Love revived! ...

No one who lives in him keeps on sinning.  
No one who continues to sin has either seen him 
or known him. - I John 3:6

"As bodily nourishment restores lost strength,

so the Eucharist strengthens our charity, 

which tends to be weakened in daily life; and this living charity 

wipes away venial sins (Cf. Council of Trent). 

By giving Himself to us Christ revives our love

and enables us to break our disordered

attachments to creatures and root ourselves in him (…).”

Catechism of the Catholic Church (#1394)*

*The Catechism is bounding with beauty, truth and goodness regarding the Eucharist.  Perhaps a fruitful exercise during Lent would be to discover and meditate on these gems!

Painting above: Priest teaching Catechism ~ Jules Alexis Muenier

Daily segments of the Catechism via email:
http://flocknote.com/catechism

Also remembering ...
St Casimir
1458-1484
Patron of Poland and Lithuania
Feast Day - March 4

"Daily, daily sing to Mary.  Sing my soul her praises due!
All her Feasts.  Her actions worship.  With heart's devotion true."
From song, "Daily sing to Mary" attributed to St Casimir

St Casimir, pray for us!

Never lose a Communion...

“There is nothing so great as the Eucharist.  If God had something 
more precious, He would have given it to us.” – St John Vianney

“…try to participate every day in the sacrifice of the Mass.  Remember that Mass is both Christmas and Calvary. … Where you have the Blessed Sacrament, there you have the living God, the Savior, as really as when He was living in Galilee and Judea, as really as when He is now in heaven. 

Never lose a Communion by your own fault.  Communion is more than life, more than all the goods of the world, more than the entire universe.  It is God Himself, it is Jesus.  Can you prefer anything else?  If you love Jesus sincerely, can you willfully lose the grace of His coming within you?  Jesus asks you to love Him with all the energy and the simplicity of your heart.”

Ven Charles de Foucauld (+1916)

Still looking for that ‘perfect’ Christmas gift?  Invite someone to holy Mass!

Your heart: a living tabernacle...

"Live in the joy and the peace of the divine Majesty.
Live lost in divine love." - St Paul of the Cross

"How wonderful are the treasures which are enclosed
in the divine Eucharist! I exhort you, even though you live in the world,
to receive Communion often, but with piety.
Holy Communion is the most efficacious means 
of uniting one's self to God.

Always prepare yourself well for this sacred banquet.
Have a very pure heart, and watch over your tongue,
for it is on the tongue that the Sacred Host is laid.

Carry Our Lord home with you after your thanksgiving,
and let your heart be a living tabernacle for Jesus.
Visit Him often in this interior tabernacle, offering Him your homage,
and the sentiments of gratitude with which divine love will inspire you. 
Preserve carefully the sentiments of love
with which you are filled after Communion."

 

St Paul of the Cross
Priest, Mystic, powerful teacher/preacher

Founder - Passionist Order
To the vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience they added a fourth: 
to spread devotion to Christ’s passion among the faithful.

Italy ~ 1694-1775

FEAST DAY - October 20

Painting above: First Communion ~ Jules Octave Triquet

"When you are alone in your room, take your crucifix,
kiss its five wounds reverently, tell it to preach to you a little sermon,
and then listen to the words of eternal life that it speaks to your heart;
listen to the pleading of the thorns, the nails, the precious Blood.
Oh, what an eloquent sermon!" - St Paul of the Cross

Click here: Discovering our Saints - St. Paul of the Cross - YouTube (3 mins)

Click here: St. Paul of the Cross - YouTube (10 mins)

St Paul of the Cross 

St Paul of the Cross, pray for us!

Bread of the strong...

"Grant that my soul may hunger after Thee, the Bread of Angels,

the Refreshment of holy souls,

our daily and super substantial bread." - St Bonaventure

 "Every morning during meditation,

I prepare myself for the whole day's struggle.

Holy Communion assures me

that I will win the victory; and so it is.

I fear the day when I do not receive Holy Communion.

 This bread of the Strong gives me

all the strength I need to carry on my mission 

and the courage to do whatever the Lord asks of me.

The courage and strength that are in me

are not of me, but of Him Who lives in me -

it is the Eucharist." 

St Faustina Kowalska

Image above: Elijah fed by an angel ~ Ferdinand Bol (1663)

  

This year Ash Wednesday is February 10.

Consider praying the Mass an additional day each week -

or perhaps every day - during the holy season of Lent.

If you already go to Mass every day,

consider planning to pray a Holy Hour each day too!

Be filled with strength and courage!

Soul power

Then Jesus declared, "I am the Bread of life.  

He who comes to me will never go hungry, 

and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. - John 6:35

 Brother André had a particular love for the Eucharist

and encouraged people to go to Communion frequently:

“If you ate only one meal a week

would you survive?

It is the same for your soul.

Nourish it with the Blessed Sacrament.”

St. André Bessette

Canada ~ 1845-1937

Holy Cross Brother, porter

Miracle Man of Montreal

Great devotion to Eucharist and St Joseph

Feast Day - January 6

 

"I am only a man, just like you," time after time Br André Bessette reminded petitioners who came to him.  Known as a miracle worker of healing during his lifetime, this humble lay brother insisted on giving all the credit to God, the faith of those healed, and the intercession of St Joseph.  Quietly, he said, 'I will pray for you.'  Time after time, healing came. 

...."He spent his whole life speaking of others to God, and of God to others," said a friend of Br André. "It is difficult to say at what point in his life work began and ended, and at what point prayer started and ended: the two seemed to flow so naturally one into the other."

St. André Bessette, pray for us!

When Alfred (later to be Brother André) Bessette came to the Holy Cross Brothers in 1870, he carried with him a note from his pastor saying,"I am sending you a saint." By his death, he was receiving 80,000 letters each year from the sick who sought his prayers and healing.  He died in 1937, at age 91.  A million people filed before his coffin.

“It is with the smallest brushes that the artist paints

the most exquisitely beautiful pictures,” said St. André Bessette.

Click here: St. Andre Bessette, C.S.C. - YouTube (3 mins)

Do the Dew!

 Therefore we do not lose heart.  Though outwardly we are wasting away, yet inwardly we are being renewed day by day. - 2 Cor 4:16

  

 

Someone once asked the celebrated biologist, Sir Frederick Grant Banting, why he cared so much about daily Communion. 

    "Have you ever reflected - what would happen if the dew did not fall every night?  No plant would develop.  The grass and flowers could not survive the evaporations and the dryness that the day's heat brings in one way or another.  Their cycle of energies, their natural renewal, the balance of their lymphatic fluids, the very life of plants requires this dew..."

    "Now my soul is like a little plant.  It is something rather frail that the winds and heat do battle with every day.  So it is necessary that every morning I go get my fresh stock of spiritual dew, by going to Holy Communion."

 

Click here: Craig Gallagher Liturgical Art Studio-Murals and paintings for churches

Making our way to eternity...

 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life;

no one comes to the Father, but by me." - John 14:6

 

Aged Man Receiving Communion ~ Alfred Johannot (1831)

 

 

    "The Lord's Supper, to which the Virgin leads us in order that we may partake of her joy, is renewed every morning.  The table is always set, the Bread always offered.  The Christian makes his way to eternity from Communion to Communion.  At each stage in the journey, Christ is waiting for him in order that he may renew his strength and take heart again.

    But let us take care not to allow too much time to elapse between these stages.  Long before the grace of a Communion has grown weak in us, long before the silence and peace which emanate from a Communion have been dispelled by nature and the world, we must make our way into the radiant sphere of another Communion.  Let there be no opportunity between two Communions for a period of darkness in which we would run the risk of falling into snares.  We have nothing to fear if Christ marks our life.  Hardly have we had time to lose Him when already we have found Him again."

 

 

Francois Mauriac

Holy Thursday, An Intimate Remembrance

Cure for sagging faith

 

... and I, when I am lifted up from the earth,

will draw all men to myself. – John 12:32

"Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: death. By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires.
The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.

Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children - from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn - open necked and dirty youths, women in trousers and often with hair both unkempt and uncovered. Go to communion with them (and pray for them). It will be just the same (or better than that) as a Mass said beautifully by a visibly holy man, and shared by a few devout and decorous people. It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand - after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come."

The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to his son

 

Fidelity's reward

 Give us each day our daily bread. ~ Luke 11:3

Bellarmine Jesuit Retreat House ~ Illinois ~ USA

“Life changes utterly and begins to make true sense to us when we participate in Mass daily.  Our horizons become wider than all the universe, for they span time and eternity.  Love grows within our soul until finally its eyes see Christ in all.  Slowly, but oh, how surely, our whole person turns to God!  Then the spirit of the evangelical counsels – of poverty, chastity, and obedience – of the Beatitudes and the Ten Commandments becomes simple and clear.  We become free. How free cannot be told:  it has to be experienced.” 

Servant of God Catherine de Hueck Doherty (+1985)

More fervant, more fruitful

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.  God is love. 

Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.  In this way,

love is made complete among us ...There is no fear in love. 

But perfect love drives out fear ... I John 4: 16, 17a, 18a

 

Valerie Grays receives Holy Communion from Fr William Norvel, Sept 2011. (Marvin Joseph - The Post)

"Because each of our Communions ought not only to preserve but to increase charity in us, each Communion should be substantially more fervent and more fruitful than the preceding one; for each one, by increasing the love of God in us, ought to dispose us to receive our Lord on the following day with not only an equal but a superior fervor of will." 

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, O.P.

This death is our life!

 

 

"Come and participate in the Body and Blood

 of the Victim immolated for us;

come and remember that this death is our life."

Jacques Benigne Bossuet (+1704)

Bishop of Meaux in France

May it be said of you and of me...

  

St Augustine has left us this praise of his mother, St Monica:

"She did not let a day pass

without being present

at the Divine Sacrifice

before Your altar, O Lord."

St Monica

North Africa ~ 333-387

Mother of St Augustine

Patroness of Married women and Mothers

FEAST DAY - August 27

As recounted by Augustine... before his mother died she told him:

"There was indeed one thing for which I wished to tarry a little in this life, and that was that I might see you a Catholic before I died. My God hath answered this more than abundantly, so that I see you are now made His servant and spurning all earthly happiness. What more am I to do here?"

Prayer for St Monica's intercession

Exemplary mother of the great Augustine, you perseveringly pursued your wayward son not with wild threats but with prayerful cries to heaven.  Intercede for all mothers in our day so that they may learn to draw their children to God. Teach them how to remain close to their children, even the prodigal sons and daughters who have sadly gone astray. Amen.

St Monica, ora pro nobis!

Each one - more fervent, more fruitful

And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.  God is love. 

Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him.  I John 4:16

 

 "Because each of our Communions ought not only

to preserve but to increase charity in us,

each Communion should be substantially

more fervent and more fruitful than the preceding one;

for each one, by increasing the love of God in us,

ought to dispose us to receive our Lord on the following day

with not only an equal but a superior fervor of will." 

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, O.P.

Holy duo...

 

 

"Ask Jesus to make you a saint.

After all, only He can do that.

Go to confession regularly

and to Communion as often as you can."

 

St. Dominic Savio

 

 

 

“There is no shame so great that God’s mercy cannot shine forth from its midst. … Jesus is not afraid to go to the core of our shame to heal us.  Sins and secrets do not scare Him.  The serpent causes shame and hiding; Jesus invites us to mercy and communion.” ~ Fr Richard Veras

 

"When you go to Confession, know this, that I Myself am waiting for you in the confessional; I am only hidden by the priest, but I Myself act in the soul.  Here the misery of the soul meets the God of Mercy.  Tell souls that from this fount of mercy souls draw graces solely with the vessel of trust.  If their trust is great there is no limit to My generosity.”  ~ Our Lord to St Faustina

Everyday graces

 

"When you think of going to Mass on working days,

it is an impulse of the grace

that God wills to grant you.  Follow it."

St John Vianney

Powerful, protective, precious Blood

On one occasion St Peter Damian wrote to a young nephew:

“If I may speak figuratively, drive out the roaring beasts from your domain; do not cease from protecting yourself daily by receiving the Flesh and Blood of the Lord.  Let your secret foe see your lips reddened with the Blood of Christ.  He will shudder, cower back, and flee to his dark, dank retreat.”

St Peter Damian

Reformer, Cardinal

Doctor of the Church

Italy ~ 1007-1072

 MOTTO:  “Do not prefer anything to the love of Christ.”

FEAST DAY - February 21

“Christ cannot be accused of forgetfulness: Christ does not enjoin things contrary to His commands.  He is the Bread that came down from heaven, which is daily brought to the table of the Church, as a heavenly food, which is broken for the forgiveness of sins, which feeds and nourishes unto life everlasting them that eat the same.” ~ St Peter Damian

St Peter Damian, ora pro nobis!

Everyday - one!

 

Detail: Bartolomé Esteban Murillo - Infant Jesus Distributing Bread to Pilgrims

“Jesus has prepared not just one Host,

but one for everyday of our life.

The Hosts for us are ready.

Let us not forfeit even one of them.”

St Peter Julian Eymard

Daily rations

Holy Mass - US Army troops - WWII

"The day's food for the day's march...

that is what Holy Communion is meant to be."

Msgr Ronald Knox

Sacrifices reap blessings

 

Walking in the Rain (Acrylic print) - Usha Rai

“Take great care to go to Holy Mass,

even on weekdays;  and for such a cause

be willing to put up with some inconvenience.

Thereby you will obtain

every kind of blessing from the Lord.”

St John Bosco

 Italy ~ Aug 16, 1815 - Jan 31, 1888

Priest, Educator, Founder of Salesian Society

"Father and Teacher of Youth"

FEAST DAY - January 31

 

 

  

“When tempted, invoke your Angel. He is more eager to help you than you are to be helped! Ignore the devil and do not be afraid of him: He trembles and flees at the sight of your Guardian Angel.”  ~ St. John Bosco

 

St John Bosco, ora pro nobis!

 

Venerable Mama Margaret is the beloved and holy mother of St John Bosco. The sanctity and holiness of St John Bosco was first nurtured by a mother's prayer, a mother's example.  From Mama Margaret to her son:

"When you came into the world I consecrated you to the Blessed Virgin Mary. When you began your studies, I inculcated this devotion in you. Now I want you to belong totally to her. Make your companions those who are devoted to Mary; and if you reach ordination, never cease to inculcate and spread this devotion.”

"I have nothing to say regarding your vocation, except that you should do what God inspires you to do. Do not be concerned on my behalf. You owe me nothing. Never forget that I was born in poor circumstances, have lived in poverty all my life; and I am happy to die poor; and I say this seriously to you: if you ever become wealthy, I shall never set foot on your doorstep."

"Dear John, you have taken the priestly habit and I am as happy as any mother could be. But never forget that it is not the habit that matters, but the effort to progress in virtue. If you ever come to have doubts about your vocation, be sure you never dishonor that priestly garb. Put it aside immediately. I would rather a poor peasant son than a priest who neglected his sacred calling".

"John, you are now a priest; you will be saying Mass; so from henceforth you will be closer to Jesus. Remember that to begin to celebrate Mass means also to begin to suffer. You will not realize this immediately, but little by little you will see that what your mother has told you is the truth."