May is the Month of the Blessed Mother

We begin the month of May and therefore the month of Mary.

“The correct Marian devotion guarantees to faith the coexistence of indispensable ‘reason’ with the equally indispensable ‘reasons of the heart,’ as Pascal would say. For the Church, man is neither mere reason nor mere feeling, he is the unity of these two dimensions. The head must reflect with lucidity, but the heart must be able to feel warmth: devotion to Mary (which ‘avoids every false exaggeration on the one hand, and excessive narrow-mindedness in the contemplation of the surpassing dignity of the Mother of God on the other,’ as the Council urges) thus assures the faith its full human dimension.” (Vittorio Messori, The Ratzinger Report, Ignatius Press, 1985)

What Marian devotions will you take part in this month?

May Crowning 2019 at Monastery

On May 4, at 3pm, join the Dominican Nuns and many others as they pray the holy rosary, sing Vespers and crown the Blessed Mother with flowers. Benediction of the Most Blessed Sacrament, too.

Father Isaac Morales, OP, celebrant and preacher

Our Lady of Grace Monastery
11 Race Hill Road, North Guilford, CT

Why crown Mary?

“The queen symbol was attributed to Mary because she was a perfect follower of Christ, who is the absolute ‘crown’ of creation. She is the Mother of the Son of God, who is the messianic King. Mary is the Mother of Christ, the Word Incarnate … ‘He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High; the Lord will give Him the throne of His father David; and He will reign over the house of Jacob forever; and of His kingdom there will be no end.’ Elizabeth greeted the Blessed Virgin, pregnant with Jesus, as ‘the mother of my Lord.’ Mary is the perfect follower of Christ. The maid of Nazareth consented to God’s plan; she journeyed on the pilgrimage of faith; she listened to God’s Word and kept it in her heart; she remained steadfastly in close union with her Son, all the way to the foot of the Cross; she persevered in prayer with the Church. Thus, in an eminent way, she won the ‘crown of righteousness,’ ‘the crown of life,’ ‘the crown of glory’ that is promised to those who follow Christ.”

(St. John Paul II, Order of Crowning an Image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1987)

St Pius V

Today, we have the liturgical memorial of Pius V, pope and friar in the Order of Preachers.

Elected to the Chair of Saint Peter he renewed with great mercy and apostolic vigor, according to the decrees of the Council of Trent, the divine worship of the Latin Church plus gave new life to Christian morality and the ecclesiastical discipline and promoted the propagation of faith.

May St. Pius V intercede for us today and always.

Easter Sunday answers our questions

Friends, As we approach the great feast of Easter –joy, hope, promise, salvation– let us consider the words from the 2019 Easter message of the Norbertine Abbot General, Jos Wouters. Let us keep each other in prayer and friendship.
 
The Abbot writes:
 
Some years ago, I preached the retreat during Holy Week at the abbey: an introduction to the mysteries celebrated in the liturgy of these holy days. To one of our confreres I admitted that it was far easier to speak about Jesus’ Passion, suffering and anguish preceding the resurrection, than about Easter itself.
 
He understood. He said that we all understand physical suffering, fear of death, betrayal and utter loneliness. But Easter points at something different and altogether new. All of us are familiar with the power of death and its forbidding presence in our daily life and in the world. Hope, faith and trust belong to the realm of grace. They are Gods’ gift. It is evident that we question ourselves about the sense of our attempts to love, to strive for fraternity and solidarity, our longing to be really good and caring in this world. We seem powerless against the doom of destruction and decay, violence and injustice.
 
But illuminated by his encounter with the living Christ, Saint Paul said: “What is foolish in the eyes of the world has been chosen by God to shame the wise; what is weak in the eyes of the world has been chosen by God to shame the strong; what is insignificant and despised in the eyes of the world, what is nothing, God has chosen to destroy what is something (1 Corinthians 1: 27-29).”
 
The gospel of Easter Sunday (John 20: 1-9) leads us every year again to the bud, the first gleam of the faith that has grown into the robust tree, the bright light that lives and shines forth in the proclamation of the gospel in the Apostolic Church and in the life and teaching of the saints. The scene is a garden: a place of cherished life, life that is taken care of. In this garden stands the empty tomb where the dead body of Jesus had been laid down with respect and care. Slowly it would become clear that what seemed the end was in reality a new beginning.
 
The confusion of Mary of Magdala, the silence of Peter and the faith of the disciple who ran faster than Peter, but entered the tomb after him, are all signs of an encounter with new life, with hope that takes root in our own life when we meditate on this “nothing” that destroys evil and death, which seem so all-overpowering. The peaceful and silent garden in the morning brims with life. Together with Mary Magdalene, Peter and the nameless disciple, we need to attune our hearts to the unexpected newness, to this seed of hope that buds in the garden. The mute lips of the empty tomb inarticulately speak of the victory of the crucified Christ. God proclaims unambiguously that He recognizes himself in this powerless Messiah who loved to the end.
 
The liturgy of Easter-tide will lead us into the fullness of the Pascal creed. We will need, however, to return often to this hesitant beginning. It is so tempting to give in to world-wise cynicism which is nothing but civilly disguised despair. Violence, decay, corruption, abuse – all forms of evil seem so imposing and powerful. In the words of psalm 11, 3 (11:3) we could ask “When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do?” The gospel of Easter Sunday answers this question. All genuine love and care are stronger than life-destroying evil. Death does not have the last word. The Father of Jesus does. And He is love.
May we find ways to live up to this faith in our communities as they are. May God’s Spirit be your breath.
 
Easter 2019,
Jos Wouters, o.praem., abbot-general
 
#Norbertine
#OPraem

Our Lady of Paris 2019

On Christmas Day in 1886 Paul Claudel attended High Mass at the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. He was not particularly moved by the ceremony, which probably was presided over by the newly appointed archbishop. Claudel left and then returned for vespers. “It was the gloomiest winter day and the darkest rainy afternoon over Paris,” he wrote. He listened to the psalms and the Magnificat.

For the rest of his life he recalled that he “stood near the second pillar at the entrance to the chancel, to the right, on the side of the sacristy.” There one finds a fourteenth-century statue of the Virgin and Child. “Then occurred the event which dominates my entire life,” he wrote.

“In an instant, my heart was touched and I believed. I believed with such a strength of adherence, with such an uplifting of my entire being, with such powerful conviction, with such a certainty leaving no room for any kind of doubt, that since then all the books, all the arguments, all the incidents and accidents of a busy life have been unable to shake my faith, nor indeed to affect it in any way.”

UPDATE:

THE VAULT HELD!!! the fire stayed ABOVE it!! Only a small part of the vault collapsed. The interior seems to be relatively untouched.

Apparently the great rose window is intact, though the two smaller ones (the north and south windows) are probably gone.

French reporter who was allowed into Notre Dame de Paris with President Macron on a brief 5-7 minute tour is saying the inside is largely preserved, with the Altar and the walls intact, even the rows of chairs still in place. There is a massive hole in the roof obviously. The Crown of Thorns and the Cloak of Saint Louis had been removed previously safe.

St Simeon of Thessalonica

On the Eastern liturgical calendar we have our father among the saints, Simeon, Archbishop of Thessalonica. The Liturgy speaks of Simeon in this manner:

By the light of your wisdom and virtue, O holy father, Simeon, the spirit of God revealed you as a true shepherd of Salonica and a divinely inspired master of the mysteries of grace. Because of this, we look upon you as a teacher sent by God himself, and in our joy we exclaim: Glory to Christ for glorifying you. Glory to him who crowned you. Glory to him who gives us grace through you.

The point of the troparion is to highlight Simeon’s gifts of being a shepherd and a teacher of the divine mysteries. Gifts we ought to beg the Holy Spirit to bestow upon us. The faith community is desperate to have great shepherds and teachers again! Yet, St Simeon has often gifts we aspire to live by.

A New Skete hagiographical sketch of the archbishop says thus. “Simeon was a native of Constantinople, where he also became a monk. In 1416 he was made archbishop of Thessalonica. During most of his episcopate, the city was under a vise-like threat from Venetians on one side and Turks on the other. In those years of turmoil, all looked to Simeon for his pastoral prudence and courage under stress.

Simeon was a successor to Gregory Palamas in the see of Thessalonica, and heir to his theology, refracted through the humanism of Nicholas Cavasilas: “He was the noblest of the latter’s pupils. Simeon never claimed to be a mystic himself, but like his master, he believed that the highest mystical experience was to be found in the liturgy. And though he argued against the Latins, he clearly longed to reach an understanding with them. His peacemaking attitude and compassionate administration made him so well loved in his diocese that when he died, six years after the city had been sold to the Venetians and four months before it fell to the Turks, not only did the Italians mourn him along with the Greeks, but the Jews, a race that seldom had cause to love Byzantine hierarchs, joined sincerely in the mourning.

From Simeon’s writings we have descriptions of the last use of the cathedral rites of Byzantium, which in his day had been replaced in Constantinople herself by Palestinian monastic forms. While the archbishop lamented the change, he made practical pastoral adjustments in his own churches to accommodate the new forms.

In addition to his liturgical works, his writing spanned political, historical, canonical, dogmatic, apologetic, moral, and pastoral themes as well. He may be considered the last true theologian of the Byzantine period.

After his death in September, 1429, he was revered by many as a saint. But, perhaps because of the centuries of Turkish occupation, it was not until modern times that he was officially canonized. This occurred in his own cathedral in Thessalonica in 1981.