Donna Cori Gibson - "Lady in Blue"

Father Rutler: The Cause of Our Joy

A weekly column by Father George Rutler.

Saint Robert Bellarmine (1542-1621) was a man of many parts: scholar, mystic, poet, traveler, diplomat, debater, cardinal and even something of a scientist, as is evident in his exchanges with Galileo. He had the fine title of Professor of Controversial Theology at the Roman College, but that is a poor translation of what is known as “apologetics,” which means explaining something to doubters. His correspondence with the English king, James I, is a good example of how to do this and is a model for explaining the mystery of the Catholic Church to those in our worldly culture who imagine the Church to be just a human institution, and a regressive one at that.

The saint lists some fifteen “marks” of the Church’s supernatural character. One of these is the “unhappy end” of those who fight against her. History is littered with the detritus of figures great and small who took arms, physical and moral, against the Church. Some of the most notorious are embalmed and, ironically, on display in the lands they ruined, while the tomb of Christ is empty. Bellarmine did not gloat over this. His was not the happiness which Ambrose Bierce defined in his Devil's Dictionary of 1911 as “an agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.” The saint spent his life trying to save the Church's enemies from an unhappy end. He wanted others to share in that other mark of the Church: the “temporal peace and earthly happiness of those who live by the Church’s teaching and defend her interests.” In his method of explaining the Church, Bellarmine sounds like Blessed Teresa of Calcutta who said, “People are often unreasonable and self-centered. Forgive them anyway. If you find happiness, people may be jealous. Be happy anyway.”

In the “pursuit of happiness” — which even our Declaration of Independence names as a natural right — the Church is not a casual option. Christ is the source and goal of true happiness. Pope Francis recently said, “No one comes to Christ without the Church.” Christ is the Bridegroom, and the Church is his Bride. To want Christ without the Church is like the corrupting conceit of cohabitation before marriage. Just as bulimia is an eating disorder, so conjugal life outside matrimony is a love disorder. The joy promised by our Lord is through, and not despite, full union with the Church which is his body.

The month of May especially celebrates Christ's mother as the Mother of the Church, a title used by Saint Ambrose and conferred officially by the Second Vatican Council. As Blessed John Paul II preached: “Mary embraces each and every one in the Church, and embraces each and every one through the Church.” All the sorrows of a perplexed world turn to joy through the mystery of the Church for the same reason hers did: “The Lord has risen as he promised.”

David Wigram - Ave Maria - Bach / Gounod

'On This Day, O Beautiful Mother'

Lovely Lady dressed in blue -------
Teach me how to pray!
God was just your little boy,
Tell me what to say!

 

Did you lift Him up, sometimes,
Gently on your knee?
Did you sing to Him the way
Mother does to me?

 

Did you hold His hand at night?
Did you ever try
Telling stories of the world?
O! And did He cry?

 

Do you really think He cares
If I tell Him things -------
Little things that happen? And
Do the Angels' wings

 

Make a noise? And can He hear
Me if I speak low?
Does He understand me now?
Tell me -------for you know.

 

Lovely Lady dressed in blue -------
Teach me how to pray!
God was just your little boy,
And you know the way.

Mary Dixon Thayer who wrote more than one poem for Our Lady, is the author.
This prayer-poem was popularized in the 1950s by Archbishop Fulton Sheen.

Elvis Presley - Miracle of the Rosary

In this month dedicated to Our Lady and the Most Holy Rosary, an unlikely and beautiful tribute:

From CatholicCulture.org

The month of October is dedicated to the Holy Rosary. According to an account by fifteenth-century Dominican, Alan de la Roch, Mary appeared to St. Dominic in 1206 after he had been praying and doing severe penances because of his lack of success in combating the Albigensian heresy. Mary praised him for his valiant fight against the heretics and then gave him the Rosary as a mighty weapon, explained its uses and efficacy, and told him to preach it to others.

"Since the prayers of the Rosary come from such excellent sources — from Our Lord Himself, from inspired Scripture, and from the Church — it is not surprising that the Rosary is so dear to our Blessed Mother and so powerful with heaven.

"If we consider the power of the Rosary as seen in its effects, we find a great abundance of proofs of its wonderful value. Many are the favors granted to private individuals through its devout recitation: there are few devoted users of the Rosary who cannot testify to experiencing its power in their own lives. If we turn to history, we see many great triumphs of the Rosary. Early tradition attributes the defeat of the Albigensians at the Battle of Muret in 1213 to the Rosary. But even those who do not accept this tradition will admit that St. Pius V attributed the great defeat of the Turkish fleet on the first Sunday of October, 1571, to the fact that at the same time the Rosary confraternities at Rome and elsewhere were holding their processions. Accordingly, he ordered a commemoration of the Rosary to be made on that day. Two years later, Gregory XIII allowed the celebration of a feast of the Rosary in churches having an altar dedicated to the Rosary. In 1671, Clement X extended the feast to all Spain. A second great victory over the Turks, who once, like the Russians, threatened the ruin of Christian civilization, occurred on August 5, 1716, when Prince Eugene defeated them at Peterwardein in Hungary. Thereupon Clement XI extended the feast of the Rosary to the whole Church.

"Today, when dangers far greater than those of the ancient Turks threaten not only Christianity but all civilization, we are urged by our Blessed Mother to turn again to the Rosary for help. If men in sufficient numbers do this, and at the same time carry out the other conditions that she has laid down, we have the greater reason for confidence that we will be delivered from our dangers." -- Mary in our Life by Fr. William G. Most

The Rosary and the Liturgical Year

The Rosary had its origin in the liturgical mentality of former ages. Even at the present time it is called "Mary's Psalter." There still are Catholics who consider the 150 Hail Marys a substitute for the 150 psalms for those persons who neither have the time, the education, nor the opportunity to pray the Hours of the Divine Office. Thus "Mary's Psalter" is a shortened, simplified "breviary" — alongside the common Hour-prayer of the Church. — The Church's Year of Grace, Dr. Pius Parsch

The Rosary is Christocentric setting forth the entire life of Jesus Christ, the passion, death, resurrection and glory. Of course, the Rosary honors and contemplates Mary too, and rightly so, for the same reason that the Liturgical Year does likewise: "Because of the mission she received from God, her life is most closely linked with the mysteries of Jesus Christ, and there is no one who has followed in the footsteps of the Incarnate Word more closely and with more merit than she"142 (Mediator Dei). Meditation on this cycle of Joyful, Sorrowful, Glorious and Luminous Mysteries makes the Rosary not only "a breviary or summary of the Gospel and of Christian life,"(Ingravescentibus malis) but also a compendium of the Liturgical Year. Therewith the Rosary stands revealed as a dynamic teacher and nurturer of Christian faith, morality, and spiritual perfection, fostering in various ways faith, hope, charity, and the other virtues, and mediating special graces, all to the end that we may become more and more like unto Christ. — Mariology, Juniper B. Carol, O.F.M.

"O Sanctissima"

O Sanctissima, O Piissima
Dulcis Virgo Maria
Mater amata, In te temerata
Ora, Ora Pro Nobis

May, The Month of Mary

Hail, holy Mother, thou

who didst bring forth the
King who rules heaven
and earth forever and ever.

Czarna Madonna