Churches of the Day

Saint of the Day;  29-04 ; St Catherine of Siena, Patron of Europe
A humble, dauntless, religious/mystic, Doctor of the Church, d. 1380
C/f A short life of this saint can be found below todays' Readings and Reflection

FIRST READING

A reading from the first letter of St John              1:5-2:2
The blood of Jesus God's Son, purifies us from all sin.

This is what we have heard from Jesus Christ, and the message that we are announcing to you: God is light; there is no darkness in him at all. If we say that we are in union with God while we are living in darkness, we are lying because we are not living the truth.

But if we live our lives in the light, as he is in the light, we are in union with one another, and the blood of Jesus, his Son, purifies us from all sin.
If we say we have no sin in us we are deceiving ourselves and refusing to admit the truth; but if we acknowledge our sins, then God who is faithful and just will forgive our sins and purify us from everything that is wrong.
To say that we have never sinned is to call God a liar and to show that his word is not in us.

I am writing this, my children, to stop you sinning; but if anyone should sin, we have our advocate with the Father, Jesus Christ, who is just; he is the sacrifice that takes our sins away, and not only ours, but the whole world's.

The Word of the Lord.                 Thanks be to God

Responsorial Psalm              Ps 102:1-4. 8-9. 13-14. 18-19 R/v 1
Response                                  My soul, give thanks to the Lord.

1. My soul, give thanks to the Lord, all my being, bless his holy name.
My soul, give thanks to the Lord and never forget all his blessings.                                 Response

2. It is he who forgives all your guilt, who heals every one of your ills,
who redeems your life from the grave, who crowns you with love and compassion.    Response

3. The Lord is compassion and love, slow to anger and rich in mercy.
His wrath will come to an end; he will not be angry for ever.                                            Response

4. As a father has compassion on his sons, the Lord has pity on those who fear him;
for he knows of what we are made, he remembers that we are dust.                               Response

5. But the love of the Lord is everlasting upon those who hold him in fear;
his justice reaches out to children's children when they keep his covenant in truth.   Response

Gospel  Acclamation                      Mt 11: 25
Alleluia, alleluia!
Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth,
for revealing the mysteries of the kingdom to mere children .
Alleluia!

GOSPEL

The Lord be with you.                       And with your spirit
A reading from the Gospel according to Matthew    11:25-30         Glory to you, O Lord
You have hidden these things from the learned and the clever, and reveal them to mere children.

Jesus exclaimed,
'I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and of earth, for hiding these things from the learned and the clever and revealing them to mere children. Yes, Father, for that is what it pleased you to do. Everything has been entrusted to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father, just as no one knows the Father except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal him.

'Come to me, all you who labour and are overburdened, and I will give you rest. Shoulder my yoke and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.

Yes, my yoke is easy and my burden light.'

The Gospel of the Lord    Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

____________________________________    
Gospel Reflection               29th April            Feast of Saint Catherine of Siena        Mt 11:25-30


Born in 1347, Catherine entered the Dominican Third Order at the age of eighteen and spent the next three years in seclusion, prayer, and austerity. Gradually, a group of followers gathered around her, men and women, priests and religious. An active public apostolate grew out of her contemplative life, working with the sick, the poor, prisoners and plague victims. In 1378, the Great Schism began, splitting the allegiance of Christendom between two, then three, popes. She spent the last two years of her life in Rome in prayer, pleading on behalf of the cause of Pope Urban VI and the unity of the Church. She offered herself as a victim for the Church in its agony. She died surrounded by her followers and was canonized in 1461.

A contemplative, her life of prayer expressed itself in the loving service of those in need. A mystic, she involved herself as a peacemaker and a reconciler in the great affairs of church and state of the day. In the words of today’s first reading, she lived her life in the light, in God who is light, and brought the light of God’s reconciling love to her broken church and world.

Today’s gospel reading gives us an insight into the prayer of Jesus, ‘I bless you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth’. Jesus’ communion with God in prayer directs him to those who labour and are overburdened, inviting them to come to him and receive the gift of rest, the revival of their drooping spirits. This two fold dynamic of prayerful communion with God and loving service of the broken and needy that shaped the life of Jesus also shaped the life of Catherine. It also shapes all of our lives.

__________________________________

The Scripture Readings are taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd. and used with the permission of the publishers.  http://dltbooks.com/
The Scripture Reflection is made available with our thanks from his book Reflections on the Weekday Readings 2024: The Word is near to you, on your lips and in your heart by Martin Hogan and published by Messenger Publications , c/f www.messenger.ie/bookshop/

__________________________________________

Saint of the Day: April 29;  St Catherine of Siena, Christian mystic

The late Mary O’Driscoll OP  has lectured on St Catherine of Siena in many countries, finds messages for today in the great saint’s life and writings. Mary taught spirituality and ecumenism at universities in Ireland, Italy, and South Africa. Born in Ireland, she was a Dominican sister of the Cabra Congregation. She worked in South Africa during the apartheid era and has taught at the Angelicum in Rome for many years.  Here she is talking about St Catherine

 One of the characteristics of contemporary spirituality is a return to classical sources for light and nourishment on our own journey as Christians. In this short reflection I would like to share some thoughts on the spirituality which is offered to us by one of the greatest mystics in the Christian tradition, Catherine of Siena, for I believe strongly that she has much to say that is relevant for today's Christians.

Remarkable Christian Woman
Catherine of Siena was a remarkable Christian woman. She stands out not only in her historical period, but also in succeeding centuries, as a colourful, strong, passionate and enthusiastic personality. She was a woman who had a tremendous zest for life and who put all of herself into whatever she was convinced about. One of her biographers describes her as someone who was always 'at full stretch', whether she was responding whole-heartedly to her loving God or reaching out compassionately to her needy neighbour.

Time of great change
Catherine Benincasa (to give her actual name) was born in Siena in Italy in 1347. The fourteenth century in which she lived bears many resemblances to our own twentieth century. In fact, our century is seen by many as "distant mirror" of Catherine's century. (See for example, Barbara Tuchman, A Distant Mirror, Macmillan, 1978). Both periods are characterized by great cultural, economic, political, religious and social changes with all the insecurity, confusion and upheaval that go with such changes. Catherine, through her life and writings, was clearly able to speak to her contemporaries of the fourteenth century in relevant and helpful ways, so there is a good chance that she can speak to us too.

Doctor of the Church
Another reason for seeking a suitable Christian spirituality for ourselves today from Catherine of Siena has to do with the fact that in our own time she has been named a 'doctor of the Church'.

In 1970 Pope Paul VI, conferred this title on her and on Teresa of Avila. This was an extraordinary occurrence. The title, doctor of the church has been conferred on relatively few (34) christian theologians in the course of church history, and on no woman before 1970. The significance of this declaration is immense, for it places two women mystics among the major church theologians, thereby recognizing their ecclesial role as teachers whose doctrine is relevant for the whole church and for all time. By declaring in our time the laywoman, Catherine of Siena, a doctor of the church, Paul VI was surely recognizing not only that her theological teaching is authentic and therefore contributes to our understanding of revelation, but also that she has something worthwhile to say to our age.

Literary vitality
Catherine's spirituality was lived out day by day in her life, and she offers us its main dimensions in her writings, particularly in her mystical experience of God, and her own understanding of what the Christian life is about.(See Suzanne Noffke, The Dialogue, Paulist Press 1980). One of the attractions of Catherine's writings is her style which is spontaneous, energetic and passionate. Her literary vitality comes in great measure from her superb use of imagery. She uses images in her efforts to communicate her inexpressible experience of the most profound realities, and hopes that these images will stimulate the dormant intuition of her readers opening up for them a deeper meaning of human and divine truths. Her images come from the ordinary things and experiences of her life:
*a fire eagerly consuming the wood thrown on it,
*light filtering through a narrow street,
*a tall tree laden with fruit,
*bridge across a river, the mirror in which she sees her own reflection,
* a vineyard, the vast ocean with its peaceful surface.
This last image is a favourite of Catherine's. In one place in The Dialogue she prays:
"You, Eternal Trinity, are a deep sea.
The more I enter you, the more I discover,
and the more I discover, the more I seek you".

Self-knowledge
The context in which Catherine develops her theology and spirituality is self-knowledge. This is very interesting. Her first theological question is therefore, not "Who is God?" but "Who am I?" This question, "who am I?" is a haunting question for people today. In our time, more and more people speak of an emptiness within themselves, a sense of meaninglessness in their lives. "Who am I?" or "What is the meaning of my life?" can at times become a terrifying, tormenting question. Most of us will have asked ourselves this question in one way or another, at one time or another in our lives.

The times we question the meaning of life or our identity or worth are usually not the times when we feel everything is going well or when we are successful or feel good about ourselves, but rather when we have to cope with failure or sickness or loneliness or rejection or despair. In her writings Catherine of Siena shows that she is aware of such moments, and it is through them that she begins her quest for self-knowledge.

In seeking knowledge and understanding of ourselves, Catherine explains that we will never find these if we keep looking only at ourselves. Rather, in order to know who we are or what the meaning of our lives is, we need to go to the One who made us. Einstein declares, "If a person finds a satisfying answer to the question 'what is the meaning of life?' that person I would call religious". Catherine of Siena would agree. In stating that we need to look at God in order to know who we are, she is not however offering an easy way out of the question but rather showing her appreciation of the fact that, although we can come quite far in understanding ourselves by looking at ourselves, we can never arrive at the deepest, richest self-knowledge without seeing ourselves through God's eyes, or, as she puts it, without gazing at ourselves in the "gentle mirror" of God. Catherine's God is always gentle just as the God Jesus tells us about in the gospels is gentle. The reason we can see ourselves in our gentle God is that we are made in the divine image.

Not afraid of the dark
The process or growing in self-knowledge is compared by Catherine to digging a well. If we want to make or uncover a well we need to dig through much soil, even stones at times, before we reach the running water. Likewise in coming to know ourselves, we come in touch with our own inadequacies, imperfections, failures, limitations. These are what Catherine calls "the soil of our poverty". She encourages us not to be afraid to go down this well, that is, not to run away in fear or disgust from that part of ourselves which is dark, frail or imperfect. Rather, she encourages us to stay with it, for it reminds us of an important truth about ourselves, namely, that as created beings, we have to accept that limitations and inadequacies are built into our human condition. This however is not a depressing discovery; rather, in becoming aware of our failures and incompleteness, we become aware also of our need for God, the running water at the bottom of our well, and we begin to stretch out and reach down towards this bubbling source of life within us. We are like the deer that yearns for running streams (Ps.42), or like the dry, weary land that longs for water (Psalm 63). At the bottom of our well, at the centre of our being, therefore, where we best know who we are as limited human beings, we rejoice in God who is All, and it no longer matters (in fact it is an advantage) that we are small, frail, imperfect.

That is one part of the answer to the question, "who am I"? - the part that puts me in touch with the truth that I am a creature and not the creator (and in that sense, I am, in Catherine's words, "the one who is not"). There is however another side to who I am, namely, that I am of tremendous worth and have extraordinary dignity. To do justice to Catherine of Siena's teaching on self-knowledge, we need to reflect also on this.

God’s love
When we look at ourselves in God's "gentle mirror", the first truth that we discover is that we are loved. Catherine never ceases to be amazed at the depth and extent of God's love for us. This is expressed above all in Creation and Redemption. Explaining God's creative love, she prays:
"With indescribable love you looked at us within your very self,
and you fell in love with us. So it was love that made you create us and give us being". (Dialogue 13)

There is no other reason for our existence except God's love. Catherine pictures God addressing her as "my dearest daughter whom I love so very much". God wants to tell each of us, too, of the extent and depth of divine love. If Catherine of Siena is amazed by God's love in creating us, she is more staggered by the even greater manifestation of that love in the Incarnation. Trying to fathom God's redemptive love, which comes to us through Jesus Christ, she asks:
"Do you need your creature? It seems so to me, for you act as if you could not live without her.
She runs away from you and you go looking for her. Why are you so mad?" (Dialogue 153)

Yes, in looking at myself in God, I can say with absolute certainty, "I am loved". The knowledge and experience of being loved gives us the freedom to love others freely and sends us out into our world, as nothing else can, to share our love with others.

Beauty
Looking at ourselves in God, our “gentle mirror”, we also realize how beautiful we are. Here we are reminded of the statement in Ephesians: "you are God's work of art" (Eph. 2:10). Catherine's spirituality, more than that of many others, stresses the beauty of the human person.
That beauty comes about first of all because we are made in the image of God who is "beauty beyond all beauty".

At the beginning of The Dialogue, Catherine receives the invitation: "Open your eye and gaze into me and you will see the dignity and beauty of human persons" (Dialogue 1). She would say that all the magnificent and breath-taking beauty which is disseminated in the natural world is surpassed by the beauty of the human person made in God's image and redeemed by Jesus Christ.
Some of us find it hard to believe in our own beauty; that may be because we are not looking into the gentle mirror that is God to know who and what we are. Others find it hard to see beauty in some people who do not appeal to them. Here the advice God gives to Catherine is relevant: when you see something you do not like in a person, "pluck the rose from the thorns" (Dialogue 100) Many people in our world today have no sense of their own beauty and dignity. Our task as christians is to try to bring them to a realization of who and what they are.

We see from our reflection that self-knowledge, in the sense in which Catherine uses the term, is not a morbid or depressing introspection. It is rather a knowledge of ourselves which we gain by gazing contemplatively at the gentle God who created us. "I am loved, I am beautiful", we can all say with absolute conviction. This conviction is our best antidote to the materialism and sense of meaninglessness which have such a stranglehold on our twentieth century existence.





This article first appeared in Spirituality (July/August 1995), a publication of the Irish Dominicans.

____________________________

******************************

Memorable Sayings for Today

Behind every strong holy woman, there is God 

~ unknown author~

******************************

Fifth Sunday of Easter

No one can come to the Father except through Christ. Working together in love,
all God’s people can build up the kingdom in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, our high priest.

FIRST READING

A reading from the Book of  Acts of the Apostles           6:1-7
They elected seven men full of the Holy Spirit

About this time, when the number of disciples was increasing, the Hellenists made a complaint against the Hebrews: in the daily distribution their own widows were being overlooked. So the Twelve called a full meeting of the disciples and addressed them,
'It would not be right for us to neglect the word of God so as to give out food. You, brothers, must select from among yourselves seven men of good reputation, filled with the Spirit and with wisdom; we will hand over this duty to them, and continue to devote ourselves to prayer and to the service of the word'.

The whole assembly approved of this proposal and elected Stephen, a man full of faith and of the Holy Spirit, together with Philip, Prochorus, Nicanor, Timon, Parmenas, and Nicolaus of Antioch, a convert to Judaism. They presented these to the apostles, who prayed and laid their hands on them.

The word of the Lord continued to spread: the number of disciples in Jerusalem was greatly increased, and a large group of priests made their submission to the faith.

The Word of the Lord.               Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm            Ps 32: 1-2. 4-5, 18-19. R/v 22
Response                               May your love be upon us, O Lord,
as we place all our hope in you.
Or                                             Alleluia!

1. Ring out your joy to the Lord, O you just; for praise is fitting for loyal hearts.
    Give thanks to the Lord upon the harp, with a ten-stringed lute sing him songs.   Response

2. For the word of the Lord is faithful and all his works to be trusted.
    The Lord loves justice and right and fills the earth with his love.                               Response

3. The Lord looks on those who revere him, on those who hope in his love,
    to rescue their souls from death, to keep them alive in famine.                                   Response

SECOND READING  

A reading from the first letter of St Peter          2:4-9
You are a chosen race, a royal priesthood

He is the living stone, rejected by men but chosen by God and precious to him; set yourselves close to him so that you too, the holy priesthood  that offers the spiritual sacrifices which Jesus Christ has made acceptable to God, may be living stones making a spiritual house. As scripture says: See how I lay in Zion a precious cornerstone that I have chosen and the man who rests his trust on it will not be disappointed. That means that for you who are believers, it is precious; but for unbelievers, the stone rejected by the builders has proved to be the keystone, a stone to stumble over, a rock to bring men down. They stumble over it because they do not believe in the word; it was the fate in store for them.

But you are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation, a people set apart to sing the praises of God who called you out of the darkness into his wonderful light.

The Word of the Lord.          Thanks be to God.

Gospel Acclamation                 Jn 14: 6
Alleluia, alleluia!
Jesus said: 'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.
No one can come to the Father except through me.'
Alleluia!

GOSPEL

The Lord be with you              And with your spirit.
A reading from the Gospel according to John           14:1-12
I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Jesus said to his disciples 'Do not let your hearts be troubled. Trust in God still, and trust in me. There are many rooms in my Father's house; if there were not, I should have told you. I am going now to prepare a place for you, and after I have gone and prepared you a place, I shall return to take you with me; so that where I am you may be too. You know the way to the place where I am going.'

Thomas said, 'Lord, we do not know where you are going, so how can we know the way?'
 Jesus said:'I am the Way, the Truth and the Life. No one can come to the Father except through me. If you know me, you know my Father too. From this moment you know him and have seen him.'

Philip said, 'Lord, let us see the Father and then we shall be satisfied'. 'Have I been with you all this time, Philip,' said Jesus to him 'and you still do not know me? ' 'To have seen me is to have seen the, Father, so how can you say, "Let us see the Father"? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me?
The words I say to you I do not speak as from myself: it is the Father, living in me, who is doing this work. You must believe me when I say that I am in the Father and the Father is in me; believe it on the evidence of this work, if for no other reason.

'I tell you most solemnly, whoever believes in me will perform the same works as I do myself,
he will perform even greater works, because I am going to the Father.'

The Gospel of the Lord    Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.



Taken from THE JERUSALEM BIBLE, published and copyright 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc, and used by permission of the publishers.