become a Catholic, he left his career to become a priest, later a bishop. Since for a while he was in charge of the archdiocese of Hamburg, with was then entrusted with the care of Catholics in Denmark and Norway, he was our bishop, too. His health was poor. He travelled ceaselessly without, for that reason, lessening his asceticism. His vision just became brighter. When he died at the age of 48 he was like a ripe pear, ready for picking. The scientist Steensen was sensitive to the beauty of creation. It touches me that he should have written: ‘Lovely is what we see; lovelier still is what we hold as true; loveliest of all is what we cannot comprehend.’
