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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

Ave Maria Meditations

EUCHARISTIC HOLY HOUR  

The Eucharistic Holy Hour has received the ap­proval of several Popes and is enriched with indulgenc­es. By Apostolic Letter, dated March 30, 1886, Pope Leo XIII allowed the faithful to make their “Holy Hour” on any day and hour of the week.  

Jesus made it clear to St. Margaret Mary that through this devotion, He wishes His faithful friends to become partakers of that “sorrow unto death” which He willed to suffer in the Garden of Olives and to join with Him in the humble prayer which He offered to His Fa­ther at that time. He also wishes the faithful to appease His father’s anger and to ask Him to forgive all sinners.  

It is a noble and sublime deed to keep Our Eu­charistic Lord company while meditating on His bitter Agony and consoling His most Sacred Heart. This is best done at the altar where Jesus is truly present, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in the Holy Eucharist. In His presence we can best console Him for the negligence of men; make known our needs to Him; beg graces and favors from Him ourselves and others; and assure Him of our undying loyalty to Him.  

If we do not hesitate to ask favors of the Saints, all the more we should not hesitate to go directly to the Source of Life Himself, to the Heart of God, to obtain material and spiritual help. He has promised never to turn a deaf ear to our petitions.

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.

Variety #93 – A Day with Mary in Pawtucket, RI ( 17min) >>> Play

Ave Maria!

After the visit of our Lady of Fatima the three children were set on fire with the love of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. Souls are being called to live an heroic life; a life without sin, a life full of love for God and gratitude for His Mercy.

Ave Maria!

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16 minutes

The whole purpose of your being is to know and love God and His Immaculate Mother. Participating in “A Day With Mary” is one way in fulfilling your being; A day in the real Presence of Jesus with Mary.

Ave Maria!

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Fi News #86 – Brother Seagull perched above Procession ( 06min) >>> Play

Ave Maria!

This Corpus Christi procession was the 18th year for the friars in New Bedford since 1993.

Ave Maria!

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Ave Maria Meditations

I love You, O my God! And my only desire is to love You until the last breath of my life.  I love You, O my infinitely loveable
God and I would rather die loving you than live without loving You.

I love You, Lord, and the only grace I ask is to love You eternally…my God, if my tongue cannot say in every moment that I love You, I want my heart to repeat it to you as often as I draw breath.

Saint John Marie Vianney Quotes on The Blessed Virgin Mary

• “To serve the Queen of Heaven is already to reign there, and to live under her commands is more than to govern.”
• “Only after the Last Judgment will Mary get any rest; from now until then, she is much too busy with her children.”
• “Christian wife! Follow in the footsteps of the ideal of all womanhood, the Blessed Mother of God; in joy and in sorrow, she will be your advocate at the throne of her Son.”
• “Jesus Christ, after having given us all he could give, that is to say, the merit of his toils, his sufferings, and bitter death; after having given us his adorable body and blood to be the food of our souls, willed also to give us the most precious thing he had let, which was his holy Mother,”
• “When our hands have touched spices, they give fragrance to all they handle. Let us make our prayers pass through the hands of the Blessed Virgin. She will make them fragrant.” 

 
Saint John Marie Vianney Quotes on The Blessed Sacrament

“We should consider those moments spent before the Blessed Sacrament as the happiest of our lives.”   (more…)

Homily #100606t ( 08min) Play – When we look at the Cross we see how much God loved us, and we look at the Holy Eucharist we see how much God LOVES us. Jesus gives us His very self in this Blessed Sacrament and He wants to draw us up into Himself.
Ave Maria! Mass readings

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Ave Maria Meditations

With each sacramental communion Jesus writes afresh the new law on our hearts. Here we touch upon an important point for the celebra­tion of the Eucharist…To participate in the Eucharist, to communicate with the body and blood of Christ, demands the liturgy of our life, a sharing in the passion of the Servant of God. In this participation our sufferings become “sacrifice” and so we can complete “in [our] flesh what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions” (Col. 1:24).

It seems to me that this aspect of Eucharistic devotion has been somewhat obscured in the liturgical movement and that we ought to recover it. In the communion of suffering, sacra­mental communion is actualized; we enter into the riches of the Lord’s mercy, and from this compassion springs up anew the capacity to be merciful from which come the vocations which make mercy their aim and which are lacking today in the Church.

One final observation. If we have at length interpreted the connection between Supper and Cross, we have in fact all the time been speaking also of the Resurrection. Not only are Supper and Cross inseparable: Supper, Cross and Resurrec­tion form the one indivisible Paschal Mystery. The theology of the Cross is the Resurrection; therefore the Resurrection is the divine response and the divine interpretation of the Cross. The theology of the Cross is a paschal theology, a theology of joyous victory even in this valley of tears. We have shown that the Last Supper was the anticipation of the violent death of Jesus, and that the Cross without the Supper, the Supper without the reality of the Cross, would remain void. Now we have to add that the Last Supper also antic­ipates the Resurrection, the certainty that love is stronger than death. This act of love to the last is the transubstanti­ation of death, its radical transformation, the power of the Resurrection already present in the shadow of death.

The Supper without the Cross, the Cross without the Sup­per, would be void, but the two without the Resurrection would be the wreck of hope. The image of the pierced side, fount of water and blood, is also the image of the Resurrec­tion, of love stronger than death. In the Eucharist we receive this love – we receive the medicine of immortality. The Eu­charist guides us to the fount of true life, of invincible life, and shows us where and how true life is to be found – not in riches, not in having. Only if we follow Jesus on the way of His Cross do we find ourselves on the road to life.

Pope Benedict XVI: Journey to Easter

Fi News #68 – Bushfire at Perth Friary ! ( 05min) >>> Play

In the afternoon of March 1st, 2010 a bushfire started near the friary in Perth, Australia and grew quickly. It jumped the main road and approached our backyard. We decided to evacuate the friary. We took the Blessed Sacrament, a few liturgical items of worth, a few personal items (passports, etc.) and the computers and loaded up the cars. We turned on the lawn sprinklers on the side facing the fire, closed all windows and doors, placed a statue of Our Lady to watch over the fire and drove down the road to a safe distance to wait it out. Roads were blocked by the police. After noticing that the smoke in the immediate area of the friary had died down and after the police told us the friary was ok, we went to a benefactor’s house for something to eat and drink only to be allowed back onto the property around 10:00pm. Damage was limited to a few sheds in the area, no homes or loss of life but about 47 hectares (115 acres) burned.

Homily #100209 ( 07min) Play – For the Jews the Temple in Jerusalem was the dwelling place of God and so was central to their spiritual life. Listen as Fr. Angelo relates this to the Blessed Sacrament to which we should make frequent visits to give true worship.
Ave Maria! Mass readings
1: 1 Kings 8:22-23,27-30
R: Ps 84:3-5,10-11
G: Mk 7:1-13

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Ave Maria Meditations  

“The Lord is in the midst of you.”

It is St. John the Baptist who speaks to us in the Gospel (Jn1:I9~28),   ” There is one in the midst of you whom you know not.” John, a man of faith, was telling the Jews with full conviction that Jesus had been living among them for thirty years and that they did not know Him because He had not yet manifested Himself by miracles.

His words have value for us too; Jesus is really present in our midst: present in our tabernacles by the Eucharist, present in our souls by grace. But who recognizes Him? Only those who believe. Revive, then, your faith; you will find Jesus, and will know Jesus according to the measure of your faith in Him. Sometimes He conceals Himself from you, and you think that you will never find Him, never feel Him again. This is the time to redouble your faith, to walk “in pure faith.” “Blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed”(Jn.20:29). Such was the faith of St. John the Baptist, who had not seen Jesus’ miracles, and never­theless believed.

Such was Mary’s faith, to which the Vesper antiphon refers, “Blessed art thou, O Mary, that hast believed the Lord; those things will be fulfilled in thee,  which were spoken to thee.” (Lk.1:45). Even Mary lived by faith; she had to believe in the words of the Angel, and when she agreed to become the Mother of God, she had to accept a mystery which she did not understand. But Mary did believe, and by her faith, God’s words were accomplished in her. And so shall they be in you; you will see all your hopes fulfilled, you will be able to realize your ideal of intimate union with God if you have faith in Him and in His promises. (more…)

Ave Maria Meditations

The Eucharistic sacrifice and the ordinary life of the Christian.

The Second Vatican Council reminds us that the sacrifice of the Cross and its sacramental renewal in the Mass are, apart from the difference in the manner of offering, one and the same sacrifice of praise, of thanksgiving, of propitiation and of satisfaction. The ends which Our Savior gave to His sacrifice on the Cross are usually summed up in these four.

The four ends of the Mass are achieved in different ways and to a different extent. The ends that refer directly to God, namely, adoration, praise and thanksgiving, are always produced infallibly and with all their infinite value, independently of our collaboration.  This is true even when the Mass is celebrated without the presence of a single member of the faithful, or, if there is one, if he assists in a distracted way. God, our Lord is praised infinitely every time the Eucharistic Sacrifice is celebrated, and thanksgiving is offered up which satisfies God fully. This oblation, says Saint Thomas, pleases God more than all the sins of the world offend him, since Christ himself is the actual Priest who offers, as well as being the actual victim who is offered in every Mass.

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