Dominican saints & blesseds – Page 4

Litany to Blessed Piergiorgio Frassati

Today is Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati‘s 112th birthday. As a friend who brought this Litany to my attention said, “it’s a great piece of reflection for students and for those of us looking to be life-long learners.” Let‘s pray to Blessed Piergiorgio for the grace of being a better friend, Christian, apostle and person of the Beatitudes.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Christ, have mercy on us.

Lord, have mercy on us.

Christ hear us. Christ, graciously hear us.

God the Father of heaven, have mercy on us.

God the Son, Redeemer of the world, have mercy on us.

God the Holy Spirit, have mercy on us.

Holy Trinity, one God, have mercy on us.

Holy Mary,

pray for us. (repeat after each line)

All the angels and saints,

Blessed Pier Giorgio,

Loving son and brother,

Support of family life,

Continue reading Litany to Blessed Piergiorgio Frassati

Saint Raymond Penyafort

O God, who
adorned the Priest Saint Raymond with the virtue of outstanding mercy and
compassion for sinners and for captives, grant us, through his intercession,
that, released from slavery to sin, we may carry out in freedom of spirit what
is pleasing to you.

The wags will say that Saint Raymond is the only certified canon lawyer who is in heaven and that we ought to pray that Saint Raymond to guide other canonists to holiness.

From a letter by Saint Raymond Penyafort

The preacher of
God’s truth has told us that all who want to live righteously in Christ will
suffer persecution. If he spoke the truth and did not lie, the only exception
to this general statement is, I think, the person who either neglects, or does
not know how, to live temperately, justly and righteously in this world.

Continue reading Saint Raymond Penyafort

All Saints and All Souls Days in religious orders

The Church is not liturgically monolithic: let’s consider the various observances of feasts of All Saints and the Commemoration of the Faithful Departed (All Souls) in various religious orders:

All Saints

November 5: the Society of Jesus
November 7: the Order of Preachers
November 13: the Order of St Benedict; Order of St Augustine; the Trinitarian Order
November 29: the Franciscan Families

All Souls

October 5: the Capuchin Order
November 5: the Franciscan Families
November 8: the Order of Preachers
November 13: the Carthusians
November 14: the Order of St Benedict; the Trinitarian Order
November 15: the Order of Carmel
November 16: the Servite Order

Translation of the Relics of Saint Dominic

O Light of the Church, teacher of truth, rose of patience, ivory of chastity; you freely pour forth the waters of wisdom, preacher of grace, unite us with the blessed.

(Magnificat antiphon for Vespers; O Lumen)

In Churches administered by the Order of Friars Preachers (the Dominicans) the faithful would have heard the Mass prayers not for Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter but for the Translation of the Relics of Saint Dominic. That is, the observance of a secondary feast of Saint Dominic.

What is celebrated is not the mere moving of a coffin from one place to another but the recognition by the Church that the person in question has the “odor of sanctity.” That is, he or she is infallibly with the Blessed Trinity. The Dominican friars did in fact, move the body of their holy father from a humble place of burial to a more noble one, but this feast really marks an ecclesial event recognizing the sign that Dominic was holy man.

It ought to be noted, however, Dominic was buried as he wished, “under the feet of his brothers. in the Church of Saint Nicholas de Vineis. Known among the faithful to be a blessed man who loved everyone and was in turn loved by all, Dominic asked the Lord to heal people of their infirmities. Miracles happened and were acknowledged by many except for the Dominicans; they in fact destroyed the offerings left as gifts of thanksgiving at the grave of Father Dominic. Pope Gregory IX, on 24 May 1233, sanctioned the moving of the body that happened in the presence of the archbishop of Ravenna, Theodoric and the second Master of the Order Blessed Jordan of Saxony to a new marble tomb during the Dominican’s General Chapter held in Bologna. This gesture inaugurated the process of canonizing Dominic which happened on 3 July 1234 by Gregory IX.

Continue reading Translation of the Relics of Saint Dominic

God so desires her (our) salvation

In these days following the feast of Saint Catherine of Siena, I thought I would post this rather beautiful extract from one of the saint’s Dialogues. It shows the depth of love that Catherine knew she had with her Savior, her lover.

“O eternal, infinite Good! O mad lover! And you have need of your creature? It seems so to me, for you act as if you could not live without her, in spite of the fact that you are Life itself, and everything has life from you and nothing can have life without you. Why then are you so mad? Because you have fallen in love with what you have made! You are pleased and delighted over her within yourself, as if you were drunk with desire for her salvation. She runs away from you and you go looking for her. She strays and you draw closer to her. You clothed yourself in our humanity, and nearer than that you could not have come.”

Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, tr. Suzanne Noffke (New York: Paulist Press 1980) 325.

Saint Catherine of Siena

Today is the transferred feast of the great Dominican saint, Catherine of Siena.

Since her feast day is April 29th, and this year the 29th was Good Shepherd Sunday, and the Sunday celebration is rarely trumped by a saint, the feast moved to the next available day.

Being that I work at a Dominican church, we celebrated Catherine’s gift to the Church with great solemnity. Cardinal Donald Wuerl and Sister Elaine Goodell, PBVM were honored with the “Saint Catherine of Siena Award” and Brother Ignatius Perkins, OP was inaugurated with the new chair of Catholic Ethics at the Dominican House of Studies. Brother Ignatius is currently a professor of Nursing at Aquinas College, Nashville.

Here for the celebration were the Dominican Friars, a secular priest, a Jesuit priest, with several congregation of sisters including the Franciscan Sisters of the Eucharist, the Hawthorne Dominicans, the Dominicans of Nashville, the Sparkhill Dominicans, the Apostles of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and the Sisters of Life.

“Set the world ablaze”

Blessed John of Fiesole –Fra Angelico

Too many in the world know today’s Dominican blessed for a nickname given to him more than his religious name. The Dominicans celebrate Blessed John of Fiesole, the post modern world would know him as Fra Angelico (1387-1455), people in his time also knew him as Guido. His talent and grace was indeed rare among people. Only in 1982 did the Church with Pope John Paul II recognize John’s holiness.

A prior post gives a very brief history and the liturgical prayer for Blessed John’s feast day here and a 2009 post is here.

Recently, a Dominican friar of the English Province spoke to Vatican Radio saying this of his friar:

“…is to give to others the fruit of our contemplation and painting…first to be communicated and then to be precisely the fruit of contemplation…. because vision is one of the elements of contemplation…traditionally for us heaven will mean the beatific vision…”

Blessed John, Fra Angelico as he’s known, was the angelic friar: “… because of the purity, the holiness of his own life…the subject matter…the extraordinary beauty, purity reflected…”

Father Robert Ombres, OP

Raymond of Penyafort Fellow in Canon Law at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford

Blessed Jordan of Saxony

In the Order of Friars Preachers today is the feast of day of Blessed Jordan of Saxony. Blessed Jordan, from Paderborn, Germany (a Saxon noble) known for his piety and charity, was educated at the famed University of Paris. In 1220, he was admitted to the Order by Saint Dominic himself in and a year later was the Prior Provincial for the friars in Lombardy, and a year later he succeeded Dominic as the Master of the Order.

Blessed Jordan’s preaching was known to be powerful to the point of bringing Saint Albert the Great to the Order and by extension you might say that he brought Thomas Aquinas to the fraternity. Jordan died in a shipwreck off the coast of Syria in 1237 on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Pope Leo XII beatified Jordan in 1825.

The Collect is noted here.

Saint Thomas Aquinas

O God, who made Saint Thomas Aquinas outstanding in his zeal for holiness and his study of sacred doctrine, grant us, we pray, that we may understand what he taught one imitate what he accomplished.

Saint Thomas Aquinas, patron of Catholic school teacher and researchers, pray for us.

“Man’s good and what makes man good in God’s sight does not, principally, consist in external acts. But in the external actions we must use discretion and make charity the measure of our use of them”

Saint Albert the Great

St Albert the Great reminds us that there is
friendship between science and faith and that through their vocation to the
study of nature, scientists can take an authentic and fascinating path of
holiness.

His extraordinary openmindedness is also revealed in a cultural feat
which he carried out successfully, that is, the acceptance and appreciation of
Aristotle’s thought. In St Albert’s time, in fact, knowledge was spreading of
numerous works by this great Greek philosopher, who lived a quarter of a
century before Christ, especially in the sphere of ethics and metaphysics. They
showed the power of reason, explained lucidly and clearly the meaning and
structure of reality, its intelligibility and the value and purpose of human
actions. St Albert the Great opened the door to the complete acceptance in
medieval philosophy and theology of Aristotle’s philosophy, which was
subsequently given a definitive form by St Thomas. This reception of a pagan
pre-Christian philosophy, let us say, was an authentic cultural revolution in
that epoch. Yet many Christian thinkers feared Aristotle’s philosophy, a
non-Christian philosophy, especially because, presented by his Arab
commentators, it had been interpreted in such a way, at least in certain
points, as to appear completely irreconcilable with the Christian faith. Hence
a dilemma arose: are faith and reason in conflict with each other or not?

This
is one of the great merits of St Albert: with scientific rigour he studied
Aristotle’s works, convinced that all that is truly rational is compatible with
the faith revealed in the Sacred Scriptures. In other words, St Albert the
Great thus contributed to the formation of an autonomous philosophy, distinct
from theology and united with it only by the unity of the truth. So it was that
in the 13th century a clear distinction came into being between these two
branches of knowledge, philosophy and theology, which, in conversing with each
other, cooperate harmoniously in the discovery of the authentic vocation of
man, thirsting for truth and happiness: and it is above all theology, that St
Albert defined as “emotional knowledge”, which points out to human
beings their vocation to eternal joy, a joy that flows from full adherence to
the truth.

Pope Benedict XVI

March 2010