Author Archives: monks4christ

the Mission of the Holy Spirit

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..

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 .. 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.. 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.

Pentecost Sunday

Your Vocation

“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

Pentecost . This Sunday

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.

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.

Stained Glass Window
St Vincent Abbey Basilica