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Ave Maria Meditations

excerpts from ECCLESIA DE EUCHARISTIA:

On the Eucharist in its relationship to the Church

Encyclical Letter of Pope John Paul II, April 2003

The Church draws her life from the Eucharist. This truth does not simply express a daily experience of faith, but recapitulates the heart of the mystery of the Church. In a variety of ways she joyfully experiences the constant fulfillment of the promise: “Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:20), but in the Holy Eucharist, through the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord, she rejoices in this presence with unique intensity…The Second Vatican Council rightly proclaimed that the Eucharistic sacrifice is “the source and summit of the Christian life.  For the most holy Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual wealth: Christ himself, our Passover and living Bread. Through his own flesh, now made living and life-giving by the Holy Spirit, he offers life to men”. Consequently the gaze of the church is constantly turned to her Lord, present in the Sacrament of the Altar, in which she discovers the full manifestation of his boundless love.

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Ave Maria Meditations

Pope St. Pius X

Feast day is August 21st

Pope St. Pius X was born as Giuseppe Sarto to a poor family in 1835. He was ordained to the holy priesthood in 1858 was elected Pope in 1903. One biography says this on his pontificate: He lowered the age of First Communion to the age of 7 and encouraged frequent, even daily Communion. He reformed the liturgy, promoted clear and simple homilies, and brought Gregorian chant back to services. He revised the Breviary, and the teaching of the Catechism. He fought Modernism, which he denounced as “the summation of all heresies”. He reorganized the Roman curia and initiated the codification of canon law. He promoted the reading of Sacred Scripture and the foreign missions. His will read: “I was born poor; I lived poor; I wish to die poor.” He died in August of 1914.  He is known as the Pope of the Blessed Sacrament and also as the Pope who suppressed modernism and that suppression lasted for decades until  it roared again to life in the turbulent times following the second Vatican Council.

His great encyclical addressing and condemning modernism can be found at

http://www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius10/p10pasce.htm

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excerpts from

PASCENDI DOMINICI GREGIS ON THE DOCTRINE OF THE MODERNISTS ENCYCLICAL OF POPE PIUS X, SEPTEMBER 8, 1907

VENERABLE BRETHREN, HEALTH AND THE APOSTOLIC BLESSING:

1. One of the primary obligations assigned by Christ to the office divinely committed to Us of feeding the Lord’s flock is that of guarding with the greatest vigilance the deposit of the faith delivered to the saints, rejecting the profane novelties of words and the gainsaying of knowledge falsely so called. There has never been a time when this watchfulness of the supreme pastor was not necessary to the Catholic body, for owing to the efforts of the enemy of the human race, there have never been lacking men speaking perverse things, vain talkers and seducers,erring and driving into error.

It must, however, be confessed that these latter days have witnessed a notable increase in the number of the enemies of the Cross of Christ, who, by arts entirely new and full of deceit, are striving to destroy the vital energy of the Church, and, as far as in them lies, utterly to subvert the very Kingdom of Christ. Wherefore We may no longer keep silence, lest We should seem to fail in Our most sacred duty, and lest the kindness that, in the hope of wiser counsels, We have hitherto shown them, should be set down to lack of diligence in the discharge of Our office.

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Ave Maria!

The new encyclical Caritas in Veritate by Pope Benedict XVI has just been published. It is fairly long. I’m looking forward to reading it.

“Caritas in Veritate” to Cover Social Themes
VATICAN CITY, JULY 1, 2009 (Zenit.org).- Benedict XVI’s new encyclical, titled “Caritas in Veritate,” will be released Tuesday, the Vatican announced.

The Vatican press office confirmed today that the Pope’s first social encyclical, which is expected to offer an analysis of the current economic crisis, will be presented at a press conference in the late morning July 7. The text will then be released to the public at midday, local time.  More…

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The Mystery of Faith: TRANSUBSTANTIATION

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The words of Our Lord cannot be watered down: the ­bread which I

shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.

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This is the mystery of Faith, we proclaim immediately after the

Consecration at Mass. It has been and is the touchstone of the Catholic

faith. By transubstantiation, the species of bread and wine are no

longer common bread and common drink, but rather the sign of

something sacred and the sign of spiritual food. But they take on a

new expressive­ness and a new purpose for the very reason that they

contain a new reality: which we are right to call ’ontological’. For

beneath these appearances there is no longer what was there before

but something quitedifferent, since on the conver­sion of the bread and

wine’s substance, or nature, into the Body and Blood of Christ,

nothing is left of the bread and wine but the appearances alone.

Beneath these appearances Christ is present whole and entire, bodily

present too, in his physical reality although not in the manner in

which bodies are present in a place.

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We look at Jesus present in the Tabernacle, perhaps just a few yards

away, and we tell him that we know, through faith, that he is present.

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Homily #080725 ( 14min) Play – Today we celebrate the Feast of St. James the Apostle, and the 40th anniversary of the Encyclical Humanae Vitae. In today’s homily Father Ignatius speaks about our disordered desire for independence from authority, and the nature of the Married State in relation to the Church’s teaching against contraception.
Ave Maria! Mass readings
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