Saint for the Day

• November 8 – Feast of the Holy Relics

  Protestantism  pretends to regard the veneration which the Church pays to the relics of the Saints as a sin, and contends that this pious practice is a remnant of paganism. The Council of Trent, on the contrary, has decided that the bodies of the martyrs and other Saints, who were living members of Jesus Christ and temples of the Holy Ghost, are to be honored by the faithful. This decision was based upon the established usage of the earliest days of the Church, and upon the teaching of the Fathers and of the Councils. The Council orders, however, that all abuse of this devotion is to be avoided carefully, and forbids any relics to be exposed which have not been approved by the bishops, and these prelates are recommended to instruct the people faithfully in the teaching of the Church on this subject. While we regret, then, the errors of the impious and of heretics, let us profit by the advantages which we gain by hearkening to the voice of the Church.
• November 8 ~ The Octave Day of All Saints

    In the Liturgy of the Church the Feast of all Saints is celebrated for eight days. These eight days are called an Octave.

    Dearly beloved brethren, we should keep well in our mind and thoughts that we are living here meanwhile as strangers and pilgrims. –Second Nocturn: Lesson, St. Cyprian.

    Jesus hath now many lovers of His heavenly kingdom, but few bearers of His Cross. –Imitation: Book II.

    Ideal: In heaven, of course, there are no nights to break up the days; but, when a great feast like that of All Saints occurs, the church keeps the feast for eight days—on earth, that is. And a few years hence, if you have lived well—done your duty, day for day—you will be included among those whose feast we keep.

    Today: Do you know anything of Dante’s Paradiso? No one can ever imagine heaven, because no one can ever imagine a being so generous and wonderful as God; but, take a little time off today to try to imagine yourself in heaven and then suddenly be asked to forfeit your place because you were unwilling to make a little sacrifice to do a little duty you do not like. And then…?

    ~Slogan: Nor eye hath seen, nor ear hath heard, nor hath it entered into the heart of man what God hath prepared from them that love Him. –St. Paul

  

  ~A Character Calendar
  Sister Mary Fidelis, Sister Mary Charitas
  Imprimatur 1931

Sunday Sermon

• Twenty-third Sunday after Pentecost~ How to be Masters of Ourselves

  

  “Many walk, of whom I have told you often (and now tell you weeping), that they are the enemies of the Cross of Christ; whose end is destruction; whose God is their belly; and whose glory is their shame: who mind earthly things.” — Phil. iii. 18

  Sensuality is the bane of man’s existence. The dominion of the passions over reason is the source of his greatest misery. “Every passion,” says St. Ambrose, ” is a slavery,” because it subjects man to an unjust and tyrannous bondage.

  The present, or at least the ultimate, happiness of the creature is wrecked unless he resists the attacks of sensuality and frees himself from the control of the passions. The Spirit of God and the spirit of the world, the flesh, and the devil cannot exist together in the soul. Whoever seeks to serve at once God and mammon is of those “whose end is destruction, whose God is their belly, and whose glory is their shame,” who are “the enemies of the Cross of Christ,” because they strive to destroy a fundamental principle of the Christian religion, namely, self-denial.

  “We must live in this world,” says St. Francis of Sales, ” as if our spirits were in heaven and our bodies in the tomb.” We must live a dying life, and die a living and a life-giving death in the life of our King and most sweet Saviour! This we do by self-denial.

  Yet the very word — self-denial — fills the mind of some with terror, with thoughts of long fasts and of scourgings, of mental suffering and of bodily misery. These are they “who mind earthly things.” They cannot appreciate the necessity of self-denial because they are insensible to spiritual things. Their world is the region of the senses. They love their bodies and serve them with fidelity, they devote their time to the study of how they can get the most pleasure out of life, and they wander along through their probation wondering why they find so little comfort for their pains.

  Self-denial does not consist in mere bodily mortifications, Fasting and other corporal austerities are but means by which the animal man is brought into subjection. The real end of self- denial is that the soul may be the master of the man. St. John of the Cross tells us “that there is great reason to lament the ignorance of some who burden themselves with indiscreet penances and with many other disorderly exercises of their own self-will, putting all their confidence in such acts and believing that they become saints by means of them. If they would but use half the same diligence in mortifying their unruly appetites and passions they would make more advancement in a single month than in many whole years with all other exercises.”

  “Be assured,” says St. Francis of Sales, “that the mortification of the senses in seeing, hearing, and speaking is far more profitable than wearing even sharp chains or hair-shirts. It ought to be our principal aim to conquer ourselves, and from day to day to go on increasing in spiritual strength and perfection. But above all it is necessary to overcome our little temptations to anger, suspicion, jealousy, envy, duplicity, vanity, foolish attachments and so on, for by so doing we shall gain strength to resist more violent temptations.” A man’s chief care, then, ought to be turned within himself, for a man who governs his passions is master of the world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them.

  Five-minute Sermons for Low Masses on All Sundays of the Year
  By the Priests of the Congregation of St. Paul, 1893