Tuesday 19 October 2021
Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, priests, and their Companions, Martyrs
on Tuesday of week 29 in Ordinary Time
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
Saints John de Brébeuf and Isaac Jogues, priests, and their Companions, Martyrs
An illustration dated 1740. Canadian National Archives.
The spiritual diaries of St John de Brébeuf
May I die only for you, Jesus, who willingly died for me
For two days now I have experienced a great desire to be a martyr and to endure all the torments the martyrs suffered.
Jesus, my Lord and Saviour, what can I give you in return for all the favours you have first conferred on me? I will take from your hand the cup of your sufferings and call on your name. I vow before your eternal Father and the Holy Spirit, before your most holy Mother and her most chaste spouse, before the angels, apostles and martyrs, before my blessed fathers Saint Ignatius and Saint Francis Xavier – in truth I vow to you, Jesus my Saviour, that as far as I have the strength I will never fail to accept the grace of martyrdom, if some day you in your infinite mercy should offer it to me, your most unworthy servant.
I bind myself in this way so that for the rest of my life I will have neither permission nor freedom to refuse opportunities of dying and shedding my blood for you, unless at a particular juncture I should consider it more suitable for your glory to act otherwise at that time. Further, I bind myself to this so that, on receiving the blow of death, I shall accept it from your hands with the fullest delight and joy of spirit. For this reason, my beloved Jesus, and because of the surging joy which moves me, here and now I offer my blood and body and life. May I die only for you, if you will grant me this grace, since you willingly died for me. Let me so live that you may grant me the gift of such a happy death. In this way, my God and Saviour, I will take from your hand the cup of your sufferings and call on your name: Jesus, Jesus, Jesus!
My God, it grieves me greatly that you are not known, that in this savage wilderness all have not been converted to you, that sin has not been driven from it. My God, even if all the brutal tortures which prisoners in this region must endure should fall on me, I offer myself most willingly to them and I alone shall suffer them all.
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The ferial reading for today:
Tuesday of week 29 in Ordinary Time
A letter to Proba by St Augustine
On the Lord's Prayer
We need to use words so that we may remind ourselves to consider carefully what we are asking, not so that we may think we can instruct the Lord or prevail on him.
Thus, when we say: Hallowed be your name, we are reminding ourselves to desire that his name, which in fact is always holy, should also be considered holy among men. I mean that it should not be held in contempt. But this is a help for men, not for God.
And as for our saying: Your kingdom come, it will surely come whether we will it or not. But we are stirring up our desires for the kingdom so that it can come to us and we can deserve to reign there.
When we say: Your will be done on earth as it is in heaven, we are asking him to make us obedient so that his will may be done in us as it is done in heaven by his angels.
When we say: Give us this day our daily bread, in saying this day we mean “in this world.” Here we ask for a sufficiency by specifying the most important part of it; that is, we use the word “bread” to stand for everything. Or else we are asking for the sacrament of the faithful, which is necessary in this world, not to gain temporal happiness but to gain the happiness that is everlasting.
When we say: Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, we are reminding ourselves of what we must ask and what we must do in order to be worthy in turn to receive.
When we say: Lead us not into temptation, we are reminding ourselves to ask that his help may not depart from us; otherwise we could be seduced and consent to some temptation, or despair and yield to it.
When we say: Deliver us from evil, we are reminding ourselves to reflect on the fact that we do not yet enjoy the state of blessedness in which we shall suffer no evil. This is the final petition contained in the Lord’s Prayer, and it has a wide application. In this petition the Christian can utter his cries of sorrow, in it he can shed his tears, and through it he can begin, continue and conclude his prayer, whatever the distress in which he finds himself. Yes, it was very appropriate that all these truths should be entrusted to us to remember in these very words.
Whatever be the other words we may prefer to say (words which the one praying chooses so that his disposition may become clearer to himself or which he simply adopts so that his disposition may be intensified), we say nothing that is not contained in the Lord’s Prayer, provided of course we are praying in a correct and proper way. But if anyone says something which is incompatible with this prayer of the Gospel, he is praying in the flesh, even if he is not praying sinfully. And yet I do not know how this could be termed anything but sinful, since those who are born again through the Spirit ought to pray only in the Spirit.
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In other parts of the world and other calendars:
Saint Philip Howard, Martyr
A sermon of Ronald Knox
The Prisoner of the Lord
We shall be able to find, in Philip Howard, a model of detachment. He was a man born to enjoy the ease and plenty of an age in which ease and plenty seemed, as never before, within man’s reach, yet sentenced by his own conscience to live the life of a prisoner, within sight and sound of all the amenities he loved. He had, unquestionably, the chance of buying back his liberty at the price of denying his faith; if he would not consent to do that, he was not even to be allowed sight of his wife and children – a harder sacrifice than even St Thomas More had been called upon to make. But Philip Howard, I think, never stopped to ask himself the question, “What have I done to deserve all this?” He was the prisoner of the Lord; in all the circumstances which preyed upon his health and restricted his liberties, he saw nothing but the conditions of an honourable confinement. Cannot we learn from him to think of ourselves as Christ’s prisoners, ready to offer him, in small things or in great, whatever sacrifice is demanded of us by the bestowal of that honourable title?
And I think we shall be able to find in Philip Howard a model of self-effacement. Here was a man who might have been a candidate, and indeed was, when he began life, a candidate for some of the highest prizes the world had to offer; and that in an age of unexampled splendour. When he became a Catholic, and as a Catholic had to spend the last ten years of his life in gaol, he put those brilliant hopes behind him. Can we not imagine what a temptation it must have been to him to fret and to chafe, when he found himself so cut off from all the life of his time? To be unable to assert himself, to make his influence felt, to strike a blow for the causes he had at heart – what an ignominious sense of frustration it must have given him! When they wanted to trump up a charge of high treason against him, what was the figment in which they took refuge? Why, that he had had Masses said for the success of the Spanish Armada! Malice itself was unable to credit him with any more active interference in the political events of his time. Can we not learn from Philip Howard to curb that self-assertiveness in us which makes us want to interfere with the running of things everywhere; to be at the head of every movement, or, if that is impossible, to be always criticising the people who are at the head of it, as if we could have done it better ourselves? Can we not learn to be content with the work, however humble its sphere may be, which God has given us to do; content to be overlooked and passed by, to have our opinion disregarded, to be left out in the cold? The prisoners of Christ, happy, if need be, on a treadmill, because that is how he wants us to serve him?
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