Tag: Blessed Angela Salawa

Asking for the intercession of Blessed Angela Salawa

Not long ago someone asked me for a prayer to the Secular Franciscan Blessed Angela Salawa.  She read a blog post I did on Blessed Angela and wanted more. Here is a prayer asking for Blessed Angela’s intercession. The translation is from the Polish done by a Capuchin friar friend:

Triune God, I give you glory, praise and love for all the graces, which You willed to bestow upon Blessed Angela Salawa, and I beg You, if it is according to Your will, grant that through her intercession You grant me the grace of ….. of which I humbly beg.  Look upon the spirit of sacrifice and dedication Your servant, Blessed Angela Salawa, had for others and allow her to be my advocate before Thy throne in Heaven.  Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Blessed Angela Salawa

Bl Angela Salawa.jpgIn Scripture and the Liturgy we read: “Come, blessed of my Father, says the Lord: I was ill and you comforted me. I tell you, anything you did for one of my brothers, you did it for me.”

Let us pray with the Church:

Lord God, You teach us that the commandments of heaven are summarized in love of You and of our neighbor. By following the example of blessed Angela, the virgin, in practicing the works of charity may we be counted among the blessed in Your kingdom.

 
Blessed Angela’s life (1881-1922) is striking because of its simplicity and the felt sense of love. Some parts of her family history, though, was tough: she was the youngest child of nine brothers, often undernourished, weak and sick, she was unruly and capricious. Angela received some schooling and learned to read, but spelling was not a skill she could take pride in. Angela learned to be a pious woman and in time she was eager to read good book. By her late teenage years, she entered to the Association of Saint Zita (caring for sick people.)

 
Little by little she understood that her vocation was to suffer with Christ, and accept it resolutely, but conscious of its weakness. She spent many hours in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament and read books of spiritual depth, taking copious notes. By order of her confessor, Angela began to make notes of the mystical experiences. When one of the people she was looking after died, interpersonal difficulties with the deceased’s family surfaced for Angela. She wrote that it feels suddenly that Jesus says to her: “Daughter, why do you worry? I have not left to you.”
 
In order to follow more closely Christ crucified and poor, she joined the Secular Franciscan Order on March 15, 1912, and she professed vows on 6 August 1913. As a lay woman consecrated to Christ living under the Rule of Saint Francis for the Laity, Angela is an example to all of us that obstacles can be overcome with grace.

 
At her 1991 beatification in Kraków, Pope John Paul II said: “It is in this city that she worked, that she suffered and that her holiness came to maturity. While connected to the spirituality of St. Francis, she showed an extraordinary responsiveness to the action of the Holy Spirit” (L’Osservatore Romano, 34.4, 1991).