『Catholic Saints & Feasts』のカバーアート

Catholic Saints & Feasts

Catholic Saints & Feasts

著者： Fr. Michael Black
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 "Catholic Saints & Feasts" offers a dramatic reflection on each saint and feast day of the General Calendar of the Catholic Church. The reflections are taken from the four volume book series: "Saints & Feasts of the Catholic Calendar," written by Fr. Michael Black.

These reflections profile the theological bone breakers, the verbal flame throwers, the ocean crossers, the heart-melters, and the sweet-chanting virgin-martyrs who populate the liturgical calendar of the Catholic Church.Copyright Fr. Michael Black キリスト教 スピリチュアリティ 聖職・福音主義
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  • December 10: Our Lady of Loreto

    December 10: Our Lady of Loreto
    2024/12/10
    December 10: Our Lady of Loreto
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: white
    Patron Saint of air crews and builders

    Heaven will reinforce what we know of Christ and Mary

    When Jesus said, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house on rock” (Mt 7:24), He likely had a specific house in mind—His own house in Nazareth where He grew up. The footings of many of Nazareth’s houses are lodged, even today, into the dense bed of rock that lies under much of the town. Ancient tradition holds that the Virgin Mary was raised in Nazareth, was visited by the Archangel Gabriel in her home there, and then lived in that same home with her husband, Joseph, and her son, Jesus. Jesus would leave Nazareth as an adult for the larger, more cosmopolitan town of Capernaum, about one day away by foot, but He was always identified with His hometown.

    The Holy Family’s house in Nazareth has a complicated and obscure history. What is known is that the knights of the First Crusade took control of Galilee in 1099 and made Nazareth their capital. The Italian Angeli family began to reconstruct the Holy Family’s house when a Muslim army won a key battle in 1187 near Nazareth, forcing all the Europeans to flee. The Angelis disassembled stones of the Holy Family’s house and shipped them to Italy by way of modern-day Croatia. The stones were ultimately reconstructed in 1294–95 in their present location in Loreto, where the labors of the Angelis in bringing the stones by ship turned into the legend that “angels” had scooped up the home in Nazareth and transported it through the air to Loreto. In the succeeding centuries, the small stone house was enclosed within an elaborate marble structure within an ornate papal basilica, which became one of the most visited Marian shrines in the world.

    Our Lady of Loreto is the title of the statue of the blackened Virgin found in the Holy House. By the 1600s, a beautiful “Litany of Loreto” enumerating Mary’s biblically rich and theologically evocative titles became a popular Catholic devotion. In October 2019, Pope Francis went on pilgrimage to Loreto and announced that December 10 would henceforward be the Optional Memorial of Our Lady of Loreto on the Church’s universal calendar. The formal decree instituting the change states that the new feast "will help all people, especially families, youth and religious to imitate the virtues of the perfect disciple of the Gospel, the Virgin Mother, who, in conceiving the head of the church also accepted us as her own."

    The unwrapped gift of the Virgin Mary conceived the Lord amid her domestic concerns in the privacy of her family home in an insignificant hamlet. God did not spare Mary the demands He imposes on every human soul. The Christian God complicated Mary’s life just as He complicates every life. God is not an electric blanket or a pacifier. In satisfying His demands, we find ourselves; in imposing demands on ourselves, we find fulfillment. For the Christian, the goal of life is not happiness but meaning. And meaning is found by acquiring virtues, by attaining holy goals, by maturing through adversity, and by self-knowledge gained through prayer, among many other pathways. The dysfunctions of modernity are often the results of fools’ errands, of the search for deep meaning in hobbies, activities, clubs, sports, and occupations that, though worthy in themselves, are simply incapable of satisfying the most secret longings of the human soul. It is common to ask a pregnant woman, “What are you expecting?” Mary in the silence of her holy house was expecting the Savior, but she kept this immense secret locked inside the chamber of her heart. Perhaps Mary might ask us, with mirth, when we hopefully see her crowned in heaven, surrounded by a constellation of saints, “What were you expecting?” For the Catholic, heaven will be an intensification of what we already know.

    Our Lady of Loreto, we ask your intercession to intercede on behalf of all who have recourse to you. Grant us the grace to respond generously to all of God’s invitations to holiness, though they may disrupt our domestic duties and life’s plans.
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    6 分
  • December 9: Saint Juan Diego, Hermit

    December 9: Saint Juan Diego, Hermit
    2023/12/09
    December 9: Saint Juan Diego, Hermit
    1474–1548
    Optional Memorial; Liturgical color: white
    Patron Saint of indigenous people

    Mary said to Juan: "Am I not here, I who am your mother?"

    Good things happen to those who go to daily Mass. A very good thing happened to today’s saint on his long trek to daily Mass, something so extraordinary that it permanently altered a continent. Juan Diego Cuauhtlatoatzin (the “Talking Eagle”) was born near present-day Mexico City in the pre-Colombian Aztec Empire, though he belonged to the Chichimec, not the Aztec, people. At the age of fifty, Juan received baptism from a Franciscan priest, about five years after those path-breaking missionaries had first walked barefoot from coastal Veracruz into the Aztec heartland. Juan must have quickly fell in love with his newfound faith, because he visited God as one visits a sturdy friend, more than just once a week.

    On Saturday, December 9, 1531, Juan was walking to Mass and crossed over a small hill called Tepeyac. A mysterious woman appeared to him speaking Nahuatl, the local language. The woman quickly identified herself as the “Ever-Virgin Holy Mary, Mother of the true God” and asked Juan to approach the Bishop to petition that a shrine be built in her honor on that very hill. So the humble Juan went and knocked on the door of one of the most powerful men in the new Spanish dominion. The Bishop was solicitous but cautious and requested a sign to buttress Juan’s credibility and his request. A series of events then transpired which culminated on Tuesday, December 12. On that day, Juan presented the Bishop with flowers, carefully cradled in his poncho, which Mary had directed him to collect. When Juan unfurled his poncho in the Bishop’s presence, everyone saw then what everyone sees now in the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City—the young, pregnant Mary of Tepeyac emblazoned, in full color, on Juan’s coarse poncho.

    An early document holds that, after 1531, Juan Diego, whose wife had died by then, spent the rest of his days living the life of a hermit near the chapel on Tepeyac housing the miraculous image. Juan likely welcomed the first waves of pilgrims who visited the primitive shrine to pay homage to Our Lady of Guadalupe. It is difficult to imagine anyone returning to his or her everyday existence after seeing, hearing, and conversing with God, Mary, or a saint. Some experiences are “before” and “after” events, their profundity divides life into halves or portions: a divorce, a dreadful medical diagnosis,  a financial collapse, a child’s death, a crippling accident, or, on the positive side and much more rarely, a divine locution, an apparition, or an unmistakable spiritual intervention, all divert the straight line of a life’s graph.

    The days between December 9 and the vigil of December 12 are a kind of Mexican Triduum, when that nation celebrates founding events which have nothing to do with legal documents. Nation-building requires more than just a constitution or the winning of a key battle. Building an enduring people requires a shared language, a common history, an undivided religious outlook, and a unity of cultural expression. If there is a source of Mexican unity, it is found in the vision of the humble servant Saint Juan Diego. Millions of pilgrims endlessly process, day after day, year after year, century after century, before the miraculous image in the most visited Marian shrine in the world. These citizens don’t go to Mexico’s national archives to search for words on a faded parchment, but to a shrine to gaze in wonder at a young woman imprinted vividly on rough cactus fibers. The faithful arrive on pilgrimage, often on foot, to bow their heads, to light a candle, and to pray before the permanent miracle that is a simple Indian’s gift to the Church. They come to visit a person, not an idea, because a person can absorb our love and love us back.

    Saint Juan Diego, we ask your humble intercession in heaven to assist all those who doubt the power of God and His saints. May your example of fidelity and service inspire us to holiness as much as your miraculous tilma.
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    6 分
  • December 8: The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

    December 8: The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    2024/12/07
    December 8: The Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary
    c. 15 B.C.
    Solemnity; Liturgical Color: White
    Patroness of Brazil, Korea, Philippines, Spain, and the United States

    Only one person ever chose His own mother

    The Ark of the Covenant was a sumptuously adorned chest housing the Jews’ most sacred objects: the tablets of the Ten Commandments, a pot of manna, and Aaron’s staff. Before its disappearance, the Ark was the centerpiece of the Holy of Holies, the mysterious chamber lying behind the curtain in Jerusalem’s Temple. Only the high priest dared to enter this sacred chamber. Mary is the Ark of the New Covenant. She is not a gold-encrusted trunk filled with artifacts but the flesh-and-blood person whose womb nurtured Jesus Christ. Today’s feast celebrates Mary’s own stainless conception, the remote preparation that formed her into that vessel of honor where the living Word first sprang to life. God prepared Mary from her first instant for this great purpose—to be the perfect edifice to carry, birth, and mother the Son of God, one to whom any taint of sin would be repugnant.

    Mary was conceived in the natural human way by her parents, Joachim and Anne. But God had a plan and was eager to give Mary an utterly unique gift that could not wait until her childhood or adolescence to be unwrapped. The gift of the Immaculate Conception was given contemporaneously with Mary’s microscopic sparking to life. If we had the chance to choose our own mother, we would not select a selfish, disordered, mean, and sinful woman. We would lovingly accept such a mother but not deliberately choose her. God could choose His own mother, though, and so logically chose a perfect one. As the author of creation, He crafted a pristine soul incapable of sin or moral disorder. Alone among all creation, Mary reaped the spiritual rewards of her Son’s resurrection before its historical occurrence, saving her from death and bodily corruption, sin’s cruelest punishments. Mary was simply flooded with God’s grace in her very origins and has never ceased to be united with Him after that.

    When she is just a fetus, a woman has as many eggs as she will ever have. The ovaries of a female fetus are saturated with eggs whose numbers will only decrease over time. So half of the genetic material necessary to form an embryo has waited, latent, inside of that embryo’s mother since the time that mother was herself in utero. The unbroken chain of human life is unfathomably beautiful. Grandmother, mother, and grandchild are, in a certain sense, bound together, united, in every woman expecting a daughter. When Mary was conceived in the womb of Saint Anne, then, the DNA of Jesus of Nazareth was already present in the embryonic Mary. This is a biological fact, not a statement of faith. At the Annunciation, when Mary miraculously conceived Jesus by the power of the Holy Spirit, that “Lord and Giver of Life”spoke through the words of the Archangel Gabriel and sparked Christ to first stir with humanity deep inside the body where His genes had long been waiting.

    Everything new is experienced as a miracle—a new dawn, a new baby, a new house, a new marriage. The Immaculate Conception is celebrated with the greatest solemnity around the world because it commemorates a new, pivotal moment. In Saint Anne, God was readying the fairest flower of Israel, her most modest daughter and humble rose, for Himself. Mary’s virtues of humility and obedience would straighten the path twisted by Eve’s sins of pride and disobedience. By God’s own choice, Mary alone would escape the grip of Adam’s sin. She would be the New Eve, that Spiritual Vessel, House of Gold, and Morning Star whose Immaculate Conception was the first flicker of a greater Light to come.

    Mary of the Immaculate Conception, may your purity, virtue, and obedience be a perennial model for all the faithful of the humble and narrow pathways which alone lead to God. Be at our side to encourage and inspire us as we try to be ever nearer to your Son, Jesus.
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    6 分
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