The craze happening today regarding the new Star Wars movie is not surprising as the work of some adventuresome scholars who found that Yoda was NOT unique to the Steven Spielberg and his team of artists for the movie series. Yoda seems to be a figure known in a 14th century manuscript called “The Decretals of Gregory IX with gloss of Bernard of Parma.”
Read the article here.
It is reported today that His Holiness, Pope Francis authorized on Thursday the Congregation for the Causes of Saints to promulgate a decree regarding a miracle attributed to the intercession of Blessed Teresa (nee Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu). The Pope met privately with Cardinal Amato on December 17th. The relevant data was presented to the experts (bishops, theologians, doctors, etc) who help discern with the Pope the reputed sanctity of a candidate and the miracle said to be attributed to the person. The miracle at Blessed Teresa’s intercession was of a Brazilian man cured of brain abscesses.
No date has been set for the canonization.
Mother Teresa is likely the most recognizable Catholic in the world because of her work among the poor. Blessed Teresa was born in Albania on August 26, 1910 and died September 5, 1997. She was foundress of the Missionaries of Charity in 1950.
Reflecting on the declaration of Blessed Teresa’s being declared a saint, Archbishop Thomas D’Souza, the Archbishop of Calcutta [Kolkata] said, “Her entire life was spent doing works of mercy,” he said. “Her entire life was spent in service to the poor…she was reflecting God’s love here among the poorest of the poor, and so it comes as a very significant event in this Year of Mercy that the Holy Father has given to the Church.”
Mother Teresa was beatified by Saint John Paul II on October 19, 2003.
We have a new Benedictine oblate Blessed!
Today, we mark the liturgical memorial of a magnificent saint (all saints are magnificent!), the 16th century Carmelite friar, John of the Cross.
A friend posted the following on contemplation:
“Contemplation is nothing less than a secret, peaceful and loving infusion from God. The road of contemplation is where God himself feeds and refreshes the soul directly, without the soul’s help or meditation.
There is a remarkable transformation of the heart’s desires as a result of surrendering to God in our soul’s center. Our desire and God’s desire now join in a consonance of desire.
The nature of love is to be united, linked up with and at one with the object of its love. Only love unites and cements the soul with God. The soul lives in that which it loves.
Prayer, by its nature, involves a sense of incompleteness and thus of longing in truth.
The more God wants to give us, the more He makes us desire–even to the point of leaving us empty in order to fill us with goods. Be careful that you do not lack the desire to be poor and in want.
In following Christ in the contemplative way, without laying down one’s own ground rules and conditions, we grow into dimensions of the reality of God’s love which lie beyond what we can comprehend, experience or place in any systematic order. We are stripped of all guarantees which are rooted in the self, and we begin to live on the faith, trust and love that we have for God. We now experience God more as he is–as sheer Mystery.
Prayer ultimately leads us to go beyond anything that can be known. We travel unknowing into an unknown land and we learn how to stay there, knowing naught.”
We have arrived at Gaudete Sunday, the Third Sunday of Advent. It’s a short time before the celebration of the Lord’s Nativity. In both forms of the sacred Liturgy we encounter the Lord’s cousin, Saint John the Baptist. The supreme lesson the Baptist teaches is that we are not Jesus, which seems obvious to say but in reality so many think they are the messiah and therefore do not live in humility. Here is an excerpt from a meditation by Saint Augustine on the Prophet Saint John the Baptist:
“What does to prepare the way mean, except to pray as you ought, to be humble-minded? Take an example of humility from John himself. He is thought to be the Christ, but he says he is not what people think. He does not use the mistake of others to feed his own pride. Suppose he had said: I am the Christ. How easily would he have been believed, since that was what people were thinking before he spoke! But he did not say it. He acknowledged who he was, distinguished himself from Christ, humbled himself.”
Mary, the Mother of God is an example of the tenderness that is at the heart of the Gospel. It is also said that Mary is at the center of what is called “the revolution of tenderness” by the Pope. Today as we remember Our Lady of Guadalupe. Saint Juan Diego said in 1531:
Do listen, do be assured of it, my littlest one, that nothing at all should alarm you, should trouble you, nor in any way disturb your countenance, your heart. For am I not here, I, your mother? Are you not in the cool of my shadow? In the breeziness of my shade? Is it not I that am your source of contentment? Are you not cradled in my mantle, cuddled in the crossing of my arms? Is there anything else you need?
Today we honor Mary with a Solemnity, recalling the title she has carried as the Mother of God, the Immaculate Conception. Under the title of the Immaculate Conception is placed the USA. So, let us pray for our country and for ourselves asking for the solicitude of the Divine Maternity. As always, we need to remember that anything we say about Mary needs to be true for her Son –it all has to cohere. Saint Anselm wrote, “Without God’s Son, nothing could exist; without Mary’s Son, nothing could be redeemed.”
Saint Sophronius of Jerusalem writes:
“Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God that can never be lost. You have won from God a most glorious favor, a grace long desired, a grace of great splendor, a saving grace, an unfailing grace, a grace that will last forever. Many before you have been holy, but no one has been as favored as you, no one as blessed as you, no one as perfectly sanctified as you, no one as highly praised as you. No one else has like you been possessed from the first by purifying grace, no one else has been enlightened like you, or exalted like you, for no one has approached so close to God as you, or been enriched with such divine gifts, or endowed with such heavenly grace.”
O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee!
Today, the Church celebrates the feast Saint Ambrose of Milan, who offers us a model of public Christian witness, and he is one of the Church’s great doctors. You know most of the salient points of the person of Ambrose: In A.D. 374 Ambrose became archbishop of Milan, a city taken over by the Arian heresy. Milan was also the residence of one of the Roman co-emperors; this new vocation was forced upon him. The saint quickly embraced an ascetical life, was charitable toward the poor, and reformed the Liturgy of his mammoth diocese; endured hardships, including an assassination attempt ordered by the Western empress herself. Ambrose’s mission was to convert the heretics of his diocese back to belief in the divinity of Christ. What got him elected as the bishop was his fine reputation as an eloquent speaker; later he revealed the talent of being author on Christian doctrine and composer. Many will always credit him for his role in the conversion of Saint Augustine, whom Ambrose baptized in A.D. 387.
One of the things that sticks out about Saint Ambrose today is his insistence on being a good churchman, one who doesn’t coddle the people. This quote gives you a sense of what I mean:
For there is this difference between good and bad rulers, that the good love freedom, the bad slavery. And there is nothing in a Bishop so offensive in God’s sight, or so base before men, as not freely to declare his opinions… I prefer then, to have fellowship with your Majesty in good rather than in evil; and therefore the silence of a Bishop ought to be displeasing to your Clemency, and his freedom pleasing. For you will be implicated in the danger of my silence, you will share in the benefits of my outspokenness. I am not then an officious meddler in matters beyond my province, an intruder in the concerns of others, but I comply with my duty, I obey the commandment of our God. This I do chiefly from love and regard to you, and from a wish to preserve your well-being. But if I am not believed, or am forbidden to act on this motive, then in truth I speak from fear of offending God. (Ambrose, Epist. XL.2-3, trans. H. Walford, 1881)
Today, I am praying through the intercession of the holy bishop and doctor of the Church Ambrose for all my friends of Milan.
The sacred Liturgy, at least the Byzantine Church, recalls the person of the Holy Prophet Nahum, whose name means “God consoles.” The particularities of Nahum’s life are unknown. Historically we know that the Prophet Nahum came from the village of Elkosh (Galilee) and lived during the seventh century B.C. He died at the age of forty-five, and was buried in his native region. He is the seventh of the Twelve Minor Prophets. How fitting in this era of civil upheaval, personal anxiety, and the temptation to nihilism. The liturgical remembrance of the prophets is a little unusual for Latin Catholics but as we know, nomen omen, the name means something, the name of a person shows that person’s God-given mission to the world.
Scholars tell us that Nahum is distinguished from most of the prophets because he neither issues any call to repentance (metanoia), nor denounce Israel for their infidelity to God. The text is one of the richest in image and composition. But in the Office of Prophet that he exercised, Nahum did speak of the ruin of the Assyrian city of Nineveh because of its iniquity, the destruction of the Israelite kingdom, and the blasphemy of King Sennacherib against God. The Assyrian king Ashurbanipal died in 632 B.C., and over the next two decades, his empire began to crumble. Nineveh fell in 612 B.C. All this leads to the catastrophic demise of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 B.C.
The book of Nahum places a strong emphasis on the God’s absolute sovereignty over everything.
The Byzantine Church ask for the Prophet Nahum and Saint Nahum of Ochrid’s (December 23) for people with mental disorders.
“How is it we are saved by you, O Lord, from whom salvation comes and whose blessing is upon your people, if it is not in receiving from you the gift of loving you and being loved by you? That, Lord, is why you willed that the Son of your right hand, the Man whom you made strong for your own self, should be called Jesus, that is, Savior, for he will save his people from their sins. There is no other in whom is salvation except him who taught us to love himself when he first loved us, even to death on the cross. By loving us and holding us so dear he stirred us up to love himself, who first had loved us to the end.”
―William of Saint-Thierry