On Nov. 21, hundreds of millions of Christians celebrate the momentous occasion of Sts. Joachim and Anne bringing their child, the Blessed Virgin Mary, to the Temple in Jerusalem for a blessing.
Yes … even Jesus had grandparents. Doting, wonderful, Jewish grandparents. If Joachim and Anne had raised such a wonderful child as the Blessed Virgin Mary, imagine how great they must have been as Jesus’ nono and nona.
Man’s adversity is God’s opportunity.
You must renew your faith in Divine Providence, which wisely and miraculously directs and orders everything, even the smallest event, and which brings about our temporal and spiritual well-being.
We cannot do stupid things except when we deviate from obedience to the Rule, since the Rule gives us the surest guarantee for peace and assures the final attainment of our goal and destination. The fact that we sometimes think we would be more at peace and happier if things happened according to our own desires has its origin in the fact that we lack the experience of a life of true freedom, or else those who have had this experience have paid too little attention to it.
Indeed, we know that no Christian is perfect. None of us is without shortcomings… There will always be disappointments, but they will never disturb our peace significantly or for a long time. Disappointments will further our salvation, not endanger it.
Archabbot Boniface Wimmer
There’s no greater book in the Bible than the Psalms to teach you how to pray with the heart. The Psalms are a collection of prayers and songs that have shaped Jewish and Christian traditions for centuries holding profound insights into prayer. These are the prayers that Jesus himself said. They were and still are the pulse of daily prayer for many including the Holy Family.
Rose Philippine Duchesne came to the wilds of North America when anything west of Pittsburgh was considered uncharted wilderness. She came up the Mississippi to Missouri and established a school at St. Charles as early as 1818, while St. Elizabeth Seton was doing her work in the eastern United States. She is the foundress of the American branch of the Society of the Sacred Heart.
She was born in Grenoble, France, in 1769, her father a successful businessman. She was educated by the Visitation nuns and, although her father opposed her decision, she entered the Visitation Order in 1788, in the middle of the French Revolution. She was not able to make her profession because of the disruption of the Revolution and had to return home when the Visitation sisters were expelled from their convents.
During the Revolution, she cared for the sick and poor, helped fugitive priests, visited prisons, and taught children. After the Revolution, she tried to reorganize the Visitation community but was unsuccessful, so she offered the empty convent to St. Madeleine Sophie Barat, foundress of the Society of the Sacred Heart, and entered the Sacred Heart Order herself. When the bishop of New Orleans, William Du Bourg, requested nuns for his huge Louisiana diocese, St. Rose Philippine Duchesne came to the United States, arriving in New Orleans in 1818.
She and her four nuns were sent to St. Charles, Missouri, where she immediately opened a school; then at Florissant, she built a convent, an orphanage, a parish school, a school for Indians, a boarding academy, and a novitiate for her order. In 1827, she was in St. Louis where she founded an orphanage, a convent, and a parish school. Her energy and ideas were prodigious. When she was seventy-two years old, she founded a mission school for Indian girls in Kansas and spent much of her time there nursing the sick.
Her last years were spent at St. Charles, a model and inspiration to those around her, facing all the hardships of pioneer work. She died on November 18, 1852, at the age of eighty-three and was canonized in 1988. She was truly the “missionary of the American frontier,” one that her beloved Potawatomi Indians called , “Woman-who-prays-always.”
Source EWTN
I understand that each time we contemplate with desire and devotion to the Host in which is hidden Christ’s Eucharistic Body , we increase our merits in heaven and secure special joys.
Angels constantly guard the servants of the
Blessed Virgin from the assaults of Hell.
The greater and more persistent your confidence in God,
the more abundantly you will receive all that you ask.
Banish, therefore, from thy heart the distractions of earth and turn your eyes to spiritual joys, that thou may learn at last to repose in the light of of God.
They who pray with faith have fervor and fervor is the fire of prayer. This mysterious fire has the power of consuming all our faults and imperfections, and of giving to our actions, vitality, beauty and merit.
Speak often of Heaven to those who approach you, make them love it as well as the virtues which are required before we can be admitted to our beloved country. For if you know how to draw souls there by your zeal, your good example and your exemplary religious conduct, you may be assured the gates will be opened for you also.
St Frances Xavier Cabrini
In the name of the Lord Jesus and protected only by the sign of the cross, without shield or helmet, I shall penetrate the enemy’s ranks and not be afraid.
Hitherto I have served you as a soldier; allow me now to become a soldier to God. Let the man who is to serve you receive your donative. I am a soldier of Christ.
Everything, even sweeping, scraping vegetables, weeding a garden and waiting on the sick could be a prayer, if it were offered to God.