Monthly Archives: May 2021

the Holy Trinity

the Spirit restores our original beauty and fills us with his grace, leaving no room for anything unworthy of our love. The Spirit frees us from sin and death, and changes us from the earthly men we were, men of dust and ashes, into spiritual men, sharers in the divine glory, sons and heirs of God the Father who bear a likeness to the Son and are his co-heirs and brothers, destined to reign with him and to share his glory. In place of earth the Spirit reopens heaven to us and gladly admits us into paradise, giving us even now greater honour than the angels, and by the holy waters of baptism extinguishing the unquenchable fires of hell.

Speaking quite literally, and also in harmony with the words of water and the Spirit, John the Baptist says of Christ: He will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and with fire. Since we are only vessels of clay, we must first be cleansed in water and then hardened by spiritual fire – for God is a consuming fire. We need the Holy Spirit to perfect and renew us, for spiritual fire can cleanse us, and spiritual water can recast us as in a furnace and make us into new men.

From the treatise On the Trinity
by Didymus of Alexandria

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Saint Pope Paul VI

Pope St Paul VI and Humanae Vitae . Catholic-link website

“For you deal here above all with human life, and human life is sacred; no one may dare make an attempt upon it. Respect for life, even with regard to the great problem of the birth rate, must find here in your Assembly its highest affirmation and its most rational defense. Your task is to ensure that there is enough bread on the tables of mankind, and not to encourage an artificial control of births, which would be irrational, in order to diminish the number of guests at the banquet of life.”

Pope St Paul VI

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Pentecost Sunday

“To consider life as a vocation encourages interior freedom, stirring within the person a desire for the future, as well as the rejection of a notion of existence that is passive, boring, and banal.”

Holy Spirit, I appear before you as a sinner, but I appear before you in your name. Come with me, stay with me, enter into my heart, teach me what to do and what direction to take. Show me what to choose so that, with your help, I may please you in all things. Be my counselor and the author of my purpose. You, who with God, the Father, and his son, bear the name of glorious.

I thank you, spirit of truth. I thank you, consoler, because you brought me close to the mystery of the pierced hands and feet, the pierced side of God. Because you have again brought us close to the depth and the power of the mystery of the redemption.

Come, Holy Spirit. Come. Enter deep into the hearts of those who belong to you. May each be given the manifestation of you for the common good. So that God may be all in all.

Send upon me, O Father, a new effusion of the spirit so that I may walk in a manner worthy of the Christian vocation, offering to the world the testimony of the Gospels’ truth and inspiring the faithful to unite all believers in the chain of peace.

Pope St John Paul II

the Spirit brings Eternal Life

From the Commentary on the Corinthians
by Saint Cyril of Alexandria

Those who have a sure hope, guaranteed by the Spirit, that they will rise again lay hold of what lies in the future as though it were already present . . The light of the Only-begotten has shone on us, and we have been transformed into the Word, the source of all life. While sin was still our master, the bonds of death had a firm hold on us, but now that the righteousness of Christ has found a place in our hearts we have freed ourselves from our former condition of corruptibility.”

This means that none of us lives in the flesh any more, at least not in so far as living in the flesh means being subject to the weaknesses of the flesh, which include corruptibility. Once we thought of Christ as being in the flesh, but we do not do so any longer, says Saint Paul .. for having died once, he will never die again, death has no power over him any more. His death was a death to sin, which he died once for all; his life is life with God.

Since Christ has in this way become the source of life for us, we who follow in his footsteps must not think of ourselves as living in the flesh any longer, but as having passed beyond it. Saint Paul’s saying is absolutely true that when anyone is in Christ he becomes a completely different person: his old life is over and a new life has begun. We have been justified by our faith in Christ and the power of the curse has been broken. Christ’s coming to life again for our sake has put an end to the sovereignty of death. We have come to know the true God and to worship him in spirit and in truth, through the Son, our mediator, who sends down upon the world the Father’s blessings.

And so Saint Paul shows deep insight when he says: This is all God’s doing: it is he who has reconciled us to himself through Christ. For the mystery of the incarnation and the renewal it accomplished could not have taken place without the Father’s will. Through Christ we have gained access to the Father, for as Christ himself says, no one comes to the Father except through him. This is all God’s doing, then. It is he who has reconciled us to himself through Christ, and who has given us the ministry of reconciliation.

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the Joy of being Catholic

Saint Paul Street Evangelization

The following report comes to us from team leader Ed with our team in Sierra Vista, AZ:

On Saturday, May 1, after being consecrated to St. Joseph, and after Mass celebration we drove down to Tombstone to evangelize. We set up in front of the Tombstone Visitor Center and had our Rosaries, Medals, Pamphlets ready. Many people took our Rosary and our Medals and we got to speak to many fallen-away Catholics. One lady was so happy to see us, she wanted to take almost all of our pamphlets and a few Rosaries and all the Medals – Miraculous and St. Michael.

A mother and daughter spoke to us and the mother was a practicing Catholic and her daughter wasn’t. Ed told the daughter St. Augustine’s quote: “We came from you O Lord and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.” Ed told her that everything in life – money, jobs, cars, homes, clothes, people – nothing will make you permanently happy until you get a relationship with God. They last a short time but they all go away.

Robert spoke with a young gentleman and got in a deep discussion with him and was giving him brochures and medals and telling him about the joy of Catholicism. We prayed over a young lady and asked the Lord to heal her daughter and we also spoke to two young ladies, whose husbands were deployed in the military. They were both from Sierra Vista so Ed gave him his card and asked them to listen to the MP3s on the back of the card to learn about our Faith. They were very excited about listening to it. And we spoke to a middle aged lady who loved what we gave her so much, she asked if she could hug each of us!

Praised be Jesus Christ! We handed out approximately 125 rosaries, about 100 pamphlets and about 150 Medals. Overall a very fruitful day.

Saint Paul Street Evangelization

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the Holy Spirit’s Mission

From “Lumen gentium” The mission of the Holy Spirit in the church

the Holy Spirit was sent on the day of Pentecost to sanctify the Church unceasingly, and thus enable believers to have access to the Father through Christ in the one Spirit. He is the Spirit of life, the fountain of water welling up to give eternal life.

By the power of the Gospel he enables the Church to grow young, perpetually renews it, and leads it to complete union with its Bridegroom. For the Spirit and the Bride say to the Lord Jesus: “Come!”In this way the Church reveals itself as a people whose unity has its source in the unity of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

Moreover, the Holy Spirit not only sanctifies and guides God’s people by the sacraments and the ministries, and enriches it with virtues, he also distributes special graces among the faithful of every state of life, assigning his gifts to each as he chooses. By means of these special gifts he equips them and makes them eager for various activities and responsibilities that benefit the Church in its renewal or its increase, in accordance with the text: To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for a good purpose.

These charisms, the simpler and more widespread as well as the most outstanding, should be accepted with a sense of gratitude and consolation, since in a very special way they answer and serve the needs of the Church.

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