Category Archives: News

News

The Mother of Mercy Calls Us!

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This month’s issue of Religious Life magazine is devoted in good part to the only approved Marian apparition site in the United States – the Shrine of Our Lady of Good Help in Champion, Wisconsin. Our Lady appeared to Adele Brise in 1859 and told her to teach the children their catechism and about the sacramental life of the Church. “Gather the children in this wild country and teach them what they should know for salvation.”

in 2009, Bishop David Ricken of Green Bay opened a two-year inquiry into the apparitions. He found that they exhibited a supernatural character and were worthy of belief. The other important act was the entrusting of the Fathers of Mercy as guardians of the shrine. They have seen the number of pilgrims increase from 25,000 a year in 2010 to about 200,000 a year in 2011!

The shrine offers daily mass, confession, spiritual direction, anointing of the sick, meeting rooms for groups, a new cafe (it is pretty remote), and other devotions. It is unlike other apparition shrines in that the countryside looks much as it did 150 years ago. There are no shops, restaurants or secular establishments to speak of anywhere nearby with the exception of a few farms. Hence, it is a beautiful place for quiet reflection.

Fr. Peter Stryker, C.P.M., the Rector of the Shrine, in commenting on the value of their Fathers’ work at the shrine quoted from a 1955 book on the shrine’s history in which it said:

There must be a grave reason and great need for Mary to come so often in our generation. There are great dangers threatening us…these are hurling humanity down the precipice of ruin and destruction….Mary would remind us of the value of suffering, the necessity of sacrifice, and the mercy of our Savior.

Fr. Stryker says that we all have the responsibility to open the door of faith to our family, friends and neighbors. This Year of Faith and the Holy Father’s words at World Youth Day have the same message: Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.

And as someone who has been to the shrine, I am happy to be reminded of what a pilgrimage is all about.  Regardless of what we may experience there, a pilgrimage is still, in the words of Father Stryker, “an outward sign of our desire to be on a safe path regarding our ultimate pilgrimage: our journey toward heaven as our true and eternal home!”

 

 

 

 

News, Papal Address

Go and Make Disciples

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Jesus did not say: “if you would like to, if you have the time,” but: “Go and make disciples of all nations.” Sharing the experience of faith, bearing witness to the faith, proclaiming the Gospel: this is a command that the Lord entrusts to the whole Church, and that includes you; but it is a command that is born not from a desire for domination or power but from the force of love, from the fact that Jesus first came into our midst and gave us, not a part of Himself, but the whole of Himself, He gave His life in order to save us and to show us the love and mercy of God.

 Krakow 2016

 

 

News

A Century Plus of Zoe

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In 2011, we published an article in Religious Life called “A Century of Zoe” which was the vocation story of Mother Teresa Margaret, foundress of the Carmelite Monastery in Traverse City, Michigan. Baptized with the name Zoe, she said that she never liked the name, thinking it not Catholic enough, until she read that Father John Hardon said that Zoe means sanctifying grace in Greek.

Well, on May 26, 2013, Zoe went to meet, face to face, her heavenly spouse. She had been a cloistered nun for 83 years! She died at the age 101 and had entered the Grand Rapids Carmel when she was 18 years old.

Zoe Julia Armstrong was born in Ohio in 1911. When she first wrote to her first Carmel and received the answer back that they were full and to try elsewhere, she wrote back and said, is anybody going to die soon? She was full of spunk. When she entered the Grand Rapids Carmel, she was so excited that she grasped “old Mother Bernadita” in her arms and spun her around! Zoe had a rough go at first but said, “No I’m not going to go. I’m going to become what they want me to be, to prove my love to Him!”

In all challenges, Mother said we have to remember, “God wouldn’t ask this of me if He didn’t intend to help me with it.”

According to her sisters, Mother transitioned from vigorous activity to old age with remarkable gracefulness.  Until her brief final illness, she participated in all the activities of her religious community.

Requiesce in pace.

 

 

News

Like Father, Like Son

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When Father Patrick Allen was ordained by Most Rev. Robert Guglielmone of Charleston on July 7th, his young son Henry wanted to share that moment with his father. What a beautiful picture!

Fr. Allen attended a Presbyterian Seminary but then became attracted to Anglo-Catholicism. He was ordained a priest in the Episcopal Church in 2001. His pilgrimage of faith ultimately led him and 19 other “pilgrims” into the Catholic Church. They are part of the Corpus Christi Catholic Community, part of the “Anglican Ordinariate,” which meets in St. Mary of the Annunciation in downtown Charleston, SC.

For a complete list of communities, parishes and religious communities belonging to the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter, as it is officially called, please visit their website.

“All things that are good and pure and true in the Anglican church have a home in the Catholic Church,” Allen says. Welcome home, fellow pilgrims.

For the complete story, see the article in The Post and Courier.

 

News, Women's Communities

A Quick Novena for Conversions

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One of the missions of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Wichita (IHM) is to pray for the conversion of sinners. You can help! Using Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta’s “quick novena” as a model, the sisters are enlisting the help of the laity in this endeavor to pray for sinners and to ask for Our Lady’s help as they build their new novitiate. As of May 13, 2013, they had prayed 71,080 Memoraraes on their way to their goal of 5,000,000!

The IHM sisters have a special devotion to Our Lady of Fatima. When their religious institute was founded in Spain in 1848 by Fr. Joaquin Masmitija, he placed it under her protection. It was in Fatima that the Blessed Mother told Lucia, Francisco and Jacinta to “pray much and make sacrifices on behalf of sinners, for many souls go to hell because there is no one to make sacrifices for them.” When they made such a sacrifice, she told them to pray: “O Jesus, it is for love of You, for the conversion of sinners and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”

Their mission and the beloved name of Mary held by the sisters encourages them to partake of this work for the sake of the world. Anyone can pray the quick novena which is 9 Memoraraes said in petition and 1 said in thanksgiving for a total of 10. You can pray all at once or scatter them throughout the day. If you do this daily for 14 weeks, you will have said 980 Memorares! Add 2 more days and you will have said a thousand. You can help the sisters reach 5 million prayed for the conversion of the world!

The sisters sent us a postcard that can be used as a daily tally which is to be mailed back to them after 1000 Memoraraes are said. They will then present them to Our Lady of Fatima at her shrine on their property each year on May 13th and October 13th—the anniversary of her first and last apparition at Fatima in 1917.

For more information, please visit their website.

 

Men's communities, News

Twenty-Five years of Faithful Service

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On July 18, 2013, the Priestly Fraternity of St. Peter (FSSP) celebrated its 25th anniversary. Founded in 1988 by former members of the Society of St. Pius X, it has enjoyed spectacular growth, with 240 priests and 140 seminarians worldwide.

Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre formed the Society of St. Pius X in response to the liturgical abuses that developed after Vatican II. But when he consecrated four bishops against the wishes of Pope John Paul II, Fr. Josef Bisig and 11 other priests along with many seminarians left the organization on order to be obedient to the Holy Father. Founding an order that retains the traditional Latin liturgy was done with humility and fealty to the Church.

With the support of the then-Cardinal Ratzinger, Bishop Joseph Stimpfle of Augsburg, Germany gave the Fraternity a home in Wigratzbad, a Marian shrine in Bavaria, that is now the Fraternity’s European seminary. Fr. Bissig was the first Superior General, a position he held until 2000.The FSSP’s mission is twofold: “formation and sanctification of priests in the cadre of the traditional liturgy of the Roman rite, and secondly, the pastoral deployment of the priests in the service of the Church.”

The fraternity’s missionary work is worldwide with more than 50 locations in North America alone. To find a parish near you, click here! Their US seminary is in Denton, Nebraska where their Chapel of Our Lady of Guadalupe was consecrated in 2010.

For more information, see the National Catholic Register’s article.

News

A Meeting of the Saints

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It is always interesting, when reading the lives of the saints, to discover that different saints’ lives often intertwined. It’s as if one were attending class in a schoolroom and sitting next to you was St. Catherine of Siena and in front of you was St. Ignatius of Loyola. Of course, there is the other moment in history when Poland had in their midst St. Maximilian Kolbe, St. Faustina and Bl. Pope John Paul II and yet they did not personally know one another!

Today, we celebrate the great saint Bonaventure, Cardinal-Bishop and Minister General of the Franciscan Order, Doctor of the Church known as the Seraphic Doctor who, with St. Thomas Aquinas, studied in Paris. Born in c. 1218, Bonaventure was given the name John. When he was 4 years old, according to tradition, his mother threw herself at the feet of St. Francis of Assisi begging that her son John be delivered from a serious illness. He was cured and St. Francis, foreseeing the “Divine graces” in store for the child cried out ,”O buona ventura!” (Good Fortune!).

At age 22, Bonaventure entered the Order of St. Francis. Sent to Paris to study, he was asked by St. Thomas Aquinas where he had acquired his knowledge. St. Bonaventure pointed to the crucifix and said: “This is the source of all my knowledge. I study only Jesus Christ and Him crucified.”

While attending the Council of Lyons in 1274, St. Bonaventure took ill and died on July 14th. Amazingly enough, St. Thomas Aquinas died en route to the same council. The humble Franciscan who rose to the highest ranks of the Church and the celebrated Dominican who said at the end of his life, “All that I have written seems like straw compared to what has now been revealed to me,” were like bookends in a glorious chapter of the Church.

Pope Benedict XVI (March 17, 2010) describes the two Doctor’s definition of the ultimate goal of mankind:

St Thomas and St Bonaventure define the human being’s final goal, his complete happiness in different ways. For St Thomas the supreme end, to which our desire is directed is: to see God. In this simple act of seeing God all problems are solved: we are happy, nothing else is necessary.

Instead, for St Bonaventure the ultimate destiny of the human being is to love God, to encounter Him and to be united in His and our love. For him this is the most satisfactory definition of our happiness.

In the words of St. Bonaventure, “Let us therefore say to the Lord Our God: ‘Lead me forth, Lord, in Thy way, and let me step in Thy truth; let my heart be glad, that it fears Thy name.'”

News

Listen Carefully, My Child

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I S T E N  carefully, my child,
to your master’s precepts,
and incline the ear of your heart (Prov. 4:20).
Receive willingly and carry out effectively
your loving father’s advice,
that by the labor of obedience
you may return to Him
from whom you had departed by the sloth of disobedience.

To you, therefore, my words are now addressed,
whoever you may be,
who are renouncing your own will
to do battle under the Lord Christ, the true King,
and are taking up the strong, bright weapons of obedience.

And first of all,
whatever good work you begin to do,
beg of Him with most earnest prayer to perfect it,
that He who has now deigned to count us among His children
may not at any time be grieved by our evil deeds.
For we must always so serve Him
with the good things He has given us,
that He will never as an angry Father disinherit His children,
nor ever as a dread Lord, provoked by our evil actions,
deliver us to everlasting punishment
as wicked servants who would not follow Him to glory.

From the Prologue of the Rule of St. Benedict

News

On the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle

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Saints like St. Thomas the Apostle, separated from us by 2000 years of time and minimal in their biblical documentation, can often become a bit abstract in our minds. Most people can recognize the name “Thomas” and recall, “Oh, yes, the doubter,” but few can actually account for how he got the title “St.” placed before his name. Much less can they see any real depth of applicability in his story, besides the obvious “Don’t doubt in Jesus.”

Perhaps, however, in the Gospel of John, when Jesus says to Thomas, “Put out your hand, and place it in my side,” He is offering Thomas a directive that years of meditation could not exhaust. Place your hand in the wound in My side? In the very wound inflicted by a lance, and from which streams of blood and water flowed? In the very puncture of My beating heart, which loved you enough to die for you? Even though you had not the trust to take both My own and My apostles’ word for it that I was truly alive? Thomas’s need for continuing proof, despite all that he had already seen, is at one time or another an experience we all share, but Jesus’ merciful response—to enter the Upper Room through a locked door and invite him to touch His wounds anyway—belongs to us just as much. He extends to all of us this inexhaustible invitation to forever share in all His heart’s secrets—His joys and pains, His love and His sorrow.

As for how Thomas did get the “St.” before his name, traditional accounts say that he traveled as far as India in response to Jesus’ instruction to teach all nations, and that in the end, he met his martyrdom by being pierced through with a lance. For one who was given the privilege to touch the pierced heart of Jesus Himself, this act of accepting a lance through his own heart was the ultimate response. And it is the response we must make (day-to-day and probably in less dramatic ways than Thomas did, but make it we must nonetheless), if we are one day to have the title “St.” placed before our own names.

News, Women's Communities

I Must Decrease

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From the beginning of their foundation, the Franciscan Sisters of St. John the Baptist were inspired by Ven. Archbishop Fulton Sheen to offer a holy hour every day for priests and seminarians. Imagine their joy when their bishop, Daniel R. Jenky, asked them for help in the setting up of the diocesan museum as well as the Archbishop Sheen Museum. The Museum is also only one block away from the Cathedral of Saint Mary of the Immaculate Conception, where Sheen attended grade school, learned to serve Mass, and was ordained a priest on Sept. 20, 1919.

The Franciscan Sisters of St. John the Baptist are a relatively new community established in 2006. Previously members of another religious congregation, they were inspired to start a new community, modeled after the life of St.  John the Baptist, which is a life of total trust in God and self-renunciation. They are a contemplative-active community who serve the sick and poor, according to the needs of the Church, their bishop and society. Bishop Jenky told the sisters that John the Baptist is “a faithful model of conversion who spent his life preparing the way of the Lord and preaching repentance.”

May the Sisters be blessed on this solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist!

“He must increase and I must decrease” (John 3:30).