St Ambrose –the saint we need, and want

Saint Ambrose presenting to God the letter of Emperor Theodore, Louis Lagrenée 1764, Paris, St. Marguerite Church

We have the liturgical memorial of Saint Ambrose, bishop, confessor and doctor of the Church.

Ambrose is quite an interesting person and one we ought to think about more often. His personal history is daunting to wrap the mind around: a convert, a motivating speaker, a provocative thinker, a reformer of civil and ecclesiastical works, an author, a composer (the Te Deum), a zealous preacher and valiant defender of the Christian Faith, a worker of miracles, a man of virtue, and a man of the people. He is the saint the Holy Trinity has given us, he is the saint I want and the one I need.

As said before in this forum that saints beget saints, one great example is that Ambrose baptized Augustine.

He was fast-tracked to the ministry of bishop. I merely point this fact out because he was acclaimed to be bishop of Milan prior to be baptized. One biographer noted that “He accepted holy Baptism from an Orthodox priest and, passing through all the ranks of the Church clergy in just seven days, on December 7, 374 he was consecrated Bishop of Mediolanum [Milan].” Today’s feast, hence, doesn’t commemorate a saint’s death as most often happens saint’s memorials, but Ambrose’s feast is on the day he was consecrated to the episcopal order.

Reading up on St Ambrose I realized that I hope this happens to me: St Ambrose, who departed to the Lord on the night of Holy Pascha. What better day than to make one’s transitus to the Lord of Life than that of the day we celebrate Easter! His death on Pascha encapsulated all that he believed, preacher and loved.

The Church’s liturgical hymns are key in our forming our own theological heart and mind. Below the Troparion and Kontakion tells us what the faithful and the magisterial church believe when thinking of Saint Ambrose.

In truth you were revealed to your flock as a rule of faith,an image of humility and a teacher of abstinence; your humility exalted you; your poverty enriched you.Hierarch Father Ambrose, entreat Christ our God that our souls may be saved. (Troparion)

You shone forth with divine doctrine eclipsing the deception of Arius, shepherd and initiate of the mysteries, Ambrose.you worked miracles through the power of the Spirit, healing various passions; righteous father, entreat Christ our God to grant us His great mercy. (Kontakion)

Today I am praying for two monk-friends named for Ambrose, the Parish of St Ambrose and its pastor in North Branford, Connecticut, the Fraternity of Communion and Liberation whose origins is that of the Diocese of Milan and the Benedictine monks who colonized just outside the City of Milan. AND I am praying for my honey bees and fellow CT beekeepers.

St. Nicholas the Wonderworker

Today is the feast of St. Nicholas the Wonderworker, archbishop of Myra in Lycia. 

The Byzantine Church honors Nicholas in several beautiful texts. This one taken from the sticheron from the Lamp-Lighting Psalms, teaches us: 

“What crowns of praise shall we confer upon the saintly Nicholas? Once present in the flesh in Myra, he is present in spirit to all who love him purely. He is the leader and defender of everyone, a comforter in distress, and a haven of all in danger, a pillar of piety and conqueror for believers. For his sake, Christ overcame enemies and shows us great mercy!”

Nicholas has captured the imagination of many through the years because of charity which morphed into gift-giving. He’s not remembered in popular culture as a teacher of the Christian Gospel, or the holy bishop who faithfully served the Divine Mysteries, or for saving the innocent from death, or calming storms, nor challenging the false teachers. And yet, he’s more than all these things. He allowed the Lord to speak eloquently through his life and thus comes to us in 2021 as a friend and disciple of the Lord Jesus.

Would that we could live and act as Nicholas did in the face of false teaching by a life of virtue and charity, by listening to sacred Scripture, and by worthily receiving the Divine Mysteries (the sacraments)? We prayerfully ask  St. Nicholas to beg Jesus Christ to save us.

As Knights and Dames of the Order of the Holy Sepulchre it seems that to be renewed for mission we have to consider what one of St. Nicholas’ biographers wrote of him:

“In serving the Lord the youth was fervent of spirit, and in his proficiency with questions of faith he was like an Elder, who aroused the wonder and deep respect of believers. Constantly at work and vivacious, in unceasing prayer, the priest Nicholas displayed great kind-heartedness towards the flock, and towards the afflicted who came to him for help, and he distributed all his inheritance to the poor.”

What more can be said of our eucharistic vocation and mission as members of the EOHSJ? What more can asked of us than to be keen witnesses of St. Nicholas in the world today? May we, in fact, have our sins forgiven and be brought one day into perfect communion with the most holy Trinity.

 St. Nicholas, pray for us.

Dorothy Day’s sainthood cause advances

The diocesan phase of the cause for canonization of the Servant of God Dorothy Day closes officially on December 8, 2021. The Archdiocese of New York will now send the gathered documentation to the Holy See’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints. Holy Mass will note this advancement will be offered by Timothy Michael Cardinal Dolan at St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 7:30 p.m. on the Feast of the Immaculate Conception.

The diocesan work for the Cause was overseen by an army of people (circa 100) coordinated by the Dorothy Day Guild: George Horton and Msgr. Gregory Mustaciuolo, vice postulators, members of the Ignatian Volunteers, Day’s granddaughter Martha Hennessy and supported by the current and previous two archbishops of New York. The collaboration had the goal of keeping the process local and simple so that it abided with the focus that Day had in life.

Just to give you a sense of the work in gathering Dorothy’s written work: it measures 32 square feet. No doubt that what Day communicated contributed to the conversion of countless people.

And so we pray for God’s grace in this proposal of Dorothy Day being recognized as a saint. In the spirit of Day, we are all called to be saints. As Day loved the saints, so we ought to be real saints.

Servant of God Dorothy Day, pray for us.

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)