OCTOBER 12th: OUR LADY OF APARACIDA IN BRAZIL & THE BLESSING OF AN ICON IN OUR MONASTERY (SYNOD ON THE FAMILY - 6)
July 27th, 2013, Pope Francis visited the national shrine of Brazil, one of the largest in the world. Full coverage of that event, together with the story behind the shrine and photos, videos etc can be found at:
For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptised into one body – Jews or Greeks, slaves or free – and we were all made to drink of one Spirit. (I Cor. 12, 12&13)
St Ephrem writes:
Go with Him, as His inseparable companion, to the wedding feast of Cana, and drink of the wine of His Blessing. Let you have ever before you the Face of the Lord, and look upon His beauty, and let your earnest gaze turn nowhere away from His most sweet countenance. Go before Him into a desert place and see the wonder of His works, where He multiplied in His own Holy Hands the bread that sufficed to feed a great multitude. Go, my brother, go forward, and with all the love of your soul follow Christ wherever He may go … and lovingly behold Him as taking bread into His hands, He blesses it, and breaks it, as the outward form of His own Immaculate Body; and the chalice which He blessed as the outward form of His precious Blood, and gave to His disciples; and be you also a partaker of His sacraments,” – St. Ephrem of Syria (c. 306-73) Also: “O Lord, we cannot go to the pool of Siloe to which you sent the blind man. But we have the chalice of Your Precious Blood, filled with life and light. The purer we are, the more we receive.” Also: “
“In your bread hides the Spirit who cannot be consumed; in your wine is the fire that cannot be swallowed. The Spirit in your bread, fire in your wine: behold a wonder heard from our lips.
“The seraph could not bring himself to touch the glowing coal with his fingers, it was Isaiah’s mouth alone that it touched; neither did the fingers grasp it nor the mouth swallow it; but the Lord has granted us to do both these things.
“The fire came down with anger to destroy sinners, but the fire of grace descends on the bread and settles in it. Instead of the fire that destroyed man, we have consumed the fire in the bread and have been invigorated”
What happens when a person has been baptised as a Catholic lapses in adolescence, like Blessed Charles de Foucauld, marries in church to please his parents, divorces and marries again, and then converts and wishes to live an active Christian life. To solve it, the Church has treated it as a purely legal problem, and his hardness of heart doesn’t come into it. If he marries in an Anglican church, the marriage is invalid and he is free to marry again, and it does not matter how unfaithful to his first partner he has been. If he has had the bad luck to have married in a Catholic church, then, when he converts to Christ and wants to receive him in communion, he can’t unless he breaks uo his second marriage, which usually no one wants him to do. As he was not living a Christian life before, whether he married in a Catholic church or an Anglican one was a matter of external circumstance or chance. Whether he can receive communion or not has nothing to do with his hardness of heart: it is simply a lottery. There are many problems related to re-married couples where criticism of the Church’s normal pastoral practice has little to do with the New Testament, however strictly you interpret Christ’s words on marriage.
However, that does not mean to say there is no problem. Christians still need to wear their wedding garment when they participate in the nuptial feast. For this reason, the Church is taking a long time and much prayer to solve the problems related to marriage.
I blessed the icon after the sermon at Sunday Mass. At the beginning and at an interval during the blessing, the monks sang part of the Reproaches from Good Friday, including the Trisagion in Spanish and Greek:
“Holy is God! Holy and strong! Holy immortal One, have mercy on us.”
The icon was blessed with holy water, chrismated and incensed. It will be displayed during the ordination and first Mass(-es), and is on the holy picture that will be given to those who take part as a remembrance of the great event in Br Alex’s life and in the history of our community.
Source: http://fatherdavidbirdosb.blogspot.com/2014/10/october-12th-our-lady-of-aparacida-in.html
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