Author: Paul Zalonski

Seeking the Kingdom?

“Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places” (Ephesians 1.3), and especially with the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. As baptised and confirmed Christians, we know intimately the depth and scope and challenge of the Eucharistic Mystery, both as Sacrifice and as Sacrament. 

Taking for just a moment the Lord’s parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30) in reviewing our lives, let us focus on the third servant. The greatest mistake of the third servant in the parable of the talents is not that he buried his talent. His great failing is that he allowed fear to impede the fruition of his God-given talent. To surrender to fear of risking anything in God’s service is to reject the Lord’s call to live a life fully formed and informed by the eternal Word of God. The Holy Spirit’s gift of “the fear of the Lord” is something else entirely: the true fear of the Lord is the reverent love and willing service offered by those who belong to Christ and who seek first his Kingdom and his righteousness (Matthew 6.33).

Keeping one’s talent safe from risks, that is, secure from question and challenge, is not faithfulness to God. We know from the saints and spiritual masters that true fidelity to Christ does not consist in complacency or in leaving the status quo unchanged. 

Advent is a fitting time to ask ourselves: 

  • Do we harbor an attitude that masks habits of passivity, fear of conflict, paralysis, comfort seeking? 
  • Do we lack trust in the promptings of the Holy Spirit? 
  • What do I need to do, concretely, to enter through the eye of the needle to embrace my vocation as a follower of Christ? 
  • How does the parable of the talents challenge my reality as it is? 
  • What does my Examination of Conscience reveal to me about what would need to change so that I can fully live the gifts of faith, hope and charity?

When we act eucharistically and with openness to the Holy Spirit, we give up the need to control the outcome of our actions, allowing ourselves to enter into the story of the unfolding of God’s Kingdom in his Church, “which he obtained with his own Blood” (Acts 20.28). When Knights and Dames of the Holy Sepulchre act in faith rather than from servile fear, then the Holy Spirit is truly at work in us. This is the spiritual challenge before us this Advent.

Blessed Charles de Foucauld

Blessed and soon to be sainted in 2022 Charles de Foucauld failed in his efforts to found a religious community during his lifetime, and he experienced much sorrow and pain and spiritual darkness and obscurity even regarding his own work. How close he is to my own experience.

But in a letter of December 1, 1916 –never posted– “the universal brother” wrote these words: “When we can suffer and love, we can do much, it’s the most that we can do in this world: We feel our suffering, but we don’t always feel that we love and that’s an additional suffering! But we know that we want to love and to want to love is to love.”

In way I take Blessed Charles’ words to be similar to the pious sentiment of “offering it up.” What? The phrase indicates that we ought to connect our sufferings to those of Jesus Christ. He knows that our suffering does have meaning and for it to be fruitful, that is, to be generative of something new, we give our suffering and pain to God the Father. We are meant to give our sufferings Jesus Christ so that he can do something useful with them. St. John Henry Newman has written a brilliantly inspired discourse on the interior sufferings of Christ in which he posits that the interior sufferings were indeed much greater. (https://www.newmanreader.org/works/discourses/discourse16.html)

Father James Brent, O.P. teaches us the basis of this practice. The video is a beautiful way to connect to a venerable spiritual practice.

Happy feast day of Blessed Charles de Foucauld!

St. Edmund Campion and his companions

The Church liturgically recalls the memory of the great and holy English martyrs of the Venerable English College in Rome. The Jesuit Saint Edmund and 43 others is rather striking because of the intimate connection to the Roman seminary situated to form English Catholic priests. This was the time of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign and the height of Catholic persecution. Today is known by many as Martyrs’ Day.

That forty-four men who were executed, tortured, or incarcerated for giving good witness, that is, ministering the Catholic faith to their own people in England. One of Campion is remembered for what is called “Campion’s Brag,” his clear and undisputed defense of the Catholic faith. He noted that his mission was to “justify the said faith by the common wisdom of the laws standing yet in force and practice” concluding that “The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored.”

The “Second Apostle of Rome,” St. Philip Neri, living opposite the English College used to greet the students with the words Salvete Flores Martyrum (Hail! flowers of the Martyrs). 

The grace we ask St. Edmund Campion and his companions to secure for us is to abide in, to be attuned to, the truth of the Catholic Faith.

Oratorian Father advances toward sainthood

Today, Pope Francis agreed to advance the Servant of God Father Giorgio Guzzetta, C.O., to the next step on the road to sainthood. The announcement came in the normal course of a meeting between the Roman Pontiff and the Prefect of the Congregation for Saints.

Father Giorgio Guzzetta (April 23, 1682 – 21 November 1756) is a well known priest in the Italo Greek Byzantine Catholic Church. Guzzetta was a priest of the Congregation of the Oratory in Palermo, Italy.

The incorrupt remains of Father Giorgio Guzzetta rest in the Cathedral of Piana degli Albanesi. The Congregation of the Oratory has another son that will be raised to the altar and this one as a Byzantine Catholic priest. He was tireless worker for the unity of the Eastern and Western Churches. He is considered to be “illustrious father Giorgio Guzzetta, an exemplary character not only from a spiritual point of view, but also as a great luminary of Arbëreshe culture.”

The process for beatification was begun by the Eparchy of Piana of the Albanesi on 26 October 2001 under the direction of Bishop Sotir Ferrara. Father Giorgio will now carry the title of Venerable Servant of God until a miracle is determined for advancement to beatificaiton.

A brief biography for Father Giorgio may be read here but it is in Italian AND the Congregation for Saints has this biography. In 2007, Guzzetta’s home eparchy celebrated the 250th anniversary of his death when the bishop and other scholars presented the state of his Cause for sainthood, his Oratorian spirituality, and his importance in the Church.

The prayer for Father Giorgio’s beatification:

Blessed are You, Lord, God of our Fathers, because you raised up Your Servant Father Giorgio Guzzetta in your Church, consecrated with a prophetic spirit and full of apostolic charity in favor of your people. We humbly beg you to glorify him on earth, so that we can invoke him as our intercessor at your heavenly throne. By the mercies of Jesus Christ, your only begotten Son, with whom you are blessed together with your All-Holy, Good and Life-giving Spirit, now and always and forever and ever. Amen.

Venerable Servant Father Giorgio Guzzetta, pray for us.

New Giussani Book: The Meaning of Birth

Brand new.

The 1980 conversation now turned into a book, The Meaning of Birth, is due out on December 7, and available for pre-order from Slant Books.

The reviewers of the book which can be read from the link above will draw you into reading not only for information but with regard for human and spiritual formation.

Those who are familiar with Bill Congdon’s artwork will note that the cover bears his piece on the Incarnation.

Thanks to Greg Wolfe!

St Luke

A blessed and glorious Feast of the Holy Apostle, Evangelist, Physician, and Iconographer Luke, to all celebrating today; a happy patronal day to all bearing his name.

(Icon of St Luke by the hand of Michael Kapeluck, Carnegie, PA)

Blessed Bartolo Longo

Today, 5 October, is the liturgical memorial of a former satanist priest revert Catholic and promoter of the Rosary. Today our reflection and call to deeper faith has us meditating on the life and work of Blessed Bartolo Longo (1841-1926), who according to Pope John Paul II, the “Apostle of the Rosary.” The witness of Longo is one that is personal in two ways: my baptismal parish is Our Lady of Pompeii where the Rosary has been prayed fervently for years, and in mid-October I’ll be invested in the Order of the Holy Sepulchre, a group to which Blessed Bartolo also belonged. The parish the image and relic of Blessed Bartolo hangs in quite guidance of those who pass by. While I have a strong connection with the Order of Preachers, Longo was a professed member of the Third Order Laity, now known as the Fraternity of St Dominic. The Lay Dominican vocation gave certain direction to Longo which formed his heart and mind anew dedicating himself to Truth, Beauty and Goodness.

A brief biography of Blessed Bartolo Longo can be read here.

This prayer are caught under the bondage of Satanism and the occult:

“O Blessed Rosary of Mary, sweet chain that unites us to God, bond of love that unites us to the angels, tower of salvation against the assaults of Hell, safe port in our universal shipwreck, we will never abandon you. You will be our comfort in the hour of death: yours our final kiss as life ebbs away. And the last word from our lips will be your sweet name, O Queen of the Rosary of Pompei, O dearest Mother, O Refuge of Sinners, O Sovereign Consoler of the Afflicted. May you be everywhere blessed, today and always, on earth and in heaven.”

blessed hermann of reichenau

A little known blessed of the Church is the monk, Blessed Hermann of Reichenau, known also as Hermann the Cripple. He was an 11th century Benedictine monk who is said to be a genius, a polymath, and who needed help moving his body. From his hagiographers we learn of a quite a remarkable person. While the person of Hermann is not well-known yet is best remembered for being the composer of hymns. Two notable hymns are his Salve Regina and Alma Redemptoris Mater. Brother Hermann’s vocation was not his intellectual abilities but his call to the monastic way of life taking vows in 1043. It is said that he was entrusted by his parents to the learned Abbot Berno, at the age of seven, at the Benedictine abbey on Reichenau Island on the lake of Constance.

A few thoughts on Blessed Hermann can be read here.

The cult of Hermann was officially approved by the Holy See in 1863.

Beate Hermanne, ora pro nobis!