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“The divine intention in surrounding the Fall of Rome in 410, with discoveries of Saints’ bodies was clearly manifested in the most in the most important of these discoveries, the one we celebrate today, August 3rd. The Year 415 had opened. Italy, Gaul, and Spain were being invaded; Africa was about to share their fate. Amidst the universal ruin the Christians, in whom alone resided the hope of the world, put up their petitions at every sanctuary to obtain at least, according to the expression of the Spanish priest Avitus, ‘that the Lord would inspire with gentleness those whom He suffered to prevail.’ It was then that took place that marvelous revelation which the severe critic Tillemont, convinced by the testimony of all the chronicles, histories, letters, and discourses of the time, allows to be ‘one of the most celebrated events of the Fifth Century A.D.’ Through the intermediary of the priest Lucian, John, Bishop of Jerusalem, received from St. Stephen the first martyr and his companions in the tomb a message couched in these terms: ‘Make haste to open our sepulchre, that by our means God may open to the world the door of His clemency, and may take pity on His people in the universal tribulation.’ The discovery, accomplished in the midst of prodigies, was published to the whole world as the sign of Salvation. St. Stephen’s relics, scattered everywhere in token of security and peace, wrought astonishing conversions, innumerable miracles, ‘like those of ancient times,’ bore witness to the same faith of Christ which the Martyr had confessed by his death four centuries earlier. Such was the extraordinary character of this manifestation, so astonishing was the number of resurrections from the dead, that St. Augustine, addressing his people, deemed it prudent to lift their thoughts from Stephen the servant to Christ the Master. ‘Though dead,’ said he, ‘he raises the dead to life, because in reality he is not dead. But as heretofore in his mortal life, so now too, he acts solely in the name of Christ; all that you see now done by the memory of Stephen is done in that Name alone, that Christ may be exalted. Christ may be adored, Christ may be expected as Judge of the living and the dead.” —Dom Prosper Guéranger, The Liturgical Year The three companions found buried together with St. Stephen: Nicodemus, who had come secretly to Jesus (John 3), Gamaliel, the grandson of the great Rabbi Hillel, who had defended the Apostles before the Sanhedrin (Acts of the Apostles 5:3439), and Gamaliel’s son Abibo

The singing of the Solemn Te Deum on Trinity Sunday, as we are doing at our 9 AM and 11 AM Masses, is a way of expressing our praise and thanks to God on this Feast which celebrates the Trinitarian Mystery of God as He is in Himself: a Trinity of Persons in a Unity of Being. We praise God for His Excellence and we thank God for all of His many gifts and benefits to us, even as we are aware that we can never, ever praise or thank Him enough. The Te Deum is also known as the Ambrosian Hymn , as it is attributed to the composition of St. Ambrose (+397). Let us be drawn in to the mystery of these great phrases: Te Deum laudamus … We praise Thee, O God, we acknowledge Thee to be the Lord: all the earth doth worship Thee: the Father Everlasting. To Thee all Angels cry aloud: The Heavens and all the Powers therein. To Thee all the Cherubim and Seraphim continually do cry. Holy, Holy, Holy: Lord God of Sabaoth.

Our Sermon Series for this year’s Parish Lenten Mission is entitled: “Themes in English Catholicism: From the Mission of Saint Augustine of Canterbury to the Elizabethan Settlement, 597-1564 A.D.” The Catholic Religion is a universal religionone and the same for everyone–but it also has its peculiarities and varying textures as it finds itself accepted into the hearts of the world’s diverse peoples. The Catholic Religion “inculturates” it  self, we may say, in its mission. This does not mean that it dilutes itself nor that mixes-in with already existing religions or spiritual understandings to become a hybrid, for it does neither. What it does is it plants itself adaptively, and then when a new place receives the Gospel the people there forge something freshly new in the life of Catholic Christianity. So it was with the conversion of Britannia in the Seventh Century of our Christian era A.D. There emerged from that evangelization a distinctive “English Catholicism” of which we American Catholics are very much the inheritors, although we hardly think of ourselves as such! We begin our story with the Mission of St. Augustine in the year 597 A.D. This is a different St. Augustine than the St. Augustine of the “Confessions” and the son of St. Monica. That St. Augustine of Hippo was from Roman Africa. He died in 430 A.D. Our St. Augustine here is the one known as St. Augustine of Canterbury, England. Back in 410 A.D., Rome had abandoned its territory of Britannia, under the pressures of external enemies and internal collapse. In short order the Romano-British world was destroyed. Invaders from Scandinavia and Germany drove the British west, towards Wales and Cornwall. There were new kingdoms now of these heathen barbarian tribes over most of Britain: the Kingdoms of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. One day in Rome, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great), was struck by the sight of fair-haired war captives in the Roman slave-market. When he asked who these foreigners were, he was told that they were Angles. Then the Pope made a prediction: that one day these “Angles” would become “Angels”. For the new mission to conquered Britannia, Pope Gregory turned to the Benedictine monastery of St. Andrew on the Coelian Hill at Rome, wherein he, Gregory, had once been a monk. He commissioned the Prior–Augustine–and forty of the monks to go to preach the Gospel in Britannia. The year was 596 A.D. The missionaries set out as far as Provence in the south of France. Hearing of what fate likely awaited them among these fierce peoples and the dangers of crossing the Channel they tried to turn back, but Pope Gregory insisted they go on. He would not let them return. After securing interpreters from among the Franks, Augustine and his missionary band landed on the Isle of Thanet off the coast of Kent, where the barbarian King Ethelbert ruled. They disembarked, carrying a silver cross as their standard and a painting of Jesus Savior. They sent word to the King of their arrival and their purpose in coming. In reply he ordered them to stay where they were. After a few days he came to Thanet and gave them audience. The King insisted they meet in the open. (He was afraid that these foreign wizards might use spells on him, which, he reasoned, could not work in the open air.) The King then sat under an oak tree. Augustine, through his interpreter, began to speak. Ethelbert, favorably touched, gave them leave to preach to his people and convert whom they could. But for himself, he was not ready to abandon all that he held sacred. That was the opening the Holy Ghost needed. It was on Pentecost of the Year 597 that King Ethelbert and many of his nobles received Baptism at the hands of Augustine. Then on Christmas Day of that same Year, Augustine baptized upwards of 10,000 Angles in a river near York. The prediction of Pope Gregory thus turned out to be a prophecy. The “Angles”, receiving the Christian Gospel, were indeed becoming “Angels”, so much so that this transformation has been marked ever since by the new country name given to Britannia. That name we know so well is “England”, which is an abbreviation of “Engelland”–or, to use modern English: “Angel-land”.

Two weeks before the beginning of Lent the Iraqi Chaldean Catholic Mission here at Mary Immaculate of Lourdes observes a particular tradition of theirs called “Bautha”—the “Pleading of the Ninevites”. (This year, February 10th-12th) The “Bautha” is a three-day hard fast, followed on the fourth day by a thanksgiving feast. It commemorates the three days during which the Prophet Jonah lay trapped in the belly of the whale before he was spit out. He than proceeded to the heathen city of Nineveh to preach the warning of imminent destruction by God for their sins, unless they repented, which, in the event, they did. The city of Nineveh was spared. The Christian religious fast then combines the memory of the suffocating imprisonment of Jonah with the repentance of the people. As many of you will recall, the Christian heartland in Muslim Iraq remained in the northern part of the country on the Nineveh plain. The tomb of the Prophet Jonah, revered by Christians but also by many Muslims, was preserved in the modern-day city of Mosul. The ISIS conquest of Mosul and the Nineveh plain in 2014 destroyed it. The Chaldean Christians in exile, however, keep alive their tradition. The memory of Jonah in the whale and the Pleading of the Ninevites has a wider, universal application to Christians of all rites and traditions. Our Lord explicitly compares the “Sign of Jonas” to His own Death and Resurrection. “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign: and a sign shall not be given it, but the sign of Jonas the Prophet. For as Jonas was in the whale’s belly three days and three nights: so shall the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.” (Matthew 12:39-40) The week after next we shall be beginning our Lent by receiving the mark of the Ashes on our foreheads. (Ash Wednesday is March 5th.) The Pleading of the Ninevites is a perfect image for us of the spirit of Lent. A Christianity without a vigorous awareness of sin and the effects of sin is but a soft-soaped, knock-off version of itself. Beware of any Christian spirituality which would leave you complacently in your sins rather than challenging you to take on the hard personal work of really becoming a Christian!

In the Year 1858, a 14 year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous, from the Pyrenean mountain town of Lourdes, received 18 APPARITIONS of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Blessed Virgin appeared to her in the cleft of a great rock known to the local people as the “Massabielle”. Bernadette received a total of 18 Apparitions. The first occurred on February 11th which has since become the Feast-day of Our Lady of Lourdes. That year it was the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Shrovetide. According to the Liturgical Calendar of that Year, the Apparitions corresponded to the following days: First Apparition: Thursday of Shrovetide 2nd Apparition: Shrove Sunday 3rd Apparition: Thursday after Ash Wed. Apparitions 4-15, “The Fortnight” — From Friday after Ash to Thursday of the Second Week in Lent. Apparition 16: March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation. Also, that year: Thursday in Passion Week. 17th Apparition: Easter Wednesday 18th Apparition: July 16th (Mt. Carmel) THE TWO GREAT SIGNS GIVEN TO THE WORLD AT LOURDES: THE FIRST SIGN: THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF THE FRESH SPRING OF WATER OUT OF THE SIDE OF THE GREAT ROCK OF THE MASSABIELLE, FEBRUARY 25th, at the NINTH APPARITION, A CLEAR SYMBOL OF THE WATER FLOWING FROM CHRIST’S SIDE ON THE CROSS AND THE BAPTISMAL REGENERATION.  THE SECOND SIGN: MARY IDENTIFIES HERSELF WITH HER SINGULAR PRIVILEGE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. SHE SAID TO BERNADETTE: “I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION”. THIS OCCURRED AT THE 16th APPARITION, ON THE FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATION ITSELF, MARCH 25th. THE MYSTERY OF MARY’S FULLNESS OF GRACE IS INDICATED IN THE ANGEL GABRIEL’S GREETING: “HAIL, FULL OF GRACE, THE LORD IS WITH THEE.”

Prayer of Saint Francis de Sales: Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow. The same everlasting Father who takes care of you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either He will shield you from suffering or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations and say continually, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart has trusted in Him and I am helped. He is not only with me, but in me, and I in Him.”

In the life of St. Gregory the Wonderworker (+270) we have the example of a Saint who fulfilled Christ’s words of the Gospel in a literal way: “ Amen I say to you that whosoever shall say to this mountain, Be thou removed and be cast into the sea and shall not stagger in his heart, but believe that whatsoever he saith shall be done: it shall be done unto him. (Mark 11:23) St. Gregory, the Bishop of Neocaesarea, performed great signs and wonders in the Name of Christ. As we read in the Roman Breviary: By his prayer he removed a mountain which was an obstacle to the building of a church. He also dried up a lake which was a cause of dissension between brothers. The River Lycus, which was inundating and devastating the fields, he restrained by fixing in the bank his stick, which immediately grew into a green tree, and served as the limit which the river henceforth never overpassed. The most powerful effect of St. Gregory’s prayers, however, was the graces of conversion for his city which he obtained: When he was dying, he asked how many infidels remained in the city of Neocaesarea: and on being informed that there were only seventeen, he gave thanks to God, and said: When I was made bishop, there were but seventeen believers. Indeed for anyone at all to be truly converted to Christ is the equivalent of a mountain being moved. And yet it does happens. May we be good instruments by prayer and good example.

During All Saintstide there is a Mass which may be said: F east Of The Holy Relics Preserved In The Churches Of The Diocese,or, All Holy Relics . This Mass draw our attention to the Mystery of the Resurrection. The relics of the Saints—fragments of their bones, ashes, clothes, or other objects used by them—yet “ work wonders on earth.” Just as divine power emanated from Christ and worked miracles for people, even if they so much as touched the hem of His Garments, so Christ in His Church continues to heal and work wonders through the relics of His Saints. These relics “ exorcise devils, heal the sick, restore sight to the blind, cleanse lepers, drive away temptations and bestow on all the excellent gifts which come from the Father of Light.” (Lessons of the Second Nocturn at Matins for the Feast of All Holy Relics) This mysterious divine power of relics is a pledge to us of the future Resurrection. If God can work through their ashes here and now, how can He not also bring this dust back into a glorified, resurrected body on the Last Day? The early Christians had the spiritual intuition to connect the remains of the martyrs with the Sacrifice of the Mass. This is why Mass was celebrated near the tombs of the martyrs in the Catacombs “ in order to show that these Saints had mixed their blood with that of the Victim of Calvary.” (Vespers Antiphon) After the Persecutions had ended the beautiful churches erected served as vast reliquaries to preserve the tombs of celebrated martyrs. The remains of those who had confessed their faith were placed under the Church’s High Altar, in the Conf  essio . (For example, in St. Peter’s Basilica, the main altar is over the tomb of Peter. It is the Confession of St. Peter.) Related to this is the custom of placing martyrs’ relics in a small cavity of the altar stone called the “sepulchre” in the ceremony of the Dedication of a new Church. I can find no information on which particular martyrs’ relics are placed in the sepulchers of our parish altar stones, but we know that they are there. We also have our other visible reliquaries on the reredos over our High Altar. May the regular sight of them stir us to thoughts of Heaven and the Resurrection of the Body.