From the desk of the Tar Heel disciple:
July 24, 2026 (#118)
The Holy Spouses of July
During the month of July, the Catholic Church celebrates 4 feast days that commemorate the sanctity of married couples: Saints Joachim and Anne (July 26), the parents of the Blessed Virgin Mary; Saints Aquila and Priscilla (July 8), a missionary married couple of the first century; Saints Louis and Azélie-Marie Martin (July 12), the parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux; and Blessed Józef and Wiktoria Ulma (July 7), who, together with their seven children, were executed in 1944 for sheltering Polish Jewish families.
The names and story of Saints Joacim and Anne are not recounted in Sacred Scripture, but rather in the Protoevangelium of James, a second century apocryphal work. The veneration of Saint Anne was manifested in Constantinople by the dedication of a great church there in her honor in the 6th century. By the 9th century, there is evidence in the Byzantine world of a feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary by Saint Anne. The devotion to her in the West developed later but became very popular and widespread by the late Middle Ages. Devotion to Saint Joachim developed even later. Only in the years after the Council of Trent was his feast established in the Roman Calendar (March 20). From 1913 until 1969, his feast was observed on August 16. And during the reform of the calendar that followed the Second Vatican Council, the feast was joined to that of Saint Anne, so that in our time the parents of the Virgin Mary (and the grandparents of Jesus!) are commemorated together, on July 26.
Saints Aquila and Priscilla were Jewish-Christians and collaborators of Saint Paul in preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Like him, they were tentmakers by trade. They are mentioned by name six times in the New Testament, in four different “books,” by two different authors (Paul and Luke). Ancient tradition relates that Aquila was made a bishop in Asia Minor by Saint Paul and that he and his wife died together as martyrs of the Faith.
Louis Martin (1823-1894), a French watchmaker, married Azélie-Marie Guérin (1831-1877), a French lacemaker, on July 12, 1858. In October 2015, for the first time in the Church’s history, they were canonized together, as a married couple. The date of their marriage was set as their common feast day. They had nine children, of whom five daughters survived childhood. All five entered the religious life as nuns. Their daughter, St. Thérèse, wrote lovingly of them in her autobiography, giving witness to their great faith and charity.
The story of the Ulmas, a Polish family, is as heroic as it is shocking. Józef Ulma (1900-1944) and Wiktoria Niemczak (1912-1944) were married on July 7, 1935, and lived and worked together on a small family farm, where they raised their children. In 1942, under German occupation, they gave refuge to 8 Jews from two families, which was, of course, forbidden by the German authorities, under pain of death. When the Ulmas were betrayed by a neighbor, the police came to their farm in the early hours of March 24, 1944. Local residents were summoned to see the punishment then inflicted. The Jewish refugees were summarily executed by means of a bullet to the head. Then Józef and Wiktoria were shot and killed. When the six Ulma children cried out upon seeing the dead bodies of their mother and father, they were then executed. Wiktoria was nine months pregnant and at some point, during the ordeal began to give birth. When the bodies of the Ulma family were exhumed in 1945, the head of the newborn child who had died with all the other members of the family was identified, located between the mother’s legs. On December 18, 2022, Pope Francis declared the entire family, parents and seven children, to be martyrs and they were subsequently beatified on September 10, 2023.
All holy husbands and wives, and their holy children, pray for us!
