SAINT OF THE DAY FEBRUARY 25: BLESSED SEBASTIÁN OF APARICIO

🕊 🙏 SAINT OF THE DAY 💕 🕊

🙏🏻 Blessed Sebastian of Aparicio 🙏🏻

(Feast Day: Feb. 25,)

Pray for us!

Sebastian de Aparicio y del Pardo was a Spanish colonist in Mexico shortly after its conquest by Spain, who after a lifetime as a rancher and road builder entered the Order of Friars Minor as a lay brother. Source:Wikipedia

Born: January 20, 1502, A Gudiña, Spain

Died: February 25, 1600, Puebla, Mexico

Feast: 25 February

Beatified: 17 May 1789 by Pope Pius VI

Blessed Sebastian of Aparicio’s Story

Sebastian’s roads and bridges connected many distant places. His final bridge-building was to help men and women recognize their God-given dignity and destiny.

Sebastian’s parents were Spanish peasants. At the age of 31, he sailed to Mexico, where he began working in the fields. Eventually he built roads to facilitate agricultural trading and other commerce. His 466-mile road from Mexico City to Zacatecas took 10 years to build and required careful negotiations with the indigenous peoples along the way.

In time Sebastian was a wealthy farmer and rancher. At the age of 60, he entered a virginal marriage. His wife’s motivation may have been a large inheritance; his was to provide a respectable life for a girl without even a modest marriage dowry. When his first wife died, he entered another virginal marriage for the same reason; his second wife also died young.

At the age of 72, Sebastian distributed his goods among the poor and entered the Franciscans as a brother. Assigned to the large (100-member) friary at Puebla de los Angeles south of Mexico City, Sebastian went out collecting alms for the friars for the next 25 years. His charity to all earned him the nickname “Angel of Mexico.”

Sebastian was beatified in 1787 and is known as a patron of travelers.

PRAYER FOR DELIVERANCE FROM EVERY KIND OF WAR

We pray for deliverance from every kind of war.

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PRAYER FOR DELIVERANCE FROM EVIL

Immaculate Heart! Help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today, and whose immeasurable effects already weigh down upon our modern world and seem to block the paths towards the future!

From famine and war, deliver us. From nuclear war, from incalculable self-destruction, from every kind of war, deliver us. From sins against the life of man from its very beginning, deliver us. From hatred and from the demeaning of the dignity of the children of God, deliver us. From every kind of injustice in the life of society, both national and international, deliver us. From readiness to trample on the commandments of God, deliver us. From attempts to stifle in human hearts the very truth of God, deliver us. From the loss of awareness of good and evil, deliver us. From sins against the Holy Spirit, deliver us, deliver us.

Accept, O Mother of Christ, this cry laden with the sufferings of all individual human beings, laden with the sufferings of whole societies. Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit to conquer all sin: individual sin and the “sin of the world,” sin in all its manifestations. Let there be revealed, once more, in the history of the world the infinite saving power of the Redemption: the power of merciful Love! May it put a stop to evil! May it transform consciences! May your Immaculate Heart reveal for all the light of Hope!

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Ref.: Saint John Paul II, Consecration of all Individuals and Peoples of the World to the Immaculate Heart of Mary, 1984

🙏 Evening Prayer 🙏

Evening Prayer

Into thy hands, Mary, I commend my body and my soul, I ask thee to provide for them and to protect them. I ask thee to protect them from the evil one. I ask thee enlighten my mind, strengthen my will, and refrain my appetites by grace. Our Lady and St. Michael, call down from Heaven the legions of angels under your command to protect me; I ask of thee all the things I ask of my Guardian Angel. My Guardian angel, under thy intellectual and volitional protection I place my body. I ask thee to illumine my mind and refrain my appetites. I ask thee to strengthen my cogitative power, my memory and my imagination. Help me to remember the things I should and not remember the things I should not. Help me to associate the things I should and not to associate the things I should not. Give me good clear images in my imagination. I ask thee to drive away all the demons that might affect me while I sleep (or throughout the course of the day). (Help me to sleep and, if thou should deem it prudent, direct my dreams. Help me to arise refreshed). Amen.

SAINT OF THE DAY St. Peter Damian (Feast Day: Feb.21)

SAINT OF THE DAY

St. Peter Damian

(Feast Day: Feb.21,)

Pray for us!

Saint Peter Damian’s Story

Maybe because he was orphaned and had been treated shabbily by one of his brothers, Peter Damian was very good to the poor. It was the ordinary thing for him to have a poor person or two with him at table and he liked to minister personally to their needs.

Peter escaped poverty and the neglect of his own brother when his other brother, who was archpriest of Ravenna, took him under his wing. His brother sent him to good schools and Peter became a professor.

Already in those days, Peter was very strict with himself. He wore a hair shirt under his clothes, fasted rigorously and spent many hours in prayer. Soon, he decided to leave his teaching and give himself completely to prayer with the Benedictines of the reform of Saint Romuald at Fonte Avellana. They lived two monks to a hermitage. Peter was so eager to pray and slept so little that he soon suffered from severe insomnia. He found he had to use some prudence in taking care of himself. When he was not praying, he studied the Bible.

The abbot commanded that when he died Peter should succeed him. Abbot Peter founded five other hermitages. He encouraged his brothers in a life of prayer and solitude and wanted nothing more for himself. The Holy See periodically called on him, however, to be a peacemaker or troubleshooter, between two abbeys in dispute or a cleric or government official in some disagreement with Rome.

Finally, Pope Stephen IX made Peter the cardinal-bishop of Ostia. He worked hard to wipe out simony—the buying of church offices–and encouraged his priests to observe celibacy and urged even the diocesan clergy to live together and maintain scheduled prayer and religious observance. He wished to restore primitive discipline among religious and priests, warning against needless travel, violations of poverty, and too comfortable living. He even wrote to the bishop of Besancon complaining that the canons there sat down when they were singing the psalms in the Divine Office.

He wrote many letters. Some 170 are extant. We also have 53 of his sermons and seven lives, or biographies, that he wrote. He preferred examples and stories rather than theory in his writings. The liturgical offices he wrote are evidence of his talent as a stylist in Latin.

He asked often to be allowed to retire as cardinal-bishop of Ostia, and finally Pope Alexander II consented. Peter was happy to become once again just a monk, but he was still called to serve as a papal legate. When returning from such an assignment in Ravenna, he was overcome by a fever. With the monks gathered around him saying the Divine Office, he died on February 22, 1072.

In 1828, he was declared a Doctor of the Church.

SAINT OF THE DAY St. Jacenta and Francisco Marto (Feast Day: February 20)

 

SAINT OF THE DAY

St. Jacenta and Francisco Marto

(Feast Day: February 20,)

Pray for us!

Saints Jacinta and Francisco

Marto’s Story

Between May 13 and October 13, 1917, three Portuguese shepherd children from Aljustrel, received apparitions of Our Lady at Cova da Iria, near Fátima, a city 110 miles north of Lisbon. At that time, Europe was involved in an extremely bloody war. Portugal itself was in political turmoil, having overthrown its monarchy in 1910; the government disbanded religious organizations soon after.

At the first appearance, Mary asked the children to return to that spot on the thirteenth of each month for the next six months. She also asked them to learn to read and write and to pray the rosary “to obtain peace for the world and the end of the war.” They were to pray for sinners and for the conversion of Russia, which had recently overthrown Czar Nicholas II and was soon to fall under communism. Up to 90,000 people gathered for Mary’s final apparition on October 13, 1917.

Less than two years later, Francisco died of influenza in his family home. He was buried in the parish cemetery and then re-buried in the Fátima basilica in 1952. Jacinta died of influenza in Lisbon in 1920, offering her suffering for the conversion of sinners, peace in the world, and the Holy Father. She was re-buried in the Fátima basilica in 1951. Their cousin Lúcia dos Santos, became a Carmelite nun and was still living when Jacinta and Francisco were beatified in 2000; she died five years later. Pope Francis canonized the younger children on his visit to Fátima to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the first apparition–May 13, 2017. The shrine of Our Lady of Fátima is visited by up to 20 million people a year.

WHY DO WE HAVE TO GO TO MASS

WHY GO TO MASS ?

1. At the time of your death, your greatest comfort will be the Masses that during your life you attended with fervor and devotion.

2. Every Mass you attended will accompany you in divine court and advocate for you to attain forgiveness.

3. With each Mass you can lessen the temporary punishment you owe for your sins, in proportion to the fervor with which you hear it.

4. With devoted attendance for the Holy Mass, pay the highest homage to the Holy Humanity of Our Lord..

5. The well-heard Holy Mass replaces your many neglects and omissions.

6. By the well-heard Holy Mass you are forgiven all the venomous sins you are determined to avoid, and many others you don't even remember.

7. Because of her also the devil loses dominion over you.

8. You offer ultimate consolation to the blessed souls of Purgatory.

9. You get blessings in your business and temporary affairs.

10. A Mass heard while you live will benefit you much more than many can offer for you after death.

11. You spare yourself from many dangers and misfortunes which you might fall into if not for the Holy Mass.

12. Also remember that it shortens your Purgatory.

13. With every Mass you will increase your degrees of glory in Heaven. In it you receive the blessing of the priest, which God ratifies in heaven.

14. To the one who hears Mass every day, God will deliver him from a tragic death, and the guardian Angel will keep in mind the steps he takes to go to Mass, and God will reward them in his death.

15. During Mass you kneel in the midst of a crowd of angels invisibly attending the Holy Sacrifice with utmost reverence.

16. When we hear mass in honor of a particular Saint, giving thanks to God for the favors bestowed on that Saint, we cannot help but earn his protection and special love, for the honor, joy and happiness that our good work follows him.

17. Every day we hear Mass, it would be good if, besides the other intentions, we had the one to honor the Saint of the day.

18. The Mass is the greatest gift that can be offered to the Lord for souls, to take them out of purgatory, to set them free from their sorrows, and to bring them to enjoy glory. – Saint Bernard of the Seine.

19. Whoever hears Mass, prays, gives alms, or prays for the souls of the Purgatory, works for his own benefit. – Saint Augustine.

20. For every Mass celebrated or heard with devotion, many souls leave Purgatory, and those who remain there are lessened by the sorrows they suffer. – Saint Gregory the Great, Pope.

21. During the celebration of the Mass, the sorrows of the souls are suspended for those who pray and work the priest, and especially for those for whom the Mass is offered. –St. Gregory the Great.

22. You can also earn Plenary Indulgence every Monday of the year by offering the Holy Mass and Communion in suffrage of the blessed souls of Purgatory. For the believers who can't hear Mass on Monday it's worth listening to it on Sunday with that intention.

23. It is pleaded that they apply all the indulgences in suffering of the Souls of Purgatory, for God our Lord, and they will reward you this charity.

24. The Holy Mass is the renewal of the Sacrifice of Calvary, the greatest act of worship to the Holy Trinity. That's why it's obligatory to listen to it every Sunday and holidays to save.

 

A BEAUTIFUL ACT OF CONTRITION

A BEAUTIFUL ACT OF CONTRITION

Forgive me my sins, O Lord, forgive me my sins; the sins of my youth, the sins of my age, the sins of my soul, the sins of my body; my idle sins, my serious voluntary sins; the sins I know, the sins I do not know; the sins I have concealed for so long, and which are now hidden from my memory.

I am truly sorry for every sin, mortal and venial, for all the sins of my childhood up to the present hour.

I know my sins have wounded Thy Tender Heart, O My Savior, let me be freed from the bonds of evil through the most bitter Passion of My Redeemer.

Amen.

O My Jesus, forget and forgive what I have been.

Amen.

PRAYER OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNION

PRAYER OF SPIRITUAL COMMUNION

My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the most Blessed Sacrament. I love You above all things and I desire to receive You into my soul. Since I cannot now receive You sacramentally, come at least spiritually into my heart. I embrace You as if You were already there, and unite myself wholly to You. Never permit me to be separated from You. Amen.

Saint of the Day: Saint Valentine

This is what the Bible says about Valentine:

Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth.

Saint Valentine was a 3rd-century Roman saint, commemorated in Western Christianity on February 14 and in Eastern Orthodoxy on July 6. From the High Middle Ages, his Saints' Day has been associated with a tradition of courtly love. He is also a patron saint of Terni, epilepsy and beekeepers. - Wikipedia

Born: 175 AD, Terni, Italy

Died: February 14, 269 AD, Rome, Italy

Full name: Valentine of Terni

Feast: February 14 (Catholic, Anglican and Lutheran Churches), July 6 and July 30 (Eastern Orthodox)

Place of burial: Basilica di San Valentino, Terni, Italy

💞🙏 St.Valentine was a priest in Rome who was ordered beaten, stoned and beheaded by the emperor Claudius II for helping Christian couples to wed at a time when Roman law forbade young people from marrying.

The most famous miracle attributed to Saint Valentine involved the farewell note that he sent to Julia. Believers say that God miraculously cured Julia of her blindness so that she could personally read Valentine's note, rather than just have someone else read it to her.

During his time in jail, Valentine fell in love with his jailer's daughter, who visited him in prison. Before he was put to death, Valentine sent a letter to the girl signed “from Your Valentine”, the basic expression we still use every year during this holiday.

 Valentine was executed on February 14, 270 AD.Valentine refused to deny Christ before the emperor Claudius II Gothicus (214-270) and was executed outside the Flaminian Gate as a result. His martyrdom on 14 February became his Saints' Day, which has been observed as the Feast of Saint Valentine (Saint Valentine's Day).

St. Valentine gave his life so that young couples could be bonded together in holy matrimony. They may have killed the man, but not his spirit. Even centuries after his death, the story of Valentine’s self-sacrificing commitment to love was legendary in Rome. Eventually, he was granted sainthood and the Catholic Church decided to create a feast in his honor. They picked February 14 as the day of celebration because of the ancient belief that birds (particularly lovebirds, but also owls and doves) began to mate on that very day.

Valentine is also the patron saint of beekeepers—charged with ensuring the sweetness of honey and the protection of beekeepers among many other things. Saints are certainly expected to keep busy in the afterlife. Their holy duties include interceding in earthly affairs and entertaining petitions from living souls.

♥ Happy St Valentine's Day! 💕

The Beatitudes of Jesus

The Beatitudes are sayings attributed to Jesus, and in particular eight blessings recounted by Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew, and four in the Sermon on the Plain in the Gospel of Luke, followed by four woes which mirror the blessings.[1] Each is a proverb-like proclamation, without narrative. - Wikipedia

The Beatitudes are the teachings of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:1-10). Jesus teaches us that if we live according to the Beatitudes, we will live a happy Christian life. The Beatitudes fulfill God’s promises made to Abraham and his descendants and describe the rewards that will be ours as loyal followers of Christ.

THE BEATITUDES

Now when he saw the crowds, he went up on a mountainside and sat down. His disciples came to Him, 2and He began to teach them, saying:

3Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

4Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.

5Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.

6Blessed are those who hunger and thirst after righteousness,

for they will be filled.

7Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy.

8Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.

9Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called the sons of God.

10Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

11Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. 12Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Jesus proclaims the poor, the hungry, the suffering and the persecuted blessed, and he admonishes those who are rich, satisfied, who laugh and are praised by the people. The reason behind this paradoxical beatitude lies in the fact that God is close to those who suffer, and intercedes to free them from their bondage. Jesus sees this; he already sees the beatitude beyond its negative reality. And likewise, the “woe to you” addressed to those who are doing well today, has the purpose of “waking” them from the dangerous deceit of egotism, and opening them up to the logic of love, while they still have the time to do so. The page from today’s Gospel thus invites us to reflect on the profound sense of having faith (Pope Francis)