Monthly Archives: September 2023

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

We are celebrating the feast of the cross which drove away darkness and brought in the light. As we keep this feast, we are lifted up with the crucified Christ, leaving behind us earth and sin so that we may gain the things above. So great and outstanding a possession is the cross that he who wins it has won a treasure.

St Andrew of Crete

“When we are overcome by sadness, fear, or suffering; when the pains of loss overwhelm us; when evil seems to have taken power; let us look to the cross and be filled with peace, knowing that Christ has walked this road and walks it now with us and with all our brothers and sisters.”

St Teresa of Avila

“O souls! seek a refuge, like pure doves, in the shadow of the crucifix. There mourn the Passion of your divine Spouse, and drawing from your hearts flames of love and rivers of tears, make of them a precious balm with which to anoint the wounds of your Saviour.”

St Paul of the Cross

There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There is no cross to bear that Christ has not already borne for us, and does not now bear with us. And on the far side of every cross we find the newness of life in the Holy Spirit, that new life which will reach its fulfillment in the resurrection. This is our faith. This is our witness before the world.

St John Paul II

Saint Notburga

Notburga was an Austrian peasant from Tyrol
and was born in 1265 at Rattenberg on the Inn river.
She was a cook in the household of Count Henry
of Rattenberg and gave food to the orphans of the town.

Notburga then worked for a farmer in Eben Austria.
The farmer came upon her in the field one evening
as she was setting down her sickle.

The bell had rung for vespers and
the vigil for Sunday had just begun.
The farmer wanted her to continue working
but she insisted that no Christian should harvest
during the vigil in good weather.

Perhaps she declared that she should let her sickle decide.
She tossed it in the air and it hung there like a crescent moon,
a harbinger of good weather. And so Notburga went off
to vespers and kept the Sunday vigil.

the Most Holy Name of Mary

“The name of Mary is free from all vice
and resplendent with every virtue”

“Dei matris nomen sit mihi ultimus linguae loquentis motus,”
“May the name of the Mother of God be for me the last movement of my tongue!”
Blessed Bartolomo

“Let us pray, then, my devout reader, let us pray God to grant us
this grace, that the last word we pronounce at death may be the name of Mary.”
St Alphonsus Liguori

“May Jesus Christ, thy son, bestow the gifts of his grace on thy servants, w
ho invoke the sweet name of Mary.”
St Bernard

Abraham Lincoln


To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.

Abraham Lincoln