Category: Benedict XVI

Year for Priests

The Year for Priests decreed by Pope Benedict XVI begins today.

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Sr. Dorcee, belovedLeave a comment
Patron of Parish Priests
"The priesthood is the love of the heart of Jesus." (St. Jeanne Marie Vianney)

I have to add yet one more post for today (#3!) because today starts the Year for Priests decreed by Pope Benedict XVI on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the death of St. John Marie Vianney, the patron saint of parish priests.  (His is one of the four relics in our altar at Christ the King.)  A plenary indulgence may be gained by all the faithful.  See plenary indulgence.  Let’s pray diligently for all priests this year: those we know, those suffering for the faith, those struggling with serious sin, and seminarians.

It’s no coincidence that it begins today on the Feast of the Sacred Heart.

The top half of the picture

Sr. Dorcee, beloved2 Comments

A story we can all learn from from the then Cardinal Ratzinger:

The British doctor Sheila Cassidy (who in 1978 entered the Benedictine order) was imprisoned and tortured in Chile in 1975 for having given medical treatment to a revolutionary.  Shortly after being tortured she was transferred to another cell, where she found a tattered  Bible.  She opened it, and the first thing she saw was a picture of a man prostrate under lightning, thunder and hail. Immediately she identified herself with this man, saw herself in him.  Then she looked further and saw in the upper part of the picture a mighty hand, the hand of God, and the text from the eighth chapter of the Letter to the Romans, a text that comes straight from the center of Resurrection-faith: “Nothing can separate us from the love of Christ” (8:39).  And whereas at first it was the bottom half of the picture which she experienced, her being invaded by all that was terrible, crushing her like a helpless worm, she gradually came to experience more and more the other part of the picture, the powerful hand and the “Nothing that can separate us .”  At first she still prayed, “Lord, let me out of here,” but this interior shaking of the prison bars turned more and more into that truly free composure which prays, with Jesus Christ: “Not my will, but thine, be done.”  Furthermore she discovered that, as a result, she was filled with a great freedom and kindness toward those who hated her: now she could love them, for she saw their hatred as their distress and imprisonment.”   (Co-workers for the Truth)

Words of Hope from Benedict XVI for this day

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Today is Holy Saturday.

“Holy Saturday is the day of the ‘death of God,’ the day which expresses the unparalleled experience of our age, anticipating the fact that God is simply absent, that the grave hides him, that he no longer awakes, no longer speaks, so that one no longer needs to gainsay him but can simply overlook him . . . Christ strode through the gate of our final loneliness; in his passion he went down into the abyss of our abandonment. Where no voice can reach us any longer, there is he. Hell is thereby overcome, or, to be more accurate, death, which was previously hell, is hell no longer. Neither is the same any longer because there is life in the midst of death, because love dwells in it.”

“Christ descended into ‘Hell’ and is therefore close to those cast into it, transforming their darkness into light. Suffering and torment is still terrible and well-nigh unbearable. Yet the star of hope has risen—the anchor of the heart reaches the very throne of God. Instead of evil being unleashed within man, the light shines victorious: suffering—without ceasing to be suffering—becomes, despite everything, a hymn of praise.”

“God cannot suffer, but he can suffer with.”

~Benedict XVI