Paul Zalonski – Page 18

Saint Maron

Today we liturgically recall the witness of the great church father, Saint Maron. Monk and founder. The Sedro for the saint is noted below tells us the importance Maron has for us and why we remember and follow him. The accent has to be on following, that is, seeking, Christ through the witness of the saints.

Blessed are you, Saint Maron, for you fought the good fight on Mount Cyrrhus, and the faithful from everywhere came to you. Your prayers healed the sick, guided those gone astray, and brought back sinners to righteousness and salvation.

Blessed are you, Saint Maron, for you became a prayer on the lips of the faithful, and a living example for the people who bear your name and will be known as Maronites to the end of the age.

Sedro, Liturgy of the Word for the Feast of Saint Maron

Blessed Pius IX

Published in another place, this brief reflection on Pius IX is meant to bring to light the importance of Pius’ papacy and his role in re-founding the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem.

Today, the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem together with the Church liturgically recall the memory of Blessed Pius IX, the Roman Pontiff who re-founded and showed great concern for our Order.

John Maria Mastai Ferretti was born at Senigallia (Italy) on 13 May 1792. After he was ordained priest in 1819, he spent two years as a missionary in Chile. By 35 years of age he was appointed Archbishop of Spoleto, and then moved in 1832 to Imola. In 1840 he was created Cardinal (but was really created cardinal In Pectore in 1839) and on 16 June 1846 was elected Supreme Pontiff at only 54 years of age! He took the name Pius to honor a previous pope who inspired his vocation.

Pius served the Church as Pope for 32 years.The papacy of Pius IX was decisively marked by a history that gave us very notable events which continue to impact us today:

On 8 December 1854, he defined the dogma of the Immaculate Conception;

In 1847, re-established the Latin Patriarch of Jerusalem and re-founded and modernized the EOHSJ;

In 1864, published the Syllabus of Errors which condemn liberalism, modernism, moral relativism, secularization, separation of church and state, and other Enlightenment ideas.

In 1869, he called the First Vatican Council, which precisely defined the Infallibility;

On 8 December 1870, he declared Saint Joseph Patron of the Universal Church;

On 16 June 1875, he consecrated the Church to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.

In more subtle ways, Pope Pius’ friendship with St John Bosco helped to develop the Salesian Society. He’s recalled for giving the Marian title of Our Lady of Perpetual Help to the Redemptorist Congregation, and showed concern for the souls purgatory by giving us a prayer to pray for them on Good Friday, and was the last sovereign of the Papal States when the territory was incorporated differently as the Italian Republic.

Of all the things Blessed Pius IX did for the Church, and the one that stands out for us as members of the EOHSJ, is the 1847 restoration of the Latin Patriarchate and his re-founding and modernizing of the Order. Pius was instrumental in issuing a new Constitution and placing the Order under the direct protection of the Holy See and assigning its government to the Latin Patriarch. Pius, moreover, added to the Order’s fundamental role: to uphold the works of the Latin Patriarchate of Jerusalem, while preserving the spiritual duty of defending and propagating Catholic Faith.

After 32 years of an intense period of leadership he made his transitus to the Lord of Life on 7 February 1878. John Paul II proclaimed him Blessed on 3 September 2000.

With the Church we pray:

O God, who gave your servant, Blessed Pius IX, Pope, the spirit of fortitude in adversity, and enabled him to enter more deeply into the pure faith of the Church, grant through his intercession, that we may be filled with the same spirit and live with the same devotion.

Blessed Pius IX, pray for us.

reconciling to mother church

A trail is forming of new Catholics in recent times in England. A careful observer will acknowledge that several now former Anglican bishops have reconciled with the Mother Church: the Catholic Church, that is, after a period of discernment that has questioned the increasing secularization of the CofE.

Most Catholics on this side of the pond would not be too aware of these events in the CofE, or even care. But they ought to care. Catholics outside the UK need to be aware of the trends not only in ecclesial polity but also in theological reflection, in particular the reality of Divine Revelation. These recent conversions are good examples of the horizon of faith and reason.

For my money, the point worth exploring further is Ashenden’s point:

“Evangelicals of [Peter] Forster’s generation were always alive to the primacy of the Holy Spirit. They believed in the miraculous conversion of the heart and the rebirth of the soul. But to their dismay, the generation that followed would find progressive identity politics more compelling than repentance and would exchange salvation for social revolution.”

Gavin Ashenden, a recent “convert” himself adroitly explores the phenomenon in the UK in a blog post, “The Conversion of Evangelical Bishops to Rome –A Diagnosis.”

Before the Catholic Church, East and West goes further down the D.I.E (diversity, inclusion and equality) trail, she better come to terms with the radical agenda and consequences of the CofE. It is true, and we have experience here, the CofE is not projected to be serving the Good News and tradition for much longer. The American equivalent, the Episcopal Church, has adopted DIE and is now no more than a social justice group, a club of old elites unconcerned about preaching the liberating word of Jesus Christ and nor is it impacted by the sacramentality of Tradition. When you abandon true, apostolic and one catholicity of faith and reason you become no better than a society of do-gooders.

Blessed Sebastian Valfrè was committed to Christ in the person

Today is the Feast of the Oratorian Blessed, Sebastian Valfrè (1629-1710). In 2013 and then again in 2014, I wrote a brief blog post on Blessed Sebastian with two links. A fuller biography notes the following of today’s beatus of the Church.

Sebastian Valfrè is one of the most important members of the Piedmontese clergy, and the forerunner of the many Saints who have graced the Church of Turin in recent centuries. Sebastian was born at Verduno, in the Diocese of Alba, on 9th March, 1629. His family was poor, but despite hardships and difficulties he managed to follow a course of studies at Alba, Bra and finally Turin. He joined the Oratory of Turin on 26th May, 1651, and was ordained priest on 24th February, 1652. He gained his doctorate in theology in 1656. He went on to hold many of the offices at the Oratory and, although he declined being made Archbishop of his city, he nevertheless, through his tireless work, is honoured as the Apostle of Turin. His particular concerns were the teaching of the Catechism, hearing confessions, giving spiritual direction, helping the poor and the sick, widows, orphans and prisoners. Sebastian became confessor to the Piedmontese Royal Family and his influence at Court enabled him to do much for the poor of the city. He was greatly devoted to the Shroud of Turin, and there is a print in existence, showing him supervising some repair work being done to the Shroud.

During his years in Turin the Kingdom endured several wars, including a siege of the city. He organised practical aid for the soldiers – so much so that today he is invoked as the patron of military chaplains. He introduced to Turin the Forty Hours Devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, and encouraged devotion to Our Lady, inspiring King Victor Amadeus II to build the Basilica of Superga. Sebastian also helped in the founding of the Accademia at Rome, for the training of Papal diplomats. He is remembered, too, in difficult times, for striving to build up good relations with both Protestants and Jews in Piedmont.

The Archives of the Turin Oratory possess some 22 volumes of his writings. One of his most important works was his ‘Compendium of Christian Doctrine’, a catechism organised on a question and answer basis. This rapidly became a well-used teaching aid, and lasted until the introduction of the Catechism of Pope Pius X.

‘The Father who had Paradise in his eyes’ died at Turin on 30th January, 1711, and was beatified by Pope Gregory XVI on 31st August, 1834. His body rests in a silver shrine in the Oratory Church in Turin. His feast is kept each year on 30th January.

Blessed Sebastian Valfrè, pray for us!

St Hilary of Poitiers

This post was written for members of the Order the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem and posted on FB.

Today the Church gives us the feast of a great Father and Doctor of the Church of the West: St Hilary of Poitiers (315-368), one of the important figures of the fourth century. He was a convert to the faith. At the time of his election as bishop of Poitiers by the lay faithful and clergy, he was married with one daughter (who became a nun known for her charity and later a saint). Our saint was known as the “Hammer of the Arians” (Malleus Arianorum) and the “Athanasius of the West.”

In the controversy with the Arians, Hilary devoted his energy defending and teaching orthodox Christian faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ, Son of God and God as the Father who begot him from eternity; by comparison the Arians considered Jesus the Son of God to be an excellent human creature but only human. You might remember that Arian “theology” spread through music. Opposing the Arian hymns, Hilary wrote hymns to foster Catholic faith. St Hilary’s method for his theological reflection began in baptismal faith. The starting point of Christian life is and has always been the sacrament of Baptism, and it is a point that members of the EOHSJ take as critical in living our vocation.

In his famous work, De Trinitate, Hilary writes: Jesus “has commanded us to baptize in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, that is, in the confession of the Author, of the Only-Begotten One and of the Gift.

The Author of all things is one alone, for one alone is God the Father, from whom all things proceed. And one alone is Our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom all things exist, and one alone is the Spirit, a gift in all…. In nothing can be found to be lacking so great a fullness, in which the immensity in the Eternal One, the revelation in the Image, joy in the Gift, converge in the Father, in the Son and in the Holy Spirit.”

God the Father, being wholly love, is able to communicate his divinity to his Son in its fullness. Particularly beautiful and insightful is the formula of St Hilary composed to understand the Mystery: “God knows not how to be anything other than love, he knows not how to be anyone other than the Father. Those who love are not envious and the one who is the Father is so in his totality. This name admits no compromise, as if God were father in some aspects and not in others.”

St Hilary of Poitiers is the patron saint fighting against snake bites. As his name suggests, Knights and Ladies of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem ought to be people of good cheer as we give good witness to the truth of Jesus Christ.

St Hilary, pray for us.

St Aelred

“One can make a rather easy transition from human friendships to friendship with God himself.” St Aelred of Riveaulx –the ‘St Bernard of the North,’ is a true man of consequence for people who care about their development of the spiritual life but also for those are seeking God.

At the age of twenty-four Aelred took up his mission as a Cistercian monk at Rievaulx in Yorkshire, England. His biography relates:

“There he pursued with rigor the friendship of Jesus Christ, gladly submitting to mortification and hard labor, to constant prayer, meditation, and study. “This is the yoke,” he said, “which does not crush but liberates the soul; this burden has wings, not weight.”

“Gracious and sensitive toward his fellow monks, Aelred became Abbot of Revesby in Lincolnshire and later abbot of the great monastery at Rievaulx. There he presided over some three hundred monks. Under Aelred’s leadership the community became a living model of peace and charity, a true colony of the kingdom of heaven. There he wrote his book, Spiritual Friendship, warmly extolling the joy and strength of friendships, divine and human.

Let us pray.

O God, who endowed Saint Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx, with the gift of fostering Christian friendship and the wisdom to lead others in the way of holiness, grant to your people, we pray, that same spirit of fraternal affection, so that in loving one another we may know the love of Christ and rejoice in the eternal possession of your supreme goodness. (from the English Missal)

Where and how are we educated?

This post was written for the Order of the Holy Sepulchre for January 8, 2022.

“The place where the educational process unfolds must be a place where all of reality is presented” (Luigi Giussani, The Risk of Education, 133).

This blog post is less about an educational theory of two well-known theologians than about staying in front of the reality we are presented as a place where grace operates in our life, that is, the inner Life of the Holy Trinity. Grace is relational not a bag of good things given by God to make us feel good.

As we move into 2022 I think we are faced with some serious questions regarding our life and work as members of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre of Jerusalem. Being in realtionship with the Holy Trinity requires us to face life squarely and with certainty. How do the real events of life of the human person affect us personally or the Church at large? What or who responds to our human questions? Do we place our constructed utopias in the path as an answer to the thirst within the heart of man?

“What does your Lord require of you, but to look at all things as they really are, to account them merely as His instruments, but to believe that good is good because He wills it, that He can bless as easily by hard stone as by bread, in the desert as in the fruitful field, if we have faith in Him who gives us the true bread from heaven?… Doubt not, then, His power to bring you through any difficulties, who gives you the command to encounter them” (St. John Henry Newman, CO).

As 2022 progresses I hope that we find the reason and hope for living: Jesus Christ here and now. Intellectually many of us know that only Jesus Christ, crucified and risen, is the answer and response to reality as it is. But does this fact impact us deep in our sinews? Nicodemus knew this when Jesus challenged him to question to whom did he belong. The same challenge remains for us when we consider our Noble Ideal: teach the faith, feed the poor, educate children, visit the elderly, or live in relation with our enemies.

May Our Lady of Palestine, pray for us.

St. John Henry Newman, pray for us.

May Blessed Bartolo Longo, intercede for us.

Synaxis of the Baptist

The Greek Church honors the Lord’s forerunner today. It is one of six times the Church recalls the liturgical memory of the Forerunner. St John the Baptist has achieved quite a place in our theology. We recall that John is the cousin of the Lord (Elizabeth’s cherished son); he was a member of an ascetic group; he’s known as a prophet; he preached the coming of the Messiah; he “spoke truth to power”, and lost his head as a consequence.

“The memory of the righteous is celebrated with hymns of praise, but the Lord’s testimony is sufficient for you, O Forerunner. You were shown in truth to be the most honorable of the prophets, for you were deemed worthy to baptize in the streams of the Jordan Him whom they foretold. Therefore, having suffered for the truth with joy, you proclaimed to those in hell God who appeared in the flesh, who takes away the sin of the world, and grants us great mercy.” (Troparion, Tone 2)

While the Roman Church has a different way of honoring the saints, the Byzantine Church has its own and immediately following the Theophany, the commemoration of Jesus’ baptism, we have John the Baptist, the holy man inextricably connected with the Theophany. And this is a critical point: saints, especially the prophets, need to be located on the liturgical calendar that closely relate to the Paschal Mystery or to the season preparing for a great feast.

What is the message of the Baptist? Why must we attend to his announcement? St. John the Baptist announces the coming of the one who would baptize with fire and the Spirit, proclaiming a new life for humanity. We believe that the Baptist precedes Jesus into Hades, the Kingdom of Death, to announce liberation to the souls held there. He is, therefore, the model of sanctity manifesting not his own glory. The controlling idea: the Son of God is the center of our attention. As a parenthetical idea, John’s image was always painted in scenes where the artist would be trying to communicate the virtues of religious life. So, at point in art history you would not see a St Pachomius or a John Cassian or a Francis of Assisi without the Baptist nearby.

John tells us three important points:

“Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world. He is the one of whom I said, ‘A man is coming after me who ranks ahead of me because he existed before me’” (John 1:29-30). “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 3:2). AND “He [Jesus] must increase; I must decrease” (John 3:30).

The Church proposes the Holy Forerunner to us today as a paradigm of what we need to do: we must “prepare the way of the Lord,” by a similar ascetical struggle John engaged in. This ascetically struggle is possible for all of us, even in small ways. The Church as a good parent that the discipline of our souls and bodies can be filled with Jesus Christ. Here we believe that to be a faithful Christian also means imitating John the Baptist. To venerate John in body and spirit is not an easy task, yet must be undertaken if we are to be in heaven with the Holy Trinity.

St John the Baptist, pray for us.

St. André Bessette

Today is the feast day of St. André Bessette. The holy brother who, as he said, was shown the door, and there he stayed.

Br. André Bessette, C.S.C., more commonly known as Brother André, or since his canonization as Saint André of Montreal, was a Brother of the Congregation of Holy Cross. He was credited with thousands of healings associated with his devotion to Saint Joseph.

On October 17, 2010, André Bessette became the first saint of the Congregation of Holy Cross when he was canonized by Pope Benedict XVI. On this day, the Church recognized that God chose a very simple man for a remarkable life of service to the Church. He had previously been beatified by Blessed John Paul II on May 23, 1982.

To learn more about St. André visit https://www.saint-joseph.org/en/

St Elizabeth Ann Seton

We have in St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774-1821) the first native born American saint today.

In her own words:

“We must pray without ceasing, in every occurrence and employment of our lives – that prayer which is rather a habit of lifting up the heart to God as in a constant communication with Him.”

“The first end I propose in our daily work is to do the will of God; secondly, to do it in the manner he wills it; and thirdly to do it because it is his will.”

“The accidents of life separate us from our dearest friends, but let us not despair. God is like a looking glass in which souls see each other. The more we are united to Him by love, the nearer we are to those who belong to Him.”

“And in every disappointment, great or small, let your heart fly directly to your dear Savior, throwing yourself in those arms for refuge against every pain and sorrow. Jesus will never leave you or forsake you.”

“God is everywhere, in the very air I breathe, yes everywhere, but in His Sacrament of the Altar He is as present actually and really as my soul within my body; in His Sacrifice daily offered as really as once offered on the Cross.”