Easter: May 11th
Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter
Other Commemorations: St. Francis di Girolamo, Priest (RM)
MASS READINGS
May 11, 2023 (Readings on USCCB website)
PROPERS [Show]
COLLECT PRAYER
Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter: O God, by whose grace, though sinners, we are made just and, though pitiable, made blessed, stand, we pray, by your works, stand by your gifts, that those justified by faith may not lack the courage of perseverance. 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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Today the Roman Martyrology commemorates St. Francis di Girolamo (1642-1716) (also known as Francis de Geronimo), a Jesuit priest from Italy who spent most of his life working as a rural missionary in the countryside near Naples. He died in 1716. His sermons were short but vigorous, and he touched many hearts.
—Meditation for Thursday of the Fifth Week of Easter:
Baptism, the Divine Seed of the Christian Life
All Christian asceticism proceeds from baptismal grace. Its aim is to cultivate the divine germ cast into the soul by the Church on the day of her children's initiation. Christian life is nothing else but the progressive and continuous development, the practical application, throughout our whole life, of this double supernatural result of "death" and of "life" produced by Baptism. There is all the programme of Christianity.
In the same way, too, our final beatitude is nothing else but the total and definitive freedom from sin, death, and suffering, and the glorious unfolding of the divine life sown in us when we received this sacrament.
Thus, then, the very life and death of Christ are reproduced in our souls from the moment of baptism: but the death is unto life. We are "engrafted" on Him, in Him, says St. Paul, for Christ is the Vine, we are the branches, and it is this divine sap that flows in us to transform us into Him.
—Dom Marmion, Christ the Life of the Soul, p. 164
St. Francis di Girolamo (also Francis de Geronimo)
St. Francis di Girolamo was the famous Jesuit pulpit orator of Naples: a volume would hardly suffice to record the wonderful effect of his eloquence. "His voice" says Butler "was loud and sonorous, . . . and the style of his preaching simple and impressive. . . . His descriptions forcible and graphic and his pathetic appeals were sure to draw tears while his energy astounded and terrified," yet there must have been much of the magnetism of the popular orator in his manner for whenever he spoke whether in the streets of Naples — a constant habit of his — or in the church great crowds followed him and not a few of the sudden conversion made by him of hardened sinners sound like the records of some modern "Revivalist" preachers.
He was an earnest untiring faithful worker to the very last. Born in 1642, at a very early age he became a prefect in the "College of Nobles of the Society of Jesus" and soon after his novitiate was completed took high rank in the society. It was as a preacher and evangelist that he excelled. He died May 11th, 1716 and was beatified by Pius VII, on the feast of St. Joseph in 1806, and canonized by Gregory XVI, on Trinity Sunday 1839.
—Excerpted from Saints and Festivals of the Christian Church, by H. Pomeroy Brewster
Patronage: Grottaglie, Italy; Naples
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