Faith-filled Australian lives celebrated during

June 29-30 2019: 13th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Ad Limina Visit: The Australian Catholic bishops have been in Rome this week for their ‘ad limina’ visit to the pope. Below is a report from this week’s Catholic Outlook .

Eileen O’Connor
Australian bishops are hopeful that a number of Australians could follow in the footsteps of St Mary of the Cross MacKillop and enter the Church’s Communion of Saints.
As part of their Ad Limina Apostolorum pilgrimage, which commenced on Monday, bishops met on Wednesday with officials from the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, including its prefect, Cardinal Giovanni Becciu.

Progress on the journey towards beatification of two prominent Australians – Eileen O’Connor and Dr Sr Mary Glowrey – was high on the meeting’s agenda.

Sydney Auxiliary Bishop Anthony Randazzo, who has been involved with the cause for canonisation for Eileen O’Connor, said he was encouraged by what he heard from the officials of the Holy See.

"While we in Australia already understand the holy life that Eileen led, including co-founding Our Lady’s Nurses for the Poor, and we would like things to proceed quickly, the congregation explained that the process is complex – and rightly so," Bishop Randazzo said.

The bishops also discussed other holy people who might one day progress down the path to sainthood, including famed 19th-century humanitarian Caroline Chisholm, St Vincent de Paul pioneer Charles O’Neill, Constance Gladman, a religious sister who was killed while teaching in Papua New Guinea, and Fr Joseph Canali, known as "the Apostle of Brisbane".


Bishop Bosco Puthur, who led the delegation to the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, said as well as discussing people of the past who lived saintly lives, the conversation also explored how people today can pursue holiness.
"We can sometimes look at the saints and think that we couldn’t possibly live like they did," Bishop Puthur said.
 "But there is no reason that we can’t hold them up as our role models whose faith, virtues and values gave witness to their Christian discipleship – even if they aren’t yet recognised as saints by the universal Catholic Church."

On the third full day of the Ad Limina visit, the bishops also met with the Congregation for Clergy and the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments.

In the meeting with the Congregation for Clergy, the bishops discussed the ongoing development of the Ratio Nationalis, a document to guide bishops in helping men discern the priestly vocation, in forming them during their seminary training and ensuring they embrace ongoing formation after ordination.


Congregation officials promoted efforts to increase the involvement of women in the discernment and formation processes.
 

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"Because there is a consumerist culture that wants to block us from living according to the Creator’s plan, we must have the courage to create first islands and oases, and then great landscapes of Catholic culture in which life follows the design of the Creator."
 Pope Benedict XVI, 6 April 2006

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To Luther, who reproached him for remaining in the Catholic Church despite her ‘corruption’, Erasmus of Rotterdam replied one day: "I endure this Church in the hope that she will improve, given that she also has to endure me in the hope that I will improve." Quoted by Fr R Cantalamessa, Lenten Meditations for pope and curia 2003.
 

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"The moment men cease to pull against it [the Catholic Church], they feel a tug towards it. The moment they cease to shout it down, they begin to listen to it with pleasure."

G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion, London, Burns, Oates & Washbourne, 1927, p.62.,
 

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This Eucharistic host still contains fresh blood over 770 years later

June 22-23 2019: Corpus Christi;
The Body and Blood of the Lord.

 

The miracle is visible to pilgrims in Santarem, Portugal, and looks the same as it did in 1247.

Catholics believe that the bread and wine at Mass are trans-formed into Jesus’ body, blood, soul and divinity. It is a mystery known as "transubstantiation," which means that while the appearances of bread and wine remain, the under-lying substance is changed (through the power of God) completely to the body and blood of Christ. It is a teaching based on scripture and tradition and has remained unchanged in its essence since apostolic times.

However, the Church recognizes that on rare occasions both the substance and the appearance is changed into Jesus’ body and blood. These are identified as "Eucharistic miracles," and testify to the words Jesus gave to his disciples at the Last Supper ("This is my body").
 
One such miracle occurred in Santarem, Portugal, in 1247, when a young woman, jealous of her husband, went to a sorceress in hopes of making a love potion. The sorceress instructed the young woman to obtain a consecrated host from a Catholic Church. The young woman followed the instructions and hid the host in a linen cloth.

Shortly after she enclosed the host in the cloth, it began to bleed. She was frightened by what she saw and quickly shut the host in a drawer in her bedroom. At night, brilliant rays of light came from the drawer and she was forced to tell her husband everything.

The next day she brought the miraculous host to the parish priest, who enshrined the bleeding host in a reliquary.

It has remained there in Santarem ever since, and canonical investigations were undertaken in 1340 and 1612. On both occasions the miracle was found to be authentic.


Over the centuries the host will appear like fresh bloody tissue, or dry up and harden. According to those who have seen it, the host remains irregularly shaped and has veins that run from top to bottom. The fact that the host has remained intact all of these years is a "second miracle," and continues to baffle skeptics.

It is a sign for all of Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharistic host and has reinvigorated the faith of many Catholics around the world

Philip Kosloski , Aleteia, Jun 20, 2019
 

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"One Holy Communion is enough to make you a saint if you receive it with all the love of which you are capable"
St Alphonsus Ligouri (1696-1787)

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Unite your heart with Jesus’s heart with these short prayers

June 15-16 2019: Trinity Sunday.

"My Jesus! Give me a heart conformable to thy own sacred heart."

If there is any heart that we should strive to be like, it is Jesus’ heart. Uniting our hearts with the most sacred heart of Jesus should be the goal of every Christian, finding in his heart the key to true Gospel living.

One way to remind us of the various qualities of Jesus’ heart is to pray to Jesus for specific attributes. This will help us overcome particular weaknesses in our own lives and set us on the right path to union with Jesus.

Below is a whole litany of short prayers that can be memorized or written down and prayed throughout the day, especially when we feel deficient and the most unlike Jesus.


 My Jesus! Give me a heart conformable to thy own sacred heart.
Give me a humble heart, loving an abject and a hidden life.
Give me a meek heart, ready to bear all in silence — to pardon and forget the greatest injuries. Give me a patient heart, tranquil in the severest trials.
Give me a heart filled with the love of poverty, and with contempt for all earthly things.
Give me a pure heart, desiring only to please you in my thoughts and deeds.
Give me an obedient heart, having no will but that of God.
Give me a heart delighting in prayer, and making this heavenly exercise its chief occupation.
Give me a heart having no joy but that of seeing God known, loved, served and honoured.
Give me a heart having no sadness but that of seeing God offended.
Give me a heart having no aversion but for sin.
Give me a heart having no desire but for the glory of God and for the salvation of souls.

 
Philip Kosloski Aleteia, Jun 09, 2019

The two powerful ways the Holy Spirit comes

June 8-9 2019: Pentecost Sunday.
Welcome him today. Both ways bring his peace.

The Holy Spirit comes in two ways in the readings for this Sunday, Pentecost

Sunday.
  He also comes in two ways to each of us, bringing something very different in
each kind of visit. First, there is the private, person-to-person visit of the Spirit after the Resurrection.
The drama of Pentecost comes in the first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. But the Gospel records an earlier, no less important, event:




Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, "Peace be with you. … As the Father has sent me, so I send you." And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit."

This is a remarkably intimate gesture. Jesus comes to his friends where they are, tells them to have peace, and breathes on them. His breath is the breath of God, and it confers the Holy Spirit, the animating principle of their spiritual life.

This is the same encounter we have in the blessed Sacrament, when Christ comes to each of us in Communion, where his flesh is "given life and giving life through the Holy Spirit."

In these intimate visits, the Spirit leaves his stamp on each of us uniquely.

When you experience this kind of visit by the Holy Spirit, you realize you are entirely known and utterly unique.
There is another kind of visit from the Holy Spirit, though.



The second way the Holy Spirit comes is all about uniting us, not singling us out.
Compare the gentle breath of Jesus in the Upper Room to what happens in the Upper Room on Pentecost Day: "Suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were." Fire "parted" and came to rest on each of them.  
Before, the Spirit came to each in a singular way, with a specialized task. Here, the Spirit comes to them all and makes their differences go away.


This is the uniting power of the Holy Spirit, the power of the Holy Spirit to remind us that we aren’t so special after all, tie us together, and make us no longer a collection of individuals but an army, a unit, a people, a Church.

There are very specific, named ways the Holy Spirit does this in the Church.

The Holy Spirit is the quiet voice of conscience in each of us. But he is also the mighty voice of the moral teachings of the Church.

He comes to each of us in the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, granting us personal wisdom, insight and knowledge. But he also comes in the seven sacraments, guaranteed channels of supernatural grace.

He inspires our personal prayer but also the Bible; our personal devotions but also the Liturgy; individual holiness but also the canonization tradition in the Church.


Tom Hoopes , Aleteia, Jun 06, 2019



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