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!

St Silouan the Athonite

Today we celebrate the liturgical memory of the early twentieth century saint, Silouan the Athonite (+1938). For many Christians, East and West in the North America St. Silouan is an unknown personage but he is worth knowing as one his biographers writes he has “a sense of cosmic unity and the way that we are called to love and have compassion on all things:

He who has the Holy Spirit in him, to however slight a degree, sorrows day and night for all mankind. His heart is filled with pity for all God’s creatures…For them, more than himself, he prays day and night, that all may repent and know the Lord” (352).The Lord bestows such rich grace on His chosen that they embrace the whole earth, the whole world, with that love (367).

Once I needlessly killed a fly. the poor thing crawled on the ground, hurt and mangled, and for three whole days I wept over my cruelty to a living creature, and to this day the incident remains in my memory….One day, going from the Monastery to Old Russikon-on-the- Hill, I saw a dead snake on my path which had been chopped in pieces, and each piece writhed convulsively, and I was filled with pity for every living creature, every suffering thing in creation, and I wept bitterly before God (469).That green leaf on the tree which you needlessly plucked – it was not wrong, only rather a pity for the little leaf. The heart that has learned to love feels sorry for every created thing (376).The Spirit of God teaches the soul to love every living thing so that she would have no harm come to even a green leaf on a tree, or trample underfoot a flower of the field. Thus the Spirit of God teaches love towards all, and the soul feels compassion for every being (469).