As I was away on Tuesday and Wednesday, I missed some interesting feast days of the church. A short explanation of each is offered below:
August 10 - St. Laurence, a deacon, served as the "treasurer" for the Church of Rome. In 258, he was ordered by a Roman prefect to surrender all of the treasures of the church. Laurence was allowed three days to complete this task and, when he returned with the sick, poor, the widows and orphans, announced that these were the "treasures of the church." The prefect rewarded Laurence for his cleverness and clear presentation of Gospel-based theology by having him roasted to death on a gridiron. [By the way, that's why Laurence is the patron saint of football teams.]
August 11 - St. Clare, after hearing a sermon by St. Francis of Assisi in the year 1212, surrendered her inheritance and joined the founder of the Franciscans, establishing a religious order for women that exists to this day in both the Roman and Anglican Churches.
August 12 - An unofficial feast day, as it has not been properly ratified by the PTB*, is offered today for Florence Nightingale. The reason for the hesitance is that she tended to the pantheistic in some of her personal writings and was also rather liberated in her personal relations. [How's that for a euphemism?] However, her reformation of the British nursing system turned it from a practice employing alcoholics and "reformed" prostitutes to a profession that stressed education, hygiene, and vocational competence.
August 13 - "Jeremy Taylor was born at Cambridge in 1613 and ordained in 1633. In the years between 1633 and the ascendancy of the Puritans in 1645, he was a Fellow of two Cambridge colleges, and chaplain to Archbishop Laud and to King Charles. Under Puritan rule, he was imprisoned three times, and forced into retirement as a family chaplain in Wales. After the Restoration, in 1661, he became Bishop of Down and Connor in Ireland."
[* Powers That Be]