THE SAINTS: STORIES, IMAGES, MEDITATIONS

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TERESA BENEDETTA
00giovedì 8 novembre 2007 18:17
Book on Mother Teresa's spirituality released


Nov. 8 (Spero News) - In a press release, Our Sunday Visitor publishers announced that Rev. Joseph Langford, a collaborator with Mother Teresa of Calcutta in her Missionaries of Charity, will release a book that offers revelations about her interior life.

Entitled Mother Teresa: In the Shadow of Our Lady, Rev. Langford says that this is an “attempt to describe Mother Teresa Mother Teresa in a few broad strokes by holding up one or another aspect of her life or work without reference to the whole is to fail to grasp who she was."

Critics of the Nobel Prize-winning nun, such as English writer Christopher Hitchens, have questioned the spiritual struggles of the woman who was world-renowned for charitable works in the streets and slums of Calcutta. Some have called her a hypocrite and fraud.

Rev. Langford spoke of the “darkness” experienced by the Albanian-born nun saying, "Who, in reality, was Mother Teresa, beyond headlines and magazine covers, beyond the easy clichés of those who observed her from the outside?"

Answering the skeptics, Rev. Langford said: "While her widely publicized but little understood darkness was indeed a challenge, it never placed her in crisis. Her darkness was a crucible of faith, hope, and love in which Mother Teresa became Saint Teresa."

Rev. Langford speaks to the failings of many in the media to understand a key element in Mother Teresa’s spirituality – her devotion to the Virgin Mary.

Speaking of the founder of an order that sprang from India to embrace outcasts such as those suffering from HIV/AIDS in other parts of the world, Rev. Langford said "It was Our Lady who taught her to see in the darkness, Our Lady who had seen through it first, and at its worst, as her Son struggled for his last breath.

It was Our Lady whose faith bolstered and directed Mother Teresa's faith, and brought her to stand and not waver, despite the darkness, at the cross planted in her own soul."

Rev. Langford knew Mother Teresa for thirty years and promises in his forthcoming book to describe the "lights and lessons learned from the pages of her life".

His book Mother Teresa: In the Shadow of Our Lady is intended to set aright any negative depictions of Mother Teresa's spiritual life and beliefs, and familiarize readers with her special devotion to Mary – revered by millions of Christians as the mother of Jesus.

Rev. Langford currently resides in Tijuana, Baja California, Mexico, where he continues his work within the Missionaries of Charity at the motherhouse located there. He met Mother Teresa three decades ago while studying theology in Rome. He was co-founder of her community of priests. He will soon start a book tour in the United States.


TERESA BENEDETTA
00sabato 10 novembre 2007 04:42
November 9
Feast of the Dedication of
the Basilica of St. John Lateran


Today's feast does not commemorate a saint but the consecration of a church. The 'material' relevant to it more properly belongs to a thread on Church art and architecture if we had one. And if we did, just as with this thread, we would have material to last us for a lifetime, had we the time to devote to it for the forum.







Dedicated to John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, the Basilica of St. John Lateran (Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano) is the first among the four major basilicas of Rome.

It is the cathedral church of Rome and the official ecclesiastical seat of the Bishop of Rome, who is the Pope. Officially named Archibasilica Sanctissimi Salvatoris ("Archbasilica of the Most Holy Saviour"), it is the oldest among the four major basilicas of Rome.



As the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome, containing the papal throne (Cathedra Romana), it ranks above all other churches in the Roman Catholic Church, even above St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican.

In reflection of the basilica's primacy in the world as mother church, the words Sacrosancta Lateranensis ecclesia omnium urbis et orbis ecclesiarum mater et caput are incised in the main door, meaning "Most Holy Lateran Church, of all the churches in the city and the world, the mother and head."

It also holds the title of Omnium urbis et orbis Ecclesiarum Mater et Caput (mother church of the whole inhabited world) among Roman Catholics. The current archpriest of St. John Lateran is Camillo Cardinal Ruini, Cardinal Vicar General for the Diocese of Rome.

An inscription on the façade, Christo Salvatore, dedicates the Lateran as Archbasilica of the Most Holy Saviour, for the cathedrals of all patriarchs are dedicated to Christ himself.

Built by Constantine the Great in the 4th century, San Giovanni in Laterano was the first church to be built in Rome. It contains several important relics, a lovely 13th-century cloister and an ancient baptistery (San Giovanni in Fonte).

In ancient times, the site of San Giovanni Laterano was occupied by the palace of the family of the Laterani. Their 1st-century mansion has been located 5.55 meters below the nave of the church. In the 2nd century, the mansion was replaced by the barracks of the mounted Imperial Guard.

On the pretext that the Imperial Guard had fought on the side of Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge (312), Constantine razed the barracks and filled in the basement to form a foundation for a church that was to be the cathedral of Rome.

The Lateran Palace next to the barracks came into the hands of Constantine through his second wife Fausta, sister of Maxentius. This was used in 313 for the First Lateran Council, a church council that condemned the Donatist schism.

A porticoed structure found in front of the palace has frescoes from the late 4th century depicting the Resurrection of Lazarus, Christ and the Samaritan, the Multiplication of the Loaves, and three saints: Vitus, Modestus and Crescentia.

The cathedral was dedicated to the Savior on November 9, 318. It was embellished with beautiful decorations given by Constantine, including seven silver altars with seven gilded candlesticks inlaid with images of prophets; 111 chandeliers; and gold voil for the apse vault. Constantine also built the baptistery on the northwestern corner of the church, which still survives in its original form.

From the fifth century there were seven oratories surrounding the basilica. These before long were incorporated in the church. The devotion of visiting these oratories, which held its ground all through the medieval period, gave rise to the similar devotion of the seven altars, still common in many churches of Rome and elsewhere.

In the 10th century, Pope Sergius III (904-911) added John the Baptist to the basilica's dedication, and in the 12th century, Pope Lucius II (1144- 1145) added John the Evangelist.

A Benedictine monastery of St. John the Baptist and St. John the Evangelist adjoined the basilica and its members were charged at one period with the duty of maintaining the services in the church.

A great many donations from the popes and other benefactors to the basilica are recorded in the Liber Pontificalis, and its splendour at an early period was such that it became known as the "Basilica Aurea", or Golden Basilica. This splendour drew upon it the attack of the Vandals, who stripped it of all its treasures.

Pope Leo the Great restored it about 460, and it was again restored by Pope Hadrian, but in 896 it was almost totally destroyed by an earthquake — damage so extensive that it was difficult to trace the lines of the old building, but the reconstruction was of the same dimensions as the old.

This second church lasted for 400 years and before suffering extensive damage from a series of fires, the worst of which was in 1308. It was rebuilt by Pope Clement V and Pope John XXII, only to be burnt down once more in 1360 and again rebuilt by Pope Urban V.

When the popes returned to Rome from their long absence at Avignon in 1377, they found the city deserted and the churches almost in ruins. Great works were begun at the Lateran by Pope Martin V and his successors. The palace, however, was never again used by them as a residence, with the Vatican, which stands in a much drier and healthier position, being chosen in its place.

Pope Sixtus V replaced most of the remaining structure with work by his by his favorite architect Domenico Fontana, and a further renovation of the interior ensued, carried out by Francesco Borromini for Pope Innocent X (1644-55). This is the definitive remodeling that created the present church.

Finally, Pope Clement XII (1730 - 1740) launched a competition for the design of a new facade, which was completed by Alessandro Galilei in 1735.


The two-storied portico that makes up the facade of the basilica dates from the 18th century. It is from here that the Pope gives his benediction on Maundy Thursday.

Visible from miles away are the 15 colossal travertine statues, each 7 meters high, atop the facade, dating from the 18th century - of Christ the Savior, Sts. John the Baptist and John the Evangelist, and 12 Doctors of the Latin and Greek Churches, signifying the doctrinal unity of the Church: Gregory the Great, Jerome, Ambrose, Augustine, Athanasius, Basil, John Chrysostom, Gregory Nazinanzene, Bernard, Thomas Aquinas, Bonaventure and Eusebius Vercelli.

There are five entrances in the columned, double portico outer facade, which in turn opens onto the inner facade and atrium, which has five doors, corresponding to the five naves of the basilica.

The mammoth bronze central doors [photo at the start of post) are from the Roman Forum from the building where the Roman Senate met. They had been transferred in the seventh century to the Church of St. Hadrian in the Forum, and then in 1660 to the basilica by Pope Alexander VII (1655-67). The furthest door on the right is the Holy Door.


Backside of the Loggia of Benediction; the Lateran Palace, headquarters for the Diocese of Rome, is on the left.



Inside, despite many alterations over the centuries, the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano still retains its original plan: a nave flanked by two aisles and ending in a semi-circular apse to the west. Unusually, the basilica is oriented to the west instead of the east: this is because it was built before the tradition of east-orientation had taken hold.

Some of the original decoration survives as well, although not in its original position. Parts of the 4th-century nave colonnade can now be seen supporting the triumphal arch (two red granite columns), flanking the Altar of the Holy Sacrament (four bronze columns), and flanking the statues of the apostles in the nave (24 green-speckled marble columns).



The octagonal cupola is decorated with paintings depicting the life of St. John the Baptist.


Statues of St. Peter (left) and St. Matthew.


The marble pavement of the nave, and the elaborate ceiling; right photo, the choir.

The Cosmatesque pavement in the nave is from the 14th century, making it a late example of this technique. It was paid by the Colonna family, and attained its present form in 1425 under Pope Martin V Colonna. The family's coat-of-arms can be seen in sevaral places on the floor.

The statues in the nave date from the time of Pope Clement XI (1701–1721) and depict Apostles and Evangelists. Closed doors painted on the wall behind the statues represent the gateways to Heavenly Jerusalem. Above the statues are 17th-century relief panels with Old Testament scenes on the left and related scenes from the New Testament on the right. Above are oval paintings of prophets, also from the 17th century.


The Confessio (crypt below pavement level) next to the high altar and a statue of John the Baptist in the Confessio.


The graceful baldacchino over the high altar, which looks out of place in its present surroundings, dates from 1369. At the top is a reliquary said to contain the heads of Saints Peter and Paul, but these may have been removed during the French occupation of Rome in the 18th century.

Beneath the baldacchino is the High Altar, which can only be used by the Pope. It contains a relic said to be part of St. Peter's communion table.



The jewel in this crown is the Blessed Sacrament Chapel, erected by Clement VIII (1592-1605). The tympanum is supported by four gilt columns which, it is said, came from the ships of Cleopatra and, later, from Constantine's palace. The tabernacle is embellished with rare stones of jasper and lapis lazuli. Above the altar is a bas-relief of the Last Supper, behind which is enshrined a cedar table said to have been used at the Last Supper.

The marble and bronze columns are said to have been taken from the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline Hill. The bronze columns in that temple had been recast from the bronze prows of Cleopatra's ships, taken in battle by Emperor Augustus.


Apse - Photo by Gerald Augustinus.

The apse, reconstructed between 1878 and 1886, by order of Pope Leo XIII (1878-1903), contains the Pope's cathedra (episcopal throne, which is used by the Pope whenever he comes to his cathedral church.

The apse features exquisite mosaics focused on the Redeemer. Below the Redeemer, they depict a jewelled cross topped by a dove in the heavens above Jerusalem, and from this the four rivers which empty into the Jordan. The figures on both sides of the cross are Our Lady, Sts. Peter and Paul, John the Baptist and John the Evangelist and Andrew.

Below them, and between the windows, are nine Apostles, separated by palm trees. Some of the frescoes date from the time of Constantine and the first basilica: these were restored by Franciscans in the 13th century. Some of the larger figures, including the Virgin, date from the ninth century.

The walnut stalls on both sides of the apse are for the archpriest of the basilica and the 22 canons.



The cloisters, all that remain of the Benedictine monastery, date from the early 13th century. Their design, by Vassellectus and the Cosmati brothers, is an intermediate style between Romanesque and Gothic.

They are surrounded by graceful double columns of inlaid marble and contain many early Christian fragments from the basilica. A porphyry slab in the cloister is believed to be the surface on which Roman soldiers cast lots for Christ's robes.

The old Lateran Palace was demolished by Pope Sixtus V (1585-1590), but the apse of the papal dining hall, the Triclinium Leoninum, has been preserved on the outside of the remains of the building (below).

The mosaic in the apse dates from 800, the year Charlemagne was crowned in Rome. It depicts Christ with the Apostles in the center; Christ with Constantine and Pope Sylvester I on the left; and St Peter, Pope Leo III and Charlemagne on the right. Pope Leo III has a square nimbus, showing that he was alive when it was made.



The Scala Sancta or Holy Stairs, consisting of twenty-eight white marble steps, now encased by wooden steps, are in a building which incorporates part of the old Lateran Palace opposite the Basilica.

According to tradition, the staircases were part of the praetorium of Pilate in Jerusalem, hence were sanctified by the footsteps of Jesus Christ during his Passion. They are located next to a church which supposedly was built on ground brought from Mount Calvary, and now lead to what was the private chapel of the Lateran palace, known as the chapel of St. Lawrence or Sancta Sanctorum.

Medieval legends claim that the Holy Stairs were brought from Jerusalem to Rome about 326 by St. Helena, mother of Constantine the Great. In the Middle Ages, they were known as Scala Pilati (Stairs of Pilate). From old plans it can be gathered that they led to a corridor of the Lateran Palace, near the Chapel of St. Sylvester, were covered with a special roof.

When Sixtus V in 1589 destroyed the then ruined old papal palace to rebuild a new one, he ordered the Holy Stairs be transferred to their present site, before the Sancta Sanctorum (Holy of Holies), which received its name from the many precious relics preserved there, including the celebrated icon of Santissimi Salvatore Acheiropoieton ("not made by human hands") which on certain occasions used to be carried through Rome in procession. .

In its new site, the Scala Sancta is encased in protective wood boards, and flanked by four other stairs, two on each side, for common use, since the Holy Stairs may only be ascended on the knees, a devotion much in favor with pilgrims and the faithful, especially on Fridays and in Lent.



Names: Basilica of St. John Lateran; Basilica di San Giovanni in Laterano; Archbasilica of the Holy Savior
Type of site: Cathedral; major basilica
Faith: Roman Catholic
Status: Active
Dates: Founded 318 AD
Location: Near the city walls, Rome, Italy
Address: Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano 4, Rome, Italy
Metro: San Giovanni
Bus: 4, 16, 30, 85, 87, or 174
Phone: 06-69886433
Hours: Daily 7-6:45 (closes 6pm in low season)
Cost: Free; cloisters €2



The square in front of the Lateran Palace has a red granite obelisk built by Pharaoh
Tuthmosis III in Karnak. Said to be the largest obelisk in the world, it was placed
in the Circus Maximus before being re-erected in its current place. This square
is a favorite site for some of the largest gatherings in Rome (rallies or outdoor concerts)
.


Click here for a satellite view of the St. JohnLateran area;
maps.google.com/maps?q=basilica+of+st+john+rome&ll=41.885953,12.506207&spn=0.004044,0.007196&t...
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 11 novembre 2007 18:10
November 10
MEMORIAL OF ST. LEO THE GREAT
POPE AND DOCTOR OF THE CHURCH



A belated post that I have not really worked on yet, but for now, I will post two items which Argent by the Tiber selected and posted yesterday in a timely manner.


The relief at the left shows Leo I meeting Attila the Hun.


'A burden to shudder at' - thus St. Leo I spoke of the papal office.

Yet few have been so capable of bearing that burden as the clever, energetic, and holy Tuscan who succeeded St. Sixtus III. A deacon in the Church at Rome Leo was absent in Gaul on an important mission for the Emperor when St. Sixtus III died. He returned to find himself pope.

To rule the mid-fifth-century Church was not easy. The West was filled with the clamor of barbarians wandering through provinces which had lost the nerve to resist. The East was troubled with a new and dangerous heresy. How Leo faced both situations is the story of his pontificate.

Leo acted strongly against all heresies, but the dogmatic crisis of his pontificate arose when the Constantinople monk Eutyches and the patriarch of Alexandria, Dioscorus, began to teach that in Christ there is only one nature.

This Monophysite (one-nature) heresy made such progress in the East that St. Flavian, the patriarch of Constantinople, called on the Pope to do something about it. Leo did. In a famous letter to Flavian, the Pope so clearly and forcefully exposed and condemned the Monophysite error that this letter has been venerated as a creed.

The Monophysites, however, gained the ear of the Eastern Emperor, Theodosius II, and succeeded in holding a packed synod at Ephesus. There they so maltreated the saintly Flavian that he died, and they proclaimed the Monophysite error to be true Christian doctrine. Leo came to the rescue. In stinging words he characterized the Ephesus affair as a robbery, and the name has lived. To this day it is known as the robber synod.

To counteract Monophysite influence on Theodosius, Leo got Valentinian III, the Western Emperor, to wake up his cousin to the danger of fostering heresy. Though Theodosius died, his successor Marcion heeded the Pope. To settle the matter a great council, the fourth ecumenical, was called to meet at Chalcedon in 451. There the fathers condemned Eutyches and accepted Leo's letter as the symbol of orthodox belief.

Though the Monophysite heresy lingered long to trouble the Eastern Church, this great council killed its chance to win the East.

In the West imperial feebleness forced Leo to stand as buffer between his people and barbarian hordes. Attila the Hun, checked at Chalons, had burst over the Alps in 452. Leo went north to meet Attila. On the banks of the Mincio these two giants of the age met, one representing brute might, the other, moral force. And Leo prevailed. Attila agreed to make peace and spare Rome.

Three years later when a Vandal fleet sailed up the Tiber, the panic-stricken Romans turned to their bishop. The Pope went outside the walls to meet Genseric, the Vandal king. Genseric agreed to spare the lives and homes of the Romans. Then for fourteen days the Vandals helped themselves to the wealth of imperial Rome, but true to Genseric's promise to the Pope, they set no fires and kept their swords sheathed.

The many-sidedness of Leo is a marvel. Diplomat, statesman, administrator, theologian, orator, and above all a holy man, this pope well deserves the title, Leo the Great.


The special obligations of our ministry
~by Pope St. Leo the Great

Although the universal Church of God is constituted of distinct orders of members, still, in spite of the many parts of its holy body, the Church subsists as an integral whole, just as the Apostle says: We are all one in Christ.

No difference in office is so great that anyone can be separated, through lowliness, from the head. In the unity of faith and baptism, therefore, our community is undivided.

There is a common dignity, as the apostle Peter says in these words: And you are built up as living stones into spiritual houses, a holy priesthood, offering spiritual sacrifices which are acceptable to God through Jesus Christ. And again: But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart.

For all, regenerated in Christ, are made kings by the sign of the cross; they are consecrated priests by the oil of the Holy Spirit, so that beyond the special service of our ministry as priests, all spiritual and mature Christians know that they are a royal race and are sharers in the office of the priesthood.

For what is more king-like than to find yourself ruler over your body after having surrendered your soul to God? And what is more priestly than to promise the Lord a pure conscience and to offer him in love unblemished victims on the altar of one’s heart?

Because, through the grace of God, it is a deed accomplished universally on behalf of all, it is altogether praiseworthy and in keeping with a religious attitude for you to rejoice in this our day of consecration, to consider it a day when we are especially honoured.

For indeed one sacramental priesthood is celebrated throughout the entire body of the Church. The oil which consecrates us has richer effects in the higher grades, yet it is not sparingly given in the lower.

Sharing in this office, my dear brethren, we have solid ground for a common rejoicing; yet there will be more genuine and excellent reason for joy if you do not dwell on the thought of our unworthiness.

It is more helpful and more suitable to turn your thoughts to study the glory of the blessed apostle Peter. We should celebrate this day above all in honour of him. He overflowed with abundant riches from the very source of all graces, yet though he alone received much, nothing was given over to him without his sharing it.

The Word made flesh lived among us, and in redeeming the whole human race, Christ gave himself entirely.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 12 novembre 2007 06:15
November 11, 2007
BEATIFICATION OF CEFERINO NAMUNCURA

Born Aug. 26, 1886, in Chimpay, Argentina
Died May 11, 1905, in Rome




First indigenous Argentine
beatified in his hometown






CHIMPAY, Argentina. Nov. 11 (AP) — Ceferino Namuncura became the first Argentine Indian to be beatified by the Roman Catholic Church on Sunday, in a ceremony before tens of thousands including Indians in bright ponchos and plumed headdresses.



Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, led the beatification in the wind-swept Patagonian community of Chimpay, 600 miles southeast of Buenos Aires, as traditional Catholic rites mixed with sporadic drumming, cow horns and Mapuche chants.


Chimpay is so tiny it is not even found on most detailed maps of Argentina. It is marked with a red dot on the small map below.
In the 2nd map, find the city of Nuequen near the center - Chimpay is about 110 miles due east of it.



Namuncura, who lived from 1886 to 1905 and is revered for his piety and humility, has a wide following among Argentina's poor. Police estimated some 120,000 people attended the beatification, which attracted Mapuche Indians from Argentina and from neighboring Chile.

"Let us learn from Ceferino to be good children of God and brothers to all," Bertone told the crowd spread out on a grassy field.

"Viva Ceferino!" church leaders shouted, raising a cheer among the crowd.

Church investigators have attributed a miracle to Namuncura based on an Argentine woman's claim that devotion to him healed her of uterine cancer in 2000. On Sunday, she told journalists there was no medical explanation for her recovery.

"Doctors told me, 'this is impossible."' said Valeria Herera, 24. "But they were never able to explain it to me scientifically speaking."

Namuncura, the son of a Mapuche Indian chief, studied at a Catholic school in Buenos Aires run by the Salesian order, began seminary training in Argentina and went to Rome for more studies before dying there at 18 of tuberculosis.

Some have criticized Namuncura's beatification, noting that his father resisted Argentine military campaigns blamed for eradicating indigenous peoples.

Namuncura "was handed over to be converted to Christianity," said Jorge Nahuel, a spokesman for one Mapuche group. He called the beatification a "real offense against the history of our people."

The ceremony was authorized in July by Pope Benedict XVI, who has made efforts to beatify subjects in their homelands instead of Rome. Beatification is sometimes the first step to sainthood.

The first Indian saint in the Americas, Juan Diego, was canonized by then-Pope John Paul II in Mexico City in 2002.


In Chimpay, Argentina, a statue of Blessed Ceferino at his shrine, and nuns line up in the pre-dawn hours for the beatification rites today.


Beatification in Chimpay


A bishop blesses an effigy of Blessed Ceferino.

CHIMPAY, Argentina, Nov. 11 (AFP) - Tens of thousands of faithful turned out Sunday to witness a ceremony honoring Ceferino Namuncura, the first indigenous South American to be beatified by the Roman Catholic Church.

"Ceferino is blessed," proclaimed Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, deputy of Pope Benedict XVI, drawing a thundering ovation from the crowd of onlookers that swelled to 120,000 people for the event, police said.

More than a century after his death in Rome, Namuncura - the son of a Mapuche Indian chief who fought the European settlers in the late 19th century - became the first Argentine to be beatified outside the Vatican, organizers said.


Mapuche Indians at the beatification rites.

The ceremony took place in this southern Patagonia town 1,000 kilometers (600 miles) south of Buenos Aires.

"The Gospel never destroys the values in a culture, but assimilates them and perfects them," said Bertone, adding that Namuncura "never forgot he what it was to be native and tried to be useful to his people."

Often the first step toward sainthood, beatification is a long process, which in Namuncura's case began in 1944 and culminated in a "miracle" in 2000, when a young Argentine girl was allegedly cured of uterine cancer after praying to him.

Pope Benedict XVI officially certified Namuncura's miracle in July, opening the path to beatification.

The miracle girl, Valeria, her husband and three children were among those who gathered for the beatification ceremony Sunday.

Bertone, the Vatican's secretary of state, celebrated the beatification mass, which was also attended by Buenos Aires archbishop Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio, some 50 bishops from Argentina and Latin America, and by Namuncura's descendants.

Born August 26, 1886, Ceferino Namuncura was the son of legendary Mapuche chief Manuel Namuncura who, after years of fighting the military and white encroachment surrendered on the advice of a Salesian monk who baptized his son when he was eight.

Ceferino studied at a religious school in Buenos Aires, "so he could be of service to his race" according to historians, and as a priest became renown for his unswerving faith.

He was presented to then Pope Pius X in Rome in 1904, but succumbed to tuberculosis a year later. His remains were taken back to Argentina in 1924 and laid to rest in Buenos Aires.





From Wikipedia:

Ceferino "Morales" Namuncurá (the Venerable Namuncurá) (August 26, 1886 - May 11, 1905) was a religious student and the object of a Roman Catholic cultus and veneration in northern Patagonia.

He was born in Chimpay, in Valle Medio, Río Negro Province, Argentina, the sixth child of Rosario Burgos and a Mapuche cacique, Manuel Namuncurá. He was baptized by a missionary priest, Domingo Milanesio, at the age of eight. [His father was 75 when he was born, and his mother was 29).



Namuncurá's early years were spent by the Río Negro river, and it was here that he allegedly miraculously survived a fall into the river. He attended the San Fernando school, and then the Pio IX technical school, in Almagro, Buenos Aires, where he was given a Catholic education by the Salesians of Don Bosco.

Namuncurá started studies for priesthood, yet he became increasingly sick with a cough (later diagnosed as tuberculosis). In 1904, he departed for Italy together with Monseñor Antonio Cagliero, who was to become an Archbishop.

Pope Pius X received them on September, after which Namuncurá moved to Turin to continue his religious education. He became ill during the Italian winter and was taken to Rome, were he died a few weeks later.

In 1924, his remains where returned to Argentina, where they now rest in Fortín Mercedes, in the south of Buenos Aires Province.

In Chimpay a very small chapel has been erected to Namuncurá, where believers from Río Negro Province and beyond pray for his intercession. In 1945, a request for his beatification was made to the Vatican. Since 1972, Ceferino was officially considered venerable, the first Argentine to be so. Pope Benedict XVI finally decreed his beatification on July 6, 2007.


For those who read Spanish, there is a very good state-of-the-art multimedia official website about the new Blessed:
www.ceferino.dbp.org.ar/


There's a beautiful section about why exactly Ceferino was proposed for beatification. He had a very short life, and he had no chance to do anything but be a devoted son, an excellent student and a devout Catholic. And yet...

Here's how his biographer puts it (a translation):

Ceferino did nothing extraordinary. He didn't cause miracles, he did not even make any heroic gestures. All he did was live his life simply as did other boys his age, like other schoolboys in the Salesian colleges he attended. But he filled the little acts of everyday with Christian sense and spiritual vigor - and this is most important as a testimony to how the most simple saintliness is possible, that we do not need to live outside our daily life to fulfill our baptismal mission, that wherever we are and in the concrete ways we live, God invites us all to saintliness.


TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 13 novembre 2007 00:47
November 12
MEMORIAL OF ST. JOSAPHAT,
Bishop and Martyr




Once again, I must fall back on Argent by The Tiber who has the daily feasts afficiently covered with the appropriate data and meditations. I must confess I had never heard of St. Josaphat before today.




Josaphat Kuncewitcz was born about the year 1580 at Vladimir, Volhynia, [part of the Polish province of Lithuania at the time] and given the name John at baptism.

While being instructed as a child on the sufferings of our Savior, his heart is said to have been wounded by an arrow from the sacred side of the Crucified. In 1604 he joined the Ukrainian Order of Saint Basil (Basilians), lived as a monk in a very mortified life, went barefoot even in winter, refrained from the use of wine and flesh-meat, and always wore a penitential garb.

In 1614 he was appointed archimandrite of Vilna, Russia and four years later archbishop of Polotzk; in this position he worked untiringly for Church reunion.

He was a great friend of the poor, once even pledged his archepiscopal omophorion (pallium) to support a poor widow. The foes of union decided to assassinate him. In a sermon, he himself spoke of his death as imminent.

When he visited Vitebsk (now in Russia), his enemies attacked his lodging and murdered a number of his companions. Meekly the man of God hastened toward the mob and, full of love, cried, "My children, what are you doing? If you have something against me, see, here I am."

With furious cries of "Kill the papist!", they rushed upon him with gun and sword. Josaphat's body was thrown into the river but emerged, surrounded by rays of light, and was recovered. His murderers, when sentenced to death, repented their crime and became Catholics.

~from The Church's Year of Grace, Pius Parsch


He gave his life for the unity of the Church
~from Pope Pius XI's encyclical Ecclesiam Dei

In designing his Church God worked with such skill that in the fullness of time it would resemble a single great family embracing all men. It can be identified, as we know, by certain distinctive characteristics, notably its universality and unity.

Christ the Lord passed on to his apostles the task he had received from the Father: I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations. He wanted the apostles as a body to be intimately bound together, first by the inner tie of the same faith and love which flows into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, and, second, by the external tie of authority exercised by one apostle over the others. For this he assigned the primacy to Peter, the source and visible basis of their unity for all time. So that the unity and agreement among them would endure, God wisely stamped them, one might say, with the mark of holiness and martyrdom.

Both these distinctions fell to Josaphat, archbishop of Polock of the Slavonic rite of the Eastern Church. He is rightly looked upon as the great glory and strength of the Eastern Rite Slavs.

Few have brought them greater honour or contributed more to their spiritual welfare than Josaphat, their pastor and apostle, especially when he gave his life as a martyr for the unity of the Church. He felt, in fact, that God had inspired him to restore world-wide unity to the Church and he realised that his greatest chance of success lay in preserving the Slavonic rite and Saint Basil’s rule of monastic life within the one universal Church.

Concerned mainly with seeing his own people reunited to the See of Peter, he sought out every available argument which would foster and maintain Church unity. His best arguments were drawn from liturgical books, sanctioned by the Fathers of the Church, which were in common use among Eastern Christians, including the dissidents.

Thus thoroughly prepared, he set out to restore the unity of the Church. A forceful man of fine sensibilities, he met with such success that his opponents dubbed him “the thief of souls”.


=====================================================================

May St. Josaphat work his intercessive powers for a quicker, smoother resolution of the ecumenical issues that stand in the way of Christian reunification. Amen.
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 18 novembre 2007 01:13
'JESUS'S 'LITTLE FLOWER' VISITS ROME



Pope Benedict XVI venerates the relics of St. Therese
at his private chapel in the Vatican on 11/14/07.



Little Flower Welcomed
By Elizabeth Lev

ROME, Nov. 15 (ZENIT.org) - Last week, Rome received a delightful visit. The relics of St. Thérèse of Lisieux - the Little Flower - were brought to the Eternal City.

For one week her mortal remains were transported with great pomp and honor from the Russian College, which bears her name, to various churches in the city, concluding with all-night adoration at the Church of St. Agnes in Piazza Navona.

Everywhere she went, she was greeted with prayers, flowers and songs, bringing a swath of joy to the first cold dark days of November.

Thérèse, born in 1873, visited Rome only once in her brief lifetime. At the age of 15, her father brought her here on a pilgrimage, where she met Pope Leo XIII at the papal audience.

She knew she was called to serve God as a religious sister, but had been denied entry into the Carmelite order because of her youth. She asked the Pope to allow her to join the order, but Pope Leo counseled her to obey her superiors.

Thérèse visited the Mamertine prison and the Colosseum, praying at the sites of the Roman martyrs. Meditating on their example, she put aside her own frustrations. Shortly after her return to France, the local bishop permitted her to join the convent.

Within the convent Thérèse thrived spiritually although her health soon began to decline. Under obedience, she wrote the “Story of a Soul” with her mother superior, outlining with simplicity her “little way.”

She succumbed to tuberculosis at the age of 24, after an exemplary witness of embracing suffering for the love of Christ, and was canonized by Pope Pius XI in 1925.

Once she joined the Carmelites, the Little Flower never traveled any further than her hometown, and yet she was named patron saint of missions because of her ceaseless intercession for missionaries and her promise to spend her heaven doing good on Earth. From her little world, she was able to see the biggest picture of all.

Ten years ago, in October 1997, Pope John Paul II declared Thérèse a doctor of the Church, although she had never earned a university degree or taught a course.

She was the youngest of the 33 people in the history of the Church to receive this exalted title. In his homily, John Paul II declared that “her spiritual itinerary shows such maturity and the intuitions of her faith expressed in her writings are so vast and so profound, that they merit a place among the great spiritual masters."

Thérèse’s autobiography was a best-seller throughout the 20th century and has offered spiritual guidance to millions of souls. Her simplicity and faith resonate in the longing to do something meaningful for God and others in all of us.

Thérèse takes a refreshing view of academic posturing when she writes: “When I read spiritual treatises, in which perfection is shown with a thousand obstacles in the way and a host of illusions round about it, my poor little mind soon grows weary. I close the learned book, which leaves my head splitting and my heart parched, and I take the holy Scriptures. Then all seems luminous, a single word opens up infinite horizons to my soul, perfection seems easy.”

In a society that esteems learning over wisdom, and titles over virtue, Thérèse’s “little way” reminds us that God chooses what the world deems foolish to shame the proud.




TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 18 novembre 2007 01:35
November 18
BEATIFICATION OF ANTONIO ROSMINI

Born in Rovereto, Italy March 24, 1797
Died in Stresa, Italy, July 1, 1855





The 19th-century priest
who prefigured Vatican-II


His beatification takes place today in Novara (35 miles west of Milan). Here is a Vatican Radio feature on him yesterday, translated from the Italian service:


"One of the five or six greatest intellects that humanity has produced in centuries," is how the great 19th century Italian novelist Alessandro Manzoni described Antonio Rosmini, a fundamental figure of 19th century Catholicism.

A priest who was profoundly spiritual, a philosopher, a political theoretician and prolific writer, Rosmini was a far-sighted prophet of the life of the Church. Committed to 'leading men to religion through reason', he was also a shining example of obedience to the Church.

Alessandro Gisotti interviewed Agostino Giovagnoli, historian and lecturer at the Catholic University of Milan, on the contribution Rosmini made to the Church and to Catholic thought.


"He is a personage who truly illuminated the 19th century in Italy and Europe. Certainly, he was a man very sensitive to his time. In this sense, he built a bridge - to a world which was changing vortiginously and problematically - for a Church which had just been violently separated from the State, which found itself facing what the people of the time called a 'revolution.'

Rosmini showed a way in which the 'revolution' was not only against the Church, but could be made a friend of the Church, and above all, a friend of the faith. I think this opened a way of great importance.


[G]Le cinque piaghe della Santa Chiesa(The five wounds of the Holy Church) is Rosmini's best-knwon work, something which was not understood in his time, but which has since borne much fruit. What was Rosmini's strongest point here?

He wrote it in 1832 but it was not published till 1848. And so, everyone read it in the political context of 1848 [during which a series of political and economic revolts took place in Europe because of a recession and abuse of political power, in Germany, italy, France, Hungary, etc].

ACtually, his basic thesis was ecclesiological, which was owed to - as all of Rosmini's ecclesiology were - the 'school of Tuebingen', the German school of thought, on the basis of which Rosmini supported proposals that would rid the church of the last residues of its relationship with the ancien regime and demonstrate the universality of the Church: a Church that was a friend of the people, not of the powerful.

Therefore, the book was not so much a political affinity with the times, but an intellectual affinity that was substantially sensitive to the profound motivations of the era.

Just think of his insistence on the need for a liturgical language in the vernacular. In fact, we could see in him a prophet whio anticipated many aspects of Vatican-II.


Rosmini also remains an exemplary model of someone who could dialog with everyone, particularly with the intellectuals of his time, without diluting his own Christian identity. One sees a resemblance to Joseph Ratzinger...

I think so too. I pointed earlier to the word 'revolution'. For some time now, it has struck me that Benedict XVI is not afraid to speak of Christianity as a revolution. In some way, Rosmini did that - that is, he freed the Church from the risk of being mowed down it it attempted a counter-revolution, which was not so much a poilitical position as an ideological aversion to the modern world and all that modernity brings with it. Precisely, through Rosmini's capacity to grasp the anthropological question, to use a current term.

That was one of the most original things about him - his anthropology, which was new, because it was not pessimistic like the prevailing mood of Catholicism in his time, which was terrified at the newness of modernity. But an open and positive anthropology - knowledge or understanding of man - that did not deny original sin but also encompassed all the infinite possibilities that grace opens up to mankind.

He proposed a friendly church, friendly to novelty, friendly to the times, without renouncing the Christian message in any way, but rather valuing its most profound aspects that are often not understood by the contemporary world.


A biographical sketch


Antonio Rosmini was born in Rovereto, in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, on March 24, 1797. He attended the public school. In August of 1816, he took his final exams at the imperial secondary school, earning the grade of "eminence" in all subjects, and a written evaluation that says he is "endowed with tremendously keen intelligence."

In the autumn of 1816, he began to attend theology classes at the university of Padua, where he received his degree on June 23, 1822. Meanwhile, in 1821, he was ordained a priest by the bishop of Chioggia.

The patriarch of Venice, cardinal Ladislao Pyrcher, brought him to Rome. There, introduced by the abbot Mauro Cappellari, the future Pope Gregory XVI, he met twice with Pope Pius VIII, who gave this advice to the priest-philosopher: "Remember, you must attend to writing books, and not occupy yourself with the affairs of the active life. You handle logic rather well, and we need writers who know how to make themselves feared."

In 1830, he published his first great philosophical work, "A New Essay on the Origin of Ideas."

On February 2, 1831, Rosmini's friend cardinal Cappellari rose to the pontifical throne, and on September 20, 1839, the Institute of Charity that Rosmini had founded received definitive approval.

In just over ten days, from November 18-30, 1832, Rosmini wrote "The Five Wounds of the Holy Church," in which he denounces the dangers threatening the Church's unity and freedom, and points out the remedies for these. The book would be published in 1846.

In 1839, he published the "Treatise on Moral Conscience," in which he argues that intelligence is illuminated by the light of being that is the light of truth, and therefore there is something "divine" in man. His theses were harshly attacked by some Jesuits.

In 1848, with a mandate from the king of Piedmont, Carlo Alberto di Savoia, Rosmini returned to Rome on a diplomatic mission, with the aim of persuading Pope Pius IX to preside over a confederation of Italian states. But when the Piedmont government demanded that the pope join in the war against Austria, Rosmini resigned from his diplomatic post.

But Pius IX ordered him to remain in Rome. He was spoken of as the next cardinal secretary of state, and after the foundation of the Roman Republic, as prime minister. But he refused to preside over a revolutionary government that stripped the pope of his freedom.

On November 24, 1848, Pius IX fled to Gaeta. Rosmini followed him. But he quickly fell into disgrace by opposing the political line of cardinal Giacomo Antonelli, who wanted to use foreign armies in support of the pope. In 1849, Rosmini left the company of Pius IX.

During his trip back to northern Italy, on his way to Stresa, the news reached him that his words "The Five Wounds of the Holy Church" and "The Civil Constitution according to Social Justice" had been placed on the Index of forbidden books.

Under attack from the Jesuits, but bolstered by visits from his friends, including the author Alessandro Manzoni, Rosmini spent his last years in Stresa, guiding the two congregations he had founded and writing his loftiest work, the "Theosophia."

Tried by the Vatican for the first time in 1854, he was absolved. He died in Stresa on July 1, 1855. The Church's condemnation came in 1887, against 40 propositions drawn from his works. The revocation of this condemnation came in 2001.


Earlier this week, Sandro Magister has this important post on Rosmini:


Blessed Liberty:
The Posthumous Miracle of Antonio Rosmini


The great classical thinker was under condemnation by the Holy Office since 1886.
Six years ago, the CDF under Cardinal Ratzinger exonerated him,
paving the way
for his beatification on Sunday.

by Sandro Magister






ROMA, November 12, 2007 – A beatification ceremony is approaching that is a miracle in its own right: the beatification of the priest and philosopher Antonio Rosmini.

It's a miracle because just six years ago, the new blessed was still under a condemnation issued in 1887 by the congregation of the Holy Office, against 40 propositions drawn from his writings.

Absolution came on July 1, 2001, with a note from the then-prefect of the congregation for the doctrine of the faith, cardinal Joseph Ratzinger.

And it was only after the removal of this obstacle that the cause of his beatification was put on the fast track.

Antonio Rosmini will be proclaimed blessed on Sunday, November 18, in Novara, the northern Italian diocese where he spent the last part of his life. Pope Benedict XVI has appointed cardinal Josè Saraiva Martins, the prefect of the congregation for the causes of saints, to preside over the celebration.

In addition to being a deeply spiritual priest, Rosmini was a profound thinker and a prolific writer. The complete edition of his works, being prepared by Città Nuova, will ultimately run to 80 large volumes.

Fr. Umberto Muratore, a religious of the congregation that Rosmini founded, does not hesitate to compare him, as a philosopher, to giants like Saint Thomas and Saint Augustine.

Of his books, the one still most widely read and translated is Delle cinque piaghe della santa Chiesa [Of the Five Wounds of the Holy Church]."

One of the wounds that he denounced was the ignorance of the clergy and the people in celebrating the liturgy. But it is a mistake to view him as a standard bearer for the abandonment of the use of Latin. He wrote, instead, that "reducing the sacred rites to the vernacular languages would mean resorting to a remedy worse than the disease."

He was also a great political theorist. He was a dyed-in-the-wool liberal during a period – the mid-19th century – when liberalism, for the Church, was synonymous with the devil. In his book Filosofia della politica [Philosophy of Politics], Rosmini expresses his admiration for Democracy in America, the masterpiece of his contemporary Alexis de Tocqueville, a founding father of faith-friendly liberalism.

Rosmini anticipated by more than a century the statements on religious freedom affirmed by Vatican Council II. He was a critic of Catholicism as a "religion of the state." He was a tireless defender of the freedom of citizens and of "intermediate bodies" against the abuses of an omnipotent state.

It is not surprising, therefore, that those spreading Rosmini's thought in the Catholic camp today are above all the proponents of a form of liberalism open to religion, which in Europe has its leading figures in the "Vienna school" of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich von Hayek.

The portrait of Rosmini reproduced below was written by a prominent representative of these Catholic thinkers, Dario Antiseri, a professor at the Libera Università degli Studi "Guido Carli" in Rome, and the author of a highly respected "History of Philosophy" translated into a number of languages. His portrayal was published on November 1 in the newspaper of the Italian bishops' conference, Avvenire.

Antiseri focuses his attention on just one aspect of the figure of Rosmini, his political theories. But this may be the aspect that best displays his originality. Rosmini's ideas are still distasteful to many Catholics, bishops and priests included.

Even after Rosmini's beatification, his thought will still have a long road ahead of it before it becomes accepted language in the Catholic Church.



Rosmini, the Anti-totalitarian
by Dario Antiseri


Antonio Rosmini's first and fundamental concern in the political arena was that of establishing the conditions needed to guarantee the dignity and freedom of the human person. And it is in this perspective that, in his view, the question of property becomes crucial.

In opposition to socialist economic theory, Rosmini clearly maintains the connection between private property and individual freedom.

"Property – he writes in his Filosofia del diritto [Philosophy of Law] – truly expresses the close union between a thing and a person. [...] Property is the originating principle of legal rights and duties. Property constitutes a sphere around the person, of which that person is the center: no one else may enter within this sphere."

Respect for another's property is respect for that other person. Private property is a means for the person to defend himself from encroachment on the part of the state.

Person and state: the former is fallible, the latter, never perfect. And here is a famous passage taken from the "Philosophy of Politics":

"Perfectionism – meaning the system that believes it is possible to achieve perfection in human affairs, and sacrifices present goods for imagined future perfection – is a result of ignorance. It consists of an arrogant prejudice that judges human nature too favorably, basing itself upon pure conjecture, upon a postulate that cannot be granted, and with an absolute lack of reflection upon natural limitations."

Perfectionism ignores the great principle of the limitations of things; it does not consider that society is not composed of "angels confirmed in grace," but rather of "fallible men"; and it forgets that every government "is made up of persons who, being men, are all fallible."

The perfectionist neither uses nor abuses reason. And those who are most intoxicated by the malignant idea of perfectionism are the utopians. These "prophets of boundless happiness," with the promise of an earthly paradise, work busily to build quite serviceable hells for their fellow men.

Utopia, Rosmini asserts, is "the tomb of all true liberalism" and "far from making men happy, it digs an abyss of misery; far from ennobling them, it renders them as ignoble as beasts; far from pacifying them, it introduces universal war, substituting power for law; far from distributing wealth, it concentrates it; far from moderating the power of the government, it makes this absolute; far from opening competition to all in all areas, it destroys all competition; far from expanding industry, agriculture, art, and commerce, it deprives them of any incentives, blocking private initiative and spontaneous activity; far from spurring minds to great invention and hearts to great virtue, it smothers and crushes any vitality of the soul, rendering impossible any noble effort, any magnanimity, any heroism; virtue itself is prohibited, and even faith in virtue is destroyed."

And here it must be specified that connected with Rosmini's anti-perfectionism is his staunch criticism of the arrogance of that strain of thought that celebrated its own triumphs in the writings of the Enlightenment, and then unleashed the horrors of the French Revolution.

The goddess Reason was taken as symbolizing man's presumption that he could take the place of God and create a perfect society. The judgment that Rosmini levels against the fatal presumption of the Enlightenment calls to mind similar assessments, those of Edmund Burke first of all, and then those of Friedrich A. von Hayek.

An anti-perfectionist on account of the natural "infirmity of men," Rosmini is quick, again in his "Political Philosophy," to point out that the critical barbs that he aims against perfectionism "are not intended to deny the perfectibility of man and society. That man can continually become more perfect as long as he lives is a precious reality; it is a dogma of Christianity."

Rosmini's anti-perfectionism thus implies an even greater effort. From this arises, among other things, his attention to what he calls "long, public, free discussion," because it is from this kind of friendly hostility that men can draw out the best from themselves and eliminate the errors of their own projects and ideas.

We read further in the "Philosophy of Law":

"The individuals who comprise a people cannot understand each other if they do not speak a great deal among themselves; if they do not confront each other vigorously; if errors are not drawn forth from minds and, once fully revealed, combated in all their forms."

As an anti-statist, and therefore a defender of "intermediate bodies," and as a champion of freedom, Rosmini was very attentive to the sufferings and problems of the needy and the most disadvantaged.

But the duty of Christian solidarity did not make turn a blind eye to the harms of state-run assistance programs.

"Government beneficence – he asserts – is in great demand in view of the most serious difficulties, and instead of good it can produce great harm, not only to the nation, but also to the same poor class that it is pretending to help; in that case, instead of beneficence, it is cruelty. Very often it is also cruel because it dries up private sources of charity, discouraging citizens from helping the poor, who are thought to be receiving help from the government, while instead they are not and cannot except to the slightest extent."

So these are a few of Antonio Rosmini's positions, as a political theorist. It is not difficult to understand their extreme relevance and their astonishing timeliness.

And, together with this, the incalculable harm – not only to Catholic culture - caused by the long marginalization of this priest-philosopher.


INTERVIEW WITH CARDINAL JOSE SARAIVA MARTINS,
PREFECT OF THE CONGREGATION OF THE CAUSES OF SAINTS, AND REPRESENTATIVE OF BENEDICT XVI AT NOVARA ON 18 NOVEMBER 2007
AT THEBEATIFICTION OF ANTONIO ROSMINI
By Gianni Cardinale
30 GIORNI


"I am truly happy that Antonio Rosmini is finally going to be beatified. I am happy for the Church, and, if I may say so, I am personally happy. Since my time as professor at the Pontifical University "Urbaniana", I have always quoted from the enlightening writings of this great, sharp, prophetic thinker"

Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins is already preparing for the homily he will pronounce at Novara on the occasion of the beatification; he does not hide his personal joy for the approaching feast for the Church; it does not often happen that a thinker who has had some Propositions formally condemned by the holy See should be rehabilitated so fully.


Your Eminence, tell us what you feel about the beatification of Rosmini?

We are dealing with a most pure priestly person, who offered himself totally to Christ and to the Church, suffering greatly in the process, a model who became guide and comfort for many Christians who came after him, both "intellectual" Christians and ordinary faithful, who have been touched by the witness of the religious of the two Congregations founded by him. Rosmini is truly a Christian who has lived in the highest degree human and Christian virtues.


It was not easy for Rosmini to have his virtues acknowledged...

In effect, his cause for Beatification - I think you are referring to this - has not been easy, for various reasons... Rosmini's writings had been criticised by ecclesiastical circles, right up to the decree Post Obitum which condemned 40 Propositions taken from his writings. It was a condemnation "after his death", to which Rosmini had no chance of replying; moreover, the Propositions had been taken out of context and had been interpreted in an arbitrary way.


Among the "historic enemies" of Rosmini were the Jesuits...

Some members of the Society of Jesus of the time. The Jesuits, from some time now, have changed their views on Rosmini. Their present General, Kolvenbach, has written an article in the magazine Filosofia Oggi (1997) in which he sees Rosmini as a prophet of the third Millennium.

Kolvenbach says, "During Rosmini's life, some Jesuits - not very prestigious - did write defamatory books against him. It is useful to remember that such Jesuits acted outside the religious rules and were reprimanded by the General of the time, Fr. Jan Roothaan".

The Civilta' Cattolica, a prestigious Jesuit magazine, a few years ago allowed the publication of an article by the late Rosminian bishop Clemente Riva, a most unusual occurrence since it normally publishes only articles written by Jesuits.


Fr. Cornelio Fabro, an unrepentant critic of 1Rosmini, has written that the change of opinion among the Jesuits is only due to an "exacerbated guilty complex"...

It is true that the late Fr. Fabro maintained a negative opinion on Rosmini. We respect his views, but we know that it is the view of the minority of Jesuits.


The fact is that the decree Post Obitum has now been annulled...

In effect, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,under Cardinal Ratzinger, re-studied the Rosmini question and it concluded that there were no obstacles to the beatification of Rosmini.


Another aspect which was detrimental to the cause of Rosmini was his political stand in favour of the unity and independence of Italy, against the interests of the Austrian Empire...

Political views usually do not interfere with the process of beatification. Te Church has beatified Pius IX who, after an initial convergence of views with Rosmini, had very different approaches in political matters. But subsequent political events in italian history comformed to Rosmini's views.


The rapport with Pius IX was very important in the life of Rosmini. At the beginning the Pope had wanted to make him a cardinal - then what happened to spoil their relations?

There is much evidence that Pius IX had great esteem for Rosmini, wanting to make him a cardinal and his Secretary of State. But then, the political turmoil of 1849 took place, and then, the institution of the Italian Republic, and these resolutions came to nothing. As it has been proved by scholars, Rosmini suffered at the hands of Cardinals who were close to Austria, especially Giacomo Antonelli.


What was the general attitude of subsequent Popes to Rosmini?

Generally, great esteem. In the Positio we find quoted various documents and witnesses in relation to this. I would only mention the many times Paul VI mentioned Rosmini, and the fact that John Paul II acknowledges positively Rosmini in the encyclical Fides et Ratio. With John Paul I, it was different.

The servant of God, Albino Luciani, as a young priest, wrote a very critical thesis on Rosmini. It was answered by a young Rosminian priest, Clemente Riva, who later became auxiliary bishop of Rome. In 1978, when Luciani became Pope, he met with his Cardinal Vicar in Rome and the auxiliary bishops.

When it was the turn of Riva, John Paul I said to Cardinal Poletti, "I know him...", but he said this with a large smile. It was Riva himself who recounted this incident saying that his apprehension had been eased by the words of the Pope. We may add to this other witnesses who have testified to the desire of Pope Luciani to have Rosmini fully restored to the Church.


The most famous work of Rosmini is certainly the Five Wounds of the Church. It was placed in the Index of forbidden books, yet it was taken out before the abolition of the Index...

It is a prophetic book, in a sense, too prophetic for his time. And it is the destiny of all prophets, in the Bible, and alas, in the Church at times, to be misunderstood and persecuted.


One of the wounds has to do with the appointment of bishops...

The appointment of bishops has always been and still is a very delicate matter, as I know well from experience. Rosmini wanted to do away with political interference in their nomination, and he wanted to see the ancient tradition of bishops chosen by clergy and people restored.


Is it something we can still do?

The rules for the appointing bishops are not of divine origin, therefore they can always be improved. But it seems to me that the idea of having clergy and people electing their bishop is almost unthinkable todayn the power of the media. At the time of Rosmini there was no television...


[DIM]11t[=DIM]Another wound identified concerns the liturgy...

Rosmini was well aware of the dramatic situation of a liturgy no longer understood by the people and often by the celebrants. In this as in other things,he anticipated the resolutions of Vatican II and particularly of the constitution Sacrosanctum Concilium.


What would Rosmini make of the motu proprio Summorum Pontificum?

I do not think Rosmini would be against the motu proprio. He had a lofty view of freedom and would have appreciated the Pope's initiative to allow for a liturgy which many of the faithful want and find beneficial, and which has been for so long the official liturgy of the Church. Moreover, Rosmini wished to see people and clergy understand better and love the liturgy, not so much translating it into the vernacular.


What other aspects of Vatican II had been anticipated by Rosmini?

Certainly, his teaching on Religious Freedom, was taken up by Vatican II. His teaching was misunderstood, but the document Dignitatis Humanae owes much to Rosmini.


Rosmini died before he turned 60. Is it possible that he may have been poisoned?

In the Positio prepared by Fr. Claudio Papa, there is some indication that he may have been the target of poisoning on more than one occasion. But there is no firm evidence. Although it is not surprising that someone would wish to get rid of him: he was certainly a thorn in the flesh for some centres of political power.


The Postulator of the Cause of Rosmini has said that the cost for the process of beatification and beatification itself is going to be very high. Forgive the impertinence of the question, but why should it cost so much to become a saint?

There is no fixed fee for beatification, it depends on the various commissions, studies, paperwork, salaries of experts, etc. I must add, however, that there is a special fund for causes that need financial help.


A POEM BY BLESSED ROSMINI

How delightful it is to speak with God,
To talk of God,
To be satisfied with God alone;
To recall, desire, understand, know, and love God;
To seek and find God in God,
Giving oneself wholly to God.
To leave for the sake of God even the delights of God;
To think, to speak, to work for God;
To hope only in God, delight only in God;
To keep one's mind always intent on God;
To do all things with God in God,
Dedicated and consecrated to God,
Pleasing God alone, suffering for God,
Rejoicing solely in God;
To desire God alone,
To abide with God for ever,
To exult with God in times of joy, in times of pain;
To see, touch, taste God,
To live, die and abide in God,
And then, rapt and translated into God,
With God and in God, to offer God to God
For God's eternal honour and glory.
O God, what joy, what sweetness there is in God,
God, O God!; God, O God!; God, O God!; God, O God!; God, O God![




TERESA BENEDETTA
00mercoledì 21 novembre 2007 23:51
November 21
Presentation of Mary at the Temple



Giotto, Presentation of Mary, Cycle on Life of Mary, 1305.
Fresco, Capella Scrovigni (Arena Chapel), Padua
.


Iconography and Source:
Three-year-old Mary is taken to the Temple and entrusted to the priests. The scene takes place at the entrance to the Temple of Jerusalem, where Joachim is standing beside the elderly Simeon (112 years old) and the prophetess Anna (Bellinati). The high priest Abiatar welcomes Mary, held by Anna, while in the foreground two other high priests observe the scene.

From the Apocryphal Gospel according to Matthew (4-6):

"When she was three years old, Mary was taken to Temple of Jerusalem, and entrusted to God, together with all those who lived there, praising God day and night.

At the entrance to the Temple, she ran up the fifteen steps quickly without turning to look back at her parents, as children usually do. Those who saw the scene were amazed and even the high priests of the temple were surprised….

Her face was beautiful, as white as snow; every word she uttered was so full of grace that it was clear that God was upon her." (See C. Bellinati, Atlante iconografico della Cappella di Giotto 1300-1305)



From Saint of the Day:

Mary’s presentation was celebrated in Jerusalem in the sixth century. A church was built there in honor of this mystery. The Eastern Church was more interested in the feast, but it does appear in the West in the 11th century. Although the feast at times disappeared from the calendar, in the 16th century it became a feast of the universal Church.

As with Mary’s birth, we read of Mary’s presentation in the temple only in apocryphal literature. In what is recognized as an unhistorical account, the Protoevangelium of James tells us that Anna and Joachim offered Mary to God in the Temple when she was three
years old. This was to carry out a promise made to God when Anna was still childless.

Though unhistorical, Mary’s presentation has an important theological purpose. It continues the impact of the feasts of the Immaculate Conception and of the birth of Mary. It emphasizes that the holiness conferred on Mary from the beginning of her life on earth continued through her early childhood and beyond.

Comment:

It is sometimes difficult for modern Westerners to appreciate a feast like this. The Eastern Church, however, was quite open to this feast and even somewhat insistent about celebrating it.

Even though the feast has no basis in history, it stresses an important truth about Mary: From the beginning of her life, she was dedicated to God. She herself became a greater temple than any made by hands. God came to dwell in her in a marvelous manner and sanctified her for her unique role in God's saving work.

At the same time, the magnificence of Mary redounds upon her children. They, too, are temples of God and sanctified in order that they might enjoy and share in God's saving work.


Prayer to Mary

Hail, holy throne of God, divine sanctuary, house of glory, jewel most fair, chosen treasure house, and mercy seat for the whole world, heaven showing forth the glory of God.

Purest Virgin, worthy of all praise, sanctuary dedicated to God and raised above all human condition, virgin soil, unplowed field, flourishing vine, fountain pouring out waters, virgin bearing a child, mother without knowing man, hidden treasure of innocence, ornament of sanctity, by your most acceptable prayers, strong with the authority of motherhood, to our Lord and God, Creator of all, your Son who was born of you without a father, steer the ship of the Church and bring it to a quiet harbor.

(Adapted from a homily by St. Germanus on the Presentation of the Mother of God).



Fresco, Protaton Church on Mt. Athos,
attributed to Manuel Panselinos, 14th century Macedonian school
.



By faith she believed;
by faith, conceived


A meditation on the feast, from the Office of Readings for today:

From a sermon of St Augustine


Stretching out his hand over his disciples, the Lord Christ declared: "Here are my mother and my brothers; anyone who does the will of my Father who sent me is my brother and sister and my mother."

I would urge you to ponder these words. Did the Virgin Mary, who believed by faith and conceived by faith, who was the chosen one from whom our Saviour was born among men, who was created by Christ before Christ was created in her – did she not do the will of the Father?

Indeed the blessed Mary certainly did the Father’s will, and so it was for her a greater thing to have been Christ’s disciple than to have been his mother, and she was more blessed in her discipleship than in her motherhood. Hers was the happiness of first bearing in her womb him whom she would obey as her master.

Now listen and see if the words of Scripture do not agree with what I have said:

The Lord was passing by and crowds were following him. His miracles gave proof of divine power. And a woman cried out: Happy is the womb that bore you, blessed is that womb!

But the Lord, not wishing people to seek happiness in a purely physical relationship, replied: More blessed are those who hear the word of God and keep it.

Mary heard God’s word and kept it, and so she is blessed. She kept God’s truth in her mind, a nobler thing than carrying his body in her womb. The truth and the body were both Christ: he was kept in Mary’s mind insofar as he is truth, he was carried in her womb insofar as he is man; but what is kept in the mind is of a higher order than what is carried in the womb.

The Virgin Mary is both holy and blessed, and yet the Church is greater than she. Mary is a part of the Church, a member of the Church, a holy, an eminent – the most eminent – member, but still only a member of the entire body.

The body undoubtedly is greater than she, one of its members. This body has the Lord for its head, and head and body together make up the whole Christ. In other words, our head is divine – our head is God.

Now, beloved, give me your whole attention, for you also are members of Christ; you also are the body of Christ. Consider how you yourselves can be among those of whom the Lord said: "Here are my mother and my brothers."

Do you wonder how you can be the mother of Christ? He himself said: "Whoever hears and fulfils the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and my sister and my mother."

As for our being the brothers and sisters of Christ, we can understand this because although there is only one inheritance and Christ is the only Son, his mercy would not allow him to remain alone. It was his wish that we too should be heirs of the Father, and co-heirs with himself.

Now having said that all of you are brothers of Christ, shall I not dare to call you his mother? Much less would I dare to deny his own words. Tell me how Mary became the mother of Christ, if it was not by giving birth to the members of Christ? You, to whom I am speaking, are the members of Christ.

Of whom were you born? “Of Mother Church”, I hear the reply of your hearts. You became sons of this mother at your baptism, you came to birth then as members of Christ.

Now you in your turn must draw to the font of baptism as many as you possibly can. You became sons when you were born there yourselves, and now by bringing others to birth in the same way, you have it in your power to become the mothers of Christ.



Presentation of Mary. Russian icon, Novgorod School, late 15th century



Titian, Presentation of the Virgin at the Temple,1534-38
Oil on canvas, 345 x 775 cm. Gallerie dell'Accademia, Venice.
Detail below:



TERESA BENEDETTA
00sabato 8 dicembre 2007 16:50
TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 9 dicembre 2007 04:13
December 8
SOLEMNITY OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION OF MARY


The Immaculate Conception
A dewdrop of the darkness born,
Wherein no shadow lies;
The blossom of a barren thorn,
Whereof no petal dies;
A rainbow beauty passion-free,
Wherewith was veiled Divinity.
- John Bannister Tabb


The Virgin
Mother! whose virgin bosom was uncrost
With the least shade of thought to sin allied;
Woman! above all women glorified,
Our tainted nature's solitary boast;
Purer than foam on central ocean tost;
Brighter than eastern skies at daybreak strewn
With fancied roses, than the unblemished moon
Before her wane begins on heaven's blue coast;
Thy Image falls to earth. Yet some, I ween,
Not unforgiven the suppliant knee might bend,
As to a visible Power, in which did blend
All that was mixed and reconciled in Thee
Of mother's love with maiden purity,
Of high with low, celestial with terrene!
- William Wordsworth




Esteban Murillo, Immaculate Conception, 1678, Oil on canvas, 274 cm x 190 cm.
Museo del Prado, Madrid
.

This is probably the most famous image of the Immaculate Conception.


The Feast of the Immaculate Conception celebrates the Roman Catholic dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is celebrated on 8 December, nine months before the Nativity of Mary, which is celebrated on 8 September.

A feast called the Conception of Mary arose in the Eastern Church in the seventh century (prior to the Great Schism of 1054). It spread to the West in the eighth century. In the eighteenth century it became a feast of the Roman Catholic Church. It is the only one of Mary's feasts that came to the Western Church not by way of Rome, but instead spread from the Byzantine area to Naples, and then to Normandy during their period of dominance over southern Italy. From there it spread into England, France, Germany, and eventually Rome.

Prior to Pope Pius IX's definition of the Immaculate Conception as Church dogma in 1854, most missals referred to it as the Feast of the Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The festal texts of this period focused more on the action of her conception than on the theological question of her preservation from original sin.

The first move towards describing Mary's conception as "immaculate" came in the eleventh century. In the fifteenth century Pope Sixtus IV, while promoting the festival, explicitly tolerated those who promoted it as the Immaculate Conception and those who challenged such a description, a position later endorsed by the Council of Trent.

In 1854, Pius IX made the infallible statement Ineffabilis Deus: "The most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin."



The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception

In the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus of 8 December, 1854, Pius IX pronounced and defined that the Blessed Virgin Mary "in the first instance of her conception, by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race, was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin."


"The Blessed Virgin Mary..."
The subject of this immunity from original sin is the person of Mary at the moment of the creation of her soul and its infusion into her body.

"...in the first instance of her conception..."
The term conception does not mean the active or generative conception by her parents. Her body was formed in the womb of the mother, and the father had the usual share in its formation. The question does not concern the immaculateness of the generative activity of her parents.

Neither does it concern the passive conception absolutely and simply (conceptio seminis carnis, inchoata), which, according to the order of nature, precedes the infusion of the rational soul. The person is truly conceived when the soul is created and infused into the body.

Mary was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin at the first moment of her animation, and sanctifying grace was given to her before sin could have taken effect in her soul.

"...was preserved exempt from all stain of original sin..."
The formal active essence of original sin was not removed from her soul, as it is removed from others by baptism; it was excluded, it never was in her soul. Simultaneously with the exclusion of sin.

The state of original sanctity, innocence, and justice, as opposed to original sin, was conferred upon her, by which gift every stain and fault, all depraved emotions, passions, and debilities, essentially pertaining to original sin, were excluded. But she was not made exempt from the temporal penalties of Adam -- from sorrow, bodily infirmities, and death.

"...by a singular privilege and grace granted by God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the Saviour of the human race."
The immunity from original sin was given to Mary by a singular exemption from a universal law through the same merits of Christ, by which other men are cleansed from sin by baptism.

Mary needed the redeeming Saviour to obtain this exemption, and to be delivered from the universal necessity and debt (debitum) of being subject to original sin. The person of Mary, in consequence of her origin from Adam, should have been subject to sin, but, being the new Eve who was to be the mother of the new Adam, she was, by the eternal counsel of God and by the merits of Christ, withdrawn from the general law of original sin.

Her redemption was the very masterpiece of Christ's redeeming wisdom. He is a greater redeemer who pays the debt that it may not be incurred than he who pays after it has fallen on the debtor.

Such is the meaning of the term "Immaculate Conception."


Proof from Scripture
Genesis 3:15


No direct or categorical and stringent proof of the dogma can be brought forward from Scripture. But the first scriptural passage which contains the promise of the redemption, mentions also the Mother of the Redeemer.

The sentence against the first parents was accompanied by the Earliest Gospel (Proto-evangelium), which put enmity between the serpent and the woman: "and I will put enmity between thee and the woman and her seed; she (he) shall crush thy head and thou shalt lie in wait for her (his) heel" (Genesis 3:15).

The translation "she" of the Vulgate is interpretative; it originated after the fourth century, and cannot be defended critically. The conqueror from the seed of the woman, who should crush the serpent's head, is Christ; the woman at enmity with the serpent is Mary. God puts enmity between her and Satan in the same manner and measure, as there is enmity between Christ and the seed of the serpent.

Mary was ever to be in that exalted state of soul which the serpent had destroyed in man, i.e. in sanctifying grace. Only the continual union of Mary with grace explains sufficiently the enmity between her and Satan.

The Proto-evangelium, therefore, in the original text contains a direct promise of the Redeemer, and in conjunction therewith the manifestation of the masterpiece of His Redemption, the perfect preservation of His virginal Mother from original sin.

Luke 1:28
The salutation of the angel Gabriel -- chaire kecharitomene, Hail, full of grace (Luke 1:28) indicates a unique abundance of grace, a supernatural, godlike state of soul, which finds its explanation only in the Immaculate Conception of Mary. But the term kecharitomene (full of grace) serves only as an illustration, not as a proof of the dogma.


Other texts
From the texts Proverbs 8 and Ecclesiasticus 24 (which exalt the Wisdom of God and which in the liturgy are applied to Mary, the most beautiful work of God's Wisdom), or from the Canticle of Canticles (4:7, "Thou art all fair, O my love, and there is not a spot in thee"), no theological conclusion can be drawn.

These passages, applied to the Mother of God, may be readily understood by those who know the privilege of Mary, but do not avail to prove the doctrine dogmatically, and are therefore omitted from the Constitution Ineffabilis Deus.

For the theologian it is a matter of conscience not to take an extreme position by applying to a creature texts which might imply the prerogatives of God.


Proof from Tradition

In regard to the sinlessness of Mary the older Fathers are very cautious: some of them even seem to have been in error on this matter.

Origen, although he ascribed to Mary high spiritual prerogatives, thought that, at the time of Christ's passion, the sword of disbelief pierced Mary's soul; that she was struck by the poniard of doubt; and that for her sins also Christ died (Origen, "In Luc. hom. xvii").

In the same manner St. Basil writes in the fourth century: he sees in the sword, of which Simeon speaks, the doubt which pierced Mary's soul (Epistle 259).

St. Chrysostom accuses her of ambition, and of putting herself forward unduly when she sought to speak to Jesus at Capharnaum (Matthew 12:46; Chrysostom, Hom. xliv; cf. also "In Matt.", hom. 4).

But these stray private opinions merely serve to show that theology is a progressive science. If we were to attempt to set forth the full doctrine of the Fathers on the sanctity of the Blessed Virgin, which includes particularly the implicit belief in the immaculateness of her conception, we should be forced to transcribe a multitude of passages.

In the testimony of the Fathers two points are insisted upon: her absolute purity and her position as the second Eve (cf. 1 Corinthians 15:22). Patristic writings on Mary's purity abound.

The Fathers call Mary the tabernacle exempt from defilement and corruption (Hippolytus, "Ontt. in illud, Dominus pascit me");

Origen calls her worthy of God, immaculate of the immaculate, most complete sanctity, perfect justice, neither deceived by the persuasion of the serpent, nor infected with his poisonous breathings ("Hom. i in diversa");

Ambrose says she is incorrupt, a virgin immune through grace from every stain of sin ("Sermo xxii in Ps. cxviii);

Maximus of Turin calls her a dwelling fit for Christ, not because of her habit of body, but because of original grace ("Nom. viii de Natali Domini");

Theodotus of Ancyra terms her a virgin innocent, without spot, void of culpability, holy in body and in soul, a lily springing among thorns, untaught the ills of Eve, nor was there any communion in her of light with darkness, and, when not yet born, she was consecrated to God ("Orat. in S. Dei Genitr.").

In refuting Pelagius St. Augustine declares that all the just have truly known of sin "except the Holy Virgin Mary, of whom, for the honour of the Lord, I will have no question whatever where sin is concerned" (De naturâ et gratiâ 36).

Mary was pledged to Christ (Peter Chrysologus, "Sermo cxl de Annunt. B.M.V.");

it is evident and notorious that she was pure from eternity, exempt from every defect (Typicon S. Sabae);

she was formed without any stain (St. Proclus, "Laudatio in S. Dei Gen. ort.", I, 3);

she was created in a condition more sublime and glorious than all other natures (Theodorus of Jerusalem in Mansi, XII, 1140);

when the Virgin Mother of God was to be born of Anne, nature did not dare to anticipate the germ of grace, but remained devoid of fruit (John Damascene, "Hom. i in B. V. Nativ.", ii).

The Syrian Fathers never tire of extolling the sinlessness of Mary. St. Ephraem considers no terms of eulogy too high to describe the excellence of Mary's grace and sanctity: "Most holy Lady, Mother of God, alone most pure in soul and body, alone exceeding all perfection of purity ...., alone made in thy entirety the home of all the graces of the Most Holy Spirit, and hence exceeding beyond all compare even the angelic virtues in purity and sanctity of soul and body . . . . my Lady most holy, all-pure, all-immaculate, all-stainless, all-undefiled, all-incorrupt, all-inviolate spotless robe of Him Who clothes Himself with light as with a garment . ... flower unfading, purple woven by God, alone most immaculate" ("Precationes ad Deiparam" in Opp. Graec. Lat., III, 524-37).

To St. Ephraem she was as innocent as Eve before her fall, a virgin most estranged from every stain of sin, more holy than the Seraphim, the sealed fountain of the Holy Ghost, the pure seed of God, ever in body and in mind intact and immaculate ("Carmina Nisibena").

Jacob of Sarug says that "the very fact that God has elected her proves that none was ever holier than Mary; if any stain had disfigured her soul, if any other virgin had been purer and holier, God would have selected her and rejected Mary". It seems, however, that Jacob of Sarug, if he had any clear idea of the doctrine of sin, held that Mary was perfectly pure from original sin ("the sentence against Adam and Eve") at the Annunciation.

St. John Damascene (Or. i Nativ. Deip., n. 2) esteems the supernatural influence of God at the generation of Mary to be so comprehensive that he extends it also to her parents. He says of them that, during the generation, they were filled and purified by the Holy Ghost, and freed from sexual concupiscence.

Consequently according to the Damascene, even the human element of her origin, the material of which she was formed, was pure and holy.

This opinion of an immaculate active generation and the sanctity of the "conceptio carnis" was taken up by some Western authors; it was put forward by Petrus Comestor in his treatise against St. Bernard and by others.

Some writers even taught that Mary was born of a virgin and that she was conceived in a miraculous manner when Joachim and Anne met at the golden gate of the temple (Trombelli, "Mari SS. Vita", Sect. V, ii, 8; Summa aurea, II, 948. Cf. also the "Revelations" of Catherine Emmerich which contain the entire apocryphal legend of the miraculous conception of Mary.

From this summary it appears that the belief in Mary's immunity from sin in her conception was prevalent amongst the Fathers, especially those of the Greek Church.

The rhetorical character, however, of many of these and similar passages prevents us from laying too much stress on them, and interpreting them in a strictly literal sense. The Greek Fathers never formally or explicitly discussed the question of the Immaculate Conception.


ICONOGRAPHY OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION


Carlo Crivelli, Immaculate Conception, 1492.
Egg tempera on wood. 194cm x 93 cm.
Church of San Francesco, Pergola, Italy.


Crivelli's may be the earliest dated picture of the Virgin of the Immaculate Conception. The doctrine was controversial but enjoyed increasing popularity in the 15th century, becoming dogma in 1854. Although rejected by the Dominicans, the Franciscans supported it.

A standard format and symbolism developed for such pictures. The symbols derive from the Bible, including the Book of Revelation and The Song of Songs. Here, the Virgin's purity is symbolised by a lily in a pure crystal glass.

It was in 17th Century Spain that the details of the Immaculate Conception became firmly established in painting using the imagery of Revelation 12:1. Mary is the "woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars..."




Diego Velazquez, Immaculate Conception, 1618, Oil on canvas,
135 cm x 101.6 cm. National Gallery of Art, London


This is one of Velazquez's earliest known works. The Spanish painter and art censor to the Inquisition, Francesco Pacheco (Velazquez's teacher and eventual fatherin-law), added that she should be shown as a young girl on the verge of womanhood, dressed in a white robe (representing purity) under a blue cloak (representing Heaven), and a girdle with three knots (like the Franciscan habit, signifying poverty, chastity and obedience), with her hands folded in prayer.

This prescription informs the numerous images of the great Spanish Painters from El Greco to Velázquez to Murillo.





It is easy to look at a painting like Murillo's Immaculate Conception, noticing only the sweetness and delicate charm of the Virgin and the angels and overlooking the imaginative power and depth of feeling of the artist. Here, he transcends the standard recipe for the Immaculate Conception to bring before our eyes a vision of a celestial being existing from all eternity, suspended in an immeasurable abyss of time and space.



Francisco Zurbaran, Immaculate Conception, 1628-1630.
Oil on canvas, 139 x 104 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid.
[/DIM}


Francisco Zurbaran, Immaculate Conception, 1661.
Oil on canvas, 137 x 103 cm. Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.


The 1661 painting is a late work of Zurbarán. The Virgin is a slender, delicate young girl with an exquisite oval face and golden hair falling to her shoulders, a vision in white and ultramarine seen against a golden sky peopled with cherubs. Though lacking in vigour, this late work has all the painterly qualities and expressive beauty of the great monumental paintings of Zurbarán's early period.



El Greco, Immaculate Conception, 1608-13. Oil on canvas, 348 x 174,5 cm
Museo de Santa Cruz, Toledo


The great masterpiece of the late manner of the artist, painted for the High Altar of the Chapel of Oballe, San Vicente, Toledo, begun 1607, finished 1613. The painting certainly represents the Immaculate Conception, although it has often been referred to as an Assumption.
The various attributes of the Virgin (roses, lilies, mirror, fountain of clear water) proper to the representation of the Mystery, appear at the foot of the painting on the right. A view of Toledo appears on the left.

The spiritual excitement of the scene is reflected in meteorological effects: sun and moon shine simultaneously while explosions of light burst through the clouds like fire.

El Greco took the distinctive characteristics of his late style to their extreme conclusion in this work. Ordered scale and proportion, spatial recession and anatomical accuracy have been subordinated to imperatives of visionary experience.

Colours are unblended, forms have become dematerialised, the logic of gravity and shadows is subverted; the distinctions between near and far, open and enclosed, physical and spiritual, are all dissolved.

At the same time, however, El Greco has included a passage of naturalistic still-life that seems to belong to the earthly realm - the roses and lilies at lower right, traditional emblems of the Virgin. Their inclusion intensifies the visual transition from the earthly to the mystical.

The painting is the grand culmination of Greco's career. No artist has been able to express so convincingly the infinite: an infinity of colour and light, an infinity of movement and of space.

This expression of the spiritual reality of the universe was only possible to attain by the uncompromising disengagement of his art from the material and transitory of this World. The earth, symbolized by Toledo, is already a phantom.

From the burst of rose and white flowers at the base, a great upsurge of movement - of colour and light, in constant flux - commences, and increases in its rapture, and met by the light of the Dove, becomes all-pervading and infinite.

It is perhaps the most remarkable realisation of spiritual ecstasy in painting, and one of the greatest masterpieces of colour. A single detail - the offering of flowers, the opening of a wing, the Virgin's mantle transfigured by light - is a moving experience in itself.



Finally, this unusual portrayal of the Immaculate Conception
by a 16th-century Flemish master:


Jean Bellegambe (1470-1535), Saint Anne conceiving the Virgin Mary
Douai, Musée de la Chartreuse


campus.udayton.edu/mary//meditations/birthday.html




TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 25 gennaio 2008 08:53
RESERVED FOR ST. AGNES
TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 25 gennaio 2008 08:54
RESERVED FOR ST. FRANCIS DE SALES
TERESA BENEDETTA
00venerdì 25 gennaio 2008 09:03
January 25
FEAST OF THE CONVERSION OF ST. PAUL




Michelangelo, Conversion of St. Paul, 1542-1545. Frescoes. Pauline Chapel, Vatican


On the occasion of the bimillennial jubilee year starting on June 28 to mark the birth of St. Paul, I have put together here the four catecheses given by the Holy Father Benedict XVI on St. Paul in his catechetical cycle on the Apostles in 2006. These four lectures were given on 10/25, 11/8, 11/5, and 11/22/06.


I.

We have concluded our reflections on the twelve Apostles directly called by Jesus during His earthly life. Today we will start to look at other figures who were important for the early Church.

They too gave their lives for the Lord, the Gospel and the Church. These are men and women who, as Luke writes in the Acts, "dedicated their lives in the name of our Lord Jesus Chirst" (15,26).

The first of them, called by the Lord Himself, by the Resurrected Christ, to be a true Apostle is undoubtedly Paul of Tarsus. He shines like a star of the first magnitude in the history of the Church, and not only in that of the primitive Church.

St. John Chrysostom exalted him as a figure who was superior to many angels and archangels (cfr Pangeyrics, 7,3). Dante Alighieri, in the Divine Comedy, inspired by the story told by Luke in the Acts (cfr 9,15) defined him simply as the 'vessel of election" (Inferno, 2,28), which means an instrument chosen by God.

Others have called him the 13th Apostle - and in fact, he insisted himself that he was a true Apostle, having been called by the Risen One, "the first after the Only One." Certainly, after Jesus, he is the one person in the early Church about whom we are best informed.

We have not only the story told by Luke in the Acts of the Apostles, but also a group of Letters coming directly from his own hand, and which reveal without intermediaries his personality and his thought.

Luke tells us that his original name was Saul (cfr Acts 7,58; 8,1; etc), which was its form in Hebrew (cfr Acts 9,14,17;22,7,13;26,14), as King Saul (cfr Acts 13,21). He was a Jew of the Diaspora, Tarsus being situated between Anatolia and Syria.

Early on, he went to Jerusalem to study Mosaic law in depth at the feet of the great Rabbi Gamaliel (cfr Acts 22,3). He also learned a manual and rough trade as a tentmaker (cfr Acts 18,3), which subsequently enabled him to support himself without imposing on the local Churches(cfr Acts 20,34; 1 Cor 4,12; 2 Cor 12,13-14).

An encounter with the community of those who professed themselves to be disciples of Jesus was decisive for him. From them, he learned of a new faith - a new path - which placed in the center not so much the law of God as much as the person of Jesus, who was crucified and resurrected for the remission of sins.

As a zealous Jew, he considered this message unacceptable, even scandalous, and so, he felt it was his duty to persecute Christ's followers even outside Jerusalem. It was on his way to Damascus, at the start of the fourth decade of the first century when, according to his own words, Christ "took possession of him. (Phi 3,12).

While Luke recounts this with little detail - that the light of the Risen One touched Saul and fundamentally changes his whole life - Paul himself in his letter goes straight to the point and speaks not only of a vision (cfr 1 Cor 9,1), but of illumination (cfr 2 Cor 4,6) and above all, of revelation and vocation in his encounter with the Risen Christ (cfr Gal 1,15-16).

In fact, he explicitly defines himself as an "apostle by calling" (cfr Rm 1,1; 1 Cor 1,1), "or apostle by the will of God" (2 Cor 1,1; Eph 1,1; Col 1,1), as if to underscore that his conversion was not the result of a development of thoughts and reflections, but the fruit of divine intervention, of unpredictable divine grace.

From then on, everything that had constituted value for him paradoxically turned into 'loss and rubbish' (cfr Phi 3,7-10). And from that moment, all his energies were placed at the exclusive service of Christ and His Gospel. From then on, his existence would be that of an Apostle who wants "to do everything for everyone" (1 Cor 9,22) without reservations.

From here we learn a very important lesson: what counts is to place Jesus Christ in the center of our life, so that our identity would be distinguished essentially by the encounter and communion with Christ and His Word. In His light, every other value derives and is purified of dross.

Another fundamental lesson offered by Paul is the universal breadth which characterizes his Apostolate. Feeling acutely the problem of access by the Gentiles, or pagans, to God who, in Jesus Christ crucified and resurrected, offers salvation to all men without exception, Paul dedicated himself to making this Gospel known, literally the "good news", that is, an announcement of grace that is destined to reconcile man with God, with himself and with other men.

From the first, he understood that this was a reality that did not concern only the Jews or a certain group of men, but that it had universal value and concerned everyone, because God is the God of everyone.

The point of departure for his travels was Antioch in Syria, where for the first time, the Gospel was announced to the Greeks and where the name 'Christian' was first coined (cfr Acts 11,20,26), namely "believers in Christ."

From Antioch, he headed first for Cyprus, and later, made repeated visits to the regions of Asia Minor (Pisidia, Licaonia, Galatia), then to European lands (Macedonia, Greece). The most notable visits were to Ephesus, Philippi, Thessalonia, Corinth, not to forget Berea, Athens and Miletus.

Paul's Apostolate did not lack for difficulties which he faced courageously for love of Christ. He himself recalls acting through "labors..imprisonments...beatings, and numerous brushes with death...; thee times I was beaten with rods, once I was stoned, three times I was shipwrecked...; frequent journeys, in dangers from rivers, dangers from robbers, dangers from my own race, dangers from Gentiles, dangers in the city, dangers in the wilderness, dangers at sea, dangers among false brothers; in toil and hardship, through many sleepless nights, through hunger and thirst, through frequent fastings, through cold and exposure. And apart from these things, there is the daily pressure upon me of my anxiety for all the churches. (2 Cor 11,23-28).

From a passage of his Letter to the Romans (cfr 15, 24,28) we see he intended to push farther towards Spain to the limits of the West, to announce the Gospel everywhere even to the limits of then-unknown lands.

How can we not admire a man like him? How can we not thank the Lord for having given us an Apostle of this stature? Clearly it would not have neen possible for him to face so many difficult and at times desperate situations, if there had not been a reason of absolute value before which no limits could be considered impassable.

For Paul, this reason, we know, was Jesus Christ, of whom he writes: "The love of Christ impels us...that those who live may no longer live for themselves but for Him who died and was resurrected for them" (2 Cor 5, 14-15), for us, for everyone.

In fact, the Apostle would give the supreme testimony of blood under the emperor Nero here in Rome where we keep and venerate his mortal remains. And so the Roman Clement, my predecessor in this Apostolic Seat in the last years of the first century, wrote: "For all the jealousy and discord (around him), Paul was obliged to show himself worthy of the prize for patience... After having preached justice to the whole world, and after having reached the extreme confines of the West, he suffered martyrdom at the hands of the authorities; and so he left this world and reached the holy place, becoming for us the greatest model of perseverance." (To the Corinthians, 5).

May the Lord help us to put into practice the exhortation left by the Apostle in his Letters: "Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ" (1 Cor 11,1).


Rubens, Conversion of St. Paul


II.

In our last catechesis 15 days ago, I sought to trace the essential lines of the biography of the apostle Paul. We saw how the encounter with Christ on the road to Damascus literally revolutionized his life.

Christ became his reason for being and the profound motivation of all his apostolic work. In his letters, after the name of God which appears more than 500 times, the next most mentioned name is that of Jesus (380 times).

It is therefore important that we take note of how much Jesus Christ can register in the life of one man and therefore even in our own lives. In truth, Christ is the apex of the history of salvation and therefore the true point of discrimination in our dialog with other religions.

Looking at Paul, we can formulate a basic question: How does a human being's encounter with Christ take place? And what does the resulting relationship consist of? The answer given by Paul may be understood in two instances.

In the first place, Paul helps us to understand the absolutely basic and irrreplaceable value of faith. This is what he writes in his Letter to the Romans: "We consider that a person is justified by faith apart from works of the law" (3,28).

Similarly in the Letter to the Galatians: "...a person is not justified by works of the law but only through faith in Jesus Christ; even we have believed in Jesus Christ that we may be justified by faith in Christ and not by works of the law, because by works of the law no one will be justified" (2,16).

"To be justified" means to be made one of the just, to be welcomed by the merciful justice of God, and enter in communion with Him, and consequently, to be able to establish a more authentic relationship with all our brothers: and this, on the basis of total forgiveness of our sins.

Well, Paul says in all clarity that this condition of life does not depend on our eventual good works but on the pure grace of God: "(We) are justified freely by His grace through the redemption realized in Christ Jesus" (Rom 3,24).

With these words, St. Paul expresses the fundamental substance of his conversion, the new direction of his life as a result of his encounter with the risen Christ.

Before his conversion, Paul was not a man far from God and His law. On the contrary, he was an observant (Jew), faithful to the point of fanaticism. But in the light of his encounter with Christ, he understood that in his previous life he had sought to build up himself, his own justification, and that with all this, he was living for himself alone.

He understood that a new orientation of his life was absolutely necessary. We find this new orientation expressed in his words:
"...I live, no longer I, but Christ lives in me; insofar as I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God who has loved me and given Himself up for me" (Gal 2,20).

Paul, therefore, no longer lived for himself, to achieve his own justification. He now lived for Christ and with Christ - giving himself, and no longer seeking and building himself.

This is the new justification, the new orientation given us by the Lord. Before the Cross of Christ - extreme expression of His self-giving - no one can boast of himself, of his own self-achieved and self-serving justification!

Elsewhere, Paul - echoing Jeremiah - spells out this thought by writing: "Whoever boasts should boast in the Lord" (1 Cor 1,31 = Jer 9,22f). Or: "... may I never boast except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, through which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world" (Gal 6,14).

Reflecting on the meaning of 'justification not by works but by faith,' we come to the second component which defines the Christian identity described by St. Paul in his own life.

It is a Christian identity that is composed of two elements: first, not searching for oneself but being received by Christ and giving oneself, with Christ, and thus participating personally in the experience of Jesus Himself, to the point of immersing ourselves in Him and sharing His death as well as His life.

It is as Paul writes in his Letter to the Romans: "(we) were baptized in His death...we were buried with Him...we have been completely united with him...Consequently, you too must think of yourselves as (being) dead to sin and living for God in Christ Jesus" (Rom 6,3.4.5.11).

This last expression itself is emblematic: for Paul, indeed, it was not enough to say that Christians are baptized or believers; for him, it was just as important to say that they are "in Jesus Christ" (cfr Rom 8,1.2.39; 12,5; 16,3.7.10; 1 Cor 1,2.3, etc).

Other times he inverts the terms and writes that "Christ is in us" or "Christ is in you" (Rm 8,10; 2 Cor 13,5) or "in me" (Gal 2,20).

This mutual compenetration between Christ and the Christian, characteristic of Paul's teaching, completes his discourse on the faith. Indeed, faith while uniting us intimately with Christ, also underscores the distinction between us and Him.

But according to Paul, the life of a Christian also has a component tht we might call 'mystical' - insofar as it refers to our measuring ourselves with Christ and Christ in us. In this sense, the apostle even qualifies our sufferings as "Christ's sufferings in us" (2 Cor 1,5), such that we "always carry about in the body the dying of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our body" (2 Cor 4,10).

All this we should bring down to the level of our daily life, following the example of Paul who always lived in this great spiritual space.

On the one hand, faith should maintain itself in a constant attitude of humility before God, and more - in adoration and praise of Him. Because what we are as Christians we owe only to Him and to His grace.

Because nothing and no one can take the place of God, it is therefore necessary that we render the homage we give Him to nothing and no one else. No idol should contaminate our spiritual universe, otherwise, instead of enjoying the freedom we gain, we would fall into a form of humiliating slavery.

On the other hand, our radical belonging to Christ and the fact that "we are in Him" should inspire in us an attitude of total confidence and immense joy. We should exclaim with St. Paul: "If God is for us, who will be against us?" (Rm 8,31).

And the answer is that nothing and no one "could ever separate us from the love of God which is in Jesus Christ, our Lord" (Rm 8,39).

Our Christian life, therefore, rests on the most stable and secure rock that one can imagine, from which we draw all our energy, as the Apostle writes: "I have the strength for everything through him who empowers me" (Phil 4,13).

So let us face our existence, with its joys and its sorrows, sustained by these great sentiments that Paul offers us. Experiencing these ourselves we may understand how true it is what this Apostle wrote: "...I know Him in whom I have believed and am confident that He is able to guard what has been entrusted to me until that day" (2 Tim 1,12) of our encounter with Christ the Judge, Savior of the world and ours.


Tintoretto, Conversion of St. Paul, c. 1545, oil on canvas, 152.4 x 236.2 cm.
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC



III.

Today, as in the last two catecheses, we turn to St. Paul and his thinking. We are looking at a giant figure not only on the level of concrete apostolate but even for his theological doctrine which is extraordinarily profound and stimulating.

After having meditated last week on what Paul wrote about the centrality of Jesus Christ in our faith, today let us look at what he says about the Holy Spirit and His presence in us, because the Apostle has much of great importance to teach us.

We know what St. Luke tells of the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles, where he describes what happened at Pentecost. The Pentecostal Spirit brought a vigorous impulse to the commitment to bear witness to the Gospel throughout the world.

The Acts describes a whole series of missions carried out by the Apostles, starting in Samaria, then along the coastline of Palestine, then towards Syria. Above all, it recounts the three great missionary voyages undertaken by Paul, as I recounted in an earlier catechesis.

However, in his Letters, St. Paul talks to us about the Holy Spirit from a different angle. He does not simply illustrate the dynamic and operational dimension of the Third person of the Most Holy Trinity, but he analyzes His Presence in the life of every Christian, whose very identity is branded by the Spirit.

In other words, Paul reflects on the Spirit by showing His influence not only on how the Christian acts but on his very being. It is him who says that the Spirit of God lives in us (cfr Rm 8,8; 1 Cor 3,16) and that "God has sent the Spirit of His Son to our hearts" (Gal 4,6).

Thus, for Paul, the Spirit marks us in our most profound personal intimacy. Here are some of his words that have relevant significance: "The law of the Spirit which gives us life i Jesus Christ has liberated you from the law of sin and death...For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, 'Abba, Father!'" (Rm 8, 2.15), because as sons, we can call God our Father.

Thus we see that the Christian, even before he acts, already possesses a rich and fecund interior given to him in the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation, an interior that establishes the objective and original relationship of being a child of God.

Therein lies our dignity: we are not only in the image of God, we are His children. We are invited to live the fact of being a child of God, to be ever more conscious that we are adopted children in the great family of God.

We are invited to transform this objective gift into a subjective reality that determines our thinking, our behavior, our very being. God considers us His children, elevating us to a similar but not equal dignity as Jesus Himself, His only true Son in the full sense. In Jesus, we are given - or rather given back - our filial condition and trustful freedom in relation to God.

Thus we discover that for the Christian, the Spirit is no longer just the 'Spirit of God' as it was normally referred to in the Old Testament and continues to be called in Christian language (cfr Jn 41,38; Es 31,3; 1 Cor 2,11.12; Phil 3,3; etc.).

Nor is it just the 'Holy Spirit' in the generic sense as expressed in the Old Testament (cfr Is 63,10.11; Sal 51,13), and by Judaism itself in its texts (Qumran, rabbinism). Indeed, one of the specifics of Christian faith is a belief in the original sharing of this Spirit with the Risen Christ who Himself became 'the life-giving Spirit' (1 Cor 15,45).

Because of this, St. Paul speaks directly of the 'Spirit of Christ' (Rm 8,9), of 'the Spirit of the Son' (Gal 4,6) or the 'spirit of Jesus Christ' (Phil 1,19). It is as though he wished to say that not only is God the Father visible in His Son (cfr Jn 14,9) but that the Spirit of God Himself is expressed in the life and actions of our Lord who was crucified and resurrected.

Paul also teaches us another important thing: that true prayer does not happen without the presence of the Spirit in us. He writes: "...the Spirit comes to the aid of our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit itself intercedes with inexpressible groanings. And the one who searches hearts knows what is the intention of the Spirit, because it intercedes for the holy ones according to God's will" (Rm 8, 26-27).

That is like saying that the Holy Spirit, that is, the Spirit of the Father and of the Son, has become the soul of our soul, the most secret part of our being, from whom a movement of prayer - whose terms we cannot even specify - constantly arises to God.

The Spirit that is always awake in us makes up for what we lack and offers the Lord our adoration along with our deepest aspirations. Of course, this requires a level of vital communion with the Spirit. And an invitation to be ever more sensible, more attentive to the presence of the Spirit in us, so we can transform this awareness into prayer, feel His presence and learn to pray, to speak to God as His child in the Holy Spirit.

There is another aspect typical of the Spirit that St. Paul teaches us: His connection with love. The Apostle thus writes: "...hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us" (Rm 5,5).

In my encyclical Deus caritas est, I cied a very eloquent sentence from St. Augustine: "If you see charity, you see the Trinity" (n. 19), and he continued by explaining: "The Spirit, in fact, is that interior power which harmonizes the hearts [of the faithful] with Christ's heart and moves them to love their brethren as Christ loved them..." ibid.).

The Spirit places us into the rhythm of divine life itself, a life of love, making us personal participants in the relationship between the Father and the Son. It is not without significance that Paul, in enumerating the various components of fructification by the Sprit, places love first: "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, etc." (Gal 5,22).

And since, by definition, love unites, it means above all that the Spirit creates commuunion within the Christian community, as we say at the start of the Holy Mass, using a Pauline expression, "May the communion of the Holy Spirit [meaning that which is operated by Him] be with you all" (2 Cor 13,13).

On the other hand, it is also true that the Spirit inspires us to weave relations of love with all men. When we love, we give space fo the Spirit, we allow the Spirit to be expressed in His fullness. So we understand why Paul in his Letter to the Romans puts two exhortations side by side on the same page: "Be fervent in the Spirit" and "Do not repay anyone evil for evil" (Rm 12, 11.17).

Lastly, the Spirit, according to St. Paul, is a generous advance given to us by God Himself as an earnest and as a guarantee at the same time of our future legacy (cfr 2 Cor 1,22; 5,5; Ef 1,13-14).

And so we learn from St. Paul that the action of the Holy Spirit orients our life to the great values of love, joy, communion and hope. It is up to us to avail of it in our daily life by following the interior promptings of the Spirit, aided in our discernment by the enlightening guidance of the Apostle.


Rembrandt, St. Paul in Prison, 1627. Oil on panel. Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart, Germany.

IV.

Today we complete our 'encounters' with the Apostle Paul, dedicating a last reflection to him. We cannot take leave of him, in fact, without taking into account one of the definitive components of his activity and one of the most important themes of his thought: the reality of the Church.

First, we must note that that his first contact with the person of Jesus took place through the testimony of the Christian community of Jerusalem. It was a tempestuous contact. Having heard of this new group of believers, he became their fiercest persecutor. He himself acknowledges this at least three times in as many letters: "I persecuted the Church of God," he writes (1 Cor 15,9; Gal 1,13; Phil 3,6), almost presenting his actions as the worst of crimes.

History shows us that one normally reaches Christ through the Church. In a certain sense, it is what happened to Paul as well, who encountered the Church before finding Jesus. But this first contact, in his case, was counterproductive; it did not cause adherence, but rather a violent repulsion. [Paul was a very devout Jew who came to Jerusalem to study with a renowned rabbi.]

Paul's adherence to the Church was brought about by the direct intervention of Christ, who, revealing Himself to Paul on the road to Damascus, identified Himself with the Church and made Paul understand that to persecute the Church was to persecute him, the Lord. In fact, the Risen One said to Paul, the persecutor of the Church: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me? (Acts 9:4) (because) in persecuting the Church, he was persecuting Christ.

Thus, Paul converted, at one and the same time, to Christ and to the Church. So we can understand why the Church was so present in the thoughts, in the heart and in the activity of Paul. In the first place, because he literally founded many local Churches in the different cities where he went as evangelizer.

When he speaks of his "concern for all the Churches" (2 Cor 11,28), he is thinking of the various Christian communities established over time in Galatia, Ionia, Macedonia and Achaia.

Some of those Churches caused him worry and displeasure, as, for example, the Churches of Galatia, which he saw "turning to a different gospel" (Gal 1,6), something which he opposed with great determination. And yet, he felt bound to the communities he founded not coldly, bureaucratically, but intensely and passionately.

For example, he describes the Philippians as "my dearest and greatly longed-for brothers, my joy and crown" (4,1). At other times he compares the different communities to a unique letter of recommendation: "You yourselves are our letter of recommendation, a letter written in our hearts, to be known and read by all men" (2 Cor 3,2).

At other times he shows them the genuine feelings not only of a father but even of a mother, as when he addresses them "My little children, with whom I shall suffer the pains of labor until Christ takes shape in you!" (Gal 4,19; cfr l Cor 4,14-15; 1 Thes 2,7-8).

In his letters, Paul also illustrates for us his doctrine on the Church. We know well his original definition of the Church as the "Body of Christ," which we do not find in other Christian authors of the first century (cfr 1 Cor 12,27; Ef 4,12; 5,30; Col 1,24).

The most profound root of this surprising description of the Church is the Sacrament of the Body of Christ itself. St. Paul says: "Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread" (1 Cor 10,17). In the Eucharist, Christ gives us His body and makes us His body. In this sense, St. Paul tells the Galatians: "You are all one in Christ" (Gal 3,28).

In all this, Paul makes us understand that the Church does not only belong to Christ, but that in a sense, the Church is equivalent to and identical with Christ. It is from this that the Church - and all of us who are part of the Church - derive its greatness and nobility. Because we are the limbs of Christ, an extension almost of His personal presence in the world. And thus, it follows that we have the duty to truly live in coformity with Christ.

This concept is also the basis of Paul's exhortations about the many charisms which animate and build the Christian community. All such charisms trace themselves to a single source - the Spirit of the Father and the Son - and we know that no one in the Church lacks this, because, as the Apostle writes, "To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good" (1 Cor 12,7).

What is important, however, is that all the charisms cooperate together to build the community instead of causing them to be torn apart. And so Paul asks rhetorically: "Is the Christ divided?" (1 Cor 1,13). Paul knows well and teaches us that it is necessary "to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace: one body, one Spirit, just as you are called to one hope" (Eph 4,3-4).

Obviously, to underline the need for unity does not mean advocating that the life of the Church should be flattened out and made to function everywhere in a uniform way. Elsewhere Paul says "Do not quench the Spirit" (1 Thes 5,19), meaning, make generous room for the unpredictable dynamism of the Spirit's charismatic manifestations, because the Spirit is an ever-new source of energy and vitality.

If there is one criterion that Paul values most, it is mutual edification: "Let all things be done for edification" (1 Cor 14,26). Everything should concur to weave the ecclesial fabric in an orderly way, without knotting up, without dropping a stitch, without tearing it.

One of Paul's letters then presents the Church as the bride of Christ (cf. Eph 5,21-33), in this way taking up a prophetic metaphor, which saw the people of Israel as the spouse of the God of the Covenant (cf. Hos 2,4.21; Isa 54,5-8). This expresses the intimacy of the relationship between Christ and his Church, both because she is the object of the most tender love on the part of her Lord, and because love must be mutual and therefore we, as members of the Church, should show Christ our passionate fidelity.

Therefore, it is a relationship of communion that is in play here: the vertical relationship between Jesus Christ and all of us, but also the horizontal relationship among all those who distinguish themselves in the world 'by invoking the name of our Lord Jesus Cirst" (1 Cor 1,2).

This defines us: we are among those who call upon the name of the Lord Jesus. That is why we can understand how desirable it is to realize what Paul himself wished for when he wrote the Corinthians: "If everyone is prophesying, and an unbeliever or uninstructed person should come in, he will be convinced by what he hears; he will be judged by everyone, and the secrets of his heart will be disclosed; and so he will prostrate himself and worship God, declaring, 'God is really in your midst.'" (1 Cor 14,24-25).

That is the way it should be with our liturigcal encounters. A non-Christian who comes into one of our assemblies should be able to say at the end. "God is truly with you."

Let us pray to the Lord that we may be such, in communion with Christ, and in communion among ourselves.




Wulfrune
00giovedì 28 febbraio 2008 01:10
Joos van Cleve
We recently visited our daughter in Vienna and spent a couple of days going round the main art gallery there. It is a remarkable place, with a room full of Brueghels which have to be seen to be believed!!!

I found a couple of enchanting paintings of Our Lady. I don't know, but many pictures of her leave me cold because of their sentimentality or because Mary in art doesn't resemble the way I think of her. I think the two below are both by Joos Van Cleve (1985-1540), a Dutch artist, but I only remember taking a picture of one of the paintings, and I did photograph the label beside it. Anyway, here they are - any further information (not from Wiki etc as I have already read the online stuff) would be good to have.



While I'm at it, here is another Madonna, by Anton Raphael Mengs (18th century) - my camera snap doesn't do it justice because the real thing has such a cheerful freshness about her face. It is slightly unusual I think because she looks so friendly and the Christ Child is reaching out to the viewer with a chortle.



NB) My photos were taken with my cell phone camera without any use of flash

=====================================================================

THANKS A LOT FOR SHARING THESE, CLARE! HOW AMAZING THAT YOU CAN GET SUCH GOOD PICTURES IN A MUSEUM WITH A CELLPHONE!....And I know what you mean about that roomful of Brueghels at the Kunsthistorischesmuseum - The Bosch paintings are equally mind-boggling... I hope you had a chance to see the Sezession, Belvedere and Modern Art museums, as well. Your daughter can't run out of places to visit and revisit in Wunderbare Wien! LUCKY HER!

TERESA
maryjos
00giovedì 28 febbraio 2008 12:54
Beautiful photos!
What excellent photos of those truly lovely paintings, Wulfrune! Thank you for sharing them with everyone here!
benefan
00venerdì 25 aprile 2008 02:29
'Miracle' hastens Cardinal John Henry Newman's beatification


Ruth Gledhill, Religion Correspondent
Times Online
April 25, 2008

Doctors in the Vatican have attributed the miraculous cure of a man bent double by a crippling spinal condition to the Victorian Cardinal John Henry Newman, Britain’s most famous convert to Roman Catholicism.

Although the miracle has still to be ratified by a panel of theologians, the medical decision makes it almost certain that Cardinal Newman will be beatified this year, taking him a further step closer to sainthood.

Insiders say that Pope Benedict XVI, who has taken a close personal interest in the Newman “cause” since its early days, might even decide to make him a Doctor of the Church at the same time as he is beatified, which would in effect mean immediate canonisation. Normally, a second miracle would be required for him to be declared saint after beatification. A second miracle for Newman has been claimed but no investigations into this one will be made until the beatification process if complete.

The Consulta Medica of the Vatican met yesterday at the Congregation of Saints where the “cure” of Jack Sullivan, a lay deacon in the Church from Boston, Massachusetts, was discussed. The medical council voted that there was no known medical explanation for his recovery, effectively declaring it miraculous. The official declaration of a miracle is expected to be made within weeks, after the theologians have reviewed the medical decision.

Mr Sullivan, who had been bent double by his condition, had prayed for the intercession of Cardinal Newman when he recovered from his illness and was able to walk straight again.

Newman is on track to become the first nonmartyr saint in England since the Reformation, and de facto the patron saint of converts. He would be the first British saint since the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales were canonised in one go in 1970.





Here is the official word about the status of Cardinal Newsman's cause:

Thursday 24 April 2008
NEWMAN CAUSE MOVES FORWARD IN ROME

Peter Jennings, Press Secretary to the Fathers of the Birmingham Oratory for the Cause of the Beatification and Canonisation of the Venerable John Henry Newman (1801-1890), said:


"With the Permission of the Roman Postulator of the Newman Cause, Dr Andrea Ambrosi, I am able to announce that today, Thursday 24 April, a meeting of the Consulta Medica took place at the Congregation of Saints in Rome.

The case of Deacon Jack Sullivan, from Marshfield near Boston, Massachusetts, was discussed and voted on by the Consulta Medica. The opinion of the doctors is positive. [That is, what happened was beyond mere natural causes. For cures there must be no natural explanation, and the cure must be sudden, complete and lasting.]

We now await the meeting of the Committee of Theological Consultors on a date to be set by the Congregation of Saints. Before this, the Roman Postulator must draw up the Informatio report that will assist these theological consultors in their deliberations.

If the vote of the Theological Consultors is favourable then the matter goes to the members of the Congregation of Saints, the cardinals and bishops, whose role it is to advise Pope Benedict XVI, who is taking a personal interest in the Newman Cause.

Jack Sullivan, a 69-year old Permanent Deacon, was suffering from an extremely serious spinal disorder when he first prayed through the intercession of Cardinal Newman.

Deacon Sullivan was healed of his spinal disorder on 15 August 2001, the Feast of the Assumption.

Jack Sullivan and his wife Carol have three grown up children.

Father Paul Chavasse, Provost of the Birmingham Oratory and Postulator of the Newman Cause said: "We now hope and pray for a positive outcome for the remaining steps of the process to beatify our Cardinal."

Father Chavasse added: "The Fathers, at Newman’s Oratory here in Edgbaston, would encourage people throughout the world to redouble their prayers for the Beatification of Cardinal Newman."

The Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, Archbishop of Birmingham, said: "The Church goes to great lengths before arriving at a public declaration of a person’s holiness of life. The process is going forward steadily in the case of Cardinal Newman. We await its next step in prayerful anticipation."

=====================================================================

In view of that statement, it is questionable that the Catholic News Agency should have reported the story in this way, based on a news item in a local UK newspaper!

John Henry Cardinal Newman
to be beatified


Vatican City, Apr 23, 2008 (CNA).- The Vatican has approved the beatification of Cardinal John Henry Newman, the English convert and theologian who has had immense influence upon English-speaking Catholicism, the Birmingham Mail reports.

John Henry Newman was born in 1801. As an Anglican priest, he led the Oxford Movement that sought to return the Church of England to its Catholic roots. His conversion to Catholicism in 1845 rocked Victorian England. After becoming an Oratorian priest, he was involved in the establishment of the Birmingham Oratory.

He died in 1890 and is buried at the oratory country house Rednall Hill.

The Catholic Church has accepted as miraculous the cure of an American deacon’s crippling spinal disorder. The deacon, Jack Sullivan of Marshfield, Massachusetts, prayed for John Henry Newman’s intercession.

At his beatification ceremony later this year, John Henry Newman will receive the title “Blessed.” He will need one more recognized miracle to be canonized.

The case of a 17-year-old New Hampshire boy who survived serious head injuries from a car crash is being investigated as a possible second miracle.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00martedì 29 aprile 2008 21:10
PADRE PIO'S EXHUMED BODY MAY BE SEEN
IN SAN GIOVANNI ROTONDO TILL SEPT. 2009



Devotees flock by the thousands
to view Padre Pio's body





ROME, Apr 26, 2008 (CNA) - Thousands of devotees of the Italian mystic St. Padre Pio gathered at his shrine to see his exhumed body, which is on display for the first time since his death nearly 40 years ago.

More than one million people are expected to view his corpse, which is displayed in a transparent casket, between now and September 2009, according to Agence France Presse.

On Thursday more than 15,000 people viewed the saint’s body and also attended a Mass celebrated by Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins, head of the Vatican’s Congregation for Saints.

Cardinal Martins said in his homily, “What we see is a dead body, no longer animated by the breath of God. But Padre Pio is not simply a corpse: he lives on in communion with Jesus resurrected.” The cardinal also called Padre Pio a “saint of the people.”

The Italian state broadcaster RAI broadcast the events live across the country. According to AFP, Consilia De Martino, who was cured from a ruptured lymph duct through the Padre Pio’s intercession, was present. Her recovery was considered one of the miracles necessary for the saint’s canonization.

Padre Pio, a Capuchin friar, was credited by his fellow friars with more than 1,000 miraculous cures and interventions. Church authorities were skeptical of the reputed miracle worker until his death in 1968. He was canonized by Pope John Paul II.

In 1910 St. Pio began to bear the stigmata, the wounds that Jesus received from his crucifixion.

Investigators examining his cause for sainthood considered and dismissed allegations that Padre Pio acquired carbolic acid from a pharmacist that could have been used to simulate the stigmata. A book published last year repeated the allegations.

The saint’s body was exhumed in March and was reportedly in “surprisingly good condition.” His beard, nails, knees, and hands were clearly visible.



Biochemists and forensic scientists have worked to make the body fit for display. His displayed body wore a lifelike silicon mask of his face and was mainly hidden under his monk’s habit.

The forensic scientists, addressing a press conference, denied that the face was badly decomposed. They said the mask was used to protect the sensibilities of visitors.

Local Bishop Umberto Domenico D’Ambrosio told the press conference that when the tomb was opened there was no unpleasant smell. “When I asked the doctors for an explanation they told me it was up to me to provide an answer, not them," he said.

In 2009 the body will be returned to the crypt of Santa Maria delle Grazie church in San Giovanni Rotondo, next to the friary where Padre Pio lived for most of his life.


This was the story when the body was exhumed last March:



Padre Pio exhumed,
body is 'well preserved'


ROME, Mar 3, 2008 (CNA)- In the most discrete manner possible, the body of St. Padre Pio was exhumed at 12:30 a.m. Monday morning by a group of medical experts, while Church representatives observed.

Padre Pio was buried September 27, 1968 at the San Giovanni Rotondo shrine, just four days after he died.

"The body is well preserved," said Bishop Domenico D'Ambrosio of San Giovanni Rotondo-Manfredonia-Vieste, who observed the removal of the saint’s remains.

“From the very beginning (of the exhumation) you could clearly see his beard. The upper part of his skull is visible, but his chin is perfect and the rest of the body is well preserved. You can clearly see his knees, his hands, his mittens and his fingernails,” Bishop D’Ambrosio recalled.

The Italian bishop commented on the state of Padre Pio’s body by saying, "If Fr. Pio allows me to say, it is as if he was manicured.”

The Bishop also said that besides the upper skull, which shows some signs of the process of mummification, the rest of his remains are in surprisingly good condition, including his joints -which are all attached, and his feet.

D'Ambrosio confirmed that neither his feet nor hands showed any trace of the stigmata, since "as we know, they disappeared at the moment of his death."

=====================================================================

I will add and/or modify this post as I can. I am truly sorry I was not able to do the post in a timely manner, as at the time of the first exposition, all the initial stories were in Italian adn I had no time to translate.


TERESA BENEDETTA
00domenica 4 maggio 2008 19:49
German nun beatified:
Blessed Mother Rosa was
'a 19th century Mother Teresa'




Trier, Germany, May 4 (dpa) - The Catholic Church in Germany on Sunday beatified Mother Rosa Flesch (1826-1906), a nun who devoted her life to the poor and sick, with Cardinal Joachim Meisner describing her as a 19th century Mother Teresa.

Like the Albanian-born Teresa, who died in India in 1997, Flesch set up her own religious order in 1863, recruited other women and gained church recognition for her work helping paupers and the dying.

After 15 years she was cast out of office by the other sisters, but humbly continued as an ordinary sister until her death.

Many members of the 350-strong order, the Waldbreitbach Franciscan Sisters, gathered in Trier Cathedral to hear Meisner, archbishop of Cologne, read out a letter, signed by Pope Benedict XVI, saying that she should in future be known as the Blessed Mother Rosa.

The Catholic Church names exemplary people after their death either "blessed" or the higher rank of "saint."

Since 2005, the Vatican has let national churches choose who to beatify, or name as "blessed," and Margaretha Flesch - her name at birth - is the second person to be honoured this way by the Germans.

"She's one of us. She's not someone exotic from a faraway land," Meisner told a congregation of 2,000 in the cathedral and thousands more listening outside over loudspeakers.

TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 5 maggio 2008 03:54
NOTRE DAME DE LAUS
and
BLESSED BENOITE RENCUREL (1647-1718)






As posted earlier in NEWS ABOUT THE CHURCH:




FRENCH ALPINE SHRINE
GETS VATICAN APPROVAL



NOTRE DAME DU LAUS, France, May 4, 2008 (AFP) - The Roman Catholic Church on Sunday officially recognised a shrine in the French Alps where the Virgin Mary is said to have appeared to a young shepherdess more than 300 years ago.

Some 6,000 faithful and more than 20 bishops and cardinals attended a solemn mass at the sanctuary of Notre Dame du Laus, which draws some 120,000 pilgrims each year but had never been formally acknowledged by the Vatican.

Benoite Rencurel was 16 when she first reported seeing the Virgin Mary in 1664, the first of a series of apparitions that lasted until her death 54 years later.

Church authorities in the southeastern French town of Gap were informed during a visit to the Vatican in 2003 -- to make the case for the beatification of the young shepherdess -- that the site was not officially approved.

After three years of research, a team of theologians, historians and psychologists agreed to the move, in a report validated by the Vatican.

"I recognise the supernatural origin of the apparitions and facts experienced and recounted by Benoite Rencurel, between 1664 and 1718", the Bishop of Gap Jean-Michel di Falco Leandri told the gathering.

"I encourage the faithful to come and pray and to seek spiritual renewal in this sanctuary," he said.

The Vatican's representative in France, Papal Nuncio Fortunato Baldelli, was also present for the ceremony.

Catholic authorities have recognised three other apparitions of the Virgin Mary in France since the 19th century: in the Rue du Bac in Paris, in the Alpine sanctuary of Notre Dame de la Salette, and most famously in Lourdes, where she is said to have appeared to the shepherdess Bernadette Soubirous exactly 150 years ago.

NB: BENOITE is the French form for Benedetta.



Church recognizes 17th century apparitions
of Virgin Mary to French shepherdess




PARIS, May 4 (AP) - A Roman Catholic bishop said Sunday that the church has officially recognized that the Virgin Mary appeared to a teenage shepherd girl in the French Alps starting in the mid-1600s.

The announcement marks the first time the church has recognized apparitions of the Virgin Mary in France since those in southwestern Lourdes 150 years ago, the diocese of Gap and Embrun said.

Speaking at Mass in Laus in remarks broadcast nationally on France-2 television, Monsignor Jean-Michel di Falco Leandri said he recognized the "supernatural origin" of the apparitions to 17-year-old shepherd girl Benoite Rencurel starting in 1664 and running through 1718.

The bishop, in an interview on France-Info radio, said the decision meant the church "has committed itself in an official way to say to pilgrims 'you can come here in total confidence.'"

The recognition process involved a panel of experts including two theologians and an investigating judge, he said.

Radio Vatican's Web site said some 30 cardinals and bishops from around the world were expected for the Mass in Laus, to attend the "celebration" of the recognition.

Officials at Notre-Dame-du-Laus church say that after four months of daily apparitions starting in May 1664, the Virgin Mary asked Rencurel to build a church and a house to receive priests.

The sanctuary, which was founded by Rencurel, today welcomes some 120,000 pilgrims a year — at times providing healing oils based on a method that the Virgin Mary was said to pass on to the shepherd girl, the officials said.

The recognition Sunday makes Laus an official pilgrimage site for the church — on a par with Lourdes, a site where Roman Catholic tradition holds that the Virgin Mary appeared before a 14-year-old peasant girl, Bernadette Soubirous, in 1858.

Thousands of people who have since prayed and bathed at a spring in Lourdes said they have been healed.





THE STORY BEHIND THE SHRINE
AND THE DEVOTION TO OUR LADY OF LAUS

www.catholictradition.org/Mary/laus.htm


SITUATED in Dauphiné, in southern France at the foot of the Alps, just southeast of Gap, is the vale of Laus. Its name means lake in the local dialect as there once was one at the bottom of the basin.

In 1666 the hamlet held twenty households scattered in little huts. The inhabitants had built a chapel dedicated to the Annunciation, Notre-Dame de on Recontre [Our Lady of the Good Encounter, meaning Annunciation].

It was here that Our Lady chose to appear in another "Good Encounter", several times to to a humble, unschooled girl, Bl. Benoite Rencurel: "I asked my Son for Laus for the conversion of sinners, and He granted it to me," said the Blessed Virgin to the young shepherdess.

Bl. Benoite had learned suffering early in life as she was born into extreme poverty which was made worse when her father died when she was only seven. Our seeress was born in 1647, in September, but two months before the birth of Saint Margaret Mary, future confidante of the Sacred Heart.

Creditors were unrelenting to Benoite's widowed mother and so her children had to labor to maintain the family. Benoite was not only a help but a protection for her mother, who had faithfully taught her children the Our Father, Hail Mary, and the Creed.

One day she saw some men heading for the house and she ran to warn her mother, fighting off one of them who dared to offer her money in exchange for her virtue.

By the time Benoite was twelve the family was in even worse straits, so she took employment tending sheep for two masters at the same time. Thus, it was in the bosom of deprivation, sacrifice and prayer that the future Saint was preparing for her predestined mission.

In May of 1664, she was seventeen, praying the Rosary, her favorite devotion, watching her flock, when suddenly an old and venerable man, clothed in the vestments of a bishop of the early Church, came up to her and said: "My daughter, what are you doing here?"

"I'm watching my sheep, praying to God, and looking for water to drink."

"I'll get some for you," replied the elderly man. And he went to the edge of a well that Benoite had not seen.

"You're so beautiful!" she said. "Are you an Angel, or Jesus?"

"I am Maurice, to whom the nearby chapel [then it ruins] is dedicated . . . My daughter, do not come back to this place. It is part of a different territory, and the guards would take your flock if they found it here. Go to the valley above Saint-Étienne. That is where you will see the Mother of God."

"But Sir, She is in Heaven. How can I see Her there?"

"Yes, She is in Heaven, and on earth too when She wants."

Very early the next morning, Benoite hastily led her flock to the indicated spot, the Vallon des Fours (Valley of Kilns), so called because the hill above this valley contained gypsum, which the village inhabitants extracted and fired to make plaster for their buildings.

Benoite had just arrived in front of a little grotto that was on the site when she saw a Lady of incomparable beauty holding a no less beautiful Child by the hand. She was ravished by the sight. Despite Saint Maurice's prediction, however, the naive shepherd girl could not imagine that she was in the presence of the Mother of God.

Thinking that she was seeing a mere mortal, she said very innocently:
"Lovely Lady, what are You doing here? Did You come to buy some plaster?"

Then, without waiting for an answer, she added: "Would You be so kind as to give us this child? He would delight us all!"

The Lady smiled without answering. Charmed and won over, Benoite admired the beautiful Lady. At mealtime she took a piece of bread and said: "Would You like to eat with me? I've got some good bread; we can dip it in the spring."

The Lady smiled again and continued letting her enjoy Her presence, going in and coming out of the cavity in the rock, approaching Benoite and moving away from her. Then, when evening came She took the Child in Her arms, entered the grotto and disappeared.

The following day and for the next four months, Benoite contemplated on that site the Joy of the Angels and the Ornament of Heaven. The shepherd girl's face was transfigured right from the start; she shared her happiness with everyone in cheerful simplicity.

Seeing the change in her, people began to wonder, "What if it should be the Blessed Virgin she is seeing?" Benoite did not know this herself, and she never dared to ask the Lady, who gave her all this joy, who She was.

Before making Benoite Her friend and the dispenser of Her graces, the Blessed Virgin strongly attached the shepherd girl's soul to Herself with irresistible attraction. Then, after two months of silence, She made her Her pupil and began to speak in order to teach, test and encourage her.

Putting Herself on the level of the mountain girl's uneducated mind, the Queen of Heaven condescended to familiarities that would surprise us if we did not know that Mary's goodness is boundless. One day our tender Mother invited Benoite to rest by Her side, and the weary child went peacefully to sleep on the hem of the Virgin's mantle.

Another time, doing as mothers do to teach prayers to their children, She had her repeat, word by word, the Litany of Loreto, then enjoined her to teach it to the girls of Saint-Étienne and go to church with them every evening to sing it there.

With the sweetness and patience of a mother, She formed her gradually in view of her future mission. The pious young girl was still uncouth, quite stubborn and readily impatient.

Before the Virgin Mary personally revealed Her name, She initiated Benoite in the role she was to play all her life: to work at the conversion of sinners through prayer, sacrifice, and a special vocation-exhortation, for God had granted her the charism of reading in hearts.

Consequently, she was often given the heavy task of correcting souls and disclosing their sad condition to them. When needed, she would remind them of their forgotten or hidden sins and urge them to purify themselves of them.

A striking conversion, among many others, occurred to give credit not only to the Apparition, but to the seeress' clairvoyance as well. Benoite's employer, Mrs. Rolland, a woman who had no interest whatsoever in religion, wanted to see for herself what was going on at the site of the apparitions.

One day before dawn she went in secret to the grotto, entered before Benoite, and hid behind a rock. Benoite arrived, and a few moments later she saw the Beautiful Lady.

"Your mistress is over there, hiding behind the rock," said Mary. "Tell her not to curse with the name of Jesus, because if she keeps it up there will be no paradise for her: Her conscience is in a very bad state; she should do penance."

The employer, who had heard everything, tearfully promised to amend. And she kept her word.

News of the apparitions began to spread; people were talking about them all over. Many believed in them, but several others were incredulous and treated the shepherd girl as a false mystic. Among the many people who supported Benoite were the little girls of St. Stephen's who, like her, loved Mary with all their heart.

To repeat what we summarized above, the Blessed Virgin said to her, "Tell the girls of St. Stephen's to sing the Litany of the Blessed Virgin in the church every evening, with the permission of the Prior, and you will see that they will do it." Indeed, once they had learned their "lesson," the Litany was chanted every evening with great devotion.

It might be interesting to point out here that Laus is in the diocese of Embrun. Since 1638, the year of the consecration of France to Mary by King Louis XIII, the Litany of Loreto had been chanted regularly in the cathedral of Embrun.

As reports of the apparitions took on greater expansion, François Grimaud, the magistrate of Avançon Valley, a good Catholic and a man of integrity, decided to conduct an investigation. After serious examination he concluded that Benoite was not deceiving anyone, nor was she an impostor, or mentally ill. He also observed that Benoite had not asked her Lady to reveal Her identity, so to speak.

At the magistrate's request, although personally it cost her a great deal, Benoite was obliged to ask: "My good Lady, I and all the people in this place are hard put to know who You are. Might You not be the Mother of our good God? Please be so kind as to tell me, and we will build a chapel here to honor You."

The heavenly apparition replied that there was no need to build anything there because She had chosen a more pleasant spot. Then She added, "I am Mary, the Mother of Jesus. You will not see Me here any more, nor for some time."

Benoite did not see her heavenly Mistress for an entire month. This cast her into such profound sorrow that without the assistance of Heaven, she would not have survived.

On September 29, 1664, on the other side of the stream, halfway up the hill that led to Laus, she recognized the Blessed Virgin. "Oh, good Mother!" she exclaimed. "Why did You deprive me of the joy of seeing You for so long?"

Then she crossed the swollen stream and threw herself at the feet of the Queen of Heaven. The Blessed Virgin made this reply: "From now on, you will see Me only in the chapel that is in Laus."

And Mary showed her the path that went up and over the hill toward Laus, a village the young girl had heard about but never visited, as she actually lived in the village of St. Étienne d'Avançon.

In 1640, some pious mountain people had built a little chapel dedicated to Notre-Dame de Bon Rencontre (Our Lady of Good Encounter) deep in the solitude of Laus. They had done so for the purpose of gathering there to pray when high water would prevent them from going to the parish church in Saint-Étienne.

Exteriorly, the humble thatch-roofed structure looked like all the other small houses; just over two meters square, it had a plaster altar whose only ornaments were two wooden candlesticks and a pewter ciborium. That is where the Queen of Heaven awaited the young shepherd girl, as in a new stable of Bethlehem.

since Benoite had never heard of the chapel, the next day she searched a long time for it in tears, going here and there, sometimes wandering away for a moment. She stopped at the entrance of each poor dwelling, trying to detect the "sweet fragrance."

Finally she detected it near a door left ajar. Entering, she found her beautiful Lady standing on a dust-covered altar.

"My daughter, you have searched diligently for Me, and you should not have wept. Even so, you pleased Me by not being impatient."

Benoite humbly accepted this remark and then noticed with sadness the pitiful condition of the altar.

"Honorable Lady, would You like me to spread my apron under Your feet? It is very white."

"No, . . . soon nothing will be lacking here - neither vestments nor altar linens nor candles. I want a large church built on this spot, along with a building for a few resident priests. The church will be built in honor of my dear Son and Myself. Here many sinners will be converted. I will appear to you often here."

"Build a church?" exclaimed Benoite. "There's no money for that here!"

"Do not worry. When the time comes to build, you will find all you need, and it will not be long. The pennies of the poor will provide for everything. Nothing will be lacking."

Throughout the winter of 1664-65, in spite of the four kilometers that separated the village of Saint-Étienne from the Laus chapel, Benoite went up to it every day. And there she often saw the Virgin.

Our Lady told her, "Pray continually for sinners." Oftentimes, She would name those She wanted her to pray for. In this way the Virgin was forming Benoite for her mission, which was to help priests in the ministry of Confession and the conversion of sinners.

As of 1665, the Blessed Virgin asked her to stop tending flocks in order to devote herself to her mission.

The Virgin had told Benoite, "I asked My Son for Laus for the conversion of sinners, and He has granted it to Me."

The words of the Mother of God were fulfilled. As news of the continuing Apparitions spread, the number of visitors to Laus continually increased. Graces and blessings poured down upon souls; people came by the hundreds and then thousands to pray in the poor chapel. Cures of all kinds abounded and sinners were converted in great numbers.

On March 25, 1665, less than a year after the first apparition, an immense crowd came to the once-deserted chapel. That same year, on May 3, Feast of the Holy Cross, thirty-five parishes converged there, each walking behind its particular banner. Altars and confessionals had to be set up outdoors to satisfy the piety of the people. Priests from the area came to lend a hand to Father Fraisse, the pastor of Saint-Étienne, and hear the many Confessions.

Prudently, the diocesan authorities did not pronounce a decision, but they did permit Mass to be celebrated in the chapel. That is when the Reverend Canon Pierre Gaillard, the Vicar General of the Diocese of Gap, entered the scene. He was soon to become the director of the pilgrimage, and later he composed several authoritative narratives.

Having come out of curiosity in August 1665, he asked for and obtained such great graces there, that he was immediately convinced of the authenticity of the apparitions.

However, Laus belonged to the Diocese of Embrun at that time. Being from the Diocese of Gap, Father Gaillard did not possess the authority to pass official judgment. Upon the recommendation of several priests, he therefore wrote to Father Antoine Lambert, the Vicar General of the Diocese of Embrun, and requested that he initiate an ecclesiastical inquiry.

Father Lambert was most unsympathetic towards the apparitions at Laus, and he was not pleased to see the faithful forsaking the old pilgrimage to Our Lady of Embrun. He was convinced that Benoite's apparitions were diabolical and that she was just a common illuminate.

On September 14, 1665, he came to Laus in the company of several eminent priests, equally unsympathetic to the events at Laus, hoping to put an end to "this sorcery," prove Benoite guilty of a hoax, and shut down the chapel.

When the poor shepherd girl heard that they had arrived, she was so afraid that she wanted to leave, but the Mother of God reassured her: "No, My daughter, you must not run away. You must remain, for you must do justice to churchmen. They will question you one by one and try to catch you with your own words. But don't be afraid. Tell the Vicar General that he can very well make God come down from Heaven by the power he received when he became a priest, but he has no commands to give the Mother of God."

When the Vicar General reached Laus, he entered the chapel to pray for a moment and then summoned the shepherd girl. Backed by his colleagues, he questioned Benoite haughtily, trying to trap her and make her contradict herself. She remained unruffled and answered him with simplicity and calm assurance. Her words were clear and surprisingly affirmative.

"Don't think I have come here to authorize your visions and illusions, and all the strange things that are being said about you and this place," the Vicar General said severely. "It is my conviction, as it is of everyone with any common sense, that your visions are false. Consequently, I am going to close down this chapel and prohibit the devotion. As for you, you have only to go back home."

Following the Blessed Virgin's inspiration, the shepherd girl answered him: "Sire, although you command God each morning and make Him come down to the altar by the power you received when you became a priest, you have no commands to give His holy Mother, who does as She pleases here."

Impressed by these words, the Vicar General replied: "Well, if what people are saying is true, then pray to Her to show me the truth by a sign or a miracle, and I will do all that I can to accomplish Her will. But once again, be careful that these not be illusions and effects of your imagination to delude the people, or I will punish you severely to undeceive those who believe you. I will stamp out abuses with every means in my power."

Benoite thanked him humbly and promised to pray according to his intentions. Father Fraisse, the pastor of Saint-Étienne, Judge François Grimaud and Father Pierre Gaillard were also questioned. The Vicar General, instead of closing down the oratory, made a detailed inventory and wrote out a lengthy report of his pastoral visit.

He had planned on leaving that evening, but heavy downpours obliged him to remain for two more days. The Blessed Virgin had arranged it thus, so that he would witness a striking miracle.

A well-known woman of the area by the name of Catherine Vial had been suffering for the past six years from the contraction of the nerves in her legs: they were both bent backwards and seemed bound to her body, and no effort could separate them. Her case had been declared incurable by two eminent surgeons.

Having come to Laus with her mother to make a novena, she was a pity to behold, crouched all day long in the chapel. Around midnight on the last day of the novena, she suddenly felt her legs relax and begin to move. She was cured.

The next morning she entered the chapel under her own power while the Vicar General was saying Mass. Her presence caused quite a stir as the people exclaimed, "Miracle! Miracle! Catherine Vial is cured!" Moved to tears, Father Lambert had a hard time finishing his Mass.

Father Gaillard, who was serving, wrote, "I am a faithful witness of all that occurred." And the Vicar General declared, "There is something extraordinary occurring in that chapel. Yes, the hand of God is there!"

Father Lambert questioned the woman who had been cured and wrote out an official report of the miracle. Then he had everyone enter the chapel to sing the Te Deum and the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, and he named two young priests as chaplains at Laus: Father Jean Peytieu, who would die of exhaustion at the age of forty-nine after twenty-four years of ministry totally dedicated to souls, and Father Pierre Gaillard, who exercised an exemplary ministry there for fifty years as director of the pilgrimage. Father Barthelemy Hermitte was named to serve as their assistant, which he did for twenty-eight years until his death.

The Vicar General concluded by authorizing construction of the church as the Blessed Virgin had requested.

The little Laus chapel, where more and more wonders were being wrought, could scarcely hold ten or twelve people. It became absolutely necessary to replace it with a bigger church. The construction and the financing of that church constitute part of "the wonders of Laus."

Although there were no resources at all, construction was undertaken with great enthusiasm. It was above all the poor, the little people, who took up the challenge, made doubly difficult by often impassable access roads. The people of the area and the many pilgrims who went up to Laus would take one or more stones from A vance stream and carry them to the construction site; even the children brought some of their own. Everyone wanted to donate something, whether materials or money. It took a year to gather all the necessary materials.

Thanks to Father Gaillard's tenacity, the construction was built according to the indications Our Lady had given Benoite. To the great credit of those in charge, the chapel of Notre-Dame de Bon Rencontre was incorporated into the structure and became the choir of the new church.

On October 7, 1666, Feast of the Holy Rosary, Father Gaillard laid the first stone of the building, and the Dominican Fathers from Gap presided over a long procession of pilgrims. It was on that occasion that Benoite became a Dominican Tertiary. From then on she wore the tertiary veil and cape, and people began calling her "Sister Benoite."

Father Gaillard directed the construction work. Benoite saw to everything and motivated the workers. She prepared their meals, prayed with them and spoke words of salvation to them on occasion, sometimes adding a useful word of advice to avoid accidents.

As a result of this, throughout the entire duration of the construction, not a single blasphemy was heard and no accidents occurred. Within four years, the church was completed (1666-70).

An early historian wrote, "The Church of Our Lady of Laus was built to the singing of psalms and hymns. The hands of the poor gathered its materials, donations dug its foundations, Providence raised its walls, and confidence in God The earliest historians of Laus are unanimous in reporting the sweet, heavenly fragrance of the place; they mention it as a public occurrence to which a great number of people attested. These fragrances were sometimes so intense that their odor spread from the chapel all over the valley.

Judge François Grimaud attested, "During the Easter Season of 1666, I smelled a very sweet fragrance for around seven minutes; I had never smelled anything like it in my life, and it gave me such deep satisfaction that I was enraptured."

It is related that from March 24th till the end of May 1690, the Laus church was so pervaded with this fragrance that all the pilgrims attested to it. In 1716, because he had smelled this "sweet fragrance,"

Honore Pela, a sculptor from Gap, donated a beautiful statue in Carrara marble, representing the Virgin and Child. This phenomenon of fragrances is still occasionally experienced by pilgrims today. To avoid any possibility of deception, flowers are not usually allowed at the shrine.

Sister Benoite breathed in these fragrances from their source. The manuscripts of Laus report, "Every time the Blessed Virgin honored her with Her visit, people smelled a heavenly fragrance that pervaded the entire church. Sometimes the shepherd girl's clothing was deeply permeated with the heavenly scent for up to eight days; these supernatural fragrances were so sweet and delightful that they lifted up the soul and surpassed all other fragrances on earth."

Whenever Benoite returned from being with her good Mother, her face would seem to be ablaze, like that of Moses coming down from Sinai; she would kneel, recite the Litany of the Blessed Virgin, and then for the rest of the day she would be unable to eat.

One day in the winter of 1665, Benoite was advised by the Virgin Mary to invite those with illnesses to apply oil to their afflicted members. Our Lady said to her that "if they take oil from the lamp in the chapel and apply it to themselves, and if they have recourse to Her intercession and have faith, they will be healed;"that "God has given Her this place for the conversion of sinners." [Text from the manuscript of Rev. Can. Pierre Gaillard.]

The oil from the sanctuary lamp burning before the Blessed Sacrament, and the maternal presence of the Virgin Mary having appeared on the site, are to Laus what the waters of the spring are to Lourdes. Physical and moral cures were granted in great number by means of this oil applied with faith. A certain quantity is regularly taken from the lamp for the pilgrims' use, and its beneficial effect is still active today.

Let us recall that Saint Brother Andre of St. Joseph's Oratory in Montreal also used oil from the sanctuary lamp to heal the sick.

More than anywhere else, it was in this blessed shrine that the Virgin Mary appeared to Benoite at least once a month for fifty-four years, and this is where Mary made Her messenger Her instrument for the conversion of sinners. Faithful to her mission, Benoite never stopped praying, suffering and exhorting.

For many people, there is nothing harder than going to Confession. Rather than admit their sins to priests in order to receive pardon, many souls stop practicing their religion and sink even more deeply into sin. Out of compassion for Her sinful children, the Virgin Mary gave Benoite the exceptional privilege of reading into souls. Later, Saint John Mary Vianney, and more recently Saint Padre Pio, received the same charism in favor of the conversion of sinners.

Inspired by Heaven, Benoite urged sinners to set their conscience in order; she enlightened those who could not see and, if necessary, revealed forgotten or hidden sins. She could "see consciences the way we see in a mirror, all at once," she said. She revealed faults, grievous and lesser sins, hidden motives, hypocrisy, and errors often committed unconsciously.

She required simplicity and purity of soul, humility and a firm will to improve. She would even take away from the Communion rail people who were not in the state of grace.

Benoite often had to make painful observations and say things that were not easy to hear, but she was so kind and compassionate that people were generally very grateful to her. After speaking with her they were resolved to purify every aspect of their consciences in order to amend their lives.

Her hardest task was to reprimand or warn certain souls at Our Lady's behest. When she would put ofF this duty, the Blessed Virgin would defer a visit. It was not that the saintLy seer was defying Our Lady in pride, but that she was so humble and simple in that humility that she considered herself unworthy of the task. One day a priest asked her why she acted as she did.

"The Mother of God commands me to do it in such a mild manner that I don't believe She absolutely wants it. And when I fail, my good Mother corrects me without getting angry. So because of the shame I feel on admonishing others, I often wait for a second command, and then I obey." If it were only a question of sinners! . . . but she also had to guide their, confessors.

To priests, she revealed their indiscretion, their lack of prudence in their manner of questioning penitents, their neglectful behavior, their grudges. Concerning a religious brother who was always on the move, she said, "Let him stay where he is. That is where he will work out his salvation, but he must be faithful to grace."

She would see priests at the altar shining with light or tarnished, according to the state of their conscience, and she would warn the latter. A young priest from Embrun said, "You cannot be in that chapel without trembling if your conscience is not clear."

The Blessed Virgin, for Her part, did not condone any failings in Her messenger. She counseled her and corrected her: "Take heart, My daughter! Have patience . . . Do your duty cheerfully . . . Bear no hatred towards the enemies of Laus . . . Do not be troubled and sick over it if people do not profit from your advice . . . Do not be disturbed by temptations, visible or invisible spirits, or temporal affairs . . . Strive never to forsake the presence of God, for whoever has any faith will not dare to offend Him."

The humble shepherd girl could not love Mary without having a deep love for Jesus, Her Divine Son. She had chosen Him as the only Bridegroom of her soul, and she hungered to suffer with Him for the conversion of sinners.

There was a Cross overlooking Avançon at the entrance to the vale of Laus. Benoite descended to pray there every day, even when it snowed or rained. Kneeling down, she would gaze at our Saviour on His Cross, and her heart would melt with love and compassion at the thought of all He has done for the salvation of men.

To reward her, it pleased our Saviour to appear to her in the reality of His sufferings. She saw Him crucified, bleeding and in agony, with the wounds in His hands, feet and side, and red gashes from the scourging covering His Body.

Transported with sorrow, she said, "Oh, my Jesus, if You remain like this another instant, I will die!" The sight of His sufferings caused her such great distress that one day her Guardian Angel came to assure her, saying, "Do not be troubled, my Sister. Although our Divine Master has appeared to you in this condition, He is not suffering anything; it is solely to show you what He suffered out of love for the human race."

But these words did not console her. The fact that her good and sweet Master had suffered in that manner and to such an extent was sufficient to maintain the compassion she felt.

On Friday, July 7, 1673, the bleeding Christ said to her, "My daughter, I am showing Myself to you in this condition so that you may participate in the sorrows of My Passion."

Every week from that day on, she suffered a mystical crucifixion between Thursday evening and Saturday morning. This weekly crucifixion lasted fifteen years, with a two-year interruption from 1677 to 1679, when Benoite served food to the workers who were building the priests' residence; in November 1679, the mystical crucifixion was renewed at the Cross of Avançon.

The enemies of Laus, including some priests, regarded these occurrences as bouts of illness, phenomena related to epilepsy or hysteria. They called the pilgrimage chaplains "visionaries, idiots and fools for so easily believing a girl who has no common sense."

As for Benoite, her exterior martyrdom caused her to suffer because it attracted the veneration of the people, thus offending her sensitive humility.

One day Benoite said to her good Mother, "May my sufferings be even more cruel if such is God's good pleasure, but let them be less visible!" The Blessed Virgin appeared to her the following Saturday and said, "You will no longer have the Friday sufferings, but you will have many others."

She certainly did have "many others." The devil's rage could be felt increasingly all around her. What is more, Christ always marks the authenticity of His works with the seal of His Cross.

Canon Gaillard states that from 1664 to 1672, incredulity made only a few small waves. But during the next twenty years unspeakable contradictions arose, especially among the clergy, then infected with Jansenist venom. Father Lambert, Vicar General of the diocese of Embrun, had passed away.

A few members of the metropolitan Chapter who were prejudiced against Laus took advantage of the authority they exercised in the interim to issue an interdict against the holy girl; they posted their document on the doors of the cathedral of Embrun, and threatened with excommunication any priest who celebrated Mass in the Laus chapel.

They also posted a sign on the church door at Laus forbidding public devotions on the site. The Blessed Virgin commanded Benoite, "Remove that paper... and let Mass be said here as it was before." She was obeyed.

The Apparitions at Laus and Benoite were to meet with much hostility over the next twenty years. The Bishop, now old and in a weakened state appointed two chaplains who were not in favor of Laus, and turned the faithful away and for fifteen years Benoite was kept under house arrest, permitted only Sunday Mass.

The devil even raised up visionaries to ape Benoite's devotions, to the point of deceiving weak souls. People necessarily stopped coming to Laus for a time. It was also during this sad period that the holy priests [ Fr. Jean Peytieu and Fr. Barthelemy Hermitte] who had seconded Benoite passed away.

Even so, nothing was to succeed in ruining the pilgrimage completely. Benoite's Angel comforted her by lifting a little of the veil that hid the future from her: "There will always be troubles at Laus until there are Religious established here.

The messenger's fidelity triumphed over this long "eclipse of Laus." At long last, the Bishop of Embrun awoke from his apathy.

In 1712, six years before Benoite's death, the direction of the Pilgrimage was entrusted to some good priests, called the Pères Gardistes, "a deeply religious group of sound doctrine, moved by an ardent desire for the apostolate."

On March 18, 1700, Benoite's Guardian Angel had told her, "The Laus devotion is the work of God which neither man nor the devil can destroy. It will continue until the end of the world, flourishing more and more and bearing great fruit everywhere."

On the one hand she was tormented by the demons in Hell for the sake of the conversion of sinners, but on the other, she lived in familiarity with the Angels. She was especially close to her Guardian Angel, to whom she confided all he pain and sorrows, consulting him at every moment.

He responded to this absolute trust with all kinds of services which, because of Benoite's perfect simplicity, did not even surprise her. He taught her the virtues of plants and helped her to clean the little chapel.

One time, she had forgotten her shawl, little more than a rag, which she had left hanging on a branch in the woods. As she was suffering bitterly from the cold that night, her Angel brought it back to her. On many occasions he opened the church door for her and said the Rosary with her. But he also knew when to correct her.

One day he confiscated a beautiful Rosary that had been given to Benoite, but to which she was too strongly attached. And it was quite some time before he gave it back to her.

To the end, in spite of continual sufferings, Benoite remained Mary's faithful pupil and auxiliary with sinners. When her good Mother stopped visiting her to purify her, and Satan cried out, "She has forsaken you . . . You will no longer have any recourse but in me!" Benoite replied, "Oh, I would rather die a thousand times forsaken by Mary, than forsake Her for a single moment!"

But now a burning fever consumed her, and for her, the nights seemed to be ''as long as years." She became bedridden one month before her death.

On Christmas Day of 1718, after asking forgiveness of those who were present, for the bad examples she might have given during her lifetime, she requested and received Holy Viaticum. Suddenly her good Mother reappeared before her eyes, leaving behind a fragrance that pervaded the very poor chamber.

The Pères Gardistes prayed for her cure. "Two more years, Lord!" they implored. But on December 28th she insisted on receiving Extreme Unction, knowing full well that she would be joining the Holy Innocents on their feast day. She received the Last Sacraments at three in the afternoon. There was no death agony; she appeared very happy.

"We are your children," Father Royere said to her. "Will you bless us before leaving us?"

At first Benoite's humility inclined her to refuse, but then her simplicity won out. "It is up to our good Mother to bless you," she said. And at once she raised her hand from her bed, not wanting to refuse them this consolation, and she said to them, "I give it to you most willingly, good Fathers."

She said a calm farewell to everyone.

Around eight in the evening, after the prayers for the dying had been recited, she asked her goddaughter to recite the Litany of the Child Jesus. And so she passed away in joy. She was seventy-one years old when she died in the odor of sanctity, as stipulated by the inscription on her grave.

Sister Benoite Rencurel was declared Venerable in 1871 and beatified in 1984. The church in Laus was raised to the rank of a minor basilica in 1893.

Among the great figures who had a special devotion to Our Lady of Laus, let us mention Saint Eugene de Mazenod (1782-1861), founder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate; Saint Peter Julian Eymard (1811-1868), founder of the Blessed Sacrament Fathers and Servants; Dom Jean Baptiste Chautard (1858-1935), Abbot of Sept-Fons; and there are certainly many others who remain unknown to us.

At the request of the bishop of the diocese, Saint Eugene de Mazenod assumed responsibility for the Shrine from 1819 to 1840. During that period he transferred his novitiate and scholasticate to Laus, where it was attended by Father Bruno Guigues, who became the first Bishop of Ottawa, Canada.

As for Saint Peter Julian Eymard, he was scarcely eleven years old when by repeated insistence he obtained permission to make a sixty kilometer pilgrimage on foot while begging for his bread. He spent nine days at the holy shrine in preparation for his First Communion.

Later he wrote, "That is where I first came to know and love Mary." He had a great devotion for his "Good Mother of Laus" all his life. In times of crushing fatigue, he loved to retire to that shrine.

Our Lady of Laus, Refuge of sinners, look down with kindness and compassion upon the physical and moral miseries of our age! Have mercy on thy children and deign to convert us all entirely to the love of thy Divine Son!

Adapted from Magnificat Vol. XL, No. 5 and Vol. XXXVI, No. 5.


benefan
00domenica 10 agosto 2008 05:04
Hawaii teacher's cure
clears way for a new saint


By JAYMES SONG
August 9, 2008

AIEA, Hawaii (AP) — When cancer spread into her lungs, doctors told Audrey Toguchi she had six months to live, at best, and suggested chemotherapy as the only option.



Toguchi, however, turned to another source — a Catholic missionary who died more than a century ago.

"I'm going to Molokai to pray to Father Damien," Toguchi calmly told Dr. Walter Y.M. Chang after hearing her death sentence.

"Mrs. Toguchi, prayers are nice and it's probably very helpful, but you still need chemotherapy," replied Chang, who earlier had removed a fist-size tumor from Toguchi's left buttock that was the source of the cancer in her lungs.

Defying Chang and the pleas of her husband and two sons, Toguchi caught a flight from Honolulu to the remote peninsula of Kalaupapa on the island of Molokai to pray at the grave of the priest who had ministered to people with leprosy until he, too, caught it and died in 1889.

"Dear Lord, you're the one who created my body, so I know you can fix it," Toguchi prayed. "I put my whole faith in you. ... Father Damien, please pray for me, too, because I need your help."

On a doctor's visit on Oct. 2, 1998, a month after cancer was first detected in her lungs, doctors expected the tumors to have grown. Instead, they had shrunk, and by May 1999 tests confirmed that they had disappeared without treatment.

Chang and a half-dozen other doctors, including a cardiologist, oncologist, pathologist and radiologist, couldn't explain it. Chang, who does not belong to any religion, urged Toguchi to report it to the Catholic church.

The Vatican conducted an extensive review and concluded Toguchi's recovery defied medical explanation.

On July 3, Pope Benedict XVI agreed and approved the case as Damien's second miracle, opening the way for the Belgian priest to be declared a saint.

The Vatican requires confirmation of two miracles attributed to a candidate's intercession before canonization, or sainthood.

Church authorities approved Damien's first miracle in 1992. In that case, Sister Simplicia Hue of France, who was dying of a gastrointestinal illness, recovered overnight in 1895 after she began a novena, or nine days of prayer, to Damien.

Toguchi's story, and identity, were kept secret for years while the church investigated her case. Today, the 80-year-old retired schoolteacher talks openly of her experience.

She and her husband of 50 years, Yukio, live in the hills above Pearl Harbor, just up the road from Aiea High School, where she taught social studies.

Toguchi is a deeply religious and kind woman who is generous with hugs and smiles to everyone she meets. As a teacher, she often told students how special they were and earned the nickname "Ma" for her nurturing ways. Since retiring in 1995, much of her time now goes to her garden.

Toguchi doesn't care for the title "miracle woman," as some have called her.

"I'm just a regular Joe Blow. You can tell," she said. "I still don't know why this happened to me."

Chang says Toguchi's chances of survival at the time of his diagnosis were zero, even if she had agreed to chemotherapy.

"It may have delayed her eventual demise, probably slow (the cancer) down, but eventually, she would have succumbed to this vicious cancer," said Chang, who retired in 2004.

Toguchi had been diagnosed in December 1997 with liposarcoma, an uncommon tumor that arises in deep fat tissue — in this case, her buttock. She had several operations followed by radiation. A month later, doctors found and removed an unrelated cancer in her thyroid gland.

In September 1998, an X-ray showed three growths in her lungs. A needle biopsy of one showed it was consistent with the liposarcoma found in her left buttock. Follow-up X-rays showed the growths were shrinking on their own.

Dr. Richard Schilsky, a University of Chicago cancer specialist who is president of the American Society of Clinical Oncology, said it's "highly likely" that the lung had already been seeded with liposarcoma cells when her original tumor was found.

Schilsky said it isn't clear that all three lung growths were cancer, since only one was biopsied. And there are several reasons people get small inflammatory nodules in the lungs that might resolve spontaneously.

"The point here is that the primary tumor was treated," and that could have helped her immune system control any remaining cancer in her body, said Schilsky, who did not treat Toguchi. He based his comments on Chang's case report in the October 2000 edition of the Hawaii Medical Journal.

Rare cases of spontaneous remission, or regression, are reported, mostly involving melanoma skin cancer, kidney cancer or lymphoma — hardly ever solid tumors like breast, prostate or colon cancers, Schilsky said.

"The bottom line is, it probably does happen. Obviously, it happens very rarely because it is the nature of cancer to grow, not to regress," he said.

Chang agrees that "no one truly knows" why some cancers disappear.

"For the true believer or faithful, this is a miracle. For the true skeptic, this is a random or very unusual coincidence. For the doctor and scientist, we call it complete spontaneous regression of cancer."

Toguchi believes it was Damien and looks forward to the day when the priest is canonized, which is expected early next year. She plans to go to Rome for the ceremony.

Damien, born Joseph de Veuster, arrived in the islands in 1864. Nine years later he began ministering to leprosy patients on Molokai, where some thousands had been banished amid an epidemic in Hawaii in the 1850s. After contracting the disease, also known as Hansen's disease, he died on April 15, 1889, at 49.

His remains were moved to Belgium in 1936. A relic of his right hand was returned to his original grave on Molokai after he was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1995.

His life and work have inspired many, from Mother Teresa, who lobbied for Damien's sainthood, to Mahatma Gandhi.

Toguchi returned to Damien's grave after the cancer disappeared. This time, she took her husband, Yukio, who comes from a Buddhist family and attended Methodist church growing up on the sugar plantations of Maui.

"I'm not the praying type but I just wanted to say 'Thank you,'" he said. Every day is a blessing to him now, he said.

Audrey Toguchi still prays often to Damien, asking him to help others.



Fr. Damien's tomb in Molokai; right, memorial statue in Honolulu.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *


I have had a lifelong reverence for Fr. Damien. In grade school, the nuns made a great example of him [though in the late 1950s, he was far from being beatified], as much as they did of Maria Goretti [who had been canonized in 1950, and as a 12-wear-old saint who died defending her purity, was of course a model for us girls]. Years later, I became friends with someone who had been at my university at the same time I was but who spent the next few years working as a volunteer in Molokai - and of course, that was quite awesome, and I have always wished I had it in me to do something similar.

TERESA



TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 11 agosto 2008 01:36

Feast Day, August 9


August 9th is the Feast Day of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who was martyred on that day in 1942 in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Fr. Charles P. Connor, in Classic Catholic Converts, writes:

The story of the Jewish Carmelite Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, known in the world as Edith Stein, presents us with one of the more brilliant converts to come to the Faith in [the twentieth] century; it also places us in close contact with a horrendous tragedy of the modern world, the Holocaust.

Edith Stein was born in Breslau, Germany on October 12, 1891, the youngest of eleven children.

In 1913 she began studies at the University of Göttingen in Germany. She soon became a student of the phenomenologist Edmund Husserl and was later attracted to the work of Max Scheler, a Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism in 1920.

A chance reading of the autobiography of Saint Teresa of Avila revealed to her the God of love she had long denied. She entered the Church in 1922.

For eight years Edith lived with the Dominicans, teaching at Saint Magdelene's, which was a training institute for teachers. She wrote:

Initially, when I was baptized on New Year's Day, 1922, I thought of it as a preparation in the Order. But a few months later, when I saw my mother for the first time after the baptism, I realized that she couldn't handle another blow for the present. Not that it would have killed her—but I couldn't have held myself responsible for the embitterment it would have caused.

In fact, after her conversion Edith continued to attend synagogue with her mother. Meanwhile, she continued to grow and impress as a philosopher.

In 1925 she met the Jesuit Erich Pryzwara, a philosopher who would have a tremendous influence on Hans Urs von Balthasar. Pryzwara encouraged Edith to study and translate St. Thomas Aquinas; she eventually wrote a work comparing Usserl with Aquinas.

In 1933 Edith entered the religious life with the Carmel of Cologne, Germany. She fell in love with the person and writing of Saint Thérèse of Lisieux. She wrote:

My impression was, that this was a life which had been absolutely transformed by the love of God, down to the last detail. I simply can't imagine anything greater. I would like to see this attitude incorporated as much as possible into my own life and the lives of those who are dear to me.

After taking her first vows, Edith was known as Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross.

She continued to write, Fr. Connor notes, "continually developing the theme that Christ's sacrifice on the Cross and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass are in fact one and the same sacrifice. From her religious background, she knew the importance of sacrificial prayer for Old Testament prophets."

She wrote of how Jesus's sacrifice as the Incarnate God-man was the final, perfect sacrifice that replaced all of the sacrifices of the Old Testament.

Because of the rise of Nazi power, Edith and her sister Rosa, who had also converted to Catholicism, moved to Holland in 1938. On August 2, 1942, Edith and her sister were taken from the convent by two S.S. officers. She was martyred seven days later.

Fr. Connor writes: "On October 11, 1998, fifty-six years, two months, and two days after her death at Auschwitz, Edith Stein, Sister Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, was canonized a saint of the Roman Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II."

Ferdinand Holböck writes in New Saints and Blesseds of the Catholic Church: 1984-1987(Volume 2):

The Church now presents Sister Teresa Benedicta a Croce to us as a blessed martyr, as an example of a heroic follower of Christ, for us to honour and to emulate.

Let us open ourselves up for her message to us as a woman of the spirit and of the mind, who saw in the science of the cross the acme of all wisdom, as a great daughter of the Jewish people, and as a believing Christian in the midst of millions of innocent fellow men made martyrs.

She saw the inexorable approach of the cross. She did not flee in fear. Instead, she embraced it in Christian hope with final love and sacrifice and in the mystery of Easter even welcomed it with the salutation,"ave crux spes unica".

As Cardinal Höffner said in his recent pastoral letter, "Edith Stein is a gift, an invocation and a promise for our time. May she be an intercessor with God for us and for our people and for all people."






TERESA BENEDETTA
00lunedì 11 agosto 2008 11:50
A grander grave at last
for Cardinal Newman





LONODON, August 10 - The remains of a Victorian cardinal tipped to become the first English saint for more than a generation are to be moved from a rural cemetery to a grand urban church.

After months of wrangling over a 19th century law which forbids the transfer of bodies from graves to church tombs, the Government has agreed to allow Cardinal John Henry Newman to be exhumed.

The Ministry of Justice will grant a licence from today - the 118th anniversary of his death in 1890 - to let undertakers move his remains from a cemetery in Rednal, Worcestershire, to a special resting place of honour at Birmingham Oratory.

It is a victory for the Vatican which wants Newman moved into a setting where he can better be venerated. Pope Benedict XVI has long been admirer of his 'theology of conscience'.

The Roman Catholic Church is close to attributing a miracle to Newman and he is expected in December to be beatified - the last step before canonisation.

The miracle concerns 60-year-old Jack Sullivan, a deacon from Boston, Massachussetts, who recovered from crippling back pain after praying to the cardinal.

A second miracle is needed for Newman's cause to progress to canonization when he would be declared a saint.

If that were to happen, he would become the first Englishman to be made a saint since 1970.

Newman was born in London in 1801 into a Church of England family. He was ordained into the Anglican Church at the age of 23, but converted to Catholicism when he was 44 after a succession of clashes with Anglican bishops.

He settled in Birmingham where he founded the first English Oratory and worked with the poor.

He also made 56 crossings to and from Ireland in seven years to establish what is now known as University College, Dublin, after the Bishops of Ireland invited him to found a separate university for Catholics.

As a tribute to his extraordinary devotion, Pope Leo XIII made the unprecedented gesture of making him, an ordinary priest, a Cardinal when he was 78. He died from pneumonia 11 years later.

The date of the exhumation is a secret but will take place before Newman's beatification. Undertakers will open the coffin at the graveside and Newman's corpse, wearing the vestments of a Catholic priest, will be photographed.

It will then be taken to a morgue where Catholic officials from Rome and Milan will remove 'major relics' from the body - such as fingers - to send back to the Vatican so that pilgrims can pray before them.

Newman's remains will be transferred to a new coffin that will go on show to the public before being placed in a marble sarcophagus at Birmingham Oratory.

The exhumation was applied for in April, at the request of the Vatican's Congregation for the Causes of Sainthood. Ministers agreed to it after a meeting of Church and government officials in late July.

Peter Jennings, who led negotiation on behalf of the Archdiocese of Birmingham, said yesterday: 'The Ministry of Justice has recognised the importance of Newman as a national figure and as a figure of great importance to the country, the Church and to dialogue between faiths.'

maryjos
00giovedì 14 agosto 2008 16:36
Saint Maximilian Kolbe : August 14th


Maximilian Kolbe: one of the saints of Auschwitz.
Pope Benedict XVI in solemn prayer at Auschwitz. He visited the cell where Maximilian died.
PapaBear16
00venerdì 15 agosto 2008 00:21
Audrey Toguchi and Blsd. Fr. Damien

I presume the story was posted on one of our local papers?  Audrey is a parishioner here at St. Elizabeth Church and Saturday evening she will be an honored guest at a "Lei for Fr. Damien" fundraiser here on Oahu.  The organization is trying to raise nearly 3 million dollars (costs are high here in "Paradise"!) to renovate and re-name his church on Molokai. 

A few weeks ago,  I had the pleasure of meeting and hosting Joan Lewis, the EWTN Rome Bureau Chief whom I had never met, but corresponded with.  She took time from a speaking trip and summer family visit to make a quick trip to Hawaii seeking information on Fr. Damien for a report on her daily column, Joan's Rome.  She's a very personable and warm woman who obviously loves the Church.

Through a friend of mine who is involved in the fundraiser, she was able to spend a full day on Molokai and Kalaupapa with a personal guide.  If any of you have the wonderful opportunity to visit, it's really worth it.  It's almsot like a retreat.  In fact, Maria Sullivan, my friend and collegue on Molokai is in the midst of having a Pilgrim's Guide printed.  It's complete with photos , narrative of Fr. Damien's life and prayers so that the pilgrims to Kalaupapa rally get a sense of his mission and life. Currently, Damien Tours owned and operated by the Marks family on Molokai is the company to go to to arrange tours.

Joan Lewis also got an opportunity to spend time with our Bishop Silva and gave him lots of valuable information in advance of the coming canonization which I hear, has been requested for the Fall of 2009.  And, she also interviewed Audrey who is very accommodating as you can imagine how many people want to talk to her. 

In fact, I called and invited Audrey to speak to our parish RCIA when we cover the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick in Januar 2009.  And she agreed!  That surely should be a wonderful experience for our catechumens - a verified miracle in front of them!

An exciting time for all of us here in Hawaii and ...  having Blessed Mother Marianne is another holy person to hold up for our young people, especially, to encourage vocations.  In fact, at the request of Bishop Silva, each parish in the Diocese prays the Vocations Prayer at every Mass on every weekend, verbally, just before the final blessing.   And do you know, since then, we've had 6 men step forward to begin their seminary studies.  With the help of our two Blesseds, more men and women will, I'm sure, come forward.

Linda

[SM=g27811] [SM=g27811] [SM=g27811] [SM=g27811] [SM=g27811]




benefan
00venerdì 15 agosto 2008 05:39

Exciting Days in Hawaii


It certainly does sound like there is a lot going on for the church in Hawaii. Thanks, PapaBear, for all the information you've given us about activities and tours regarding Fr. Damien. I hate that his canonization may not happen for another year but I guess arrangements have to be made and travel has to be planned.

Do you think you will go to Rome for the ceremony, PapaBear?


maryjos
00venerdì 15 agosto 2008 21:09
So pleased you met Joan Lewis!
Papabear - I'm so pleased you met Joan Lewis and that you were able to have a good talk with her. I also met her, by absolute chance, in Rome at Easter. My friend, Mary, and I were just getting up to leave the restaurant - which turned out to be Joan's favourite and her "second home", when we spotted her at the table behind us. Mary suddenly said "Oh - Joan!" and then I saw her too. She came and sat with us - we didn't leave, after all. She sat and talked for ages, mostly about Papa's forthcoming visit to the USA. She said that when she met Papa she told him who she was and he opened his arms [as he does!] and said: "Ah - Mother Angelica!". She also said she has met GG, as he is her "go-between". Well, we ended up still talking out on the pavement at 11.30 pm and she invited us to go to the Good Friday liturgy at Santa Susanna [her parish church] if we couldn't get into Saint Peter's. We DID get into Saint Peter's!
If I've already posted this, please forgive!
Papabear, I do indeed hope you get to Rome for the ceremony!!!!! If you can get to New York, you can get to Rome. I reckon you could go either west or east!!!!! [SM=g27824]
PapaBear16
00venerdì 15 agosto 2008 21:53
Fr Damien's Canonization
Thank you, ladies for your kind thoughts about Fr Damien and Joan!

I'm afraid that a trip to NY is not the same as a trip to Rome .... Insurance will not pay for kidney dialysis treatments outside the U.S. and the treatments are not cheap ... at least $1,500 USD PER treatment (@ time you sit in the chair for dialysis)!  So, 3X @ week, for a two-week pilgrimage (Bishop is planning a package tour which may include the Holy Land!) ... you do the math.

Maybe Donald Trump can fund me?  The treatments can be arranged in Rome, but I would have to pay out of pocket ..  that's a lot of euro! 

So, if any of you holy women get to the canonization, look for the group which will, I'm sure, be dressed in Hawaiian print dresses or shirts and carrying flower leis and stick close to them ... whenever you're with a Hawaii group, you're sure to catch some of the Aloha Spirit and joy that we always carry with us!  And, I'm sure, they will be giving leis to Papa for the occasion.  I actually have two photos of Papa wearing lovely maile and tuberose leis when Blsd. Marianne Cope was beatified in 2005.  He looked great ..

And, of course if any of you want any more details on Fr Damien tours - a Hawaii trip/pilgrimage? - just let me know.  You can reach me through my parsh's website ..  www.stelizabethaiea.org  use the Contact Us link and my friend, the webmaster will put through your email to me.

Aloha from Hawaii !

[SM=g27824] [SM=g27823] [SM=g27824] [SM=g27823] [SM=g27824] [SM=g27823]





benefan
00mercoledì 20 agosto 2008 05:21

Pope approves beatification of St. Therese's parents in Lisieux

By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
August 19, 2008

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Pope Benedict XVI has approved the beatification of Louis and Marie Zelie Guerin Martin, the parents of St. Therese of Lisieux.

The couple will be beatified Oct. 19, World Mission Sunday, during a Mass in the Basilica of St. Therese in Lisieux, France, the Vatican announced Aug. 19.

St. Therese and St. Francis Xavier are the patron saints of the missions.

The Vatican did not say who would preside at the Martins' beatification Mass.

With beatification, the diocese where the candidate lived or the religious order to which the person belonged is authorized to hold public commemorations on the person's feast day. With the declaration of sainthood, public liturgical celebrations are allowed around the world.

The Martins were declared venerable, one of the first steps in the sainthood process, in 1994. But despite the active encouragement of Pope John Paul II to move the cause forward, the miracle needed for their beatification was not approved by the Vatican until early July.

Louis lived 1823-1894 and his wife lived 1831-1877. They had nine children, five of whom joined religious orders.

Also Aug. 19, the Vatican announced four other beatification ceremonies:

-- Sister Vincenza Maria Poloni, founder of the Institute of the Sisters of Mercy in Italy, will be beatified Sept. 21 in Verona, Italy.

-- Father Michael Sopocko, founder of the Sisters of Merciful Jesus and spiritual director of St. Faustina Kowalska, will be beatified Sept. 28 at the Church of Divine Mercy in Bialystok, Poland.

-- Father Francesco Pianzola, founder of the Missionary Sisters of the Immaculate Queen of Peace, will be beatified Oct. 4 in Vigevano, Italy.

-- Father Francesco Giovanni Bonifacio, martyred in 1946 by Yugoslav communists, will be beatified Oct. 4 in Trieste, Italy.

PapaBear16
00sabato 23 agosto 2008 01:36
Joan Lewis in Search of Fr. Damien


Here's Joan Lewis' column posted today - Day Two of her Hawaii pilgrimage in search of Fr. Damien.  I didn't post the first one since it was mostly what she saw walking about in Waikiki although the photos of  Waikiki beach are enough to make you drool.  If you want to see that one, just go to ewtn.com and click on the link to Joan's Rome on the right sidebar.  Then you can access her archived column.

She's continuing on with the rest of her pilgrimage Monday with her trip to Molokai and Kalaupapa.


HAWAII: THE STORY OF A TEACHER AND HER FRIEND DAMIEN

As I wrote yesterday, on July 3 the Vatican announced that a Hawaiian woman’s cure from terminal lung cancer was indeed considered miraculous and could be attributed to the intercession of Blessed Damien DeVeuster, a Sacred Hearts priest from Belgium who spent 10 years on the Hawaiian island of Oahu as a missionary before being sent to neighboring Moloka’i to take care of patients with leprosy. He cared for them for 13 years until his death in 1889 at the age of 40.

When the news was announced by Bishop Larry Silva of Honolulu, the faith community at St. Elizabeth’s Church in Aiea, Honolulu, rejoiced because the woman cured of cancer, Audrey Toguchi, was one of their very own parishioners. Another parishioner, my friend Linda, wrote me almost immediately after the news was published. She told me that Audrey “is very devoted to Fr. Damien and has been all her life. She sees him as one who dedicated his whole life in a very sacrificial way to the Lord. It was very natural for her to pray to Damien when her cancer was diagnosed and its gravity made clear. She’s a happy person, of course, not just because of her healing but because it gives her the chance to tell people about God’s loving kindness and mercy through Blessed Damien. And, of course, she’s our parishioner at St. Elizabeth for at least 25-30 years!”

Linda gave me Audrey’s contact information and I called her almost the moment I got off the plane on Tuesday, July 29th. We agreed to meet at my hotel the following morning at 10. In the meantime I had to learn as much about her life and background, her health and her cure as I could, so I spent part of my first afternoon in magnificent Honolulu doing research. Over my first dinner in this beautiful city I read pages and pages of notes, and started to compose what I hoped would be a good radio interview. I wrote until I almost fell asleep in my chair, because by the time I went to bed I had been up for close to 24 hours, given the early hour of my flight to L.A: and Honolulu, and the three-hour time difference between the islands and the mainland.

A cradle Catholic and native of Honolulu, Audrey Toguchi retired in 1995 after 44 years as a teacher in public schools in Hawaii. She has been married to her husband Yukio for 50 years and they have raised two sons, Eric and Ivan. Yukio is not Catholic but enormously respects his wife’s faith. The boys were raised in the Catholic Church. Audrey said she tried to teach her boys what she had been taught as a child – and what she learned also from Damien: “I had always been taught to turn to God in prayer in difficult moments. I taught our boys the same thing. If I put everything in God’s hands, things will be OK. After all, God made us and He knows us, and knows how to help us.”

I felt truly honored Wednesday to be in the presence of such a lovely lady, a faith-filled, smiling, warm Catholic whom the Lord chose to greatly favor. After only a few minutes in her calm, joyful presence, I felt as if I had known her for a much longer time. Before I began the interview, I asked if I could take a few photos. I include three photos in this column today: one of Audrey on my balcony, another taken in the hotel lobby and a third with her husband Yukio, who very obviously adores his wife!

Audrey, who turned 80 in June, told me that her cure was known to only a very few people before 2008 when Bishop Silva announced on April 29, that she had been cured of an aggressive form of lung cancer. The Vatican publicly announced on July 3 that the theological commission of the Vatican’s Congregation for the Causes of Saints recognized this cure as being miraculous, and approved that the miracle be attributed to Blessed Damien of Moloka’i.

How did Fr. Damien, who has been a hero to her for so many years, come into her life? “Well”, she said, “all Hawaiian school children - but most especially those at Catholic schools - learn at an early age of Fr. Damien – Blessed Damien since 1995.” She told me that in 1936, when she was only 8-years old, she and her fellow Catholic students at St. Augustine grade school in Waikiki were brought by the nuns to a pier to say farewell to Fr. Damien whose remains were being brought back to his native Belgium on a ship. “We all knew him,” she said, “as the holy man from Kalaupapa.” She said she almost “grew up” with Fr. Damien.

Kalaupapa, which I would visit the following day, is a small peninsula on the northern side of the island of Molokai’i. It was here in the 19th and 20th centuries that all the victims of leprosy were condemned to live the rest of their days on earth. It was here that Damien cared for the people whom he grew to love so much, and here he died. It is here that 25 patients still live today as I write these words.

Kalaupapa is a place that Audrey, her family and friends, have visited many times in the years since Audrey and her fellow classmates bid Damien farewell.

One of those times was in the fall of 1998.

Three years earlier, Audrey retired after 44 years of teaching. A year later, in 1996 after suffering a fall, her husband saw a small lump on her left backside, and what she and her husband thought was a hematoma from the fall, just kept growing. Finally, in December 1997, Audrey consulted Dr. Walter Chang. The news was not good and she had a fist-sized lump removed in January 1998. Because she had prayed to Fr. Damien when she had a kidney removed 20 years earlier, Audrey turned once again to the priest she so admired, praying for his intercession. Her treatment for an aggressive and very rare form of cancer of the fat tissues known as pleomorphic liposarcoma, included radiation.

Scans performed in September 1998 showed three new lumps in one of her lungs in September 1998. Dr. Chang’s prognosis - and that of other doctors: Audrey had six months to live. Audrey told me, “Dr. Chang simply had no good news to give me. It seemed like he was telling me someone else’s story. He did suggest that I might want to try chemotherapy. However, I looked him right in the eye and said: ‘I will do what I always do in times of trouble. I will turn to God and I will ask Blessed Damien to intercede for me’.” She said she told Dr. Chang that she and her husband Yukio would make a pilgrimage to Kalaupapa and to Fr. Damien’s grave at Walawao, next to St. Philomena’s Church.

And they did just that, traveled to Kalaupapa in the fall of 1998.

Just one month later, when Audrey went to see Dr. Chang, x-rays were taken and – to the astonishment of Audrey and the doctor - there were indications that the lung tumors had started to shrink. Audrey said that “Dr. Chang, in disbelief – because he is not really a religious believer – asked me if I had seen other doctors, taken medicine or herbs I had not told him about, or had radiation or chemotherapy that I had not told him about. And I told him, ‘No, all I did was pray. And I went to Kalaupapa to talk to Fr. Damien, as I said I would.” The months passed, more scans were performed, and by August 1999, there were no signs at all of cancer.

As Audrey tells her story, it is obvious that the other hero in her life is Dr, Chang. I did not get to interview him on this trip to Honolulu, but it was Dr. Chang who told Audrey he wanted to publish her story in a medical journal. It was Dr. Chang who urged Audrey to tell her story to the Vatican, saying he knew that Catholics believed in miracles. Audrey said, in fact, “perhaps Dr. Chang now believes in miracles because he told me he thinks mine is the only case he has ever read of where the pleomorphic liposarcoma ‘spontaneously regressed’.”

Dr. Chang did write about Audrey’s cure and the Vatican did get the file on Audrey in 2003. After five years of study, the Church issued its findings this past July.

Audrey and Yukio Toguchi and their two sons, Dr. Walter Chang, Bishop Larry Silva and thousands of Hawaiians now await the date of Blessed Damien’s canonization. It is believed that the ceremony will take place in 2009 in Rome, and that would be a fitting year for two reasons: 2009 marks the 120th anniversary of Blessed Damien’s death and the 50th anniversary of Hawaii’s statehood.

There is more I’d like to tell you about this remarkable, faith-filled woman with the beautiful smile, but that will be for another day, as we continue our journey to Hawaii, in search of a saint.


loriRMFC
00mercoledì 24 settembre 2008 21:31
THE SECRET STORY OF PADRE PIO'S STIGMATA


Taken from The Crescat

Volume Reveals Report of Vatican Investigator

By Mirko Testa

ROME, SEPT. 22, 2008 (Zenit.org).- A volume detailing the report of a Vatican investigator into Padre Pio gives new information on the wounds of the Passion that the friar suffered.

Padre Pio da Pietrelcina received the stigmata from the crucified Christ, who in an apparition invited the Capuchin friar to unite himself to his passion so as to participate in the salvation of others, particularly consecrated persons: This is what we can know with certainty thanks to the recent opening -- at the request of Benedict XVI -- of the archives of the former Holy Office up to 1939, which contain information on revelations to Padre Pio that were not previously published.

These revelations have been released in a book titled "Padre Pio Sotto Inchiesta: l''Autobiografia Segreta'" ("Padre Pio Under Investigation: The 'Secret Autobiography'"). The volume is prefaced by Vittorio Messori and edited by Father Franceso Castelli, historian for the beatification cause of Pope John Paul II and professor of modern and contemporary history of the Church at the Romano Guardini Institute for Religious Sciences in Taranto, Italy.

Until the publication of this book, many assumed that Padre Pio -- whether for reasons of modesty or because he thought himself unworthy of the charisms he had received -- had never disclosed to anyone what happened on the day he received the stigmata.

The only known reference to these events was in a letter Padre Pio sent to his spiritual director, Father Benedetto da San Marco in Lamis, in which he speaks of the appearance of a "mysterious person" but does not offer any details.

The new book, which contains the first complete version of the report penned by Bishop Raffaele Rossi of Volterra, (later cardinal), apostolic visitor sent by the Holy See to secretly investigate Padre Pio, clarifies that on the occasion of the reception of the stigmata the saint had a conversation with the crucified Christ.

The book also contains a number of statements that Padre Pio made under oath, which provide an interpretive key to Bishop Rossi's report.

Asked to swear on the Gospel, Padre Pio for the first time revealed the identity of the one from whom he received the wounds.

It was June 15, 1921, and in answer to a question posed by Bishop Rossi, Padre Pio said: "On Sept. 20, 1918, I was in the choir of the church after celebrating Mass, making the thanksgiving when I was suddenly overtaken by powerful trembling and then there came calm and I saw Our Lord in his crucified form.

"He was lamenting the ingratitude of men, especially those consecrated to him and favored by him."

"Then," Padre Pio continued, "his suffering was apparent as was his desire to join souls to his Passion. He invited me to let his pains enter into me and to meditate on them and at the same time concern myself with the salvation of others. Following this, I felt full of compassion for the Lord's pains and I asked him what I could do.

"I heard this voice: 'I will unite you with my Passion.' And after this the vision disappeared, I came back to myself, my reason returned and I saw these signs here from which blood flowed. Before this I did not have these."

Padre Pio then said that the stigmata were not the result of a personal request of his own but came from an invitation of the Lord, who, lamenting the ingratitude of men, and consecrated persons in particular, conferred on Padre Pio a mission as the culmination of an interior mystical journey of preparation.

Common theme

Father Castelli, the book's editor, noted that the theme of the ingratitude of men and especially those favored by God is not something new in the Capuchin friar's private revelations.

He told ZENIT: "What is decisive is that Padre Pio made no request for the stigmata. This helps us to understand the freedom and the humility of the Capuchin who is clearly completely uninterested in making a show of the wounds.

"Padre Pio's humility also manifests itself in his reaction to seeing the signs of the Passion traced in his flesh once he had come back to himself. In fact, in the conversation with the bishop, once the mystical scene has finished, it is not elaborated on further."

From the conversation with Padre Pio, from the letters, from the witnesses questioned by Bishop Rossi and finally from his own report, it is plain that the friar was unhappy about the signs of the Passion, that he tried to hide them and that he was uneasy in showing them at the request of the apostolic visitor, the editor explained.

A 6th wound?

The book conveys Bishop Rossi's conclusions about the stigmata, of which there had only been partial information, and so provides new information, especially about the form of the wound in the side and a rumored sixth wound on the friar's back.

In his report the apostolic visitor says that there was no festering in Padre Pio's wounds, they did not close and did not heal. The remained inexplicably open and bloody, despite the fact that the friar had tried to stop the bleeding by treating them with iodine.

"Bishop Rossi's description of the wound in the side," Father Castelli told ZENIT, "is decisively different from those before and after him. He did not see it as an upside down or slanted cross, but as having a 'triangular form' and so therefore with definite edges."

Contrary to what certain doctors have said, Bishop Rossi concluded that the wounds did not appear to be externally inflicted.

"This speaks in favor of the authenticity of the stigmata," Father Castelli explained, "because carbolic acid -- which according to some was what Padre Pio might have used to cause the wounds -- after it has been applied, consumes the tissue and inflames the surrounding area. It is impossible to think that for 60 years Padre Pio could have caused himself these wounds of the same definite shape.

"Further, the wounds emitted the intense odor of violets rather than the fetid stench that degenerative processes, tissue necrosis or infections usually cause."

According to the report, Padre Pio said that apart from the stigmata in his hands, feet and side, there were no other wounds, and therefore no wound on his back as Jesus might have had from carrying the cross. Some have suggested that Padre Pio might have had this wound.

Father Castelli maintains that it is not possible to speculate beyond the information gathered in Bishop Rossi's 1921 investigation and attribute to Padre Pio any other sign of the Passion.



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