Churches of the Day

Monday of the Twenty-Ninth Week of Ordinary Time, Cycle 2

Saints of the Day : Oct:19th;  1. Ss Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brebeuf and companions (17th century) The Jesuit Martyrs of North America
2. St Paul of the Cross, Passion preacher, tended the sick, the dying and the lapsed
C/f A short life of this saint can be found below todays' Readings and Reflection.

FIRST READING

A reading from the letter of St Paul to the Ephesians          2:1-10
God brought us to life with Christ and gave us a place with him in heaven.

You were dead, through the crimes and the sins in which you used to live when you were following the way of this world, obeying the ruler who governs the air, the spirit who is at work in the rebellious. We all were among them too in the past, living sensual lives, ruled entirely by our own physical desires and our own ideas; so that by nature we were as much under God's anger as the rest of the world.

But God loved us with so much love that he was generous with his mercy: when we were dead through our sins, he brought us to life with Christ-it is through grace that you have been saved- and raised us up with him and gave us a place with him in heaven, in Christ Jesus.

This was to show for all ages to come, through his goodness towards us in Christ Jesus, how infinitely rich he is in grace. Because it is by grace that you have been saved, through faith; not by anything of your own, but by a gift from God; not by anything that you have done, so that nobody can claim the credit.
We are God's work of art, created in Christ Jesus to live the good life as from the beginning he had meant us to live it.

The Word of the Lord.            Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm           Ps 99: R/v 3
Response                                 My soul is thirsting for God, the God of my life.

1. Like the deer that yearns for running streams,
so my soul is yearning for you, my God.                                        Response

2. My soul is thirsting for God, the God of my life;
when can I enter and see the face of God?                                    Response

3. I would lead the rejoicing crowd into the house of God,
amid cries of gladness and thanksgiving.                                     Response

Gospel  Acclamation          Ps 24: 4. 5
Alleluia, alleluia!
Teach me your paths, my God, make me walk in your truth.
Alleluia!

or                                            Mt 5: 3
Alleluia, alleluia!
How happy are the poor in spirit; theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Alleluia !

GOSPEL                      


The Lord be with you.          And with your spirit
A reading from the holy Gospel according to Luke     12:13-21            Glory to you, O Lord
This hoard of yours, whose will it be then?

A man in the crowd said to Jesus,
'Master, tell my brother to give me a share of our inheritance'.
My friend,' he replied-'who appointed me your judge, or the arbitrator of your claims?'
Then he said to them 'Watch, and be on your guard against avarice of any kind,
for a man's life is not made secure by what he owns, even when he has more than he needs'.

Then he told them a parable:
'There was once a rich man who, having had a good harvest from his land, thought to himself,
"What am I to do? I have not enough room to store my crops."
Then he said,
"This is what I will do: I will pull down my barns and build bigger ones, and store all my grain and my goods in them, and I will say to my soul:
My soul, you have plenty of good things laid by for many years to come; take things easy, eat, drink, have a good time".

But God said to him, "Fool! This very night the demand will be made for your soul; and this hoard of yours, whose will it be then?".
So it is when a man stores up treasure for himself in place of making himself rich in the sight of God.'

The Gospel of the Lord.            Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.

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Gospel Reflection      Monday       Twenty-ninth Week in Ordinary Time        Luke 12:13-21

The rich man in the parable in today’s gospel reading asked the right question, ‘What am I to do?’ He had more crops than he had barns to hold them. However, from God’s perspective he gave the wrong answer to his question. He decided to build more barns to store his bumper crop. Holding on to what he had was his priority.

The option of sharing his surplus with those who were struggling to live never crossed his mind. He was completely focused on himself. His speech to himself was full of the little word ‘I’ and ‘my’ – ‘my crops, my barns, my grain’, my goods and, even, ‘my soul’. Yet, his soul belonged to God, just as his crops belonged to all of God’s people. When God called back his soul, the inner poverty of this rich man was revealed. He had done nothing with the good fortune that came his way as a gift from God to be shared with others. He stored up treasure for himself, but did not make himself rich in the sight of God.

In the first reading, Paul speaks of God’s goodness towards us in Christ and how infinitely rich God is in grace. We have all been richly graced and gifted by God in Christ, which has made us, in the words of that reading, ‘God’s work of art’. God has worked richly in all of our lives, and we are to called to allow God’s work to overflow through us to enrich the lives of others. As one of the contemporary hymns puts it, ‘freely you have received, freely give’. When we ask the question, ‘What am I to do?’, our answer will be inspired by the message and the life of Jesus, who, in the words of Saint Paul, made himself poor for our sakes, so that by his poverty we might become rich (2 Cor 8:9).

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The Scripture Readings are taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published 1966 by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd. and used with the permission of the publishers.  http://dltbooks.com/
The Scripture Reflection is made available with our thanks from his book Reflections on the Weekday Readings: The Word is near to you, on your lips and in your heart by Martin Hogan and published by Messenger Publications , c/f www.messenger.ie/bookshop/

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Saints of the Day : Oct:19th; 1. Ss Isaac Jogues, Jean de Brebeuf and companions (17th century) The Jesuit Martyrs of North America.

John de Brébeuf (1593-1649) and Isaac Jogues (1607-1646) are named in this group of eight North American martyrs, French Jesuits of whom two were lay assistants and six were presbyters. Against a background of conflict between French and English and between Huron, Mohawk, and Iroquois, they went as missionaries teaching the message of Christ in the local languages. They suffered torture and death for the sake of the gospel.

Patrick Duffy tells their story.

These eight martyrs - six Jesuit priests and two helpers - were all French pioneers of evangelisation in the 17th century among the Huron and the Mohawks in what was then called New France (Canada). They learned the local language and culture, but all met a violent death. They were beatified in 1925 and canonised in 1930.

Jean de Brébeuf (1593-1649)
Jean de Brébeuf was from near Caen in Normandy, France. Trained at Rouen, he was among the first Jesuits to land in Quebec in 1625. He lived among the Huron near Lake Huron, learning their customs and language. He wrote a dictionary of the Huron and is known as Canada's first real ethnographer. Many of his experiences are recorded in the Jesuit Relations, or the annual accounts sent back from the Canadian Jesuit to its Paris office. Although he suffered from tuberculosis, he endured enormous physical hardships, travelling hundreds of miles by canoe, bitten by fleas at night and choked by smoke in log cabins. All these he saw as "minor martyrdoms" compared to the passion of Christ. De Brébeuf was forced to return to France because of a war with England. However, he returned to Canada in 1632.

He attempted to convert the Attawan on Lake Erie in 1640, but had little success and returned to the mission of St Mary among the Huron in 1644 where the Huron began to accept Christianity. He composed a Christmas Carol in the Huron language, a translated version of which still remains popular in Canada today.

Soon, however, the Iroquois began to win in their war against the Huron. They seized Brébeuf and his fellow Jesuit Gabriel Lallemont and tortured them - by scalping, mock baptism with boiling water - until they died. Their bodies were buried nearby at the Martyrs' Shrine which Pope John Paul II visited on his visit to Canada in 1984.

Antoine Daniel (1601-48)
Antoine Daniel from Dieppe in Normandy also attended the Jesuit College in Rouen. While there he became acquainted with and taught a young Huron student who had been sent to France for his education. Daniel became interested in the Huron mission and joined Brebeuf when he returned to Canada in 1632 in his second attempt to evangelise the Hurons. Daniel set up a seminary in Quebec to train young Hurons for the priesthood. Then from 1637 he worked for ten years on Lake Huron and had not long settled in Teanaostaye when he and his Huron parishoners were set upon by the Iroquois and cruelly put to death.

Gabriel Lallemont (1610-49)
Born in Paris, both Gabriel's uncles, Jerome and Charles, were superiors of the Jesuit mission in Canada. Despite taking a vow to go to the Canadian mission two years after ordination in 1632, he spent fourteen years studying and teaching theology in France before arriving in Quebec in 1646. He was only six months working with Fr de Brébeuf when they were both martyred.

Isaac Jogues (1607–46) and Jean de la Lande (d. 1646)
Isaac Jogues was born at Orleans, France and taught literature at Rouen during his scholasticate. He was ordained  a Jesuit priest in 1636. He was sent immediately to Quebec, Canada, as a missionary to the Huron Indians. He was tortured and imprisoned by the Iroquois in 1642 and suffered the loss of two fingers. Later that year on a journey through Mohawk country in New York State during which René Goupil was martyred, he was captured by the Mohawks but the Dutch at Fort Orange (Albany, New York) rescued him and made his way down to New Amsterdam (later New York), the first Catholic priest to visit the settlement. Here he gave the sacraments to the two fellow Catholics he found there. In November 1643 he sailed to France, where his fellow Jesuits already presumed he was dead. He did not visit his mother, wishing to spare her the sight of his two finger removed and the pain of another parting. He received a special permission from Pope Urban VIII to say Mass, even though he lost his index finger.

Back in Quebec in 1644 the French were making peace with Iroquois chieftains at Ossernenon, and Fr Jogues took part in the peace , but after the celebrations an epidemic broke out, caterpillars ate the crops, and famine threatened. The Mohawks blamed Jogues but the majority still wanted to honour his bravery. A minority faction invited him to pay them a visit and when he and a young lay missionary companion Jean de la Lande graciously accepted, they were treacherously tomahawked and their bodies thrown into a ravine.

René Goupil (1608–42)
René was baptized in St-Martin-du-Bois near Angers, France in 1608. He joined the Jesuits, but had to leave the novitiate because of his health. When his health improved, he volunteered to work with the Jesuits in the hospitals of Quebec, where he developed his skill as a surgeon. Assigned as an assistant to Fr Isaac Jogues on his missionary travels, they were captured and tortured by the Mohawks.  While they were in captivity, René expressed his desire to be professed as a Jesuit and Fr Isaac received  his vows as a Jesuit brother. He was tomahawked in the head from behind as they saw Goupil making the sign of the cross over a child's head and interpreted it as an evil sign. He was the first North American martyr. He has come to be regarded as patron of people who work with or receive anasthesia.

Charles Garnier (1606-49)
Charles was the son of secretary to King Henry III of France. Born in Paris, he was educated at Louis-le-Grand College there. He joined the Jesuits in Paris in 1624. He studied classics, philosophy, and theology at Clermont and taught at the Jesuit college at Eu for three years. Ordained in 1635, he was sent to Quebec and for fourteen years worked as a missionary to the Huron. They called him "Rain-giver" since a great shower of rain after a long drought took place when he arrived. He mastered the difficult language. His patience amidst endless trials won him the title of "lamb" of the mission, just as de Brébeuf was styled the "lion". After the martyrdom of Fathers Daniel, Brébeuf, (1648) and Lallemant (March 1649), he calmly awaited his own turn and he was martyred on 7 December 1649.

Noël Chabanel (1613–1649)
Chabanel entered the Jesuit novitiate at Toulouse at the age of seventeen, and was a professor of rhetoric at several Jesuit colleges in France. In 1643, he was sent to Canada, and after studying the Algonquin language for a time, was appointed to the mission at Sainte-Marie, where he remained till his death. In his apostolic labours he was the companion of Fr. Charles Garnier. As he felt a strong repugnance to the life and habits of the Huron, and feared it might result in his own withdrawal from the work, he bound himself by vow never to leave the mission. He was martyred on December 8, 1649 by what is described as a "renegade" Huron, actually Iroquois then engaged in warfare with the Huron.

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Memorable Proverb for Today

It takes no character to love people who are lovely and loving to you.
God teaches us character and love by putting some unlovely people around us.

~ Rick Warren ~

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Saints of the Day : Oct:19th; 2.; St Paul of the Cross, priest, passionate preacher, carer for the sick, dying and lapsed

Paul of the Cross, priest was born at Ovada (Italy) in 1694; died in Rome on 18 October 1775. Found a new congregation, the Passionists, who combined a strict penitential discipline with intense devotion to the passion of Christ and whose work was both active and contemplative. Noted for his prophetic preaching in parish missions, for calling sinners to repentance, and for his special gifts of healing.

Patrick Duffy tells his story.

St Paul of the Cross was the founder of the Passionists, a congregation that has preached the passion of Christ as the centre from which the love of God shines out.

Early Life
Paolo Francesco Danei, was born on January 3, 1694, in the town of Ovada, Piedmont, between Turin and Genoa. He was a pious youth. For a while he became a soldier and fought against the Turks, but then devoted himself to a solitary life of prayer.

Vision of Christ's Passion
In 1720 a vision of Christ's passion inspired him to found a religious order devoted to the passion and Bishop Gastinera of Alessandria in Piedmont vested him in the habit that had been shown to him in a vision, which  Passionists wear even to this day. His spirituality drew its power from meditation on the passion of Jesus as expressing the great love of God. Poverty and self-denial were the qualities that would make his priest shine before the world.

Approval of the Rule
Paolo then went to Rome to get approval for his Rule. His ideal was to combine meditation with the practical work of preaching to the poor and ministering to the sick. The way of life was very hard, and eventually Benedict XIV persuaded him to moderate it and approved the Rule in 1741. He was elected the first superior general in 1747 and his priests were soon in demand throughout Italy.

Spread through Italy
Meanwhile he had built his first monastery near Obitello. Sometime later he established a larger community at the Church of St. John and Paul in Rome. For fifty years he was a tireless missionary of Italy. God lavished upon him the greatest gifts in the supernatural order, but he treated himself with the greatest rigour, and believed that he was a useless servant and a great sinner.

Death and Influence
His death occurred at Rome in the year 1775, at the age of eighty-one. The Passionists opened up in Belgium in 1840 and in England the following year. They came to Ireland in the 1850s.

Fr Dominic Barbieri was the provincial in England who received John Henry Newman into the Catholic Church.

Fr Charles of Mount Argus joined up in Belgium, came to England and lived most of his life in Mount Argus, Dublin. He was canonised by Pope Pius IX in 1867. His feast day is October 20.

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Memorable Sayings for Today

"The service of God does not require good words and good desires,
but efficient workmanship, fervour and courage.
"If I could preach only one sermon, it would be on the love and mercy of God""

~ St. Paul of the Cross ~

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Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

FIRST READING                     

A reading from the book of Exodus      22:20-26
If you are harsh with the widow or orphan; my anger will flare against you.

The Lord said to Moses, Tell the sons of Israel this,
"You must not molest the stranger or oppress him, for you lived as strangers in the land of Egypt.
You must not be harsh with the widow, or with the orphan; if you are harsh with them, they will surely cry out to me, and be sure I shall hear their cry; my anger will flare and I shall kill you with the sword, your own wives will be widows, your own children orphans.

"If you lend money to any of my people, to any poor man among you, you must not play the usurer with him: you must not demand interest from him.

"If you take another's cloak as a pledge, you must give it back to him before sunset. It is all the covering he has; it is the cloak he wraps his body in; what else would he sleep in? If he cries to me, I will listen, for I am full of pity.

The Word of the Lord.            Thanks be to God.

Responsorial Psalm          Ps 17;2-4. 47. 51. R/v  2
Response                                 I love you, Lord, my strength.

1. I love you, Lord, my strength, my rock, my fortress, my saviour.
My God is the rock where I take refuge; my shield, my mighty help, my stronghold.
The Lord is worthy of all praise: when I call I am saved from my foes.                    Response

2. Long life to the Lord, my rock! Praised be the God who saves me.
He has given great victories to his king and shown his love for his anointed.          Response

SECOND READING           

A reading from the letter of St Paul to the Thessalonians     1:5-10
You broke with idolatry and became servants of God; you are now waiting for his Son.

You observed the sort of life we lived when we were with you, which was for your instruction, and you were led to become imitators of us, and of the Lord; and it was with the joy of the Holy Spirit that you took to the gospel, in spite of the great opposition all round you. This has made you the great example to all believers in Macedonia and Achaia since it was from you that the word of the Lord started to spread - and not only throughout Macedonia and Achaia, for the news of your faith in God has spread everywhere.

We do not need to tell other people about it: other people tell us how we started the work among you, how you broke with idolatry when you were converted to God and became servants of the real, living God; and how you are now waiting for Jesus, his Son, whom he raised from the dead, to come from heaven to save us from the retribution which is coming.

The Word of the Lord.            Thanks be to God.

Gospel Acclamation          Acts 16: 14
Alleluia, alleluia!
Open our heart, O Lord, to accept the words of your Son.
Alleluia!

or                                              Jn 14: 23
Alleluia, alleluia!
If anyone loves me he will keep my word,
and my Father will love him, and we shall come to him.
Alleluia!

GOSPEL   

The Lord be with you              And with your spirit.
A reading from the Gospel according to Matthew   22:34-40        Glory to you, O Lord
'You must love the Lord your God and your neighbour as yourself.

When the Pharisees heard that he had silenced the Sadducees they got together and,
to disconcert him, one of them put a question,
'Master, which is the greatest commandment of the Law?'
Jesus said, 'You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind.
This is the greatest and the first commandment.

The second resembles it: You must love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments hang the whole Law, and the Prophets also.'

The Gospel of the Lord.             Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.



For homily resources for this Sunday's Gospel click here:  https://www.catholicireland.net/sunday-homily/

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Taken from THE JERUSALEM BIBLE, published and copyright 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman and Todd Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House Inc, and used by permission of the publishers.