Today, with Google searches, online shopping, text messages, tweets, and instant credit, we have little patience for things that take time. Likewise, we want instant answers to our prayers.
St Monica is a model of patience, her long years of prayer, coupled with a strong, well-disciplined character, finally led to the conversion of her hot-tempered husband, her cantankerous mother-in-law and her brilliant but wayward son, Augustine. St. Augustine, a Christian at 33, priest at 36, a bishop at 45. Many people are familiar with the biographical sketch of Augustine of Hippo. Sinner turned saint. But to really get to know the man is a rewarding experience. Augustine is still acclaimed and condemned in our day. He is a prophet for today, trumpeting the need to scrap escapisms and stand face-to-face with personal responsibility and dignity.
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The Assumption is the oldest feast day of Our Lady. Its origin is lost in those days when Jerusalem was restored as a sacred city. After the building of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 336, the sacred sites began to be restored. The “Memory of Mary” was being celebrated only in Palestine. In the seventh century, it began to be celebrated in Rome under the title of the “Falling Asleep (Dormitio)” of the Mother of God.
Soon the name was changed to the “Assumption of Mary”. It also proclaimed that she had been taken up, body and soul into heaven. That belief is ancient, dating back to the apostles themselves. What was clear from the beginning was that there were no relics of Mary to be venerated, and that an empty tomb stood on the edge of Jerusalem near the site of her death. At the Council of Chalcedon in 451, Emperor Marcian asked the Patriarch of Jerusalem to bring the relics of Mary to be enshrined in the capital. The patriarch explained that there were no relics of Mary in Jerusalem, that “Mary had died in the presence of the apostles; but her tomb, when opened later… was found empty and so the apostles concluded that the body was taken up into heaven”… In 1950, in the Apostolic Constitution Munificentissimus Deus, Pope Pius XII proclaimed the Assumption of Mary a dogma of the Catholic Church in these words: “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever-virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heaven”. With that, an ancient belief became Catholic doctrine and the Assumption was declared a truth revealed by God. Excerpted from Fr. Clifford Stevens in Catholic Heritage |
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Rev. Fr. Christopher Tracey
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