Communio

Today’s saint, Saint Benedict-Joseph Labre, was a homeless street person. His home, it is reported, used to be in a hole in the Colosseum. Probably a rarity, other street persons gave testimony for Labre’s canonization process.

For many, the Labre is a great witness to the Gospel and therefore frequently visit the Church near the Colosseum and the Angelicum, Santa Maria ai Monti, where he is entombed.

Saint Benedict-Joseph thought his vocation was to the contemplative life and therefore tried to join the Trappists, the Common Observance Cistercians, and the Carthusians; but was denied profession of vows. In many ways his cloister was the world. Wandering Europe, especially Rome, in complete poverty, spending his days in perpetual adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. He begged in the streets, and if he was given more than he needed for the day, he would give the remainder to a person he considered more in need. Benedict-Joseph healed some of his fellow homeless, and was reported to have multiplied bread for them; he was also the spiritual director for many. Given to religious ecstacies when contemplating the crown of thorns; reputed to float, soar, and bilocate when in these swoons. He died in a hospice, exhausted from his life of austerity.

Father Marconi, Labre’s confessor and biographer, describes 136 miraculous cures attributed to him within three months of his death.

May Saint Benedict-Joseph Labre show us the face of Christ today.

On Benedictine Life

The BBC profiled 3 Benedictine monasteries in the Great Britain: Pluscarden Abbey (Scotland), Downside and Belmont Abbey. The video is modeled on the way the Carthusians were portrayed in the documentary “Into Great Silence” no interviews or telling of the narrative, just observing the daily routine and some insight into life of a Benedictine monk. Quirky, yes, but worth the view even if videos are long and a bit tedious at points.

The whole point is to follow the Rule of Saint Benedict with as much faithfulness and reasonableness for today’s era.

The description of one of the three documentaries, in part reads,

Filmed with an eye to the beauty and peace of the ancient surroundings, the film has a painterly quality that creates a feeling of restfulness and quiet contemplation. And by focusing on the natural sounds of nature and the peace of the abbey we have created a meditative soundtrack that adds to this unique experience.

St Gianna Benefit Dinner in New Haven 2018

Join us for the St Gianna Benefit Dinner

St. Gianna Pregnancy Resource Center will host its third annual benefit dinner on Sunday, April 29 from 1-5 p.m. at Amarante’s Sea Cliff (62 Cove Street) in New Haven. Tickets are $45 and include appetizers, a buffet dinner, dessert and soft drinks.

Our speaker and honoree, Christian Slattery, is the organizer of the first pregnancy crisis center in NYC. This is the busiest center in NY at this time. Also being honored, is the pro-life Choose Life at Yale (CLAY) organization that founded the Vita et Veritas Conference to bring a bigger message of pro-life to Yale.

For more information, TO ORDER tickets, or to make a donation (no donation is too small) please visit www.giannacenter.org.

Please make reservations by April 15.

Holy Monday … set your sights on things above

You, then, beloved, if you have risen with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth.

Then, as Christ rose from the dead by the glory of the Father, so you too may walk in newness of life. Then you may rejoice to pass from the secular pleasures and the consolations of the world, through the compunction and sadness that are of God to holy devotion and spiritual exultation, by the gift of the one who passed from this world to the Father and who deigns to draw us after himself, and to call us into Galilee, that he may show us himself, who is God over all, Blessed forever.

Sermons for Lent and the Easter Season
Saint Bernard of Clairvaux

St Mariam Sultaneh Danil Ghattas

St Mariam Sultaneh Danil Ghattas (4 October 1843-25 March 1927), was a Dominican tertiary. She first joined the Sisters of Joseph but following a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary she received in Bethlehem, she co-founded the Rosary Sisters (Sisters of the Holy Rosary of Jerusalem of the Latins; Congregation of the Sisters of the Most Holy Rosary of Jerusalem). The visions were kept a secret for 53 years, and her journals read only post mortem. People recognized the virtues of humility and meekness in Mother Mariam, similar to those of the Mother of God.

Ghattas promoted the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception (later known as, “Daughters of Mary”) and also the Confraternity of the Christian Mothers.

Mother Mariam spent her life working for the poor and the education of Palestinian Christians, and her Sisters continue that work today.

St Mariam Sultaneh Danil Ghattas was beatified on 22 November 2009, in the Basilica of the Annunciation, Nazareth; she was the second Palestinian nun to be beatified. She was canonized by Pope Francis on 17 May 2017.

At the door on Palm Sunday

In the ancient form of the Holy Week rites (i.e., prior to the Holy Week reforms of Pius XII in the early 1950’s) there is a very brief yet beautiful ceremony that occurs on Palm Sunday when the procession goes outside the church, the doors to the church are closed. The door of the church is then knocked on three times with the shaft of the processional cross. Having served the Mass, I can say it is a powerful and moving rite of which Benedict XVI spoke:

“In the old liturgy for Palm Sunday, the priest, arriving in front of the church, would knock loudly with the shaft of the processional cross on the door that was still closed; thereupon, it would be opened. This was a beautiful image of the mystery of Jesus Christ himself who, with the wood of his Cross, with the power of his love that is given, knocked from the side of the world at God’s door; on the side of a world that was not able to find access to God. With his Cross, Jesus opened God’s door, the door between God and men. Now it is open.”

Homily of Pope Benedict XVI
Palm Sunday, 2007

Blessed Holy Week — a week of great and divine drama!

Annunciation, a simple fact

Then Mary said, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord; let it be with me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her. (Luke 1.38)

The feast of the Annunciation is important not simply as a historical commemoration of something that happened long ago, but more of what it reveals about God: that God chose to create a world in which, to realize the dream he had for creation, human freedom had to be included. God never “decrees” in a way that violates human freedom. Rather, God offers and looks for the free acceptance of the creature. Thus God did not simply plant Jesus on earth arbitrarily. God required the free assent of the creature. This is what Mary’s “Fiat” really is: an utterance that frees the Divine Will to realize the ultimate plan for all creation.

(Credit: NS)

St Joseph

St. Joseph was chosen among all men, to be the protector and guardian of the Virgin Mother of God; the defender and foster-father of the Infant-God, and the only co-operator upon earth, the one confidant of the secret of God in the work of the redemption of mankind.
~St. Bernard of Clairvaux

St Gianna Benefit Dinner