Lay Cistercians of Gethsemani Abbey

Vigils Reading
2024-04-16
REVEALING CHRIST’S LOVE
By Caryll Houselander3
◊◊◊
Christ never forced his love on anyone. Though he is perfection, he never
allowed himself to dominate the will and mind of another with his own. He
desired love that would be communion, closer than human marriage, closer
than the life of a mother to her unborn child, an unimaginable communion of
love, but all were to come to it through their own experience, in their own way;
even, by a positive miracle of mercy, through their own sorrow for their sins.
The impulse was to begin for each one in their own heart. It was never a
violation of the individual soul; instead, a gentle, almost imperceptible,
movement of inward life. It could be likened to the quickening of the seed in
the earth, when the warmth and light of the sun which is burning in heaven
comes down through the darkness and enters into it, and the tender green shoot
pushes up towards the light, compelled by the very sun that is so far away, and
yet is within it.
Most people who want to know God and who are outside the Church have
just one thing that is precious to them, though to us with our clear-cut
definitions, our discipline, and our sacraments, it may seem so vague that it is
hard for us to realize how much it means to them. This is their personal
approach to God. Very often it seems to be hardly that at all, so vague is it, so
closely does it lean to sentimentality. It may be simply a memory of childhood,
or a stirring of the heart to God on seeing the first wild spray of blossoms that
proclaim the spring, or the stirring of the spirit when a certain familiar hymn is
heard. But it is surely an indication of that individual’s approach to God and of
his approach to them, and it is as sweet to them as it would be to a blind man if,
reaching out in darkness, he touched the garment hem of Christ.
Christ’s example shows us so clearly and simply how to practice his
objective love, how to learn what is in the hearts of others. First we must realize
everyone separately and approach each one differently. There are those who
come to him through their minds, through study, and through considering the
problems of today, suffering above all.
Sometimes the revelation is secret, and is made through reparation,
through gladly bearing the wounds of sin, our own and the world’s, inwardly,
and offering our suffering and sorrow in Christ’s to redeem the world and bring
peace and the forgiveness of sins. By this means it is that Christ in us still passes
through the locked doors of other lives, of closed minds, and frightened hearts.

3 The Risen Christ. Caryll Houselander, Sheed & Ward, New York, 1958, pp. 38-49.6

Vigils Reading
2024-04-17
IN CHRIST SHALL ALL BE MADE ALIVE
By St John Henry Newman4
◊◊◊
Jesus Christ says, “As the Father has life in Himself, so has He given also
to the Son to have life in Himself;” and afterwards He says, “Because I live, you
also shall live.” It would seem then, that as Adam is the author of death to the
whole human race, so is Christ the origin of immortality. When Adam ate the
forbidden fruit, it was as a poison spreading through his whole nature, soul and
body, and from there through every one of his descendants. We are told
expressly “in Adam all die.” We are born heirs to that infection of nature which
followed upon his fall.
But we are also told, “As in Adam all die, even so in Christ shall all be
made alive;” and the same law of God’s providence is maintained in both cases.
Adam spreads poison; Christ diffuses life eternal. Christ communicates life to
us, one by one, by means of that holy and incorrupt nature which He assumed
for our redemption. Therefore St. Paul says that “the last Adam was made” not
merely “a living soul,” but “a quickening” or life-giving “Spirit”, as being “the
Lord from heaven.” Let us not doubt, though we do not sensibly approach Him,
that He can still give us the virtue of His purity and incorruption, as He has
promised, and in a more heavenly and spiritual manner than “in the days of His
flesh;” in a way which does not remove merely the ailments of the body, but
sows the seed of eternal life in body and soul.
Let us not deny Him the glory of His life-giving holiness, that quickening
grace which is the renovation of our whole race, a spirit quick and powerful and
piercing, so as to leaven the whole mass of human corruption and make it live.
He is the first-fruits of the Resurrection: we follow Him each in our own order,
as we are hallowed by His inward presence. And in this sense, among others,
Christ, in the Scripture phrase, is “formed in us;” that is, communication is
made to us of His new nature, which sanctifies the soul, and makes the body
immortal.
Such then is our risen Savior in Himself and towards us: — conceived by
the Holy Spirit; holy from the womb; dying, but abhorring corruption; rising
again the third day by His own inherent life; exalted as the Son of God and Son
of man, to raise us after Him; and filling us incomprehensibly with His
immortal nature, till we become like Him; filling us with a spiritual life which
may expel the poison of the tree of knowledge and restore us to God. How
wonderful a work of grace! Strange it was that Adam should be our death, but
stranger still and very gracious, that God Himself should be our life, by means
of that human tabernacle which He has taken on Himself.

4 Parochial and Plain Sermons. John Henry Newman. Ignatius Press. San Francisco. 1987. p.316.8

Vigils Reading
2024-04-18
OUR CORRUPTIBLE AND MORTAL BODY
by Pope St Leo the Great5
◊◊◊
Though we once knew Christ according to the flesh, we now do so no
longer. The resurrection of the Lord did not mean the end of his flesh, but its
transformation, and his bodily substance was not consumed by its increase in
power. The quality changed, but the nature did not pass away. What could die
became immortal, what could be harmed became incorruptible. And so he says
correctly that he no longer knows the body of Christ in its former state, because
there remains nothing in it subject to suffering or to weakness. It remains
essentially human, but surpasses itself through the glory of the resurrection. It
is not surprising that Paul says this of the body of Christ, when he says about
Christians who live according to the Spirit, From now on, we know no one
according to the flesh. From now on, he says, resurrection in Christ has begun
in us; from Christ who died for all comes the shape of all our hope. We do not
hold back through diffidence, nor are we held in suspense through uncertainty:
we have received the beginnings of what we are promised, and see already with
the eyes of faith the things that will be ours. Rejoicing in the lifting up of our
nature, we possess already all that we believe.
Therefore, let us not be taken up by the appearances of things that pass,
nor let things which are merely of this earth turn our thoughts from the things
of heaven. Let us take as passing those things which have even now scarcely
any reality; and with our minds intent on those that endure, let us fix our desire
there where what is offered is eternal. For though we are saved only in hope,
and carry with us still our corruptible and mortal body, yet we rightly claim to
be no longer in the flesh if carnal passions do not rule us: rightly do we disclaim
allegiance to something which no longer holds us in its power. And so when the
Apostle says: “Make no provision for the flesh, to follow its desires, we
understand that he has not forbidden those things consistent with our bodily
health, or those demanded by human weakness. But in that we are not to cater
to all our desires, or fulfill all that the flesh covets, we recognize that he has
warned us to observe a certain measure of temperance, that the flesh, which is
created subject to the soul, is not given too much, nor is denied what is
necessary.

5 Sermo de Resurrectione Domini I. –nn 4-5; SC, Vol 74, pp 125-126.10

Vigils Reading
2024-04-19
THE CRUCIAL CHALLENGE
OF OUR CHRISTIAN FAITH
By Thomas Merton
◊◊◊
The season of Lent summoned us to change our hearts, to effect in
ourselves the Christian metanoia. But at the same time Lent has reminded us
perhaps all too clearly of our own powerlessness to change our lives in any way.
Lent in the liturgical year plays the role of the Law, the pedagogue, who
convinces us of sin and inflicts upon us the crushing evidence of our own
nothingness. Hence it disquiets and sobers us, awakening in us perhaps some
sense of that existential “dread” of the creature whose freedom suspends him
over an abyss which may be an infinite meaninglessness, and unbounded
despair. This is the fruit of that Law which judges our freedom together with its
powerlessness to impose full meaning on our lives merely by conforming to a
moral code. Is there nothing more than this?
But now the power of Easter has burst upon us with the resurrection of
Christ. Now we find in ourselves a strength which is not our own, and which is
freely given to us whenever we need it, raising us above the Law, giving us a new
law which is hidden in Christ: the law of his merciful love for us. Now we no
longer strive to be good because we have to, because it is a duty, but because our
joy is to please him who has given all his love to us! Now our life is full of
meaning.
Easter is the hour of our own deliverance–from what? Precisely from
Lent and from its hard Law which accuses and judges our infirmity. We are no
longer under the Law. We are delivered from the harsh judgment! Here is all
the greatness and all the unimaginable splendor of the Easter mystery. Here is
the “grace” of Easter which we fail to lay hands on because we are afraid to
understand its full meaning. To understand Easter and live it, we must
renounce our dread of newness and of freedom!
Death exercises a twofold power in our lives: it holds us by sin, and it
holds us by the Law. To die to death and live a new life in Christ we must die
not only to sin but also to the Law.
Every Christian knows that he must die to sin. But the great truth that St
Paul exhausted himself to preach in season and out is a truth that we Christians
have barely grasped, a truth that has got away from us, that constantly eludes
us and has continued to do so for twenty centuries. We cannot get it into our
heads what it means to be no longer slaves of the Law. And the reason is that
we do not have the courage to face this truth which contains in itself the crucial
challenge of our Christian faith, the great reality that makes Christianity
different from every other religion.

6 New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965, pp. 145-146.12

Vigils Reading
2024-04-20
THE REALITY OF THE RESURRECTION
By Bruce Vawter
◊◊◊
In biblical faith the resurrection is something; something did occur to
account for the appearances of Jesus after his death. It is not to retreat into
obscurity or equivocation to confess that we have no better way of defining that
something than to call it resurrection. We cannot define what is indefinable in
terms of human experience; we can only describe it in some fashion by the use
of the pictures we call analogies. The picture we use following the New
Testament precedent to describe both what God effected in Christ and, with it
as the proleptic example, what its faith promises to all who share in God’s
kingdom, is mythical to the extent that, taken in all literalness, it might equally
well serve to describe the resuscitation of a corpse, which the New Testament
does not intend to do…
Paul…for all his insistence on the resurrection as a reality, did not think
of it as a resurrection of dead flesh: “Perhaps someone will say, ‘How are the
dead to be raised up? What kind of body will they have?’ A nonsensical question!
The seed you sow does not germinate unless it dies. When you sow, you do not
sow the full-blown plant but a kernel of wheat or some other grain. God gives
body to it as he pleases — to each seed its own fruition… So is it with the
resurrection of the dead.
Paul admittedly tells us more about what, in his view, the resurrection is
not than what it is, but at the same time he tells us enough to dissuade us from
dismissing lightly the testimony of his senses, which he joined to the witness of
his tradition. Here was a man quite conscious of the validity of what are
sometimes thought to be modern and scientific objections to the idea of
resurrection; a man convinced that something had occurred that he could only
call resurrection while regretting the inadequacy of the concept. Paul was as
prepared as anyone today for demythologizing, but he was not prepared to
disallow any fact out of his inability to explain it. Rather than deny the fact, he
preferred to retain the myth with all its attendant ambiguities.

7 This Man Jesus, Bruce Vawter. Doubleday & Co. 1973. p.48-9.14.

Skema: Fourth Week in Easter
2024-04-21
Biblical Readings for Office and Mass
4th Week of Easter

Mass Readings: Sunday (B), Weekdays (II)
April 21 – 27, 2024

Sun
21
Mon
22
Tue
23
Wed
24
Thu
25
Fri
26
Sat
27

Office
4th Sunday of Easter
Bl Maria Gabriella
Easter Weekday
Easter Weekday
St Mark
Easter Weekday
St Rafael Arnaiz Baron

Vigils
Acts 12:1-23
Acts 12:24-13:14a
Acts 13:14b-43
Acts13:44-14:7
1 Thess 2:1-13
Acts 15:5-35
Acts 15:36-16:15

Lauds
Rev 19:19-21
Rev 20:11-15
Rev 21:5-8
Rev 21:15-21
Sir 51:13-22
Rev 22:14-21
Eph 1:11-14

Mass
50
279
280
281
555
283
284

1st
Acts 4:8-12
Acts 11:1-18
Acts 11:19-26
Acts 12:24-13:5a
1 Pet 5:5b-14
Acts 13:26-33
Acts 13:44-52

2nd
1 John 3:1-2

Gospel
John 10:11-18
John 10:1-10
John 10:22-30
John 12:44-50
Mark 16:15-20
John 14:1-6
John 14:7-14

Vespers
Rev 20:4-6
Rev 21:1-4
Rev 21:9-14
Rev 21:22-27
2 Tim 4:1-11
Eph 1:1-10
Eph 1:15-23

4th Sunday in Easter
2024-04-21
THE SHEPHERD OF OUR SOULS
From a sermon by St John Henry Newman1
◊◊◊
Our Lord here appropriates to Himself the title under which He had been
foretold by the Prophets. “David My servant shall be king over them” says
Almighty God by the mouth of Ezekiel: “and they all shall have one Shepherd.”
And in the book of Zechariah, “Awake, O sword, against My shepherd, and
against the man that is My fellow, says the Lord of Hosts; smite the Shepherd,
and the sheep shall be scattered.” And in like manner St. Peter speaks of our
returning “to the Shepherd and Bishop of our souls.”
“The good Shepherd gives His life for the sheep.” In those countries of
the East where our Lord appeared, the office of a shepherd is not only a lowly
and simple office, and an office of trust, as it is with us, but, moreover, an office
of great hardship and of peril. Our flocks are exposed to no enemies, such as
our fidelity to the sheep by encounters with fierce beasts of prey. The hireling
shepherd is not tried. But where our Lord dwelt in the days of His flesh it was
otherwise. There it was true that the good Shepherd giveth His life for the sheep
– “but he that is a hireling, and whose own the sheep are not, sees the wolf
coming, and leaves the sheep, and flees, and the wolf catches them and scatters
the sheep. The hireling flees, because he is a hireling, and cares not for the
sheep.”
Our Lord found the sheep scattered; or, as He had said shortly before, “All
that ever came before Me are thieves and robbers;” and in consequence the
sheep had no guide. “When Christ came and saw the multitudes He was moved
with compassion on them because they fainted, and were scattered abroad as
sheep having no shepherd.”
So was it all over the world when Christ came in His infinite mercy “to
gather in one the children of God that were scattered abroad.” And though for
a moment, when in the conflict with the enemy the good Shepherd had to lay
down His life for the sheep, they were left without a guide, yet He soon rose
from death to live for ever, and said, “He that scattered Israel will gather him,
as a shepherd does his flock.” And as He says Himself in the parable before us,
“He called His own sheep and they follow Him for they know His voice.” So,
on His resurrection, while Mary wept, He did call her by her name, and she
turned herself and knew Him by the ear whom she had not known by the eye.
So, too, He said, “Simon, son of Jonas, do you love me?” And He added, “Follow
Me.” And so again He and His Angel told the women, “Behold He goes before
you into Galilee… go tell My brethren, that they go into Galilee, and there shall
they see me.”
1 Plain and Parochial Sermons. John Cardinal Henry Newman, Ignatius Press, 1987, 00. 1686-87.

Bl Maria Gabriella
2024-04-22
MY ONLY DESIRE IS TO LOVE
From the final letter of Blessed Maria Gabriella to her mother 2
◊◊◊
I do not want you to get ideas and begin to pray for my recovery. Pray
instead that the Lord will do with me whatever is to his greater glory… I am
always content to do the will of God, whatever it might be, for that is my joy, my
happiness, my peace… Remain firm in your dispositions of abandonment to the
will of God and bless him always for whatever he chooses to do with me. Forget
that I am sick and think only about the Lord: thank him and bless him for the
graces and the gifts he has given me.
I feel that I love my Spouse with all my heart, but I would like to love him
even more. I would like to love him for those who do not love him, for those who
scorn him, for those who offend him. In short, my only desire is to love.
My happiness is great and no one can take it from me. It is greater than
that enjoyed by rich people in their mansions who, while they enjoy themselves,
perhaps have death in their hearts. There is no happiness greater than being
able to suffer something for Jesus and for the salvation of souls… You must be
happy as well, mother, and thank the Lord for this grace which he has given to
you and to me… I want you all to be as happy as I am… Resign yourselves and
rejoice, all of you, in the Lord.
Do not think that I am not well cared for—on the contrary, I am taken
care of hand and foot. The Reverend Mother is so good that she does not spare
herself anything in order to give me every possible assistance… No mother’s
heart could outdo her in the love and attention she demonstrates towards me.
I thank the Lord, and will thank and bless him always for all he has done for me
and for you, but I feel that I will never be able to thank him enough.
2
from Martha Driscoll, OCSO, The Silent Herald of Unity, Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1990, pp. 99-
100.

Easter Weekday
2024-04-23
JESUS IN THE HOLY EUCHARIST
From the Spiritual Autobiography of St Charles de Foucauld 3
◊◊◊
Lord Jesus, you are in the Holy Eucharist. You are there, a yard away in the
tabernacle. Your body, your soul, your human nature, your divinity, your whole
being is there, in its twofold nature. How close you are, my God, my Saviour, my
Jesus, my Brother, my Spouse, my Beloved!
You were not nearer to the Blessed Virgin during the nine months she
carried you in her womb than you are to me when you rest on my tongue at Holy
Communion. You were no closer to the Blessed Virgin and St. Joseph in the caves
at Bethlehem or the house at Nazareth or during the flight into Egypt, or at any
moment of that divine family life than you are to me at this moment – and so many
others – in the tabernacle. St. Mary Magdalene was no closer to you when she sat
at your feet at Bethany than I am here at the foot of this altar. You were no nearer
to your apostles when you were sitting in the midst of them than you are to me
now, my God. How blessed I am!
It is wonderful, my Lord, to be alone in my cell and converse there with you
in the silence of the night – and you are there as God, and by your grace. But to
stay in my cell when I could be before the Blessed Sacrament – why, it would be as
though St. Mary Magdalene had left you on your own when you were at Bethany
to go and think about you alone in her room! It is a precious and devout thing, O
God, to go and kiss the places you made holy during your life on earth – the stones
of Gethsemane and Calvary, the ground along the Way of Sorrows, the waves of
the sea of Galilee – but to prefer it to your tabernacle would be to desert the Jesus
living beside me, to leave him alone, going away alone to venerate the dead stones
in places where he is no longer. It would be to leave… the Jesus living at my side
to go into another room to greet his portrait…
Wherever the sacred Host is to be found, there is the living God, there is your
Saviour, as really as when he was living and talking in Galilee and Judea, as really
as he now is in heaven. Never deliberately miss Holy Communion. Communion is
more than life, more than all the good things of this world, more than the whole
universe: it is God himself…
3 St Charles de Foucauld. Spiritual Autobiography of Charles de Foucauld. Ed. JeanFranҫois Six. Trans. J. Holland Smith. New York: P.J. Kenedy & Sons, 1964. 98-99.

Easter Weekday
2024-04-24
THE NEW AGE OF THE RESURRECTION
By Thomas Merton 4
◊◊◊
The “new life,” the life of the Spirit, life “in Christ,” is communicated to
the human spirit by the invisible Mission of the Holy Spirit — a direct
consequence of the Resurrection of Jesus. Therefore the “new creation”
instituted by the second Adam is in fact a prolongation of his Resurrection.
The new world which is called the Kingdom of God, the world in which God
reigns in us by his divine Spirit, the world of the Second Adam is, in fact, the
Eon of the Resurrection — the new age that begins to dawn with the rising of
Christ from the dead, which reaches out to touch, with the pure spiritual light
of that dawning, each soul newly incorporated into the Risen Christ, until all
the elect are gathered together in him and the Kingdom is openly and
definitively established without question and without opposition in the
general resurrection of all the dead.
“If,” says St Paul, “by reason of the one man’s offense death reigned
through the one man, much more will they who receive the abundance of
grace …reign in life through the one Jesus Christ.” That is exactly the Pauline
concept of the Kingdom of God — a Kingdom of superabundant spiritual life,
in which the saints “reign in life through the one Christ.”
To reign in life is to have domination and autonomy by union with God
as the source of life. It is to have and enjoy the sublime liberty of the children
of God, the freedom of the Spirit by which Christ has come to make us free.
The early Church was entirely penetrated with this doctrine of liberation,
plenitude and life. Wherever the authentic Christian spirit has prevailed, it
has always been marked by this same perfect liberty and vitality in the Spirit.
For always and everywhere the Spirit of Christ teaches this message to those
who are his own: “For whoever are led by the Spirit of God, they are the
children of God. Now you have not received a spirit of bondage so as to be
again in fear, but you have received a spirit of adoption, by virtue of which
we cry, ‘Abba! Father!’ The Spirit himself gives testimony to our spirit that
we are the children of God.”
In this view of Christ’s role as second Adam, establishing the final
victory of life over death, we are still confronted with the ideas of death and
life together. The liberation from sin and death is effected by the death of
Christ. The communication of life to our souls is effected by the resurrection
of Christ. “Jesus… was delivered up for our sins, and rose again for our
justification.” We shall see that in order to enter fully into communion with
the life brought to us by Christ we must in some sense — sacramentally,
ascetically, mystically — die with Christ and rise with him from the dead. The
whole life of the Kingdom of God consists then in the gradual extension of
the spiritual effects of the death and resurrection of Jesus to one soul after
another until Christ lives perfectly in all whom he has called to himself.
4 THE NEW MAN, Thomas Merton (Farrar, Straus & Cudahy, NY 1961) pp. 152-154.

St. Mark
2024-04-25
ST MARK’S GOSPEL
By Dom Damasus Winzen 5
◊◊◊
In contrast to St Matthew, who starts his gospel with the human
genealogy of Christ, “the son of David, the son of Abraham,” and to Luke, who
explains in his short preface that he intends to “write in order” the facts which
he has most diligently obtained, St Mark’s gospel keeps most faithfully the
original character of the glad tidings of Christ as the Son of God and the
Messiah. He writes not as a historian but as a preacher, recording faithfully
what he had heard from St Peter. In fact, St Peter’s address to the Roman
colonel Cornelius contains the outlines of St Mark’s gospel. This begins with
“the baptism which John preached” and how “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth
with the Holy Spirit, and with power”; The first main section describes Christ’s
ministry in Galilee, the “word which began in Galilee, about Jesus of Nazareth,
who went about doing good, and healing all that were oppressed by the devil,
for God was with him”. A brief survey deals with “the things that he did in the
land of the Jews (Judea) and in Jerusalem”, and leads up to the second main
section of the gospel which tells us how “they killed him, hanging him upon a
tree,” and how “God raised him up on the third day, and gave him to be made
manifest”.
The fact that St Mark’s narrative of the Lord’s passion and resurrection is
on a scale out of all proportion with the rest of the book indicates clearly that in
the intention of the evangelist the person of the suffering and glorified Lord is
the core and center of the glad tidings. Here is the key to the “mystery of the
Kingdom of God” which his gospel proclaims. One has only to read the first
chapter of St Mark’s gospel to realize that the mystery of the kingdom is the
cross of the king. This first chapter contains the “beginnings” of the entire
gospel. The activity of the precursor is the “beginning” of Christ’s work of
salvation. As Christ reveals the mystery of the kingdom in his word and in his
work, so does John preach repentance and administer baptism. Because the
kingdom of God will not come in power and glory but in the self-sacrificing
charity of the Son of God, only those can enter into it who “repent” or, better,
“change their hearts” from the selfishness of the flesh to the selflessness of the
Spirit.
The rite of baptism, through which the whole person is immersed in water
and then rises, as it were, to a new life, foreshadows the work of salvation of the
Messiah Jesus who will be swallowed up in the waters of death to rise in the
fullness of the Spirit. Rightly, therefore, does Christ begin his public life as
Messiah by having himself baptized by John. He who never knew sin and did
not need repentance has himself made into sin for us, so that in him we might
be turned into the holiness of God. His death is like another flood which drowns
all that is earthly in us.
When he “comes up out of the water” foreshadowing his resurrection, he
is like another Noah, the favorite son of God. Like Noah he receives the dove,
the likeness of the Holy Spirit who descends upon this new Son of David, to
drive him like a captive into the desert. There he is “with the wild beasts.”
Exposed to the attack of the enemy, he remains victorious so that after forty
days and forty nights, which are symbolic of the “old age,” the angels come and
minister to him as the Lord of the new age. Through humiliation to exaltation,
that is the way of the Messiah Jesus, who in his life repeats and fulfills the march
of the chosen people from Egypt, through the Red Sea into the desert, and
ultimately to the promised land.
5 Damasus Winzen, Pathways in Scripture, Ann Arbor, MI: Word of Life, 1976, pp. 243-245.

Easter Weekday
2024-04-26
GOD CAME TO TEACH HUMILITY
From a sermon by St Augustine 6
◊◊◊
Pride is the source of all diseases, because pride is the source of all sins.
When a physician removes a disorder from the body, if he merely cures the
malady produced by some particular cause but not the cause itself, he seems to
heal the patient for a time; but while the cause remains, the disease will repeat
itself.
For example, to speak of this more expressly, some humor in the body
produces sores; a high fever follows and considerable pain. Certain remedies
are prescribed to repress the sores; the remedies are applied and they work. You
see the one who was full of sores now healed; but because that humor was not
expelled, it returns again to ulcers. Perceiving this, the physician purges away
the humor and removes the cause, and there will be no more sores.
What is the source of iniquity? From pride. Cure pride and there will be
no more iniquity. Hence, to cure the cause of all diseases, namely pride, the Son
of God came down and humbled himself. Why are you proud, O mortal, when
God humbled Himself for you? You might perhaps be ashamed to imitate a
humble mortal, but in any case imitate the humble God.
The Son of God came in the nature of humans and humbled himself. You
are commanded to become humble; you are not commanded to go from a
human to a brute. He, who was God, became human; you who are human
recognize that you are such; all your humility consists in knowing what you are
yourself. Therefore, because God teaches humility he said: “It is not to do my
own will that I have come down from heaven, but to do the will of Him who
sent me.” For this is the commendation of humility. Pride does its own will, but
humility does the will of God. Therefore, “No one who comes to me will I ever
reject.” Why? “Because it is not to do my own will that I have come down from
heaven, but to do the will of him who sent me.”
I came humble, I came to teach humility. I came as a master of humility.
Whoever comes to me is made one body with me; whoever adheres to me will
be humble, because they do not their own will but the will of God. Therefore
they will not be cast out, for when they were proud, they were cast out…
Thus the Teacher of humility came not to do his own will but the will of
the One who sent him. Let us come to him, enter into him, be engrafted onto
him, that we may not be doing our own will but the will of God. And he will not
cast us out, because we are his members, because he willed to be our head by
teaching us humility.
6 Christian Readings. Vol. IV. Catholic Publishing Company. New York, 1970. p. 39.

Bl Raphael Arnaiz Baron
2024-04-27
SIMPLICITY OF HEART
From the writings of St Rafael Arnaiz Baron 7
◊◊◊
I see, Brother, that the path you follow is the simple life. God does not
require more of us than simplicity without and love within. The truth is that the
real pathways of God are very easy and very simple when we walk along them
full of the spirit of trust and with free hearts fixed on God. Happy, indeed, is
the Trappist who is not merely a Trappist externally, but whose interior life is
marked by the simplicity that makes the real Trappist. People of the world could
think us somewhat complicated. I do not know how to explain myself, but I
have come to realize what Jesus means when he says: “Unless you become as
little children…”
The ways of the Lord are simplicity; his yoke is easy and his burden is
light. We die to the world in order to be born to God. The self-denial of a life of
silence and solitude blossoms into the exuberant joy of a heart which counts its
blessings in terms of simplicity and integrity. Those who follow Christ, do so
along the way of the Cross. I think that when we love the Cross all is gained.
God always lets his light shine on anyone who loves and seeks him in
simplicity. We have to find our way along many winding paths before we arrive
at the simple straight one. What causes us more distress than complicating
things! How we human beings love to complicate everything for ourselves!
Unless we keep ourselves under control by the practice of virtue, repeatedly,
with our complicated way of existing we drive far from us everything that is
simple.
Time and again, we fail to grasp the greatness hidden deep down in an
act of simplicity. We want to seek greatness in complexity and think that only
when things are difficult have they anything worthwhile to offer… Virtue, God,
Interior Life – difficult values to live out! It is not that I have attained virtue,
nor that my knowledge of God and my life in the spirit are totally clear, but that
I have seen that to achieve something in these matters I need to be free from
complexity and contortion, from clever speculation and technicalities.
I have seen that we reach God by just the opposite. True knowledge of
Him comes through simplicity of heart and integrity. An act of love is not
difficult at all. What is really hard is the effort to attain knowledge of God by
penetrating his mysteries. The act of love brings us to God; the other way leads
us nowhere… Because we are not simple; because we complicate our objectives,
because the weakness of our will makes everything we desire seem difficult. We
pander to this weakness when we let our will satisfy itself with what is pleasant,
consoling, distracting and, oftentimes, plain passion…
With Jesus at my side nothing seems difficult to me, and the path to
holiness seems simpler every time I look at it. Better it seems to consist in going
forward and leaving things behind rather than in acquiring anything new,
stripping back to simplicity rather than adding things on. In so far as we go
forward turning our back on so much inordinate love of creatures and of
ourselves, it seems to me that we are drawing closer to that one real love, that
sole desire, that unique aspiration of this life: the true holiness which is God.
7 Liturgical text, Generalizia Cistercensi S.O., Rome, 1993.

Skema - 5th Wk of Easter
2024-04-28
Biblical Readings for Office and Mass
5th Week of Easter

Mass Readings: Sunday (B), Weekdays (II)
April 28 – May 4, 2024

Sun
28
Mon
29
Tue
30
Wed
1
Thu
2
Fri
3
Sat
4

Office
5th Sunday of Easter
St Catherine of Siena
Easter Weekday
St Joseph the Worker
St Athanasius
SS Philip & James
Easter Weekday

Vigils
Acts 16:16-40
Acts 17:1-18
Acts 17:19-34
Acts 18:1-28
Acts 19:1-20
1 Cor 12:1-13
Acts 20:1-16

Lauds
Eph 2:1-10
Eph 2:19-22
Eph 3:7-13
Eph 4:1-6
Eph 4:25-32
Prov 4:10-19
Eph 6:10-17

Mass
53
285
286
287, 559
288
561
290

1st
Acts 9:26-31
Acts 14:5-18
Acts 14:19-28
Acts 15:1-6
Acts 15:7-21
1 Cor 15:1-8
Acts 16:1-10

2nd
1 John 3:18-24

Gospel
John 15:1-8
John 14:21-26
John 14:27-31a
Matt 13:54-58
John 15:9-11
John 14:6-14
John 15:18-21

Vespers
Eph 2:11-18
Eph 3:1-6
Eph 3:14-21
Eph 4:17-24
Eph 5:1-5
2 Cor 4:1-6
Col 1:1-8

Vigils Reading - 5th Sunday of Easter
2024-04-28
WITHOUT GOD, NOTHING CAN BE DONE
From a commentary by St Augustine1
◊◊◊
The passage from the gospel in which the Lord calls himself the vine and
his disciples the branches affirms in its own way that, as mediator between God
and the human race, the man Christ Jesus is head of the Church and we are his
members. It is beyond dispute that a vine and its branches are of one and the
same stock. Since Christ, therefore, possessed a divine nature not shared by
ourselves, he became man precisely in order that in his own person there might
be a vine of human stock whose branches we could become.
Dwell in me, said Jesus, and I will dwell in you. His disciples, however,
do not dwell in Christ in the same way as Christ dwells in them. In either case,
the benefit is theirs, not his. If branches are attached to a vine, it is not to confer
any advantage on the vine; it is rather that the branches themselves may draw
their sustenance from the vine. The vine is attached to the branches to provide
them with their vital nourishment, not to receive anything from them. In the
same way Christ’s presence in his disciples and their presence in him both profit
the disciples rather than Christ. If a branch is cut off, another can grow from the
life-giving root; but once severed from the root, no branch can remain alive.
The incarnate Truth goes on to say: I am the vine, you are the branches.
Whoever dwells in me and I in him yields fruit in plenty, because without me
you can do nothing. These words are to be weighed and pondered continually.
Someone hearing Jesus say, he yields fruit in plenty, might perhaps think that
a branch can bear at least a certain amount of fruit on its own. Our Lord’s words,
however, were not: You can do little without me, but: you can do nothing. Little
fruit or plenty, there can be neither without him, because without him nothing
can be done. Even if a branch does produce a little fruit, the vinedresser prunes
it away so that it may produce more. But if the branch does not remain attached
to the vine and draw its life from the root, it can bear no fruit at all.
Now, although Christ could not be the vine if he were not human, he could
not offer such a grace to his branches if he were not at the same time divine.
Since without this grace it is impossible to have life and consequently death is
the result of one’s free choice, he said: Whoever does not dwell in me will be
thrown away like a branch and will wither, to be gathered in and cast on the
fire to burn. And so the shame incurred by those branches that refuse to dwell
in the vine is in direct proportion to the glory they will have if they do remain in
him.
If you dwell in me, said Jesus, and my words dwell in you, you will ask
for whatever you desire and it will be yours. Can a person dwelling in Christ
desire anything out of harmony with Christ? The very fact that people dwell in
their Savior must mean that they have no desire that is opposed to their
salvation. And yet we do indeed desire one thing insofar as we are in Christ, and
another insofar as we are still in this world. Because of our sojourn here below,
a thought sometimes steals into our ignorant minds to ask for something which
cannot be good for us. But this may not be, if we are dwelling in Christ. He does
what we ask only if it is for our good. To dwell in him, therefore, is to have his
words dwelling in us; whatever we desire we shall then ask for, and it will be
given us.

1 Journey with the Fathers – Year B – New City Press – 1999 – pg 56.3

Vigils Reading - St Catherine of Siena
2024-04-29
THE TRUE WORKERS
From “The Dialogues” of St Catherine of Siena2
◊◊◊
Do you know what course I follow, once my servants have completely
given themselves to the teaching of the Gentle loving Word? I prune them, so
that they will bear much fruit – cultivated fruit, not wild. Just as the gardener
prunes the branch that is joined to the vine so that it yield more and better wine,
but cuts off and throws into the fire the branch that is barren, so do I the true
gardener act. When my servants remain united to me I prune them with great
suffering so that they will bear more and better fruit, and virtue will be proved
in them. But those who bear no fruit are cut off and thrown into the fire.
These are the true workers. They till their souls well, uprooting every
selfish love, cultivating the soil of their love in me. They feed and tend the
growth of the seed of grace that they have received in holy baptism. And as they
till their own vineyards, so they till their neighbor’s as well, for they cannot do
the one without the other. You already know that every evil as well as every good
is done by means of your neighbors.
You, then, are my workers. You have come from me, the supreme eternal
gardener, and I have engrafted you onto the vine by making myself one with
you. Keep in mind that each of you has your own vineyard. But everyone is
joined to your neighbor’s vineyards without any dividing lines. They are so
joined together, in fact, that you cannot do good or evil for yourself without
doing the same for your neighbors.
All of you together make up one common vineyard, the whole Christian
assembly, and you are all united in the vineyard of the mystic body of holy
Church from which you draw your life. In this vineyard is planted the vine,
which is my only-begotten Son, into whom you must be engrafted. Unless you
are engrafted into him you are rebels against holy Church, like members that
are cut off from the body and rot.
It is true that while you have time you can get yourselves out of the stench
of sin through true repentance and recourse to my ministers. They are the
workers who have the keys to the wine cellar, that is, the blood poured forth
from this vine. (And this blood is so perfect in itself that it cannot be deprived
of its benefits through any fault in the minister.)
It is charity that binds you to true humility – the humility that is found in
knowing yourself and me. See, then, that it is as workers that I have sent you
all. And now I am calling you again, because the world is failing fast. The thorns
have so multiplied and choked the seed so badly that it will produce no fruit of
grace at all. I want you, therefore, to be true workers. With deep concern help
to till the souls in the mystic body of holy Church. I am calling you to do this
because I want to be merciful to the world as you have so earnestly begged me.

2 Catherine of Siena – The Dialogue – The Classics of Western Spirituality – Paulist Press – New York – 1980 – pg
24.5

Vigils Reading
2024-04-30
THE MIRACULOUS SPREAD
OF THE GOSPEL MESSAGE
A reading from “Against the Pagans” by St John Chrysostom3
◊◊◊
It was…marvelous that these few ignorant, poor, undistinguished,
unlettered, worthless men of foreign tongue were entrusted with setting straight
the whole world. They were commissioned to lead the world to live a far more
difficult life and they did not accomplish this mission at a time of peace but
while countless wars were being stirred up against them from every side. And
this was the case in every nation and every city.
Did I say every nation and every city? In every home a war was fanned to
flame against them. For when their teaching entered a home, many a time it
split a son from his father, a bride from her mother-in-law, a brother from his
brother, a servant from his master, a subject from his ruler, a man from his wife,
a woman from her husband, and a father from his children. For everybody did
not all at once accept the faith. Their teaching was harassed by hatred every day
that passed; it stirred up one war after the other and brought death to more
people than you could count; it had people avoiding one another as if they were
common enemies and foes.
For everybody drove the apostles out. Emperors avoided them, as did
lesser rulers, common people, free and slave; whole peoples, entire cities
shunned them. Not only did they drive out the apostles but, what is worse, they
drove out those who were but newly fixed in their faith, those whom the apostles
had instructed. It was one and the same war which was waged against the
apostles and their disciples, because people saw that their teaching was opposed
to the edicts of their emperors and their ancestral ways and customs.
Even though the apostles told so harsh a story, they still won people over
to believe. This is how they built up the Church. How did they do it and by what
means? They did it through the power of Him who had commanded them to do
it. He made ready the way; he made all the hard things easy. If it were not the
power of God which accomplished this, the Church would not have had a
preface, much less a beginning.
How could all this be done? It was God who said: “Let there be heaven,”
and showed forth his work; it was God who said: “Let the earth be founded,”
and he produced its substance; it was God who said: “Let the sun shine,” and he
showed forth the star; it was God who caused all things to be. And it was the
same God who planted the Church. And that word: “I will build my Church” is
what produced all this. For this is the power of the words of God. They create
works which are wondrous beyond our expectation. God said: “Let the earth
produce the grassy plant,” and suddenly everything was a garden, everything
became a meadow; the earth heard God’s command and plumed itself with
plants beyond number. In the same way God later said: “I will build my
Church,” and this was done with the greatest of ease.

3 St. John Chrysostom, Apologist. Catholic University of America Press, 1983, pp. 242-243.7

Vigils Reading - St Joseph the Worker
2024-05-01
ST JOSEPH THE WORKER
A reflection by Pope Francis4
◊◊◊
St Joseph concretely expressed his fatherhood by making an offering of
himself in love, placed at the service of the Messiah who was growing to
maturity in his home. And because of his role at the crossroads between the Old
and New Testament, St Joseph has always been venerated as a father of the
Christian people. In him, Jesus saw the tender love of God, the one that helps
us accept our weakness, because it is through and despite our fears, our frailties,
and our weakness that most divine designs are realized. Only tender love will
save us from the snares of the accuser, and it is by encountering God’s mercy in
the Sacrament of Reconciliation that we experience His truth and tenderness,
because we know that God’s truth does not condemn us, but instead welcomes,
embraces, sustains and forgives us.
Joseph is also a father in obedience to God with his “fiat”. He protects
Mary and Jesus and teaches his son to do the Will of the Father… At the same
time, Joseph is an accepting Father because he accepted Mary unconditionally
– an important gesture even today in our world where psychological, verbal and
physical violence towards women is so evident. But the Bridegroom of Mary is
also the one who, trusting in the Lord, accepts in his life even the events that he
does not understand, setting aside his own ideas and reconciling himself with
his own history.
Joseph’s spiritual path is not one that explains but accepts – which does
not mean that he is “resigned”. Instead he is courageously and firmly proactive.
Because with the Holy Spirit’s Gift of fortitude, and full of hope, he is able to
accept life as it is, with all its contradictions, frustrations and disappointments.
In practice, through St Joseph, it is as if God were to repeat to us: “Do not be
afraid” because faith gives meaning to every event, however happy or sad, and
makes us aware that God can make flowers spring up from stony ground.
Joseph did not look for shortcuts but confronted reality with open eyes and
accepted personal responsibility for it. For this reason, he encourages us to
accept and welcome others as they are, without exception and to show special
concern for the weak… Consequently every poor, needy, suffering or dying
person, every stranger, every prisoner, every infirm person is “the child” whom
Joseph continues to protect. From St Joseph, we must learn to love the Church
and the poor.
As a carpenter who earned an honest living to provide for his family, St.
Joseph also teaches us the value, the dignity and the joy of what it means to eat
bread that is the fruit of one’s own labor. This aspect of Joseph’s character
provides the opportunity to appeal in favor of work… There is a renewed need
to appreciate the importance of dignified work, of which St. Joseph is an
exemplary patron. Work is a means of participating in the work of salvation, an
opportunity to hasten the coming of the Kingdom, to develop our talents and
abilities, and to put them at the service of society and fraternal communion.
Those who work are cooperating with God Himself, and in some way become
creators of the world around us.

4 Osservatore Romano – December 8, 2021.9

Vigils Reading - St Athanasius
2024-05-02
AS BRIGHTNESS FROM LIGHT
From the Expositio Fidei by St Athanasius5
◊◊◊
We believe in one Unbegotten God, Father Almighty, maker of all things
both visible and invisible, that has His being from Himself. And in one Only-
begotten Word, Wisdom, Son, begotten of the Father without beginning and
eternally; word not pronounced… nor an effluence of the Perfect, nor a dividing
of the impassible Essence, nor an issue; but absolutely perfect Son, living and
powerful, the true Image of the Father, equal in honour and glory. For this, he
says, ‘is the will of the Father, that as they honour the Father, so they may
honour the Son also’: very God of very God… For all things which the Father
rules and sways, the Son rules and sways likewise: wholly from the Whole, being
like the Father as the Lord says, ‘he that has seen Me has seen the Father’.
But He was begotten ineffably and incomprehensibly, for ‘who shall
declare his generation?’… no one can. Who, when at the consummation of the
ages, He had descended from the bosom of the Father, took from the undefiled
Virgin Mary our humanity… delivered of His own will to suffer for us, as the
Lord said: ‘No man takes My life from Me. I have power to lay it down, and have
power to take it again’… He was crucified and died for us, and rose from the
dead, and was taken up into the heavens, having been created as the beginning
of ways for us, when on earth He showed us light from out of darkness, salvation
from error, life from the dead, an entrance to paradise, from which Adam was
cast out, and into which he again entered by means of the thief, as the Lord said,
‘This day shall you be with Me in paradise’…
We believe, likewise, also in the Holy Spirit that searches all things, even
the deep things of God… But the Holy Spirit, being that which proceeds from
the Father, is ever in the hands of the Father Who sends and of the Son Who
conveys Him, by Whose means He filled all things. The Father, possessing His
existence from Himself, begot the Son… and did not create Him, as a river from
a well and as a branch from a root, and as brightness from a light, things which
nature knows to be indivisible; through whom to the Father be glory and power
and greatness before all ages, and unto all the ages of the ages.

5 Translated by Archibald Robertson. From Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol.
4. Edited by Philip Schaff and Henry Wace. (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing
Co., 1892.) Revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight.
<http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/2821.htm>.11

Vigils Reading - SS Philip & James
2024-05-03
THE APOSTOLIC WITNESS
By Jean Frisque6
◊◊◊
They were still talking about all this when he himself stood among them
and said to them, “Peace be with you!”
The preeminent witnesses to the resurrection of Christ were the apostles.
From the time of Jesus’ baptism to his death, they accompanied him in his
public ministry. His death on the cross at the first threw them into a panic, but
soon afterwards it clarified everything for them, once it had been placed in its
Scriptural context, through the aid of the resurrected Christ himself.
But was the testimony of the apostles limited to this single well-founded
assertion: He whom you crucified has risen from the dead through the power of
God? In reality, there was much more: the apostles did not only offer an
eyewitness account of an event but the testimony of their faith. Only their faith
enabled them to discover why the death on the cross was the key-event of
salvation-history and in what way it led to the life of the resurrection. And theirs
was not simply any faith, but faith in the paschal experience itself, the faith
which had perceived that in Jesus Christ all people were called to share in the
divine filiation and to contribute on their own behalf to the construction of the
Kingdom.
Nor was this all. The witness which the apostles rendered to the
resurrection of Christ was above all an authorized witness. The apostles had
received from the resurrected Christ himself their power to testify validly to
him. They had received the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of the resurrected Christ. Thus
the very life of the resurrected Christ was given to the apostolic group, and the
Church which they would construct in his name would be animated by this same
life. The Church was to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, and the life which
circulated in her would testify until the end of time to the resurrection of her
Head!
Thus we can see why the apostolic witness rendered to the resurrected
Christ was inseparable from the life which animated the first Christian
community. This witness was necessarily communal. The preaching in which
this witness took shape was absolutely inseparable from the grace of
communion given to the primitive community and its efforts to be entirely
faithful to the law of universal charity.
Today’s Christians are not wrong, therefore, when they insist upon the
importance of the testimony of their life. But the life to which they must witness
in order to testify to the resurrected Christ is the life of Christ himself. This life
is displayed here on earth by the way of total obedience unto death for the love
of all people, for such an obedience leads us constantly from death to life. Such
a sign can only be displayed by the Church herself.

6 London, 1965, vol. 3, pp 77-78.13

Vigils Reading
2024-05-04
THE EXPERIENCE OF FAITH
By Hans Urs von Balthasar7
◊◊◊
The analogy between the pre-Easter and the post Easter testimony
(comparable to the analogy between testimony in the Old and the New
Testament) signifies the decisive step forward: the leaving behind of the old,
which had served as basis, in order to become established in the new. Paul is
the eyewitness of this step forward, since he not only had to defend his
eyewitness arduously in itself, but his eyewitness in this matter against the
privileges of the original Apostles. Whoever disregards the element of analogy
in the Apostles’ witness, will hold unswervingly to the testimony of the other
Apostles and will with them consider Paul’s credentials as an eyewitness to be
secondary, if not altogether doubtful. But his legitimacy stands under the
protection of Scriptural inspiration and thus remains unassailable.
This is of the highest theological interest. Paul’s witness to the
Resurrection dispenses with the ‘analogy’ between witness to Christ’s earthly
existence and witness to the Resurrection; he is a witness only to Jesus’
Resurrection. For Paul, the identity of the risen Christ with the Jesus who
suffered and died lies in the vitality exhibited by the Kyrios. Because he is the
new man, he was also the old. If this holds for Paul and if it is to this that he
witnesses, the same does not necessarily apply to the others. For Paul there is
no other legitimation than that of his own turning from the Old to the New
Covenant and to the new man, his conversio morum, the fact that in all things
he shows himself to be a servant of God, the fact that his existence has been so
transformed that it has become an incontestable mirroring of the image of
Christ. Paul proves himself to be one who has seen essentially by letting himself
be seen and by being, in fact, seen. He gives himself wholly over to seeing,
hearing, and touching: by the grace of God, in him a Christian has been formed
who is not a ghost, but who has flesh and bones. Paul cuts right through the
analogy that runs across the testimony of Peter and others, and this cannot be
his work, since he himself is the work of the grace of the Risen One.
Paul straddles the boundary between the apostolic and the ecclesial era.
He fights for his inclusion in the apostolic era, and the Lord himself gives the
warrant for this inclusion; and yet his experience of Christ bears essential
features of the ecclesial era, namely, that of private revelation and its
confirmation by personal sanctity. He shares this transitional character with
the whole period of the Acts of the Apostles: this is the period of archetypal
Church history. This is certainly so, on the one hand, because this is the span
of time in which Christ’s original eyewitnesses lived. And yet Paul falls outside
these limits, while still dominating in a central way the events in the Acts of the
Apostles. For, on the other hand, this period of history is more than just the
timespan in which the original eyewitnesses lived; it is the privileged space in
which the Holy Spirit became visible, audible, and palpable: it is the expansion
of the explosion that occurred on Pentecost.

7 The Glory of the Lord. Vol. I Seeing the Form. Hans Urs von Balthasar, Ignatius Press, 1982, pp. 347-348.15

Skema
2024-05-05
Biblical Readings for Office and Mass
6th Week of Easter

Mass Readings: Sunday (B), Weekdays (II)
May 5 – 11, 2024

Sun
5
Mon
6
Tue
7
Wed
8
Thu
9
Fri
10
Sat
11

Office
6th Sunday of Easter
Easter Weekday
Easter Weekday
Bl Christian de Cherge
Easter Weekday
Easter Weekday
Holy Abbots of Cluny

Vigils
Acts 20:17-38
Acts 21:1-26
Acts 21:27-39
Acts 21:40-22:21
Acts 22:22-23:11
Acts 23:12-35
Acts 24:1-27

Lauds
Col 1:9-14
Col 1:24-29
Col 2:9-15
Col 3:12-17
1 Jn 1:5-10
1 Jn 2:7-11
1 Jn 2:18-23

Mass
56
291
292
293
294
295
296

1st
Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48
Acts 16:11-15
Acts 16:22-34
Acts 17:15, 22-18:1
Acts 18:1-8
Acts 18:9-18
Acts 18:23-28

2nd
1 John 4:7-10

Gospel
John 15:9-17
John 15:26-16:4a
John 16:5-11
John 16:12-15
John 16:16-20
John 16:20-23
John 16:23b-28

Vespers
Col 1:15-23
Col 2:1-8
Col 3:12-17
1 Jn 1:1-4
1 Jn 2:1-6
1 Jn 2:12-17
Col 3:1-11

Vigils Reading -6th Sunday of Easter
2024-05-05
A GREATER LOVE
By St Thomas More1
◊◊◊
Let us deeply consider the love of our Savior Christ who so loved his own
unto the end that for their sakes he willingly suffered that painful end, and
therein declared the highest degree of love that can be. For, as he himself says:
A greater love no one has than to give his life for his friends. This is indeed the
greatest love that ever anyone had. But yet had our Savior a greater love, for he
gave his life for both friend and foe.
But what a difference is there now, between this faithful love of his and
other kinds of false and fickle love found in this wretched world. The flatterer
pretends to love you because he dines well with you. But now if adversity so
diminishes your possessions that you find your table not laid, then – farewell,
adieu – your brother flatterer is gone and gets himself to some other table. And
he might even turn into your enemy and cruelly speak evil of you.
Who can in adversity be sure of many of his many friends when our Savior
himself was, at his capture, left alone and forsaken by his? When you go forth,
who will go with you? If you were a king would not all your realm send you on
your way alone and then forget you? Will not your own family let you depart a
naked, feeble soul, you know not whither?
Let us all in time, then, learn to love as we should, God above all things,
and all other things for him. And whatsoever love be not referred to that end,
namely, to the good pleasure of God, is a very vain and unfaithful love. And
whatsoever love we bear to any creature whereby we love God the less, that love
is a loathsome love and hinders us from heaven. Love no child of yours so
tenderly but that you could be content to sacrifice it to God, as Abraham was
ready with Isaac, if God so commanded you. And since God will not do so, offer
your child in another way to God’s service. For whatever we love that makes us
break God’s commandment, we love better than God, and that is a love deadly
and damnable. Now, since our Lord has so loved us, for our salvation, let us
diligently call for his grace that in return for his great love we be found not
ungrateful.

1 Journey with the Fathers – Year B – New City Press – 1999 – pg 58.3

Vigils Reading
2024-05-06
THE RESURRECTION OF ALL FLESH
From “The Eternal Year” by Fr Karl Rahner2
◊◊◊
We children of the earth may love the earth; we must love her, even when
she terrifies us and makes us tremble with her misery and her destiny of death.
For ever since Christ, through his death and resurrection, penetrated the earth
for all time, her misery has become provisional and a mere test of our faith in
her innermost mystery, which is the risen One himself. Our experience does not
tell us that he is the mysterious meaning of her misery; by no means! It is our
faith that tells us this. The faith that offers blessed consolation to all that we
experience in life, the faith that can love the earth because she is, or is in the
process of becoming, the “body” of the risen One.
We do not need to leave her, for the life of God dwells in her. When we
want both the God of infinity (how can we help wanting him?) and the familiar
earth, as it is and as it shall become, when we want both for our eternally free
homeland, there is one path to both! For in the resurrection of the Lord, God
has shown that he has accepted the earth for all time… The flesh is the hinge of
salvation.
The hereafter to every exigency of sin and death is not somewhere in the
life hereafter; it has come down to us and lives in the innermost reality of our
flesh. The most sublime religiosity of seclusion from the world would not fetch
the God of our life and the salvation of this earth from the distance of his
eternity; and it would not even reach him in his world. But he himself has come
to us. And he has transformed what we are and what we still want to consider
as the gloomy, earthly dwelling place of our “spiritual nature”: he has
transformed the flesh. Ever since that event, mother earth bears nothing but
transformed children. For his resurrection is the beginning of the resurrection
of all flesh.
One thing, of course, is necessary for this event – which we can never undo
– to become the blessedness of our existence: he must burst forth from the grave
of our hearts. He must rise from the core of our being, where he is as power and
promise. He is there, and yet something remains to be done. He is there, yet it
is still Holy Saturday, and it will continue to be Holy Saturday until the last day,
until that day that will be the cosmic Easter. And this rising takes place beneath
the freedom of our faith. It is taking place as an event of living faith that draws
us into the colossal eruption of all earthly reality into its own glorification, the
splendid transfiguration that has already begun with the resurrection of Christ.

2 The Eternal Year, Helicon Press: Baltimore MD 1964. pp.93-95.5

Vigils Reading
2024-05-07
THE SECRET OF THE LORD
From a sermon by St John Henry Newman3
◊◊◊
Our Lord expressly promises all Christians a certain gracious
manifestation of himself, which it is natural, at first sight, to suppose a sensible
one: and many persons understand it to be such, as if it were not more blessed
to believe than to see. Our Lord says; “He that has my commandments and
keeps them, he it is that loves me; and he that loves me, shall be loved of my
Father, and I will love him and will manifest myself to him.” When Jude asked
him, “Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself unto us, and not unto the
world?” Our Lord answered, “If one loves me, he will keep my words; and my
Father will love him, and we will come unto him, and make our abode with
him.
” In accordance with this promise, St Paul says, “The Spirit itself bears
witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God”; and St John, “He that
believes in the Son of God has the witness in himself.”
Now, that this great gift, whatever it be, is of a nature to impart
illumination, sanctity, and peace, to the soul to which it comes, far from
disputing, I would earnestly maintain. And, in this indirect way, doubtless, it is
in a certain sense apprehended and perceived; perceived in its effects, with a
consciousness that those effects cannot come of themselves, but imply a gift
from which they come, and a presence of which they are, as it were, the shadow,
a voice of which they are the echo.
But there are persons who desire the inward manifestation of Christ to be
much more sensible than this. They will not be contented without some sensible
sign and direct evidence that God loves them; some assurance, in which faith
has no part, that God has chosen them; and which may answer to their
anticipations of what Scripture calls “the secret of the Lord,
” and “the hidden
manna” which Christ invites us to partake. Some, for instance, hold that their
conscience would have no peace, unless they recollected the time when they
were converted from darkness to light, from a state of wrath to the kingdom of
God. Others consider that, in order to possess the seal of election, they must be
able to discern in themselves certain feelings or frames of mind, a renunciation
of their own merit, and an apprehension of gospel salvation; as if it were not
enough to renounce ourselves and follow Christ, without the lively
consciousness that we are doing so; and that in this lies “the secret of the Lord.
”
Others go further; and think that without a distinct inward assurance of his
salvation, one is not in a saving state.
This is what men and women often conceive; not considering that
whatever be the manifestation promised to Christians by our Lord, it is not
likely to be more sensible and more intelligible than the great sign of his own
Resurrection. Yet even that, like the miracle wrought upon Jonah, was in secret,
and they who believed without seeing it were more blessed than those who saw.

3 Parochial and Plain Sermons, San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1987, pp. 1244-1245.7

Vigils Reading - Bl. Christian de Cherge
2024-05-08
CHRISTIAN DE CHERGÉ
MONK, MARTYR, AND MYSTIC
By Dom Bernardo Olivera
◊◊◊
In its early stages, monastic life was interpreted in various ways. Not a
few understood monasticism as an authentic martyrdom. The martyr, the monk
and the mystic are people who have oriented their lives toward mystery and
entered deeply therein. They long for one thing only: to enter into communion
with their Lord in death in order to be joined with him in the Resurrection.
Christian de Chergé was born on January 18, 1937 at Colmar into a
distinguished family of eight children. His father was a military man, as would
be his older brother later on. During his childhood he spent three years in
Algeria during the Second World War. From the time of his childhood he always
remained impressed by the Muslim’s way of approaching God.
On October 6, 1956, at the age of nineteen he entered the seminary of the
Carmelites in Paris. His studies were interrupted in 1959 when he had to report
for military service. Set on becoming an officer, he took the required courses
and in July of the following year he was made second lieutenant. That same
month, at the time of the war of independence, he arrived in Algeria at the age
of twenty-three.
An event occurred during this time that left its mark on him for the rest
of his life. He had made friends with an Algerian who worked as a warden under
the French authorities, a position that made him susceptible to the violence of
the National Liberation Army. Mohamed tried to be faithful at one and the same
time to his Christian friend, to his Islamic faith, and to his own people. It so
happened one day that they were involved in a scuffle in the street. Mohamed9
protected his friend and tried to pacify his aggressors. The following day, he was
found dead. This painful episode was never to be forgotten. Christian came back
to it in later years, writing: “I know at least one beloved brother, a convinced
Muslim, who gave his life for love of another, in a concrete way, by spilling his
own blood. Indeed, since then, in my hope for communion of all the elect in
Christ, I can fix my eyes on this friend who lived, even in his death, the one
commandment.”
For Christian de Chergé all of this was a foundational experience and the
seed of a vocation. In the blood of his friend, assassinated for not having wanted
to bargain with hatred, Christian said in 1982: “I knew my calling to follow
Christ would end up living itself out sooner or later in the same country where
I had been given the pledge of the greater love, “shed for you and for many”. On
March 21, 1964, he was ordained a priest and shortly thereafter was sent to
Algeria and to the monastic life. On September 14, 1976, he made his perpetual
vows. In it he expressed his desire to “live in Prayer in the service of the Church
of Algeria, listening to the Muslim soul, God willing, until the final gift of my
death.”
Christian was elected Titular Prior of Atlas monastery in 1984. He was
already deeply involved in the interreligious dialogue. On May 21, 1996, united
with his six brothers of the community, he sealed with his blood the witness of
his life.

Vigils Reading
2024-05-09
WE ARE ALL WITNESSES
By Fr Paul Evodokimov4
◊◊◊
There are no half measures, no intermediary formulas. We are in the
presence of the fundamental evidence of Jesus risen from the dead. A God who
does not present his charter as lover of <humanity>, a God who is not love
crucified in order to radiate “life, death of death“, as St. Augustine says, is not
really God. In following St. Paul’s thought to its conclusion, we could say that
all religion exists only by the resurrection and mystically leans on this event. If
Christ is risen, this is of interest for all… If the Christian testimony to the risen
Lord is suppressed, no religion will survive on the level of the modern world,
for outside the Gospel every religious message stops halfway.
The Gospel’s transcendent end is God become a risen <Human being>.
This fact does not concern just a few witnesses only; the risen Christ in
becoming the contemporary of all <humanity> means that every <one> is
contemporary with the eternal Christ. This makes all the events of history
essentially Christological. Christ is risen as head of the human body, and now
all religions and all <individuals> can and ought to seek their life in him. This
testimony alone determines the ecumenical mission of the Church in the midst
of all religions and in the great meeting between East and West. History places
the Christian faith in the risen Christ as the crossing point of all ideologies that
now reformulate the only important question — that asked by Pilate –– ” What
is truth?” It obliges faith to say its yes, going if need be as far as the confession
of martyrdom, that unique answer that resounds universally. Christ is in agony,
and eternity is impatient to hear this answer.
The apostolic kerygma announces the event of Easter, the intervention of
God raising up Jesus; this alone gives a definitive meaning to the existence of
<humankind> in history. The resurrection of Jesus is God’s “Amen” to his
promise, an “Amen” full of the Holy Spirit who manifests it. “Amen” comes from
the Hebrew heemin and it means an unshakable base of operations. Those who
proclaim it—the apostles and martyrs—claim the right to proclaim the event
before the magistrates of the earthly city.
Likewise the Apologies of Justin, Athenagoras, and Aristides present to
emperors the same decisive message and warn them of the imminent judgment.
Their kerygma is of interest to all <humanity>. It is preached in the presence of
angels and concerns all of creation: the kingdom of God has already arrived; we
are contemporaries of the one who sits at the right hand of the Father. Here is
the lamb immolated and risen and here is his kingdom. He is here and it is the
fullness of time. All religions are ways by which <we> seek God. They are
numerous. However, the Christian revelation is unique for it is God who finds
<humanity>. The preaching of St. Paul is of capital importance for the theology
of religion. In deciphering the monument to the unknown God and in giving it
the name Jesus Christ, the apostle integrated with Christ the religious
aspiration of all times and gave it value in Christ.

4 Paul Evdokimov, The Struggle with God, New Jersey: Glen Rock, 1966, pp.66-68.11

Vigils Reading
2024-05-10
WE SCARCELY KNOW OURSELVES
From the writing of Servant of God Dorothy Day5
◊◊◊
Much as we want to, we do not really know ourselves. Do we really want
to see ourselves as God sees us, or even as our fellow human beings see us? Could
we bear it, weak as we are?… We do not want to be given that clear inward vision
which discloses to us our most secret faults. In the Psalms there is that prayer
“Deliver me from my secret sins.”… They were what I read most when I was in jail…
I read with a sense of coming back to something that I had lost. There was an
echoing in my heart. And how can anyone who has known human sorrow and
human joy fail to respond to these words?
Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord: Lord, hear my voice. Let thy ears
be attentive to the voice of my supplication. If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord
who shall stand it. For with thee there is merciful forgiveness…
All through those weary first days in jail when I was in solitary confinement,
the only thoughts that brought comfort to my soul were those lines in the Psalms
that expressed the terror and misery of <one> suddenly stricken and abandoned.
Solitude and hunger and weariness of spirit – these sharpened my perceptions so
that I suffered not only my own sorrow but the sorrows of those about me. I was
no longer myself. I was <humankind>… The sorrows of the world encompassed
me. I was like one gone down into the pit. Hope had forsaken me… And yet if it
were not the Holy Spirit that comforted me, how could I have been comforted, how
could I have endured, how could I have lived in hope?…
“What glorious hope!” Mauriac writes. “There are all those who will
discover that their neighbor is Jesus himself, although they belong to the mass of
those who do not know Christ or who have forgotten Him… Even some of those
who think they hate Him have consecrated their lives to Him; for Jesus is disguised
and masked in the midst of <humanity>, hidden among the poor, among the sick,
among prisoners, among strangers. Many who serve Him officially have never
known who He was, and many who do not even know His name will hear on the
last day the words that open to them the gates of joy. ‘Those children were I, and
I those working men. I wept on the hospital bed. I was that murderer in his cell
whom you consoled.’”
But always the glimpses of God came most when I was alone. Objectors
cannot say that it was fear of loneliness and solitude and pain that made me turn
to Him. It was in those few years when I was alone and most happy that I found
Him. I found Him at last through joy and thanksgiving, not through sorrow. Yet
how can I say that either? Better let it be said that I found Him through His poor,
and in a moment of joy I turned to Him… If Christ established His Church on earth
with Peter as its rock, that faulty one who denied Him three times, who fled from
Him when he was in trouble, then I, too, wanted a share in that tender
compassionate love that is so great…
The experiences that I have had are more or less universal. Suffering,
sadness, repentance, love, we all have known these. They are easiest to bear when
one remembers their universality, when we remember that we are all members or
potential members of the Mystical Body of Christ. A conversion is a lonely
experience. We do not know what is going on in the depths of the heart and soul
of another. We scarcely know ourselves.

5 Day, Dorothy. By Little and By Little – The Selected Writings of Dorothy Day. Ed.
Robert Ellsberg. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983. 4-7, 9.13

Vigils Reading - Holy Abbots of Cluny
2024-05-11
FROM A LETTER OF
ST BERNARD TO POPE EUGENIUS,
On behalf of Peter the Venerable, Abbot of Cluny6
◊◊◊
It would be silly for me to write you on behalf of the Lord Abbot of Cluny,
to act as if I wanted to befriend a man whom the entire world befriends. But
although he does not need me to write on his behalf, I am nevertheless doing so
in order to satisfy my affection for him, for this purpose alone and no other.
Although I cannot accompany him in body I shall be with him in spirit on his
pilgrimage to Rome. Nothing can separate us, not the height of the Alps, nor the
cold of the snows, nor the long distance of the journey. And I am present to him
now, stretching out my hand to him in this letter. He cannot go anywhere
without me because I am so much in his debt for the favor of his friendship. But
his favor itself acquits me of the debt, for what was a duty has become a
pleasure.
Honor this man as an honorable member of Christ’s body. He is a vessel
fit for all honorable employment, a vessel full of grace and truth, full of all
manner of good things. Send him back with joy to rejoice the hearts of many by
his return. Show him great favor, so that when he returns we may all receive of
his fullness. He should, of course, find no difficulty in obtaining from you
anything he asks for in the name of the Lord Jesus. For, if you do not know it,
he it is that holds out his hands to the poor of our Order; he it is that freely and
frequently, as far as he may without offending his own people, supports our
brethren from the possessions of his monastery.
But let me explain why I say “in the name of the Lord Jesus.
” It is because
I fear and suspect he may ask to be released from the rule of his monastery; and
no one who knows him would consider this a petition made in the name of
Jesus. I am very much mistaken if he is not more self-effacing than usual, if he
has not become more perfect since he last saw you, although it is well known
that almost from the first instant of assuming office he reformed his Order in
many ways, in the matter, for instance, of fasting, silence, and costly and curious
clothing.

6 Letter 349, The Letters of Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, edited by Bruno Scott James, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1953,
pp. 427-428.15

Skema: 7th Week of Easter
2024-05-12
Biblical Readings for Office and Mass
7th Week of Easter

Mass Readings: Sunday (B), Weekdays (II)
May 12 – 18, 2024

Sun
12
Mon
13
Tue
14
Wed
15
Thu
16
Fri
17
Sat
18

Office
Ascension of the Lord
Our Lady of Fatima
St Matthias
St Pachomius
Easter Weekday
Easter Weekday
Easter Weekday

Vigils
Eph 4:1-24
Acts 25:1-27
Phil 3:13-4:1
Acts 27:1-20
Acts 27:21-44
Acts 28: 1-14
Acts 28:15-31

Lauds
Dan 7:9-14
1 Jn 2:24-27
1 Jn 2:18-25
1 Jn 3:19-24
1 Jn 4:7-12
1 Jn 5:1-5
1 Jn 5:13-21

Mass
58
297
564
299
300
301
302

1st
Acts 1:1-11
Acts 19:1-8
Acts 1:15-17, 20-26
Acts 20:28-38
Acts 22:30; 23:6-11
Acts 25:13b-21
Acts 28:16-20, 30-31

2nd
Eph 4:1-13

Gospel
Mark 16:15-20
John 16:29-33
John 15:9-17
John 17:11b-19
John 17:20-26
John 21:15-19
John 21:20-25

Vespers
Eph 1:15-23
1 Jn 2:28-3:3
1 Cor 4:1-7
1 Jn 4:1-6
1 Jn 4:13-21
1 Jn 5:6-12
Rom 8:9:17
