Praise be to Jesus, our Lord and Saviour.
To be the owner of poor Franciscan martyrs who are killed for telling Muslims, frankly,
that they could only be saved through Christ.
The souls of these just men are indeed in the hand of God,
and no torment can touch them.
No torment could touch their souls.
No torment could turn them away from their Lord,
or cut them off from eternal salvation.
St. Nicholas Tavolić was born around 1340 in the Croatian city of Šibenik.
He was from an illustrious family, but as soon as he was old enough,
he gave up his privileged life in order to become a Franciscan friar.
Around 1370, he became a missionary to heretics in Bosnia.
Bosnia had come under Hungarian rule in the previous century.
The Hungarians thought that the heresy of the Bogomils had begun to spread in that country,
and the Hungarians blamed the Bosnian hierarchy for this.
So in 1252, Bosnia was removed from the jurisdiction of the Archbishop of Dubrovnik
and placed under Hungarian archdiocese.
The Hungarian appointed archbishops were never allowed to enter Bosnia,
so for a good century or so,
it was effectively cut off from communion with the rest of the Church.
The last bishops eventually died, leaving them with a Church
governed only by priests and monastic superiors who had left.
The Pope was concerned about the Christians there,
and in the 1340s, when St. Nicholas was a child in Croatia,
Franciscan missions were established in Bosnia.
The first missionaries had some success already in reuniting the Bosnians to the Catholic Church,
but they were Italians and had trouble speaking the language.
So in 1347, a local ruler asked for missionaries to be sent
who either spoke Bosnian already or could learn it easily.
A quarter century later, St. Nicholas was an obvious choice for the mission,
because his native Croatia was very similar to Bosnia.
But not all the missionaries were Slavs.
St. Nicholas worked alongside St. Theodotus,
who was from Rhodes in the south of France and arrived in Bosnia in 1372.
During the isolation of the Bosnians, the heresy of the Bogomils had flourished there.
It was a heresy like that of the Cathars or the ancient Manichaeans,
that saw everything material as evil,
and so rejected the sacraments, the Incarnation, and church buildings.
After a dozen years there, St. Nicholas and St. Theodotus
asked to join the custody of the Holy Land.
These are the Franciscans who care for the holy places in Israel or in Palestine.
In 1333, the Sultan of Egypt granted the Cenacle,
which is the place where there was the Last Supper,
the place where Pentecost took place,
and where Christ appeared to the apostles after his resurrection.
The Sultan of Egypt granted this place to a Franciscan friar,
who had the backing of the King and Queen of Naples.
He built a friary nearby on what was then called Mount Zion,
and this would become the headquarters of the custody.
With diplomatic support from Naples, the Franciscans got the right
to officiate in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulchre.
In 1342, when St. Nicholas and St. Theodotus were babies,
a papal bull recognized the Franciscan custody of the Holy Land.
By the time our two saints got there in 1383,
the Franciscans were also officiating in the Grotto at Bethlehem,
the Basilican tomb of the Virgin in the Valley of Jehoshaphat,
and the milk grotto at Bethlehem.
Their companion martyr, St. Peter of Narbonne,
who was from the Franciscan province of Provence, the south of France,
had arrived a couple of years before them.
Before that, he had spent 15 years in Italy with the Franciscan reform,
praying for long hours and passing these hours in contemplation.
The fourth martyr arrived in 1383, the same year as the two coming from Bosnia.
His name was Stefano Cunio.
He was from the Franciscan province of Genoa,
and had been in Corsica for eight years before he began serving in the Holy Land.
The international origins of the four martyrs are typical of the custody,
to which friars can come from any Franciscan province.
For the next eight years, they lived an exemplary life in the friary of Mount Sinai.
One of the oldest documents says that they were adorned with every virtue,
most devoted to God, very obedient to their superiors,
and perfect with every religious perfection.
They served Christian pilgrims and merchants.
The Muslims were not open to hearing about the Christian faith,
or at least Muslim society was not open to hearing about Christian faith.
Perhaps individual Muslims would have been,
if it hadn't been for the society they were living in.
The holy friars had long discussions about what they could do
to win for Christ these souls that the devil was carrying off.
They consulted theologians, asked for advice about how to persuade Muslims,
sought proofs to present, and ultimately prepared a written argument.
On November 11, 1391, the four friars,
carrying copies in Italian and Arabic of the argument they planned to read,
went to the so-called Temple of Solomon, known today as the Al-Aqsa Mosque.
They asked to see the qadi, explaining that they had much to say to him
that would be useful and salutary to their souls,
that is, to the souls of the Muslims.
A qadi is an Islamic judge, and the qadi of Jerusalem
was the highest-ranking Muslim religious leader in the city.
Their idea, like that of St. Francis, was to convert the leader
so as to convert those who followed him.
The men at the door replied that they should go instead to the house of the qadi,
and they led them there.
They read their argument to the qadi.
They told him that he could not be saved by observing the law that his religion taught.
They said that Muhammad should not be considered a prophet
because he was not like the prophets God had sent in the time of the Old Testament.
The rewards that he promised were not heavenly rewards, but carnal ones.
They exhorted him to abandon error and embrace the gospel faith
because only those who believe and are baptized can be saved.
Now, if you read something like that to an Islamic judge
and you don't convince him to convert, he will try you for blasphemy,
and the qadi did not convert.
There was no question what they had said because the qadi had heard it with his own ears.
The only question was whether they were responsible for those words.
So he asked them if they were insane or demented,
or if they were speaking on behalf of some Christian prince.
No, they replied, we are sent by God alone,
ordained to inspire us to preach to you and announce the truth and your salvation.
Then he angrily asked them to recant and become Muslims so as to escape death.
But they had no fear of death, and so were sentenced to die.
A crowd had gathered around the house of the qadi,
and when the sentence was pronounced, they shouted,
they should die, they should die.
They fell upon the martyrs with various weapons and beat them until they seemed dead.
An hour later, the martyrs started to regain consciousness.
So they were stripped naked, flogged, and then thrown in prison for three days
where they were further tormented.
Then they were dragged out to a public square where executions took place.
A bonfire had been prepared there, and besides the large crowd of Muslims,
there were also Christians present at the scene.
This was probably at the Jaffa Gate on the west side of Jerusalem.
They were given a last chance to save their lives by recanting what they had said
and becoming Muslims in reparation for having blasphemed the Prophet.
They replied, no, we declare to you that you must be converted and be baptized.
If not, like sons of perdition, you are headed for everlasting torment in the eternal fire.
And you say that we should become Saracens?
Know that because of Christ and faith in him, we fear neither death nor temporal fire.
At that, the enraged mob fell upon them and hacked them to pieces.
They threw the pieces into the fire, but the pieces of their bodies did not burn all that day long.
The crowd stood there at the spectacle and piled wood on the bonfire until nightfall.
Then they scattered the ashes and hid the bones so that no Christian could find them.
The Franciscan superiors held an official investigation to determine the facts
and prepared a written report of them from which I have quoted those last words.
These were the first martyrs of the custody of the Holy Land, but certainly not the last.
The four martyrs began soon to be venerated, but it was only in 1889
that St. Nicholas' cult was confirmed by Pope Leo XIII.
This made him officially a blessed.
The cult of the other three was confirmed in 1967,
and in 1970, Paul VI canonized all four.
And this makes St. Nicholas Tavolić the first Croatian canonized.
Praised be Jesus and Mary.
Now and forever.