Ordinary Time: October 16th
Optional Memorial of St. Hedwig, religious; St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, virgin; St. Marguerite d'Youville (Canada)
MASS READINGS
October 16, 2017 (Readings on USCCB website)
COLLECT PRAYER
Grant, we pray, almighty God, that the revered intercession of Saint Hedwig may bring us heavenly aid, just as her wonderful life is an example of humility for all. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
Pour out on us, we pray, O Lord, the spirit with which you so remarkably endowed Saint Margaret Mary, so that we may come to know that love of Christ which surpasses all understanding and be utterly filled with your fullness. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
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Hedwig (1174-1243), the aunt of St. Elizabeth of Hungary, was married at an early age to Henry, Duke of Silesia. After their six children had been born, they both strove to advance in sanctity and to enrich Silesia and Poland with monasteries, hospitals, and leper asylums. When Henry died in 1238, Hedwig took the habit of the Cistercian nuns at Trebnitz (where one of her daughters was the abbess), but retained the administration of her property so that she could give personal relief to the suffering.
After a girlhood marked by painful illness and even more painful family discord, Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-1690) entered the Visitation convent of Paray-le-Monial, France, at the age of 22. She was ignorant, sickly, and clumsy, but she had great charity and humility. Our Lord chose her to spread devotion to his Sacred Heart, at a time when rebellion without (Protestantism) and heresy within (Jansenism) were doing their best to separate Catholics from their faith and their God.
Marguerite d'Youville is the first native Canadian to be elevated to sainthood. She founded the Sisters of Charity.
According to the 1962 Missal of St. John XXIII the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, the feast of St. Margaret Mary is celebrated on October 17. St. Gerard Majella, listed in the Roman Martyrology, was a native of Muro in southern Italy. He was apprenticed to a tailor before asking to be received by the Redemptorists as a lay-brother. He continued his trade in the monastery, where he soon attracted the attention of St. Alphonsus de Liguori, who shortened his novitiate. His wonderful and well authenticated life was a series of supernatural phenomena — bilocations, reading of consciences, prophecies, multiplying of food, etc. He was canonized in 1904 and is the patron of expectant mothers and unborn children.
Meditation for the Third Sunday of Easter
On the road to Emmaus: Jesus, alive and at our side
The Gospel of today’s Mass presents us with another appearance of Jesus on the evening of his Resurrection. Two disciples are making their way to the village of Emmaus, having lost all hope because Christ, in whom they had placed the whole meaning of their lives, was dead. Our Lord catches up with them, as if He too were just another traveler on the road, and walks with them without being recognized. They engage in broken conversation, as happens when people talk as they are going along. They speak about their preoccupation: what has happened in Jerusalem on the Friday evening—the death of Jesus of Nazareth. The Crucifixion of Our Lord had been a very severe test for the hopes of all those who considered themselves to be his disciples and who to some extent or another had placed their trust in him. Things had all taken place very quickly and they still hadn’t got over all they had seen with their very eyes.
These men who are returning to their home village after having celebrated the Paschal feast in Jerusalem show by the tone of their conversation their great sadness and how discouraged and disconcerted they are: We had hoped that he was the one to redeem Israel. But now they speak of Jesus as a reality belonging to the past:
Concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was a prophet mighty in deed…Notice the contrast. They say ‘who was!’…And He is there by their side. He is walking with them, in their company, trying to uncover the reason, the most intimate roots of their sadness!’Who was!’, they say. We too, if only we would examine ourselves sincerely, with an attentive examination of our sadness, our discouragement, our being a little tired of life, would find a clear link with this Gospel passage. We would discover how we spontaneously remark ‘Jesus was’, ‘Jesus said’, because we forget that, just as one the road to Emmaus, Jesus is alive and by our side at this very moment. This is a discovery which enlivens our faith and revives our hope, a finding that points to Jesus as a joy that is ever present: Jesus is, Jesus prefers, Jesus says, Jesus commands now at this very moment (A. G. Dorronsoro, God and People)
Jesus lives.
These men did know about Christ’s promise of rising on the third day. They had heard that morning the message of the women who had seen the empty tomb and the angels. Things had been sufficiently clear for them to have nourished their faith and their hope; but instead, they speak of Christ as belonging to the past, as a lost opportunity. They are a living picture of discouragement. Their minds are in darkness and their hearts are numbed.
Christ Himself—whom they did not at first recognize but whose company and conversation they accept—interprets those events for them in the light of the Scriptures. Patiently He restores in them their faith and their hope. And the two of them recover also their joy and their love: Did not our hearts burn within us, they say later, while he talked to us on the road, while he opened to us the scriptures?
It is possible that we too may sometimes meet with discouragement and lack of hope because of defects that we cannot manage to root out, or of difficulties in the apostolate or in our work that seem to be insurmountable…. On these occasions, provided we allow ourselves to be helped, Jesus will not allow us to be parted from him. Perhaps it will be in spiritual direction, once we open our souls in all sincerity, that we will come to see Our Lord again. And with him there will always come joy and the desire to begin again as soon as possible: And they rose that same hour and returned to Jerusalem. But it is essential that we allow ourselves to be helped, and that we are ready to be docile to the advice that we receive.
—Francis Fernandez, In Conversation with God, Daily Meditations Volume Two: Lent-Holy Week-Eastertide
