4️⃣The Faithful Four is here!!4️⃣
In today’s video we are kicking things off with another faithful four, the past & present SEC!!

We hope you had a blessed Palm Sunday as we step into Holy Week and move closer to crowning this year’s Golden Halo winner 😇

The Faithful Four speaks for itself. We have read the bios, heard the legends, and seen the merch. Now it comes down to one simple question… who is most deserving of the Golden Halo?

First matchup of the round 👀
The Graces from Graceland, Constance and her companions, take on the man who made Reformation cool… Martin Luther

Do the girls of St. Mary’s School have what it takes to topple the Lutherans?
Will Wittenberg prevail over Memphis?
Only one will advance to the finals… and that choice is yours

Either of these two may face the winner of Friday’s matchup, Saint Benedict of Nursia who took down Blessed Gerard 55.09% to 44.91% 🔥

Watch the video, read the blogs, and vote!🗳️

Martin Luther

Martin Luther—priest, monk, theologian, hymn writer, early listicle pioneer—does not seem to have been an easy person to have been around. Perhaps no figure in the Reformation was a blast at dinner parties, but all the same, Thomas Cranmer does not have an insult generator to his credit. (Or does he? Someone get on that.) The stories about Luther depict a rather prickly, critical, person who could be combative and scathing one moment, sad and intensely self-critical the next, and yet deeply feeling and ardent in sincere faith. This person, with all his complications, perhaps more than anyone else, has shaped Western Christianity in all ways, and we are left to tease out what to make of his legacy.

I will not argue that Luther is a uniformly positive figure–his writings about the Jews were used centuries later by the Nazi regime to provide theological cover for their genocidal program. At the same time, Christian antisemitism neither began nor ended with Luther; he was hardly the only important church figure who voiced such ideas, and we who live in the wake of the horrors of the Holocaust cannot blame everything on him.

In fact, I think it is this very question that Luther did bestow upon the Church; he taught us that self-critical reflection was a necessity not just for ourselves, but for the entire institution. No longer, after Luther, would it be acceptable for the Church to exist in a bubble of impervious authority. No longer could the church exist hidden away from the questions and needs of the faithful. The Church instead must be always reforming, always examining itself, and always ready to repent and begin again, lest it stray from the path to which Christ calls us.

After Martin Luther nailed those theses to the door, daring the ecclesiastical powers to debate him, the powers that be now needed to explain themselves to the faithful, not just to God. The reformation he began ended up changing not just the Protestant churches, the Anglican churches, but the Roman Catholic church too. If the church is meant to be Christ’s Body in service to the world on earth, Luther showed us what it meant for the world to remind the Body that it was falling short of that call. He taught us that the faithful have a responsibility to ask for the church they need, and not just fall in line. He showed us that faith lived out in community, in the world, is an evolving proposition; never perfected, but always trying.

Reformation is not easy; asking an institution to fearlessly take a moral inventory and to change for the better isn’t simple or easily accomplished. It is an unending work that takes every one of us to see through. But it is thanks to Martin Luther that we have undertaken this work, rather than allow the church to ossify into a lifeless husk of what it was called to be. Reformation–constant reevaluation–is what keeps us seeking the will of God, and is what keeps the flame of the Spirit alive in our churches, and it is this gift that the irascible, difficult, devout saint bestowed to us.

— Megan Castellan

Constance and her Companions

I was thrilled when the Lent Madness gurus assigned Constance and her Companions, the Martyrs of Memphis, to me. I was familiar with their story, their ministry, and their ultimate sacrifice.

Mostly, I knew their names: Sister Constance, Sister Thecla, Sister Ruth, Sister Frances, the Rev. Charles Carroll Parsons, and the Rev. Louis S. Schuyler.

It is impossible to avoid making the clear and staggering analogy of Constance and her Companions to our modern first responders and health care angels. The dust is still settling from our COVID experiences, and our memories still burn with the images of the epidemic and heartaches of those suffering—both those with COVD and those helplessly watching loved ones suffer. Those recent memories provide us with an immediate glimpse of the yellow fever epidemic that the Martyrs of Memphis dealt with in 1878.

Nonetheless they persevered and refused to abandon their Christian ministry.

But Constance and her Companions faced much more as they tended to the sick and dying. They dealt with oppressive heat with no escape into an air conditioned room. They encountered the smells of sick people, and the summer’s effect on ailing and dead bodies. They faced food shortages, a result of the city’s quarantine and the inability to secure supplies. They suffered from a lack of help as thousands evacuated the city.

I admire these saints who persevered and refused to abandon their Christian ministry.

The six of them plus two others who survived the epidemic— the Very Rev. George Harris and Sister Hughetta— were publicly ridiculed for staying in Memphis. They were told their efforts were useless. However, they dismissed the jeers despite the name calling and societal shaming.

I am inspired by these saints who persevered and refused to abandon their Christian ministry.

We don’t have a clear number of how many were tended to by the Martyrs, and we don’t how many lives they saved. But we do know that, very much like our modern COVID workers, they touched lives. They saved lives.

I am thankful to these saints who persevered and refused to abandon their Christian ministry.

Sister Constance, Sister Thecla, Sister Ruth, Sister Frances, the Rev. Charles Carroll Parsons, and the Rev. Louis S. Schuyler are true examples of faith in action, of hands-on ministry to the sick, of the ultimate sacrifice to save others.

For these reasons and many others, Sister Constance, Sister Thecla, Sister Ruth, Sister Frances, the Rev. Charles Carroll Parsons, and the Rev. Louis S. Schuyler are worthy and deserving of the Golden Halo for 2026. They persevered and refused to abandon their Christian ministry.

Remember their names.

— Neva Rae Fox