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You are currently browsing the archives for the Sacraments category.
Ave Maria Meditations
The proud and the worldly have no time for Me But those who are themselves humble and poor are drawn to the humility and to the poverty of My Eucharistic Presence. From In Sinu Iesu, The Journal of a Priest |
Ave Maria Meditations
O Sun of Justice, give sight to the blind. O Eternal Healer, cure the wounded. O King of Kings, restore the despoiled. O Mediator of God and man, reconcile the sinful. O Good Shepherd, lead back the straying. O God, have pity on the wretched, show leniency to the guilty, bestow life on the dead, reform the impious, and give the balm of grace to the hard of heart. O most merciful God, call back the one who flees, draw back the one who resists, lift up the one who falls, support the one who stands, and accompany the one who walks. Do not forget those who forget You. Do not desert those who desert You. Do not despise those who sin against You. For in sinning, I have offended You, my God. I have harmed my neighbor; I have not even spared myself injury. I have sinned, 0 my God, against You, almighty Father, because of my weakness; against You, all-knowing Son, because of my ignorance; against You, merciful Holy Spirit, because of my malice. Thus have I offended You, most high Trinity. |
Ave Maria Meditations
Revealed to the Childlike: thoughts of a little girl. “Dear Jesus, today I’m going out and I’m going to my nuns to tell them I want to make my First Communion…Jesus, come soon into my heart and I’ll hug you very tight and kiss you. O Jesus, I want you to stay for ever in my heart” … “Dear Jesus, I love you so much, I want to tell you again I love you so much. I give you my heart. Our dear Lady, you are so good, take my heart and carry it to Jesus” … “My good Jesus, give me souls, give me a lot of them, I ask you willingly, I ask you so that you make them become good and so that they can come to you in Paradise” … “Dear Jesus Eucharist, I am so very, very happy that you have come into my heart. Never leave my heart, stay for ever and ever with me. Jesus, I love you so, I want to let myself go in your arms and do what you will with me … 0 loving Jesus, give me souls, give me a great many!. .. ” (more…) |
Ave Maria Meditations
Almighty and ever-living God, I approach the sacrament of Your only-begotten Son Our Lord Jesus Christ, I come sick to the doctor of life, unclean to the fountain of mercy, blind to the radiance of eternal light, and poor and needy to the Lord of heaven and earth. Lord, in your great generosity, heal my sickness, wash away my defilement, enlighten my blindness, enrich my poverty, and clothe my nakedness. May I receive the bread of angels, the King of kings and Lord of lords, with humble reverence, with the purity and faith, the repentance and love, and the determined purpose that will help to bring me to salvation. May I receive the sacrament of the Lord’s Body and Blood, and its reality and power. Kind God, may I receive the Body of Your only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, born from the womb of the Virgin Mary, and so be received into His mystical body and numbered among His members. Loving Father, as on my earthly pilgrimage I now receive Your beloved Son under the veil of a sacrament, may I one day see him face to face in glory, who lives and reigns with You forever. Amen. - Saint Thomas Aquinas
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Ave Maria Meditations John is the voice, but the Lord is the Word who was in the beginning. John is the voice that lasts for a time; from the beginning Christ is the Word who lives forever. Take away the word, the meaning, and what is the voice? Where there is no understanding, there is only a meaningless sound. The voice without the word strikes the ear but does not build up the heart. However, let us observe what happens when we first seek to build up our hearts. When I think about what I am going to say, the word or message is already in my heart. When I want to speak to you, I look for a way to share with your heart what is already in mine. In my search for a way to let this message reach you, so that the word already in my heart may find place also in yours, I use my voice to speak to you. The sound of my voice brings the meaning of the word to you and then passes away. The word which the sound has brought to you is now in your heart, and yet it is still also in mine. (more…) |
Ave Maria Meditations
PRAYER FOR THE SPREAD OF EUCHARISTIC ADORATION Heavenly Father, increase our faith in the Real Presence of Your Son, Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. We are obliged to adore Him, to give Him thanks and to make reparation for sins. We need Your peace in our hearts and among nations. We need conversion from our sins and the mercy of Your forgiveness. May we obtain this through prayer and our union with the Eucharistic Lord. Please send down the Holy Spirit upon all peoples to give them love, courage, strength and willingness to respond to the invitation to Eucharistic Adoration. We beseech You to spread exposition of the Most Blessed Sacrament in parishes around the world. We ask this in the name of Jesus the Lord. Amen
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Ave Maria Meditations
Confession and the holy fear of God When we go to the Sacrament of Penance it will help us very much if we foster the holy fear of God in our souls. To receive the sacrament, attrition (a supernatural but imperfect sorrow, arising from fear of punishment, or revulsion from the ugliness of the sin … ) is sufficient. But we will receive much more grace if we impel our soul to a sense of filial fear for having offended an Almighty God who is also Our Father. It will be much easier to pass from this filial attitude to one of genuine contrition, a repentance springing from love, to an attitude of sorrow based on love. Then confession becomes an immense source of grace, a place where love grows constantly stronger. Interior life grows in sensitivity and depth if we keep continually before us those truths that reveal to us the foundations of this gift of the Holy Spirit: God’s holiness and our wretchedness, our daily failures, the absolute dependence of the creature on his Creator, the enormity of a single venial sin in the sight of the divine holiness, the ingratitude implied by our lack of generosity in living up to the demands of our vocation . We shall understand better the mystery of sin if above all we develop the habit of considering frequently the Passion of Our Lord. We shall learn to love, and thereby dread committing a single venial sin. When we contemplate the suffering that Christ endured for our sins, the countless sins of all the world, our hope will be strengthened and our contrition intensified, and we shall have a firmer resolve to avoid every deliberate fault. The holy fear of God joined to love gives a special strength to the Christian’s life. With it, nothing can make him tremble, for nothing can then separate him from the love of God.The soul is consolidated in the virtue of hope and set free from a false and careless security by maintaining a watchful love against the treacherous lures of temptation. Let us ask our Mother Mary, the Refuge of Sinners, to make us understand just how much we lose every time we step aside from the path that leads to her son Jesus, even if our faults are only slight ones. Fr. Francis Fernandez |
Ave Maria Meditations St. Leopoldo is known as an Apostle of the Confessional and also as an Apostle of Unity. Feast Day is July 30th.
He was born in Dalmatia (Bosnia-Hercogovina) in 1866. He was small and sickly and even when grown to manhood he was only 4’5″ tall and never enjoyed good health. His voice was weak and so it was decided that he would not make for a good preacher which was a terrible blow to him for he longed with all his heart to do all he could for the reunification of the Eastern Church with Rome and desired (more…) |
A meditation from St. Peter Julian Eymard
Jesus loved .. Mary. (Jn.11:5) SAINT MARY MAGDALEN was the privileged friend of Jesus. She served Him with her wealth and accompanied Him everywhere. She honored His humanity magnificently with her gifts. She loved to pray at His feet in the silence of contemplation. For all these reasons she is the patroness and model of a life spent in the adoration and service of Jesus in the Sacrament of His love. Let us study Saint Mary Magdalen; her life is full of the very best lessons. JESUS loved Martha, her sister Mary, and Lazarus; but especially Mary. Certainly He loved the three of them, but He loved Magdalen with preferential love. Although our Lord loves us all, He nevertheless has His favorite friends, and He allows us also have special friends in God. Friends are a natural and even supernatural need. All the saints had bosom friends, and they themselves were the most affectionate and devoted of friends. Before her conversion Magdalen was a public sinner. She possessed all the qualities of mind and body and all the gifts of fortune that can lead one to the worst excesses. And she fell into them. The Gospel lowers her to the rank of a public sinner. She was so degraded that Simon the Pharisee felt disgraced when she entered his home. And he even doubted the prophetic power of Jesus because the Master allowed her to remain at His feet. But after having been forgiven, this poor sinful woman was to take her place among the greatest saints. See her at work. Human respect is, more than anything else, what holds back great sinners and prevents them from being converted. “I will not be able to persevere,” they say. “I dare not start what I cannot finish.” And disheartened, they go no further. (more…) |
Ave Maria Meditations
The Eucharist is a sacrament of the living. As a sacrament of the living, it bestows supernatural life and sanctifying grace. Apart from this property, which it shares with the other sacraments, the Eucharist has a special virtue of its own, expressed in the words of Christ: “My flesh is real food; and my blood is real drink” – words that the Council of Trent explains thus: “All the effects that food produces materially in our bodies, the Eucharist produces spiritually in our souls.”
Thus, food strengthens our bodies and, up to a given age, makes them grow; the Eucharist gives strength against temptations, and makes the soul grow in virtue and justice. The richer the material food, the more discriminating the palate and the sense of taste, the delicious it is; the purer the heart, and the better prepared the soul, the sweeter the Eucharist. It is through the Eucharist that the God of glory inaugurates His bliss in the midst of our misery; it is the source of all devotion, of all greatness, and of all holiness.
The Eucharist has a double foundation. It is, first of all, one of the seven sacraments of the New Law, in which Jesus Christ, present under the species of bread and wine, is offered for our adoration and offers Himself as food. It is, in addition, a sacrifice, in which the spotless Lamb renews the memory of His Passion and death and is truly immolated. Fr. Charles Arminjon (The End of the Present World)
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Ave Maria Meditations
Let us be renewed so that we may thus attend the new feast of the new Lamb, for today we shall not be feasting on the flesh and blood of brute animals as the Jews did, but on God himself, on our Lord Jesus Christ who was sacrificed as our Passover. He is our new, completely sufficient, and rich banquet.
This banquet is new because of its nature; it is free from the staleness of sin, which is shown because it imparts its own newness to us if we eat it worthily. It is completely sufficient because Christ was sacrificed as the one true victim offered once for all in place of the many prefigurative and inadequate victims offered over and over in accordance with the Law. For although Christ is sacramentally offered, sacrificed, and broken daily on many altars, he was in fact sacrificed only once as the one true victim, for Christ, having risen from the dead, dies no more. And whereas the many sacrifices of the Jews – their sacrifices for sin, their peace offerings, their votive offerings, their victims – were insufficient, Christ is a sufficient sacrifice for everything and for everyone: to atone for sins, restore peace between God and humankind, win a hearing for human prayers, and overcome enemies.
Finally, this banquet is a rich one because our Lord Jesus Christ is, as it were, “fat” with the fullness of grace, charity, and mercy. He is the fatted calf which the father ordered to be slain when his son returned from the land of unlikeness. So now that we have been invited to this new, bountiful, and rich banquet, let us be careful to do as the wise man says: If you sit at a lavish table, know that you must prepare a similar one. Since we have been invited to the table of Christ, let us prepare a similar one for him: let us love him as he has loved us, humble ourselves for him as he humbled himself for us, and be ready to die for him as he died for us.
Ralph the Fervent (+1101) was a priest in the diocese of Poitiers, France. |
Ave Maria Meditations
How Beautiful (song lyrics) How beautiful the hands that served |
Catholic Church Uses Video Contest to Promote Sacrament of Confession. Ave Maria! An ingenious video contest organized by the dioceses of NYC, Brooklyn and Rockville Center to promote confession among youth is offering a first prize of a $25,000 scholarship plus another $25,000 to the Catholic School or Parish of the winner’s choice. The author of the above very well done video has offered to send a portion of the award to the friars. Very generous indeed. But, he is up against some stiff competition at the iConfess YouTube Channel with over 90 submissions! So much very good work. Truly a smash success for the entire program. But please do give this video a view and go to Youtube and vote for him. You never know. |
To You, O God, Fountain of Mercy, I come, a sinner. May You wash away my impurity.
