Ordinary Time: May 27th
Thursday of the Eighth Week of Ordinary Time; Optional Memorial of St. Augustine of Canterbury, bishop
MASS READINGS
May 27, 2021 (Readings on USCCB website)
COLLECT PRAYER
Grant us, O Lord, we pray, that the course of our world may be directed by your peaceful rule and that your Church may rejoice, untroubled in her devotion. 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.
O God, who by the preaching of the Bishop Saint Augustine of Canterbury led the English peoples to the Gospel, grant, we pray, that the fruits of his labors may remain ever abundant in your Church. 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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St. Augustine was born in Rome and died in Canterbury, England, in 604. When Pope Gregory I heard that the pagans of Britain were disposed to accept the Catholic Faith, he sent the prior of St. Andrew, Augustine, and forty of his Benedictine brethren to England. Despite the great difficulties involved in the task assigned to him, Augustine and his monks obeyed. The success of their preaching was immediate. King Ethelbert was baptized on Pentecost Sunday, 596, and the greater part of the nobles and people soon followed his example. St. Augustine died as the first Archbishop of Canterbury. His feast is celebrated in the Extraordinary Form on May 28.
According to the 1962 Missal of St. John XXIII the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite, today is the feast of St. Bede. He was a Benedictine monk in the 8th century, who had great learning and is famous in Christian literature. He died in 735. His feast in the Ordinary Form of the Roman Rite is May 25. Today is also the commemoration of St. John I, Pope and Martyr, who died in a dungeon from the hardships he had to endure, in 526. His feast in the Ordinary Form is now celebrated on May 18.
Meditation for Tuesday of the Sixth Week of Easter
Minor Rogation Day: The need of prayer
1. "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and you shall find; knock, and it shall be opened to you." This solemn promise was made by the Lord to those who pray. Confiding in this promise, we join in the rogation procession and the Mass.
2. "The continual prayer of a just man availeth much. Elias was a man passible like unto us; and with prayer he prayed that it might not rain upon the earth, and it rained not for three years and six months. And he prayed again, and the heaven gave rain, and the earth brought forth her fruit." Thus we see how efficacious and how fruitful were the prayers of the just man Elias. And the Lord has also promised us in the Gospel: "Ask, and it shall be given you." How great, then, must be the intercessory power of the Church! How great must be the power of that prayer if all members of the Church and the saints in heaven lift their hands to the Father in supplication! The Church prays incessantly through her priests, through her religious, through the saints, through Mary, the most powerful of all intercessors, and through her Head, who is Christ Jesus. Christ is with the Father; He is also in our tabernacles, "always living to make intercession for us" (Heb. 7:25). We join our prayers to those of the Church, and we have the assurance: "Ask, and it shall be given you." We place our trust in the intercessory power of the Church, of which we are living members. We also place great confidence in the power of our prayer, because of the fact that we are supported and abetted by the prayers of many holy and God-fearing brothers and sisters in Christ. What a precious possession such prayers are! How we should prize and treasure them!
"Ask, and it shall be given you." What the Church wants today, above all else, is souls devoted to prayer. All of us in some way share a responsibility for our fellow Christians. God wishes the salvation of all men. But if this goal is to be realized. men must themselves desire salvation and work to obtain it. Moreover, men must will the salvation of their fellow men and work to accomplish it. Every man is master of his own destiny. But even so, each one of us is in some measure the master of the destiny of others. Modern science has taught us that we cannot split one atom without starting a chain reaction that destroys millions of other atoms. Much the same is true in the world of the spirit. We all contribute to the good fortune (or ill fortune), the salvation and eternal destiny, of our fellow men. Because we are all branches of the same living vine, Christ, our lives are intertwined. Necessarily, therefore, we can and do promote or hamper the progress of other branches of the vine. There is no such thing as a neutral position.
To a certain extent even the eternal salvation of our fellow men lies in our hands. This responsibility we discharge by means of our example and our prayers. By means of our prayers we prevent the just wrath of God from being visited upon His people. The sins of men in our day call out to heaven for vengeance. How frightful are the sins of unbelief! How horribly men revile God; how rashly they deny Him; how foolishly they blaspheme against Him and His Church! The world is drenched in sins of hatred—hatred between nations, hatred between social classes, hatred between individuals. For that reason we are admonished in today's Epistle: "Dearly beloved,…pray one for another that you may be saved....If any of you err from the truth and one convert him, he must know that he who causeth a sinner to be converted from the error of his way, shall save his soul from death, and shall cover a multitude of sins."
To save souls through the power of prayer is the great occupation of the Church during the rogation days and at other times also. She prays that souls may be saved, and that is the purpose of our prayer also. We pray with the tenacity of the beggar mentioned in today's Gospel: "If he shall continue knocking, I say to you, although he will not rise and give him because he is his friend; yet because of his importunity he will rise and give him as many as he needeth." We must pray much, pray diligently, and pray without ceasing. "Ask, and it shall be given you."
3. We place too little trust in the promise that has been made to us and too little dependence on the value and the power of prayer. That is why our prayers lack confidence and zeal. And yet, precisely to those who possess zeal and confidence the promise has been made: "All things whatsoever you ask when ye pray, believe that you shall receive" (Mark 11:24), and "If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth" (Mark 9:22). Moreover, the closer our union with the Church, the more effective our prayers will be. This union with the Church will manifest itself in the firmness of our faith, in our obedience to her commands, in our devotion to her service, in our participation in her prayer, in our sharing of her sacrifice. Under these circumstances our prayers will have the quality that every effective prayer must have: they will be devout, zealous, unceasing, childlike, and persevering. Therefore pray with the Church.
"Ask, and it shall be given you." Today the liturgy associates his admonition with our reception of Holy Communion, for at that time we are most intimately bound to Christ the vine, to the other members of the community, and to the Church herself. At this most holy moment Christ, who has sacrificed Himself for us, prays with us and for us, together with the whole Church, to which He is intimately united; and we pray with Him and through Him. Then we shall receive, we shall find, it will be opened to us.
—Benedict Bauer, O.S.B, from The Light of the World, Vol II
St. Augustine of Canterbury
St. Augustine was the agent of a greater man than himself, Pope St. Gregory the Great. In Gregory's time, except for the Irish monks, missionary activity was unknown in the western Church, and it is Gregory's glory to have revived it. He decided to begin with a mission to the pagan English, for they had cut off the Christian Celts from the rest of Christendom. The time was favorable for a mission since the ruler of the whole of southern England, Ethelbert/ of Kent, had married a Christian wife and had received a Gaulish bishop at his court. Gregory himself wished to come to Britain, but his election as pope put an end to any such idea, and in 596 he decided to send an Italian monk following the comparatively new Rule of St Benedict. Augustine set out with some companions, but when they reached southern Gaul a crisis occurred and Augustine was sent back to the pope for help. In reply the pope made Augustine their abbot and subjected the rest of the party to him in all things, and with this authority Augustine successfully reached England in 597, landing in Kent on the Isle of Thanet. Ethelbert and the men of Kent refused to accept Christianity at first, although an ancient British church dedicated to St Martin was restored for Augustine's use; but very shortly afterwards Ethelbert was baptized and, the pope having been consulted, a plan was prepared for the removal of the chief see from Canterbury to London and the establishment of another province at York. Events prevented either of these projects from being fulfilled, but the progress of the mission was continuous until Augustine's death, somewhere between 604 and 609.
The only defeat Augustine met with after he came to England was in his attempt to reconcile the Welsh Christians, to persuade them to adopt the Roman custom of reckoning the date of Easter, to correct certain minor irregularities of rite and to submit to his authority. Augustine met the leaders of the Welsh church in conference but he unfavorably impressed them by remaining seated when they came into his presence — it is likely that in this he unfavorably impressed St Bede too. Augustine was neither the most heroic of missionaries, nor the most tactful, but he did a great work, and he was one of the very few men in Gaul or Italy who, at that time, was prepared to give up everything to preach the gospel in a far country.
—Excerpted from The Saints edited by John Coulson
Patronage: England; Canterbury, England; diocese of Salford, England; archdiocese of Southwark, England; Personal Ordinariate of Our Lady of the Southern Cross
Symbols and Representation: Banner of the crucifixion; King Ethelbert rising out of a font (Bishop baptizing a king); fountain; cross fitchée pastoral staff and book; cope, mitre and pallium
Highlights and Things to Do:
- Pope Gregory brought the faith to different countries by sending groups of missionaries. Consider how you can help the missions, either monetarily or spiritually.
- St. Augustine has been called "Apostle of England" because of his missionary efforts. Pray to him today that England will return to the one true Faith.
- Read more about St. Augustine of Canterbury:
- Watch this video on the life of St. Augustine of Canterbury.
- St Augustine of Canterbury’s shrine was destroyed and his relics were lost during the English Reformation. Wikipedia has some further details.
