Published December 26, 2024
Duke Václav I, sometimes called Václav the Good, ruled over Bohemia during the first half of the tenth century. Christianity was still very new to that part of the world (the modern-day Czech Republic), and Václav did a great deal to help Christianity – specifically Latin Christianity – take root. During his short life, he was renowned for his piety and love for the poor. He built a small Romanesque church within the walls of his castle to house the relics of St. Vitus; the small church would eventually be expanded into what is today Prague’s great, gothic Cathedral of St. Vitus.
Václav only lived to be about 30 years old, give or take. He was assassinated – martyred, really – by his younger brother, Bolesłav. The murderous Bolesłav later repented of his fratricide and lived to see his own son-in-law, Mieszko I, establish Latin Christianity in a newly unified Poland in 966.
As for poor martyred Václav, it wasn’t long after his death that the late duke received, by general acclamation, the title of “saint” and even (the Holy Roman Emperor conferring upon him posthumously the royal dignity and title) the honorific title of “king.”
More than a millennium later, King Václav is still widely revered as a national and religious hero in central Europe, especially among the Western Slavs. In this part of the world, most of us remember him by the anglicized form of his Latin name and the nineteenth-century Christmas carol by which we know him as Good King Wenceslaus.
Good King Wenceslaus looked out,
on the Feast of Stephen,
When the snow lay round about,
deep and crisp and even.
The words of this carol were written by an Anglican priest, John Mason Neale, in the early 1850s. (Neale, as it happens, also gave us the standard English translation of “O Come, O Come Emmanuel.”) The lyrics were based on an old episode from the life of Wenceslaus and the tune was borrowed from a much older song about, of all things, the arrival of flowers in springtime.
And so a tenth-century Bohemian duke came to be associated with the feast day of a martyred first-century Hellenistic Jew on account of a nineteenth-century English carol based on a thirteenth-century Latin tune.
The lyrical connection may be purely serendipitous: the story of Wenceslaus is set on a snowy night, St. Stephen’s Day falls on December 26th, so it makes sense to set the one story against the backdrop of the other. Still, I’m sure I’m not alone in being unable to remember a time when I did not associate the name Wenceslaus instantly with Stephen.
As for my dear patron, Stephen, his feast has been celebrated on this date, the day after Christmas, since the early fifth century. He, of course, was a deacon and the first martyr. His story is recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. One of the seven men “filled with the Spirit and wisdom” chosen by the community to serve as deacons, Stephen was ordained for that ministry by the Apostles themselves.
Stephen’s speech before the Sanhedrin, which immediately precedes his martyrdom, is the longest disputation in the book of Acts. Reflecting on this speech, Pope Benedict XVI wrote that Stephen, “reinterprets the whole of the biblical narrative, the itinerary contained in Sacred Scripture, in order to show that it leads to the ‘place’, of the definitive presence of God that is Jesus Christ, and in particular his Passion, death and Resurrection.”
This ‘place’ is the new temple, the temple not made by human hands (as idols are fashioned), the temple that Jesus promised to destroy and raise up again in three days, the very body of God Incarnate.
Just as Stephen’s preaching was an imitation of Christ’s own preaching, so his death became an imitation of Christ’s as well. Pope Benedict observes:
Indeed, before dying, Stephen cries out: “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit” (Acts 7:59), making his own the words of Psalm 31:6 and repeating Jesus’ last words on Calvary: “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit.” (Luke 23:46) Lastly, like Jesus, he cries out with a loud voice facing those who were stoning him: “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” (Acts 7:60)
In this imitation of Christ, Stephen outdid even the other Apostles, at least for a time. St. Augustine, in a homily on several martyrs, compares the martyrs to Peter:
[Peter] preached Christ, he was sent, he proclaimed the gospel already before the Lord’s passion. We know, after all, that the Apostles were sent out to preach the gospel; Peter, then, was sent, and he preached. . . .But still, he wasn’t yet the equal of [the martyrs]. He was already an Apostle, he was the first, he was very close to the Lord; he was told, ‘You are Peter’ (Matthew 16: 18). But he still wasn’t. . . .Stephen; Peter still wasn’t in that class.
Not yet, anyway. Peter’s time would come. But when Stephen followed Christ through death, to win the martyr’s crown, he was following a path that not even the Apostles had yet been forced to tread. St. Augustine framed this nicely in another homily, “Peter ordained him, Paul persecuted him.” Paul, like Peter, would follow Stephen, whom he once had persecuted. He too would win the martyr’s crown in the end – the stephanos (στέφανος). Stephen means “crown” or “wreath.”
And maybe there is the dearest connection between Stephen and our Bohemian duke. Wenceslaus may not have been a king in life, but in following Stephen’s footsteps – first in service to the Church and especially to the poor, and then in martyrdom – he earned his true crown. And the last lines of that marvelous carol take on a new gloss of meaning.
In his master’s steps he trod,
where the snow lay dinted;
Heat was in the very sod
which the saint had printed.
Therefore, Christian men, be sure,
wealth or rank possessing,
Ye who now will bless the poor,
shall yourselves find blessing.
Stephen P. White is a fellow in the Catholic Studies Program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. Mr. White’s work focuses on the application of Catholic social teaching to a broad spectrum of contemporary political and cultural issues. He is the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic (Liguori Publications, 2016).
