Category Archives: Spiritual Practices

Spiritual Practices

Exaltation of the Holy Cross

St Helena and the Holy Cross

It is related by many historical accounts that Saint Helena mother of Roman emperor Constantine the Great, discovered the True Cross at the Holy Sepulchre Jerusalem after she travelled to the Holy Land in the year 326 AD. While Saint Helena was in Jerusalem she found the hiding place of three crosses that were believed used at the crucifixion of Jesus and the thieves Dismas and Gestas.

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“When we are overcome by sadness, fear, or suffering; when the pains of loss overwhelm us; when evil seems to have taken power; let us look to the cross and be filled with peace, knowing that Christ has walked this road and walks it now with us and with all our brothers and sisters.”

St Teresa of Avila

“O souls! seek a refuge, like pure doves, in the shadow of the crucifix. There mourn the Passion of your divine Spouse, and drawing from your hearts flames of love and rivers of tears, make of them a precious balm with which to anoint the wounds of your Saviour.”

St Paul of the Cross

We are celebrating the feast of the cross which drove away darkness and brought in the light. As we keep this feast, we are lifted up with the crucified Christ, leaving behind us earth and sin so that we may gain the things above. So great and outstanding a possession is the cross that he who wins it has won a treasure.

St Andrew of Crete

There is no evil to be faced that Christ does not face with us. There is no enemy that Christ has not already conquered. There is no cross to bear that Christ has not already borne for us, and does not now bear with us. And on the far side of every cross we find the newness of life in the Holy Spirit, that new life which will reach its fulfillment in the resurrection. This is our faith. This is our witness before the world.

St John Paul II

Saint Notburga

Notburga of was an Austrian saint
and peasant from Tyrol. Notburga was born
about 1265 at Rattenberg on the Inn river.
She was a cook in the household of Count Henry
of Rattenberg, and used to give food to the poor.

Notburga then worked for a farmer in Eben Austria.
The farmer came upon her in the field one evening
as she was setting down her sickle.

The bell had rung for vespers and
the vigil for Sunday had just begun.
The farmer wanted her to continue working
but she insisted that no Christian should harvest
during the vigil in good weather.

Perhaps she declared that she should let her sickle decide.
She tossed it in the air and it hung there like a crescent moon,
a harbinger of good weather. And so Notburga went off
to vespers and kept the Sunday vigil.

Abraham Lincoln

our Heavenly Father

I pray that our Heavenly Father may assuage the anguish of your bereavement, and leave you only the cherished memory of the loved and lost, and the solemn pride that must be yours, to have laid so costly a sacrifice upon the altar of Freedom.

To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.

With Malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds.

Abraham Lincoln

Canonization Sunday

the Canonizations . WEB

The September 7th canonizations of Blesseds Carlo Acutis and Pier Giorgio Frassati will be a crucial step in a decades-long effort to attract people to the Catholic faith through young, holy patrons.

“Their canonization confirms that holiness is not an abstract ideal but can manifest itself in contemporary ways, close to the sensibilities of young people, in the present and now … through friendship, study, family, the challenges of today, and even through illness faced with Christian hope,” said Leticia Arráez, a communications researcher at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome.

According to Arráez, the last 40 years have seen youth become “major protagonists” in shaping the Church’s identity and spearheading its evangelical mission throughout the world.

During the pontificate of Pope John Paul II, young people were given priority and a privileged place of recognition within the Church, especially after the pope publicly entrusted the Cross of the Jubilee Year of the Redemption to young people on Easter Sunday in 1984.

Before the close of the 1983-1984 jubilee, John Paul II expressed confidence in young people as credible leaders. During the gathering in Rome, he said they had a “right and duty” to respond to the challenges they see in the world.

“You have a sort of prophetic role: You can denounce today’s ills by speaking out, first and foremost, against that widespread ‘culture of death,’” John Paul told the gathering. “​​It is up to you, with your innate sensitivity to the values ​​proclaimed by Christ, and your aversion to compromise, to work, together with your elders who have not resigned themselves to such compromises.

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