Author Topic: Saint of the day (Read 89313 times)

bookofbirds · « **Reply #150 on:** November 04, 2024, 08:06:36 PM »

Rest in Peace

Miseremini · « **Reply #151 on:** December 13, 2024, 12:25:43 PM »

December 13, Feast of St. Lucy, Virgin and Martyr

DECEMBER 14, 2018
SOURCE: FSSPX NEWS

Proof of the veneration for St. Lucy dates back to the very earliest days of Antiquity, with an epigraph in the catacombs of Syracuse. The epigraph is for a certain “Euskia, the irreproachable, who lived a good and pure life for about 25 years,” and died “on my Saint Lucy’s feast day, she for whom I cannot find appropriate words of praise.”
While it is impossible to know for certain the exact time and circuмstances of the saint’s passion, we do know what Tradition has passed down to us about her: St. Lucy came from a noble and wealthy family in Syracuse. The acts of her martyrdom report that she consecrated herself to Christ, then decided to give all her belongings to the poor and renounce marriage.
In the 6th century, the devotion to St. Lucy reached Rome and Ravenna. Her name is mentioned in both the Roman and the Ambrosian canons.
The reason for the fervent devotion of the popes for this martyr from Syracuse is unknown; it is probably due not only to the fame of her martyrdom, but also to the large number of Sicilians in Rome (Pope. St. Agatho was Sicilian), and to the fact that the popes must have been in close contact from the 4th century on with the pontifical managers of the Roman Church’s vast heritage in Sicily.
It was probably this double influence that led to the construction in Rome of many churches of St. Vitus, St. Euplius, St. Lucy, and St. Agatha, all Sicilian martyrs.
The antiphon for the Introit is taken from the psalm de virginitate, 44. “Thou hast loved justice, and hated iniquity: therefore God, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows.” This mysterious oil is the special glory granted in Heaven to the saints who practiced not only purity of heart but also integrity of the flesh.
The feasts of virgin martyrs are very special, as St. John Chrysostom explains so well, because in them Christ’s victory appears all the more glorious since their condition was so weak and feeble. Humanity’s revenge upon the devil is thus complete, since the enemy is vanquished by the one who was the first to fall.
Ever since the Gregorian calendar was created in the 16th century, December 13 is the first day on which the sun begins to set a little later than the day before in the northern hemisphere. The popular French saying, “on St. Lucy’s day, the days lengthen by a flea’s jump”, came from this observation. However, although the sun sets later than the day before, it continues to rise later as well; the days thus continue to shorten until December 21.
Source: Dom Schuster / Liber Sacramentorum / FSSPX.News – 12/13/2018

Miseremini · « **Reply #152 on:** February 27, 2025, 01:44:35 PM »

St. Gabriel, born in Assisi in 1838, was guided by Our Lady into the Passionist Institute and became a veritable Apostle of her sorrows. His life was throughout perfect and irreproachable. He died at the age of twenty-three and many miracles bore witness to his holiness. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XV, who gave him as a pattern to young people.

Jonah · « **Reply #153 on:** February 27, 2025, 02:06:59 PM »

Quote from: Miseremini on February 27, 2025, 01:44:35 PM

St. Gabriel, born in Assisi in 1838, was guided by Our Lady into the Passionist Institute and became a veritable Apostle of her sorrows. His life was throughout perfect and irreproachable. He died at the age of twenty-three and many miracles bore witness to his holiness. He was canonized by Pope Benedict XV, who gave him as a pattern to young people.

St. Gemma had great devotion to him and attributed to his intercession the cure of her meningitis. St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.

Miseremini · « **Reply #154 on:** March 07, 2025, 11:02:18 AM »

Feast of St. Thomas Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas's undisputed mastery in scholastic theology gained him the title of "Angelic Doctor." He is one of the greatest glories of the Friars Preachers. Leo XIII declared him the patron of all Catholic schools. He died in the Cistercian monastery of Fossa Nuova, on his way to the Council of Lyons, in 1274.

Miseremini · « **Reply #155 on:** April 11, 2025, 10:46:53 AM »

The Nature of Our Lady's Compassion

Having been conceived without the stain of original sin in virtue of the anticipated merits of the Passion, and free from all personal sin, it seems the Blessed Virgin should not have suffered. Truly, in her case sorrow and death were not the consequence of sin, as they are in ours, but had their origin in the intimate bond she entered into with the divine Savior who was willing to experience suffering and death.

Since Adam and Eve joined together to sin, it was fitting that the New Eve should be associated with the New Adam for the atonement of sin. Now, since the divine Savior willed to suffer for us, the Blessed Virgin voluntarily agreed to take part in His sufferings. Although she had nothing to expiate for herself, out of Our Lady of Compassion charity she found that she had so much to expiate for us. While during her life she endured various physical pains, at the time of Jesus’ Passion she suffered above all morally from the evil of sin which was to cause the death of her Beloved and the eternal death of so many souls. The more a person is filled with the love of the good Lord, the more he or she suffers to see souls turn away from the supreme good. What, then, are we to think of the degree of suffering endured by Our Lady, who was full of grace from her conception and who consequently had a visceral repugnance with regard to the slightest sin! Less than Our Lord, but more than any other creature, she saw the abominable disorder that sin contains, and at the same time she perceived all the deplorable consequences which result from it for Our Lord and for the sinner. According to the Psalmist, “he that loveth iniquity hateth his own soul” (Ps. 10:6).

While Jesus suffered His terrible Passion, the Blessed Virgin showed the greatest compassion. St. Francis de Sales explain in his Treatise on the Love of God the nature of this feeling experienced by Our Lady: “Compassion…is nothing other than a feeling of affection which makes us share in the sufferings of those whom we love; we make our own, in our heart, the pain that they suffer, just as someone who loves with a love of kindness shares in the joy of those whom he loves by making this joy his own in his heart…Love, then, is what unites the heart of the lover with the heart of the beloved. Evils and goods become common.” Thus Mary, united with the bloody sacrifice of her divine Son, endured a sacrifice of compassion for the salvation of sinners. Her union with her Son was so close that, according to Father Faber, “Mary’s compassion was the Passion of Jesus, so to speak, felt and made real in the heart of His Mother."

Miseremini · « **Reply #156 on:** April 30, 2025, 05:18:40 PM »

The Legacy of St. Catherine

Duty of State
Despite her own marvelous gifts of mysticism, miracles, and ecstasies, Catherine never lost track of what she calls the “ordinary way” to sanctity. In her Dialogue, St. Catherine explains that there is a bridge uniting Heaven and Earth. Growing in virtue by faithfully performing one’s duty of state is the “ordinary way” to pass from Earth to Heaven across the bridge of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Rationality, Freedom, Deified Humanity
“Open your eyes and look within me and you will see the dignity and beauty of my reasoning creature.” Thus God spoke to St. Catherine as recorded in her Dialogue.
This is one of the greatest treasures of St. Catherine’s spiritual legacy: our rationality is the image and likeness of God in our souls. It is our eternal soul, able to know and love, which makes us like God.
Our Lord revealed to St. Catherine that meditating on the infinite wisdom of God reveals the true glory and beauty of the human soul because our rationality is the very image and likeness of God. By this means we find ourselves in Him and Him in us. But God not only made us rational, He also made us free. St. Catherine in her writings asserts that the greatest gift God gave to man was his free will.
In a somewhat spectacular assertion, St. Catherine applies a passage from the Gospel of St. Matthew to God Himself at the moment of our creation: “Let it be done as you wish,” says Almighty God to each one of us, “I am making you free, so that you may be subject to nothing but me.”

Weak, Fallen, but Unafraid
Despite this profound understanding of the glory and beauty of the human soul, St. Catherine was in no way naive about our fallen nature. During her time, (much like our own), there was widespread disgrace, depravity, and public scandal at every level of the Church.
However, rather than focusing on the tragedy of sin and the justice of righteous retribution, St. Catherine chose to focus on sin as an opportunity for God to bring a soul closer to Him. “I always pluck the roses from the thorns,” the Lord told her, “endless are the ways of my Providence to draw sinners out of the guilt of mortal sin.” Everything is an opportunity for grace.
Rather than focusing on the sickness of the soul, St. Catherine focused on the remedy, the saving power of the Precious Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. She referred to Christ as a God of seemingly “uncontrollable love” made manifest in His Holy Incarnation. She explains that the actions of our God are so incredible, so beyond what our weak intellects would call “reasonable,” that to bring them about He must be consumed by some divine “madness” and “drunkenness” of love for His creatures.
The supernatural perspective of this great saint strengthened her and her followers during one of the worst crises in the Church’s two-thousand-year history.

Source: angelus.online

Miseremini · « **Reply #157 on:** May 02, 2025, 02:06:09 PM »

Letter of St. Athanasius

St. Athanasius lived in the 4th century and was the bishop of Alexandria in Egypt for 46 years. Banned from his diocese at least five times, he spent a total of 17 years in exile. The famous convert to the Church, Cardinal John Henry Newman, described him as a "principal instrument after the Apostles by which the sacred truths of Christianity have been conveyed and secured to the world."
Often referred to as the Champion of Orthodoxy, St. Athanasius was undoubtedly one of the most courageous defenders of the Faith in the entire history of the Church. If anyone can be singled out as a saint for our times, surely it is St. Athanasius. The following letter of his could, almost word for word, have been written yesterday.

Letter of St. Athanasius to his flock
May God console you! ...What saddens you ...is the fact that others have occupied the churches by violence, while during this time you are on the outside. It is a fact that they have the premises─but you have the apostolic Faith. They can occupy our churches, but they are outside the true Faith. You remain outside the places of worship, but the Faith dwells within you. Let us consider: what is more important, the place or the Faith? The true Faith, obviously. Who has lost and who has won in this struggle--the one who keeps the premises or the one who keeps the Faith?

Full letter here>

Miseremini · « **Reply #158 on:** May 04, 2025, 09:23:32 PM »

The Good Shepherd

This Sunday goes under the name of Good Shepherd Sunday, because in the Mass, there is read the Gospel of St. John, wherein our Lord calls Himself by this name. How very appropriate is this passage of the Gospel to this present season, when our Divine Master began his work of establishing and consolidating the Church, by giving it the Pastor, or Shepherd, who was to govern it to the end of time!

In accordance with the eternal decree, the Man-God, on the fortieth day after his Resurrection, is to withdraw his visible presence from the world. He is not to be again seen upon the earth until the Last Day, when he will come again to judge the living and the dead. And yet, He could never abandon mankind, for which He offered himself on the Cross, and which He delivered from death and hell by rising triumphantly from the Grave. He will continue to be its Head after his Ascension into heaven: but what shall we have, on earth, to supply His place? We shall have his Church. It is to the Church that He will leave all his own authority to rule us; it is into the hands of the Church that he will entrust all the truths he has taught; it is the Church that He will make the dispenser of all those means of salvation which he has destined for the world.

Source: sspx.au/adapted from The Liturgical Year

Miseremini · « **Reply #159 on:** May 05, 2025, 03:31:57 PM »

Feast of Pope St. Pius V

The active life is concerned with men and things; the contemplative is in the realm of supreme truth and has to do with the very principle of life, Almighty God. Christianity’s chief business "officium principalissimumae” St. Thomas Aquinas says, is the union of these two lives; but the contemplative is better than the active. Vita contemplativa simpliciter melior est . . .et potior quam activa.
What else but this constant uniting of spiritual contemplation and active works, with preference given to the former, so marvelously maintained by Michael Ghislieri throughout his life as monk, Prior, Bishop, Cardinal and Pontiff, was the source of the radical and far-reaching spiritual and temporal reforms Pius V was able to bring about, in but six years of pontificate, for the Church and Christian civilization? Whether fighting heresy within, or enemies without, dealing with the disloyal Emperor and wayward sovereigns abroad on vice and lawlessness in his own States and Rome, he was all the while by his own self-denial, penances and piety drawing more and more people back to the faith and practice of true religion.
“In long vigils of silent, interior communion,” wrote Evelyn Waugh in his classic biography of St. Edmund Campion, “Pius contemplated only the abiding, abstract principles that lay behind the phantasmagoric changes of human affairs . . .This it was that enabled him to see things and situations with such complete clarity.”

Full article here>>

Miseremini · « **Reply #160 on:** July 19, 2025, 03:14:28 PM »

"Do not overburden yourself with rules of devotion, but persist in doing well those you have: your daily actions, your duty of state; in a word, let everything revolve around doing well what you are doing."

~St. Vincent de Paul

Miseremini · « **Reply #161 on:** July 22, 2025, 12:28:58 PM »

St. Mary Magdalen: The Penitent

Saint Mary Magdalene, Penitent, was born to a Syrian father, Theophile, and a Jєωιѕн mother, Eucharie, in the house at Bethany, later so honored by Our Savior's resort there to repose a little from the heat of the day's' toils. She was richly endowed with all the talents of nature, mental and physical. Yet, as often occurs, her beauty, talent, and family fortune, proved a source of temptation beyond her defenses, and she spiraled downwards: so far down that Our Lord subsequently exorcised her of seven devils, desiring that she “be converted and live” (Ez. 18:23). This event is described in St. John's Gospel, when Our Lord takes his meal with Simon the Pharisee. As St. Paul tells the Romans, “As hitherto you have used your bodies to serve sin, so now use them unto sanctification” (Romans 6:19). Mary Magdalene used her lips, her hair, and her perfumes to obtain the cure of her soul. And she is the only person in the whole of the bible to ask for such a cure, according to many patriarchal writers.
Having left her sins behind her, Mary Magdalene became Our Lord's most devoted follower. The family were already known to Our Lord and He would spend increasingly more time under their roof. As the Passion drew closer, Our Lord would raise Lazarus from his grave, a further proof of His great love for this family. What he had done for Mary's soul, buried in sin, he would do for her brother's body too.
Struck at heart by what she saw: Jesus dead to this world, and Lazarus' and her resurrection from death, she came to find Our Lord at the house of another Simon, just cured of leprosy, and there anticipated the embalming of Jesus that she would attempt to complete after His death just a week later. “As the king was at his repose, the spikenard sent forth its sweet perfume” (Cant 1:11).
Simon the Pharisee and Judas respectively, on these separate occasions, would deny her the reward promised by Our Lord for every little charitable act. And on the first Sunday, on her way to the tomb to embalm the Body of Jesus, the Resurrection would obviate this charity too. But Our Lord Himself paid His dues by granting her His first recorded apparition in glory.

The full article is available here>>

Miseremini · « **Reply #162 on:** **Yesterday** at 08:55:51 PM »

Feast of St. James the Greater

Let us, today, hail the bright star which once made Compostella so resplendent with its rays that the obscure town became, like Jerusalem and Rome, a center of attraction to the piety of the whole world.
Among the saints of God, there is not one who manifested more evidently how the elect keep up after death an interest in the works confided to them by our Lord.

The life of St. James after his call to the apostolate was but short; and the result of his labors in Spain, his allotted portion, appeared to be a failure. Scarcely had he, in his rapid course, taken possession of the land of Iberia, when, impatient to drink the chalice which would satisfy his continual desire to be close to his Lord, he opened by martyrdom the heavenward procession of the twelve, which was to be closed by the other son of Zebedee. [...]
Let it not be thought that the sword of any Herod could frustrate the designs of the most High upon the men of His choice. The life of the saints is never cut short; their death, ever precious, is still more so when in the cause of God it seems to come before the time. [...]
Full article here>>

Author Topic: Saint of the day (Read 89313 times)

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