Cyril Vasil ordained bishop

CVasil arms.jpgAs I noted a few weeks ago, Jesuit Father Cyril Vasil, 44, was nominated by the Pope to be Secretary for the Congregation for the Eastern Churches serving the Church with Cardinal Leonardo Sandri. He was ordained a bishop today in the papal Basilica of Saint Mary Major, across the street from where he resided and taught Eastern Canon Law at the Pontifical Oriental Institute. Today, is also the Archbishop’s 22nd anniversary ordination as a priest and both ordinations were done by the same bishop.

As his coat of arms suggest, Archbishop is “Always Prepared” to serve the Lord and the Church.

May God grant Archbishop Cyril many years!
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Lauda Sion

The Church has been given the gift of the enduring Presence of the Lord in the Eucharist. Last week celebrated Trinity Sunday and today Corpus Christi. This feast dates to when Pope Urban IV (1261-64) inaugurated the Feast of Corpus Christi and asked Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-74) to compose the the Liturgy for the Church. A striking feature of today’s Liturgy is singing of a poetic called a sequence, one of four done in the current liturgical life of the Church, though historically there were poetics for all the major feast of the Lord and others for saints. Today’s marvelous sequence Lauda Sion,is sung prior to the proclamation of the Gospel. As all sacred texts do, Lauda Sion expresses Catholic faith in the Body and Blood of Christ. The three verses of Lauda Sion are given here but you may pray the entire text by visiting here.

Words a nature’s course derange,

that in Flesh the bread may change

and the wine in Christ’s own Blood.

Does it pass thy comprehending?

Faith, the law of light transcending,

leaps to things not understood.

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Hail! Bread of the Angels, broken,

for us pilgrims food, and token

of the promise by Christ spoken,

children’s meat, to dogs denied!

Shown in Isaac’s dedication,

in the Manna’s preparation,

in the Paschal immolation,

in old types pre-signified.

Jesus, Shepherd mild and meek,

shield the poor, support the weak;

help all who Thy pardon sue,

placing all their trust in You:

fill them with Your healing grace!

Source of all we have or know,

feed and lead us here below.

grant that with Your Saints above,

sitting at the feast of love

we may see You face to face.

Amen. Alleluia.

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I devoutly adore the Presence of Christ



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Hidden God, devoutly I adore Thee, truly present underneath
these veils: all my heart subdues itself before Thee, since it all before Thee
faints and fails.

Not to sight, or taste, or touch be credit hearing only do
we trust secure; I believe, for God the Son has said it- Word of truth that
ever shall endure.

On the cross was veiled Thy Godhead’s splendor, here Thy
manhood lies hidden too; unto both alike my faith I render, and, as sued the
contrite thief, I sue.

Though I look not on Thy wounds with Thomas, Thee, my Lord,
and Thee, my God, I call: make me more and more believe Thy promise, hope in
Thee, and love Thee over all.

O memorial of my Savior dying, Living Bread, that gives life
to man; make my soul, its life from Thee supplying, taste Thy sweetness, as on
earth it can.

Deign, O Jesus, Pelican of heaven, me, a sinner, in Thy
Blood to lave, to a single drop of which is given all the world from all its
sin to save.

Contemplating, Lord, Thy hidden presence, grant me what I thirst for and implore, in the revelation of Thy essence to behold Thy glory evermore, Amen.

Humanity bears the profound mark of the Trinity

trinity.jpg… we contemplate the Most Holy Trinity as Jesus
introduced us to it. He revealed to us that God is love “not in the
oneness of a single Person, but in the Trinity of one substance” (Preface).
He is the Creator and merciful Father; he is the Only-Begotten Son, eternal
Wisdom incarnate, who died and rose for us; he is the Holy Spirit who moves all
things, cosmos and history, toward their final, full recapitulation. Three
Persons who are one God because the Father is love, the Son is love, the Spirit
is love. God is wholly and only love, the purest, infinite and eternal love. He
does not live in splendid solitude but rather is an inexhaustible source of
life that is ceaselessly given and communicated. To a certain extent we can
perceive this by observing both the macro-universe: our earth, the planets, the
stars, the galaxies; and the micro-universe: cells, atoms, elementary
particles. The “name” of the Blessed Trinity is, in a certain sense,
imprinted upon all things because all that exists, down to the last particle,
is in relation; in this way we catch a glimpse of God as relationship and
ultimately, Creator Love. All things derive from love, aspire to love and move
impelled by love, though naturally with varying degrees of awareness and
freedom. “O Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the
earth!” (Ps 8: 1) the Psalmist exclaims. In speaking of the
“name”, the Bible refers to God himself, his truest identity. It is
an identity that shines upon the whole of Creation, in which all beings for the
very fact that they exist and because of the “fabric” of which they
are made point to a transcendent Principle, to eternal and infinite Life which
is given, in a word, to Love. “In him we live and move and have our
being”, St Paul said at the Areopagus of Athens (Acts 17: 28). The
strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: love
alone makes us happy because we live in a relationship, and we live to love and
to be loved. Borrowing an analogy from biology, we could say that imprinted
upon his “genome”, the human being bears a profound mark of the
Trinity, of God as Love.


(Pope Benedict XVI, 7 June 2009)

Connecticut Catholics might be…

… forced to keep quiet by the State if the current law on lobbying stands. States officials in the Ethics Office are applying an unjust law to the Catholic Diocese of Bridgeport; if the Catholics today, other Christian groups, Jews and Muslims tomorrow. As Bishop Lori correctly states, the Diocese of Bridgeport is not a lobbyist but a church. And as a church is the bishops and priests are called upon to teach, govern and to sanctify. The SB 1098 and other state bills that seek to change the mission of the Church violates constitutional freedoms. This is a matter, therefore, of all people’s First Amendment rights, not just about the rights of Catholics to exercise their freedom to speak and assemble publicly. Efforts now must begin to work for the current rules for lobbyists to be changed and the ruling of the Ethics Office overturned. Civil and intelligent discourse please! The Fox News report is interesting because it reports the claim that the officials in the Ethics Office are objective. Hmmm, I don’t see the evidence of that in this case. So, I can’t say that I believe for one minute that the CT State Office of Ethics is content neutral, particularly when it comes to  the Roman Catholic Church in Connecticut, and more so when it comes to Bishop William Lori.  

Fox news reports

Where are all the priests?

Priestly Ordination 2.jpgA recent article on who has competence to remove priests from ministry permanently is interesting and yet depressing. But it is a matter of reality that some men ordained to the priesthood of Jesus Christ do not remain priests. To think since the Second Vatican Council, as some researchers and commentators have  claimed, 100,000 priests have left their vocation as priests. If true, this fact is overwhelming to grasp.

One of my intentions is to pray for the priests who have left as well as though who currently serve as priests and seminarians preparing to be ordained. I am a bit selfish in mentioning the last intention since I fall in that category. Please join me in prayer in the coming year for these intentions.

Prayer to Saint Paul

As the Year of Saint Paul comes to an end, let us pray this prayer for Saint Paul’s intercession before the Divine Majesty.

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Glorious Saint Paul, most zealous Apostle, Martyr for the love of Christ, give us a deep faith, a steadfast hope, and a burning love for our Lord so that we can proclaim with you, “It is not I who live, but Christ lives in me.” Help us become apostles serving the Church with a pure heart witnessing to her truth and beauty in the midst of the darkness of our days. With you we praise God our Father, “To him be glory in the Church and in Christ Jesus forever and ever. Amen!”

Some websites for the Year of Saint Paul in case you’ve missed them:
The Year of Saint Paul was inaugurated by Pope Benedict XVI at the Benedictine Abbey of Saint Paul outside the Walls (Rome) on June 28, 2008 and will conclude on June 29, 2009, the solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul. Many bishops around the world have set up a jubilee Church where the faithful can make a pilgrimage receiving an indulgence of grace when going to confession, receiving Holy Communion and praying for the intentions of the Pope.
In the New England area New Haven’s St Mary’s Church (Archdiocese of Hartford), Greenwich’s St Paul’s Church (Diocese of Bridgeport), Worcester’s St Paul Cathedral (Diocese of Worcester), and NYC’s St Paul’s Church (New York Archdiocese, W. 60th Str).
The above prayer is the Church’s official jubilee prayer.

“Being” determines “acting”: allowing the Good Shepherd to lead us to the Father

That today is Thursday, the day of the Eucharist and the priesthood, I thought I would republish most of the recent letter of Archbishop Piacenza (Secretary
for the Congregation for the Clergy) who writes to the world’s priests in view of the Year of the Priest. Reading the letter you see that he is right when he says that the holiness of
priests is not for themselves, it is a sacrificial holiness, an offering with
Christ, for the benefit of the entire Church. He writes to the priests: 

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Each day we are called
to conversion, but we are called to it in a very particular way during this
year, in union with all those who have received the gift of priestly
ordination. Conversion to what? It is conversion to be ever more authentically
that which we already are, conversion to our ecclesial identity of which our
ministry is a necessary consequence, so that a renewed and joyous awareness of
our “being” will determine our “acting”, or rather will
create the space allowing Christ the Good Shepherd to live in us and to act
through us.

Our spirituality must be nothing other than the spirituality
of Christ himself, the one and only Supreme High Priest of the New Testament.

In this year, which the Holy Father has providentially
announced, we will seek together to concentrate on the identity of Christ the
Son of God, in communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit, who became man in
the virginal womb of Mary, and on his mission to reveal the Father and His
wondrous plan of salvation. This mission of Christ carries with it the building
up of the Church: behold the Good Shepherd (Cf. Jn. 19:1-21) who gives his life
for the Church (Cf. Eph. 5: 25).

Yes, conversion every day of our lives so that Christ’s
manner of life may be the manner of life made ever more manifest in each one of
us.

We must exist for others, we must undertake to live with the
People in a union of holy and divine love (which clearly presupposes the
richness of holy celibacy), which obliges us to live in authentic solidarity
with those who suffer and who live in a great many types of poverty.

We must be labourers for the building up of the one Church
of Christ, for which we must live purposefully and faithfully the communion of
love with the Pope, with the Bishops, with our brother priests and with the
Faithful. We must live this communion with the unbroken pilgrimage of the
Church within the very sinews of the Mystical Body.

We should be able to run spiritually in this Year with a
“wide open heart” so as to inwardly conform to our vocation the
better to say, in truth “it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives
in me” (Gal. 2:20).

The holiness of priests redounds to the benefit of the
entire ecclesial Body. Thus it would be most fitting for all of us, be that the
ordained Faithful, seminarians, the male and female religious, and the lay
Faithful, to find ourselves all together at the Vatican Basilica for the
Vespers presided over by the Holy Father, which will be celebrated after
welcoming the reliquary of the heart of that most outstanding priestly model
who is St. John Mary Vianney.

Those who are unable to be in City of Rome are encouraged to
join themselves spiritually to the occasion.

+Mauro Piacenza

Titular Archbishop of Vittoriana Segretario