This feast combines the standard celebration of the dedication of a church for St. Peter’s Basilica and the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls, which were both built by the Emperor Constantine the Great during the 4th century. These sites had already been visited by pilgrims for over a century when the basilicas were built to honor the apostles traditionally believed to have been buried there.
Their significance in the Catholic Church is emphasized in the reference made to them in the obligation on Catholic bishops to make a Quinquennial visit ad limina in which they are required to go “to the tombs of the Apostles” in Rome every five years to report on the status of their dioceses or prelatures.
This requirement was initially set out in 1585 by Pope Sixtus V, who issued the papal bull Romanus Pontifex, which established the norms for these visits.
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.”
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.
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.
Today, we are here to celebrate, and to honor and to commemorate, the dead and the living, the young men, who in every war, since this country began, have given testimony to their loyalty to their country, and their own great courage.
On this day of remembrance, let us pray in the name of those who have fallen in this country’s wars, and most especially, who have fallen in the First World War, and in the Second World War, that there will be no veterans of any further war, not because all shall have perished, but because all shall have learned to live together in peace.
And to the dead here in this cemetery, we say, they are the race. They are the race immortal, whose beams make broad the common light of day. Though time may dim, though death has barred their portal, these we salute, which nameless passed away.
There is in the Sacred Heart the symbol and express image of the infinite love of Jesus Christ which moves us to love in return.
Thoughtful men and women, with hearts craving the truth have come to seek in the Catholic Church the road which leads to eternal life.
Our Lord came to the aid of each great tribulation with a special devotion. The present and future tribulations of the Church and of nations are greater than at any other period, and this persecution is more dangerous than those of previous times. Hence, the devotion which God sends to the succor of His Church and of the nations at the present time is the devotion to the Most Holy Eucharist. It is the highest of all devotions.
