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Today’s ✠Challoner Meditation
“… as the Botafumeiro [in Compostela] filled with incense raises the pilgrims prayers to heaven… so can you seek the apostle’s powerful intercession in your pilgrimage toward heaven …”
Carissimi: Today’s Mass; St James the Greater
Worn out by a constant succession of labours, and weakened by the austerities of his life, Alphonsus withdrew with some of the companions of his apostolate, for the sake of a little rest, into a solitary spot called Santa Maria dei Monti, near Scala. This was in the month of May in the year 1731. The inhabitants of the place were poor peasants and shepherds, whose knowledge of religion was very small, and whose spiritual destitution was extreme. Alphonsus was moved with pity on learning their sad state
To be in tribulation in this world is a great sign of predestination. “To be afflicted here on earth,” says St. Gregory, “belongs to the elect for whom is reserved the beatitude of eternity.” Hence we find in the Lives of the Saints that all, without exception, had been loaded with crosses.
How pleasing it is to Jesus Christ that we should often remember His Passion, and the shameful death He suffered for us, can be well undersood from His having instituted the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar for this very end, that there might ever dwell in us the lively memory of the love He bore to us in sacrificing Himself on the Cross for our salvation.
Today’s ✠Challoner Meditation
The readings and prayers for today’s Traditional Latin Mass…
The manner of life which Alphonsus thenceforth adopted, during the two years he lived at Naples as a secular priest and as a member of the Congregation of the Propaganda in Naples, is described in glowing terms in the Bull of his canonization.
When a soul that loves God finds herself in this state of darkness, uncertainty, and fear, she must not lose courage; and neither must he who directs her become alarmed. Those sensual movements, those temptations against Faith, those feelings of distrust, and those attacks which urge her to hate Almighty God, are fears, are tortures of the soul, are efforts of the enemy; but they are not voluntary, and therefore they are not sins.