Category Archives: Saints and Blesseds

Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal

O Virgin Mother of God, | Mary Immaculate, | we
dedicate and consecrate ourselves to you | under the title of
Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal. | May this Medal be for
each one of us | a sure sign of your affection for us | and a
constant reminder of our duties toward you. | Ever while
wearing it, | may we be blessed by your loving protection |
and preserved in the grace of your Son. |

O most powerful Virgin, | Mother of our Savior, | keep us close to you every moment of our lives. | Obtain for us, your children | the grace
of a happy death; | so that, in union with you, | we may enjoy
the bliss of heaven forever. Amen.

Solemnity of Christ the King

The coming of the kingdom of God, says our Lord and Saviour, does not admit of observation, and there will be no-one to say “Look here! Look there!” For the kingdom of God is within us and in our hearts. And so it is beyond doubt that whoever prays for the coming of the kingdom of God within himself is praying rightly, praying for the kingdom to dawn in him, bear fruit and reach perfection.

For God reigns in every saint, and every saint obeys God’s spiritual laws — God, who dwells in him just as he dwells in any well-ordered city. The Father is present in him and in his soul Christ reigns alongside the Father, as it is said: We will come to him and make our dwelling with him.

Therefore, as we continue to move forward without ceasing, the kingdom of God within us will reach its perfection in us .. For this reason let us pray without ceasing, our souls filled by a desire made divine by the Word himself.

From a Discourse of Origen

the Presentation of Mary

God inspired in the heart of the pure Virgin Mary His own intense love for humility, and abhorrence of pride. She possessed, even from her infancy, a far greater horror of pride and ambition, and a far deeper love for humility than all the saints together. It was the first virtue that she practices. 

She abased and humbled herself before all. She esteemed herself, and would have been happy to be treated by others, as the last of the creatures. 

By marvelous radiance of her Immaculate Conception, she beheld herself susceptible to the guilt of the children of Adam, except that God miraculously preserved her.

Give thanks to Almighty God who resists the proud and gives grace to the humble, and offer Him all the glory that this Maiden accorded to His majesty by her practice of the richest humility during her childhood and throughout the rest of her life.

St. John Eudes

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Founders Day . Boniface Wimmer

Wimmer Statue . St Vincent Abbey Basilica

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

Dedication of St Peter and St Paul

Basilicas of St Peter and Paul

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.

St Rose Philippine Duchesne

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

Saint Gertrude

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.

St Gertrude the Great