St. William’s Catholic Parish
Greenville, Texas
11 / 27 / 2005
First Sunday of Advent
Be watchful, be alert because you do not know when the time will come.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
Perhaps you have seen mention in the bulletin of the Liturgy of the Hours - the Office of Readings…Morning Prayer, Evening Prayer. Priests and Deacons and men and women Religious around the world are required to pray the Divine Office/Liturgy of the Hours every day. The Church even urges lay people to pray it as well. She talks about the Liturgy of the Hours being prayed everyday and we have a new volume because today is the first day of Advent.. The Church begins this first Office of Readings with the Prophet Isaiah and our First Reading in the Mass today is from the Prophet Isaiah. Listen to what God says to Israel.
Your new moon and festivals I detest, they weigh me down. I tire of the load. When you spread out your hands I close my eyes to you. Though you pray all the more I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood, wash your hands clean. Put away your misdeeds from before My eyes; cease doing evil, learn to do good.
Our Lord is very emphatic in His direction to us and He expects a conversion. The week of Thanksgiving we had the Feast of St. Margaret of Scotland. Years ago when I first read the Life of St. Margaret of Scotland, I was impressed by many things. St. Margaret married King Malcolm and the two of them influenced the people of their kingdom. Just so you will know, St. Margaret died in the year 1093. Like a good wife, she had great influence on her husband.
One curious thing I read about in her life was how St. Margaret would rise at midnight to pray the Office and different devotions that she had. It said that every year she kept both “Lents”. I thought,
“She kept both Lents? There is only one Lent!”
Lent is the period of forty days before Easter and the other Lent that is referred to in the Life of St. Margaret is the time immediately before Christmas, the season of Advent. Lent is a time of penance and conversion and the color of penance and conversion is purple, the same color used for Advent, which is the second Lent, if you will. The Church expects us to be preparing for Christmas and instead of forty days we have four weeks, so in brief, we have a smaller Lent and a smaller penitential time.
If you look at the blue page that was handed out, which says “Novena Prayer of Our Lady in Honor of the Miraculous Medal”, you can pray that prayer at home and pray the prayer at the bottom everyday, which I recommend. Look at the very top, it says;
November 27, 2005 is the 175th Anniversary of our Lady’s request to have this miraculous Medal struck.
So on this day, one hundred seventy-five years ago, our Lady appeared to St. Catherine Laboure and if you look at the front of your bulletin, that center panel represents what St. Catherine saw. On the two outside portions you see mosaics that are found in Dallas at the Chapel of St. Paul Hospital. St. Paul is one of the University hospitals on Inwood. The Chapel is the Chapel of the Miraculous Medal. I have pictured on the front of the bulletin the front and back side of the mosaic of the medal and in the middle is Our Lady appearing to St. Catherine on this day in 1830. Today is the 175th Anniversary of Our Lady’s special request as I mentioned earlier.
On page eight of the bulletin there is a brief description of the occurrence. St. Catherine was only 24 when the Blessed Mother appeared to her. In the center picture of Our Lady appearing to the saint, notice the statue right above St. Catherine in the background. This is a statue of St. Vincent de Paul, who was the founder of the Daughters of Charity. St. Catherine was a Daughter of Charity and was stationed at this time at 140 Rue du Bac, in Paris, which is the heart of France.
If you will look around the depiction in the mosaic of the Miraculous Medal you will see the words,
O Mary Conceived Without Sin Pray For Us Who Have Recourse To Thee
This medal is known as the Miraculous Medal but that is an abbreviation. The medal is the Medal of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It is a name that is so long you almost have to pack a lunch. So people have dubbed it the Miraculous Medal because of so many miracles connected with it. I remember in 1999, I went with my Aunt Mary, who passed away in 2001, God rest her soul, to France and we visited Rue du Bac and after our return I wear a Miraculous Medal every day. I got one at Rue du Bac where our Lady appeared and on this day 175 years ago, Our Lady instructed St. Catherine Laboure to have a medal created and she did.
About a year later my Aunt Mary went down to see her stepson. My aunt was a widow and her stepson had been placed in a home down in Temple, Texas. Butch is a veteran but was not in the hospital because of injuries during a war but because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. He shouldn’t have been where he was and he had a little too much to drink and he was beaten almost to death.
When Aunt Mary and I went to see Butch he had been there several months and his condition was stable but not improving. He could move his eyes but that was about it. He couldn’t feed himself, clothe himself, walk or speak and we were told that he could blink his yes, one blink for yes and two for no. No one really knew how much he could understand or if he knew what was going on around him. He’d been warehoused in one of those places where veterans are put; they deserve a lot better. Anyway, I went with my aunt because I knew she would spend the entire trip back crying. She did cry all the way home but at least she wasn’t driving.
We were there about three hours and when we started to walk out of the room I took off my Miraculous Medal and I showed it to Butch. Butch is not a Catholic Christian, but he is a Christian. His family was very, well, lets just say, anti-Catholic before his dad married my Aunt Mary so I really didn’t know how he would react looking at a religious medal. I said,
“Butch, now this is the mother of Jesus.”
I showed it to him and then pinned it to his gown. I pointed out the rays to him and if you look at the picture on the bulletin you will see them as well. They appear as beams of light coming from our Lady’s hands and St. Catherine mentioned that there in the rays were what appeared to be jewels in the sunlight. If you have ever seen a precious jewel in the sunlight it is beautiful. These were large gems in the rays and some of them were brilliant and some were darkened. So St. Catherine asked Our Lady, pointing at the brilliant jewels, what they were. The Blessed Mother told her that the brilliant jewels are the graces she would give to anyone who asked for them. Then St. Catherine asked what the dark ones were in the rays and Our Lady told her that those were the graces that no one has asked for.
So I told Butch to ask the Blessed Mother from his heart, to help him in whatever way he desired and then we left. About six months later my Aunt Mary gets a phone call from Butch, who was out in California and had a new job. He was walking and driving. From the day he received the Miraculous Medal up until the time he called Aunt Mary it was like a…m…m…mir…miracle? Yea that’s the word! It was like a miracle and I wondered if Butch had come into the Catholic Church. No, he didn’t but if it were me I would think that if the Blessed Mother had helped me like that I should convert. Well, being a mother, she doesn’t help to “get” something; she helps because she is a mother and is the best of mothers. So Butch was helped in many ways through the Miraculous Medal.
As I said, the medal is really about the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In 1830 when the Blessed Mother asked on this day that a medal be struck, people began to speak more about the Immaculate Conception. The Church has always promoted the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary but with this new apparition in the north of France, Bishops, especially in France began to talk about maybe defining the Immaculate Conception as a Dogma or Official teaching of the Church. In 1854 Pope Pius IX, exactly one hundred years before this Church building was built in Greenville, Texas. In 1854 and in union with bishops around the world, Pope Pius IX defined and declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, which teaches that from the first moment of the first minute of the existence of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she was created without the Original Sin of Adam and Eve and that the credit for such a wonderful event is the Cross of Jesus Christ.
Think of this…when you were Baptized you came or either your parents brought you to the Church to the Waters of Baptism. The water was poured over you three times along with the words,
I Baptize you in the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit.
They did this so that Original Sin would be taken away along with any of your personal sins so that God could be in your soul from that day forward. So the grace to make possible the Immaculate Conception is the same origin that makes the Sacrament of Baptism and all the other Sacraments possible; the Cross of Christ. The graces flowing from the Cross of Jesus Christ reach all the way back to Adam and Eve, opening the Gates of Heaven for them and for others. So the graces coming from that cross reach all the way back to our first parents and all the way forward to the last person who will ever be born in the future. The Immaculate Conception is not really “all” about the Blessed Virgin but all about Christ and the graces coming from His Cross, so much so that the same privilege that was given to Adam and Eve was extended to the Mother of Jesus.
“Wait a minute, Adam and Eve were not immaculately conceived!”
They were created by God and without sin. God did not create two broken toys and plant them in the Garden of Eden and call them Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve were made in original innocence, in holiness until they sinned against God. We call this the first sin, the Original Sin. So, when Adam and Eve had children they passed on to them this Original Sin. In the “natural order”, what children can be greater than their parents? It is impossible. So grace intervened. If Jesus could choose His own mother, which He did, then He could choose the best of mothers. If he choose anything less than the best of mothers then there would be something wrong. Why should He choose anyone other than the best of mothers?
So, this Dogma of the Immaculate Conception was defined in 1854 and it is interesting that four years later in the south of France, Our Lady appeared many times to a young girl of fourteen, St. Bernadette Soubirous and there in Lourdes she prayed and spoke with St. Bernadette. Bernadette’s life would never be the same. People began to ask her many questions about her visitor. St. Bernadette always identified her visitor as “The Beautiful Lady”. She never claimed that “Mary” was appearing to her, she just described her as the Beautiful Lady. One of the questions that all the interrogators had was,
“What is her name? Ask her what her name is!”
St. Bernadette would ask the lady her name every time she saw her but not until the last visit did the Beautiful Lady identify herself by saying,
I am the Immaculate Conception.
Right away Bernadette began to repeat these words over and over in her head while making a b-line to the door of the Rectory so that she could finally identify to her priest who the Beautiful Lady said she was. St. Bernadette knocked on the door of the Rectory and the priest opens it. Bernadette immediately said,
“I am the Immaculate Conception.”
The priest said,
“What?”
Again she repeated,
“I am the Immaculate Conception.”
The priest asked her if she knew what that meant and Bernadette told him she had not a clue. So the priest told her that from the very first moment of the very first minute in the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she was preserved from any stain of sin through the graces of the Cross and Resurrection of Christ. It was news to Bernadette.
Four years after the Church formally declared the Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, the Blessed Virgin Mary is essentially affirming at Lourdes what the Church emphatically taught four years earlier. You can see how in 1830 at Rue du Bac would anticipate and influence the church to define, to reveal this Dogma that had been with us all of these years but God in His Providence wished to bring it forward and to highlight His mother and the Cross. So, in 1830 we have St. Catherine Laboure in the north of France, in 1854 the formal definition and Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, and in 1858 Our Lady identifying herself to St. Bernadette in Lourdes in the south of France as the Immaculate Conception. Very interesting!
If you look at the picture on the front of the bulletin, right below the statue where St. Catherine is kneeling you can see something is there. Today if you go to visit at 140 Rue du Bac you will find the body of St. Catherine Laboure there at the foot of the statue. She died in her 70s, was buried and then the cause for her Canonization came up. When her body was disinterred they found it perfectly preserved. No, she had not been embalmed or preserved in any way by humans, which would have cost money. She was a Daughter of Charity and they were not about to spend money on keeping someone well preserved when they were buried. Still to this day St. Catherine appears as though she is just asleep, like a few of you out there right now, who appear to be asleep! Ok, we aren’t going to bury you, don’t worry.
In the south of France something similar happened to St. Bernadette. After the apparitions at Lourdes she went to live in a convent at Nevers in France. When she died she was 35 years old, buried, and when her cause came up for Canonization they disinterred her body and found it perfectly preserved and it is placed under the Altar at Nevers. She is just beautiful! Amazing… in the south of France and the north of France. The incorruptibility of these two saints gives even more to the messages that were used to reveal the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.
People have scoffed at the Church for revealing and defining this Dogma saying it isn’t necessary or important. Twelve years after today’s Anniversary in 1842, there was a man in Rome, who converted to the Catholic faith. His name was Alphonse Ratisbonne. He was from the Alsace Lorraine part of Europe. It has been going back and forth between France and Germany throughout the centuries.
Alphonse was of noble birth and he had lots of money, was very intelligent and was a Jew. A secular Jew, which means that he didn’t observe his Jewish faith. He had a brother that went on to convert to the Catholic faith and became a Catholic priest. Alphonse would have none of this! Every spare moment of his life was used to denigrate the Church; he mocked the teachings of the Church, the Blessed Mother and the saints like so many professors today at Catholic Universities. So Ratisbonne was going around doing this free! He would speak terribly of the Church and people seemed to allow it, just like today.
Alphonse Ratisbonne was traveling through Rome on his way back home because was going to be married in a few months. You may wonder how this man had any friends, but he stopped to see a friend in Rome, who was Catholic. The catholic friend had had enough and prayed for Ratisbonne’s conversion and to be a human being,, but to no avail. This friend asked Alphonse to wear a medal, a Miraculous Medal. Alphonse agreed to wear it but voiced the opinion that it wouldn’t do any good. He was going to show his friend how ridiculous wearing the medal was. The friend told him he had to always wear it and copy down a prayer to say everyday. The prayer is the Memorare, attributed to St. Bernard of Clairveaux.
Remember, O most gracious Virgin Mary, that never was it known that anyone who fled to your protection, implored your help or sought your intercession was left unaided. Inspired with your confidence, I fly to you, O Virgin of Virgins, my Mother. To you I come, before you I stand, sinful and sorrowful. O Mother of the Word Incarnate, despise not my petitions, but in your mercy, hear and answer me. Amen.
Alphonse agreed to that too! At that point the friend should have asked to Baptize Alphonse. I mean, he was on a roll. [Laughter] Alphonse went around wearing the Miraculous Medal and the first time he said the Memorare, it stuck in his mind and would not leave his thoughts. It is kind of like a when a jingle or song stays with you. Alphonse complained about not being able to get the prayer off his mind. One day they were going across the city of Rome in a carriage and the friend had to make a stop at Church to pay last respects to another friend that had died. He told Alphonse to stay in the carriage instead of going in and telling everyone how crazy they were for being Catholic.
Alphonse stayed in the carriage while the friend went inside to pay respects. The man who had died had actually been praying for Alphonse before he died. Then, as Alphonse relates, he was pulled mysteriously into the Church. He got out of the carriage and walked into the Church and saw in the chapel of San Andrea del Afrata the exact image that St. Catherine Laboure describes seeing in 1830 in Paris. In 1842 he was in Rome and she had been in Paris in 1830. Well, Ratisbonne’s life was forever changed. He left the Church, found his friend and described to him and a Jesuit priest what happened. He begged to be allowed into the Catholic Church; the Catholic Church he had mocked and despised. His entrance into the Church was granted very quickly. Alphonse changed his plans, calling off the marriage and became a student for the priesthood. He became a priest and went to the Holy Land where he founded two religious orders. Like Butch, of a more recent time, Ratisbonne was converted through our Lady’s Miraculous Medal. The instance in Rome appears to have been infused knowledge.
If you go to 140 Rue du Bac, in the chapel you will see the chair from which Our Lady spoke to St. Catherine Laboure several times. An angel would appear to the saint and lead her to the chapel. The first night it happened, they had just heard a beautiful talk on the life of St. Vincent de Paul and his love of the Blessed Virgin Mary. That evening when St. Catherine was preparing for sleep she prayed that she would be allowed to see the Blessed Virgin Mary and that is exactly what happened. Of course we don’t ask for these thing but she did. She went to the chapel and knelt beside the chair in which the Blessed Mother sat; this chair was usually reserved for the Mother Superior but the MOTHER SUPERIOR sat there that night. The mother Superior is not allowed to sit there anymore because it is reserved for Our Lady. The Virgin sat in the chair and St. Catherine sat next to her with her arms in Our Lady’s lap and of course being two women, they held hands. Right? How beautiful! St. Catherine and the Blessed Mother then spoke to one another.
The Cure of Ars, St. John Vianney once commented that a child learns much about God at his mother’s knee. If we are smart we will have recourse to the Immaculate Conception, we will turn to the Blessed Virgin Mary and ask her motherly help. She asks or expects nothing in return. Welcome to being a mother, right? Mothers do it because it is the right thing to do. The Blessed Mother wants to lead all people to Christ, to her Son. The Immaculate Conception paves the way for the Virgin Birth. People often confuse the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary with the Virgin Birth of Christ at Christmas; these are two different teachings, two different teachings and are separated by many years of course.
The Church begins four weeks of preparation so that when we get to the celebration of Christmas our lives will not be the same as they are on this day. No Sunday is merely a Sunday and is always a reminder of the Lord’s Day, the day He rose from the dead. Today, the First Sunday of Advent is the first day of the new calendar of the Church for a whole year stretching out in front of us. If we are wise we will turn to Our Lady and ask her to lead us to her Son and to Heaven.
The Blessed Mother’s specific request was that these medals be made and that they be dispersed throughout the world so that the kingdom of her Son would come. We should ask, as we wear these Miraculous Medals, for Our Lady’s special help. What if I got up here today and told you,
“I am the Immaculate Conception,”
You wouldn’t buy it. So why should I buy it from you? If you look at page three of your bulletin you will see that there have been some changes. Today I have added extra Confessions and I will do so throughout the Sundays of Advent. There will be two hours of Confession from 1:00pm until 3:00pm. Monday we have two hours of confession, Tuesday we have three hours, Wednesday two hours, Thursday one hour, Friday we will have three and Saturday we will have two. With this schedule and the ½ hour in Quinlan with Fr. Vogel, there will be 17 ½ hours of Confession for you and your children to help you be prepared. This is like a second Lent, it is a penitential time so that when we arrive at Christmas we are prepared, that we are spiritually changed, that yes, in a sense that we have really been converted to doing the Will of God. Isaiah says that right now we need some cleaning up; this is what he says to the House of Israel. I am not the Immaculate Conception and neither are you.
This day, this anniversary and the close proximity of the Immaculate Conception means everything is prepared to help us. The Church is bending over backward in a sense, to lead us to conversion so that we will be prepared for the great Feast of Christmas. Our Lord says,
Be watchful, be alert because you do not know when the time will come.
In the Name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit
Amen
