FORGIVE US WAR

 

Prayer for peace Pope Francis recited 

at his weekly general audience March 16, 2022

Composed by Archbishop Domenico Battaglia of Naples
Though written for the war in Ukraine, please pray also for peace throughout the world.

Forgive us for the war, Lord.

Lord Jesus, son of God, have mercy on us sinners.

Lord Jesus, born under bombs of Kyiv, have mercy on us.

Lord Jesus, dead in the arms of a mother in Kharkiv, have mercy on us.

Lord Jesus, in the 20-year-olds sent to the frontline, have mercy on us.

Lord Jesus, who continues to see hands armed with weapons under the shadow of the cross, forgive us, Lord.

Forgive us if, not content with the nails with which we pierced your hand, we continue to drink from the blood of the dead torn apart by weapons.

Forgive us if these hands that you had created to protect have been turned into instruments of death.

Forgive us, Lord, if we continue to kill our brother. Forgive us, Lord, if we continue to kill our brother, if we continue like Cain to take the stones from our field to kill Abel.

Forgive us if we go out of our way to justify cruelty, if, in our pain, we legitimize the cruelty of our actions. Forgive us the war, Lord.

Lord Jesus Christ, son of God, we implore you to stop the hand of Cain, enlighten our conscience, let not our will be done, do not abandon us to our own doing. Stop us, Lord, stop us, and when you have stopped the hand of Cain, take care of him also. He is our brother.

O Lord, stop the violence. Stop us, Lord.

Amen.

Translated by Catholic News Service.

 

PRAYER FOR OUR WORLD

 

O God, Creator of the universe, who extends your paternal concern over every creature and guides the events of history to goals of salvation, we acknowledge your Fatherly love when you break the resistance of mankind and, in a world torn by strife and discord, you make us ready for reconciliation. 

Renew for us the wonders of your MERCY; send forth your Spirit that He may work in the intimacy of our hearts, that enemies may begin to dialogue, that adversaries may shake hands and peoples may encounter one another in harmony. 

May all commit themselves to the sincere search for true peace which will extinguish all arguments, for charity which overcomes hatred, for pardon which disarms revenge.

St. (Pope) John Paul II

Painting:  Juan Sanchez Cotan- Spain (d. 1627)

WORLD PEACE

 

                                                      A Prayer for World Peace

 

We pray for the power to be gentle;
the strength to be forgiving;
the patience to be understanding;
and the endurance to accept the consequences
of holding on to what we believe to be right.

May we put our trust in the power of good to overcome evil
and the power of love to overcome hatred.

We pray for the vision to see and the faith to believe
in a world emancipated from violence,
a new world where fear shall no longer lead men or women to commit injustice,
nor selfishness make them bring suffering to others.

Help us to devote our whole life and thought and energy
to the task of making peace,
praying always for the inspiration and the power
to fulfill the destiny for which we and all men and women were created.

Author Unknown

Painting: Friend of Peace  - Vasko Taskovski (1937), Macedonia.  Gift from Macedonia to the UN (2000).

SIGRID UNDSET

 

Although her father was Norwegian, SIGRID UNDSET was born in 1882 in the small town of Kalundborg in  Denmark, at the childhood home of her mother, Charlotte.  She was the eldest of three daughters. She and her family moved to Norway when she was two.

She grew up in the Norwegian capital, Oslo (or Kristiania, as it was known until 1925). When she was only 11 years old, her father, the Norwegian archaeologist Ingvald Martin Undset,  died at the age of 40 after a long illness.

The family's economic situation meant that Undset had to give up hope of a university education and after a one-year secretarial course she obtained work at the age of 16 as a secretary with an engineering company in Kristiania, a post she was to hold for 10 years.

 While employed at office work, Sigrid wrote and studied. She was 16 years old when she made her first attempt at writing a novel set in the Nordic Middle Ages. At the age of 25, she made her literary debut with a short realistic novel on adultery. It created a stir, and she found herself ranked as a promising young author in Norway. 

During the years up to 1919, she published a number of novels set in contemporary Kristiania, about the city and its inhabitants. They are stories of working people, of trivial family destinies, of the relationship between parents and children. Her main subjects are women and their love. Or, as she herself put it - in her typically curt and ironic manner -"the immoral kind" (of love).

Her books sold well from the start, and, after the publication of her third book, she left her office job and prepared to live on her income as a writer. Having been granted a writer's scholarship, she set out on a lengthy journey in Europe. After short stops in Denmark and Germany, she continued to Italy, arriving in Rome in December 1909, where she remained for nine months. In Rome, she met Anders Castus Svarstad, a Norwegian painter, whom she married almost three years later. She was 30 and he was thirteen years older, married, and had a wife and three children in Norway. It was nearly three years before Anders got his divorce from his first wife.

Sigrid and Anders were married in 1912 and went to stay in London for six months. From London, they returned to Rome, where their first child, a boy named after his father, was born in January 1913. In the years up to 1919, she had another child, and the household also took in Ander's three children from his first marriage. These were difficult years: her second child, a girl, was mentally handicapped, as was one of Ander's sons by his first wife.

She continued writing, finishing her last realistic novels and collections of short stories. She also entered the public arena critical of emancipation as it was developing, and of the moral and ethical decline she felt was threatening in the wake of the First World War.

In 1919, she moved to Lillehammer, a small town in the Gudbrand Valley in southeast Norway, taking her two children with her. She was then expecting her third child. The intention was that she should take a rest at Lillehammer and move back to Kristiania as soon as Anders had their new house in order. However, the marriage broke down and a divorce followed. In August 1919, she gave birth to her third child, at Lillehammer. She decided to make Lillehammer her home, and within two years, Bjerkebæk, a large house of traditional Norwegian timber architecture, was completed, along with a large fenced garden with views of the town and the villages around. Here she was able to retreat and concentrate on her writing. 

 After the birth of her third child, and with a secure roof over her head, Sigrid started what was to become her most beloved work, Kristin Lavransdatter.  She had studied Old Norse manuscripts and chronicles and visited and examined Medieval churches and monasteries, both at home and abroad. She was now an authority on the period she was portraying and a very different person from the 22-year-old who had written her first novel about the Middle Ages.

Both Sigrid's parents were atheists and, although, in accord with the norm of the day, she and her two younger sisters were baptized and with their mother regularly attended the local Lutheran church, the milieu in which they were raised was a thoroughly secular one. Sigrid spent much of her life as an agnostic, but marriage and the outbreak of the First World War were to change her attitudes. During those difficult years she experienced a crisis of faith, almost imperceptible at first, then increasingly strong. The crisis led her from clear agnostic skepticism, with a painful uneasiness about the ethical decline of the age, towards Christianity.

Beginning around 1917, Sigrid developed a passionate interest in the writings of Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson, many of whose writings she was to translate into Norwegian.  She was received into the Catholic Church in November 1924, after thorough instruction from the Catholic priest in her local parish. She was 42 years old. She subsequently became a Third Order Dominican.

In Norway, her conversion to Catholicism was not only considered sensational, it was scandalous. It was also noted abroad, where her name was becoming known through the international success of Kristin Lavransdatter. At the time, there were very few practicing Catholics in Norway, which was an almost exclusively Lutheran country. Anti-Catholicism was widespread not only among the Lutheran clergy, but through large sections of the population. The attacks against her faith and character were quite vicious at times, with the result that her  literary gifts were aroused in response.

In all her writing, she shows an observant eye for the mystery of life and for that which cannot be explained by reason or the human intellect. At the back of her sober, almost brutal realism, there is always an inkling of something unanswerable.

For many years, she participated in the public debate, going out of her way to introduce the ongoing Catholic literary revival into Norwegian literature. In response, she was swiftly dubbed "The Mistress of Bjerkebæk" and "The Catholic Lady".

Sigrid's essays about Elizabethan era English Catholic martyrs Margaret Clitherow and Robert Southwell were collected and published in Stages on the Road. Her Saga of Saints told the whole of Norwegian history through the lives of Norwegian Saints.

In May 1928, she travelled to England and visited G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, both of whose writings she was later to translate into Norwegian.  

Sigrid won the 1928 Nobel Prize in Literature, "principally for her powerful descriptions of Northern life during the Middle Ages". At that time she was translating Catholic books into Norwegian, including works by Monsignor Robert Hugh Benson and G.K. Chesterton. She donated the money she received from the Nobel Committee to families who were raising mentally disabled children. 

When Germany invaded Norway in April 1940, Sigrid was forced to flee as she had strongly criticized both Nazi ideology and Adolf Hitler since the early 1930s. Her books were banned in Nazi Germany and she  knew her name was on a list of those to be rounded up in the first wave of arrests. Not wishing to become a target of the Gestapo. She  fled to neutral Sweden.

Her eldest son, Norwegian Army Second Lieutenant Anders Svarstad, was killed in action at the age of 27, in April 1940, while defending Segalstad Bridge in Gausdal from German troops.

Her sick daughter had died shortly before the outbreak of the war. Bjerkebæk was requisitioned by the Wehrmacht, and used as officers' quarters throughout the Occupation of Norway.

Her library had already been secretly divided between her closest local friends. The books were hidden at great risk throughout the Nazi occupation and were returned to her after the Liberation of Norway.

In 1940, Sigrid and her younger son left neutral Sweden then crossed the Soviet Union via the Trans-Siberian Railroad before arriving as a political refugee in the United States. There, she untiringly pleaded occupied Norway's cause and the plight of European Jews in writings, speeches and interviews. She lived in Brooklyn Heights, New York where she was active in 

St. Ansgar's Scandinavian Catholic League, writing several articles for its bulletin. She also traveled to Florida, where she became a close friend of novelist Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings authorof  The Yearling, which won the Pulitzer Prize.

 Sigrid returned to Norway after the liberation in 1945. She lived another four years but never published another word, dying at the age of67 in Lillehamer. She was buried in the village of Mesnali, 15 kilometers east of Lillehammer, where her daughter and the son who died in battle are remembered. The grave is recognizable by three black crosses.

FAVORITE NOBEL PRIZE WINNER

The other Norwegian Catholic to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, is our monastery’s much loved author, SIGRID UNDSET.  Here is a book I highly recommend.  The information here is taken from the publisher:

Novelist SIGRID UNDSET (1882–1949) left a transformative mark on twentieth-century literature, not only in her homeland of Norway, but across the West. Her painterly eye for the Scandinavian countryside, her uncompromising emotional realism, her concrete sense of history, her bold vision of woman and man—these won her such acclaim that she received the 1928 Nobel Prize for Literature, not long after the publication of her historical epic novel, Kristin Lavransdatter.

During World War II, she loudly opposed anti-Semitism and the Nazi regime, and in the final years of her life, the Norwegian state awarded her the Grand Cross of the Order of Saint Olav—the first time this honor was given to a woman outside the royal family.

But something more than courage and literary brilliance set Sigrid apart. In 1924, she converted to Roman Catholicism, scandalizing Protestants and atheist intellectuals alike, and leaving her isolated. This spiritual turn-which already began during the writing of Kristin Lavransdatter—shaped the very heart of her work, as well as her own life as a mother.

In a world so pockmarked by suffering, disappointment, and cruelty, Jesus Christ alone gives meaning to the word "love". Among her other celebrated works are the novels The Master of Hestviken and Ida Elizabeth, and a powerful spiritual biography of the great saint, Catherine of Siena.

Fr. Aidan Nichols, acclaimed theologian and spiritual writer, unpacks the figure of Sigrid Undset from a distinctively Christian point of view. Rich in both biography and textual analysis—including of works never translated into English—Sigrid Undset: Reader of Hearts renders a shrewd, colorful account of a writer who allowed her art to be transfigured by the Cross, by the fire of God’s mercy, and thus opened to an intricacy and beauty beyond all telling.

CATHOLIC NOBLE PRIZE WINNER- 2023

This year’s Nobel Prize for Literature goes to a Norwegian novelist and playwright who became a Catholic later in life (2012). JON FOSSE, while unknown outside Europe, was selected for his wealth of plays, novels, poetry collections, essays, children’s books and translations, "for his innovative plays and prose which give voice to the unsayable."   The Nobel committee called him “one of the most widely performed playwrights in the world.” His works have been translated into over 50 languages.

It was a series of novels that Jon Fosse began writing after his conversion that brought him to the attention of readers in the English-speaking world.

In regards to his conversion, Jon Fosse told a New Yorker interviewer:

I had a kind of religious turn in my life that had to do with entering this unknown. I was an atheist, but I couldn’t explain what happened when I wrote, what made it happen. Where does it come from? I couldn’t answer it. You can always explain the brain in a scientific way, but you can’t catch the light, or the spirit, of it. It’s something else."

He also credits his conversion to Catholicism with helping him in his struggles with alcoholism and anxiety.

Jon Fosse was born in 1959 in Haugesund, Norway, and grew up in Strandebarm. His family were Quakers and Pietists,  which he credits with shaping his spiritual views.  A serious accident at age seven brought him close to death. This experience significantly influenced his writing in adulthood. He started writing around the age of twelve, despite his claims that he was not very concerned with books and much of his teenage writing practice involved creating his own lyrics for musical pieces.

He was interested in becoming a rock guitarist, but once he began to dedicate more time to writing, he gave up his musical ambitions.  He gained a master's degree in comparative literature in 1987 from the University of Bergen. 

Gregory Wolfe, the publisher and editor of the imprint Slant Books wrote: (as told to Aleteia):

Jon Fosse is a highly deserving Nobel laureate in literature. While he has been a widely produced playwright, his renown has spread in recent years through his fiction, including the masterful Septology. While his style may not be to everyone’s taste, it is not because he is intellectual or political. In fact, Fosse’s prose has been compared to liturgy: it uses a lot of simple words and images and repetition to evoke memory, longing, and a spiritual search. And indeed as a convert to the Catholic Church he includes prayer directly into stories. Readers willing to accept the brief “learning curve” of adjusting to his narrative style will be well rewarded by a writer of an almost mystical sensibility.

Septology is a series of  seven novels about  the aging painter Asle, a widower, who over the course of seven days tries to make sense of religion, identity, art, and family life, with strong autobiographical undercurrents, including a literary tribute to Jon ’s late first wife and his own work as a painter. The daring work is written as one extraordinarily long run-on sentence. “You don’t read my books for the plots,” Fosse once told an interviewer. 

He refers to his writing style as “slow prose” and as “mystical realism.” Jon Fosse is the second Norwegian Catholic to win the Prize for Literature, the first being (one of my favorite authors), SIGRID UNDSET.

VALIANT WOMEN IN WAR

 

                    The Deluge  -   Winifred Margaret Knights-  British (d.1947) 

 

Months ago, when addressing of the mess in the Ukraine, Pope Francis spoke of the plight of the women who carry so much of the burden of war:  keeping family safe while the father is fighting, fleeing with children. His words can certainly be applied to the present mess in Israel/Palestine.

 “For women of this generation, who have lived through past wars, it must be unbearable to see what has happened and is happening...

 There is a fundamental need to change, following the lessons on peace taught by Jesus and “the saints of every age, who make humanity grow through the witness of a life spent in the service of God and neighbor.

 But it is also the school of innumerable women who have cultivated and nurtured life; of women who have cared for fragility, who have healed wounds, who have healed the human and social wounds; of women who have dedicated mind and heart to the education of new generations.”

ANOTHER PRAYER

 

 

PRAYER FOR PEACE IN THE HOLY LAND

        Mary Queen of Peace Icon written by Father Richard G. Cannuli, OSA, MFA

 

Queen of peace, Chosen daughter of a land still devastated by wars, hatred and violence.

We confidently address our plea to you: Do not allow Jesus to cry at the sight of the Holy City which did not understand the gift of peace may, once again, fall into indifference and political calculation.

Look at the afflictions of so many mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, children, victims of destructive energies that are blind and without a future. Inspire ways of dialogue, a vigorous will in solving problems and a collaboration of certain hope.

Don’t let us ever to get used to oppression, to consider the struggles as inevitable and the victims they produce as collateral.

Make sure that the logic of aggression does not prevail over good will and that the solution of many problems is not considered impossible.

Just like with Your prayer in the midst of the Disciples on Pentecost, obtain from the Almighty that situations, even if apparently insurmountable in the Holy Land, find ways of happy solution.     AMEN.

           Fernando Cardinal Filoni  (Grand Master of the Holv Sepulchre of Jerusalem)

Note on Icon:  The icon, "Mary Queen of Peace," was written because all Christians and Muslims, especially in the Middle East, venerate Mary (Maryām‎), the mother of Jesus.  She is considered one of the most righteous and greatest women in the Islamic religion.  She is the only woman mentioned by name in the Quran, and her names appears more often in the Quran than in the New Testament.      (Villanova University)

 

PEACE FOR ALL

 

Painting- Yahon Wang, age 17

Pope Francis’ Prayer for Peace

Lord God of peace, hear our prayer!

We have tried so many times and over so many years to resolve our conflicts by our own powers and by the force of our arms. How many moments of hostility and darkness have we experienced; how much blood has been shed; how many lives have been shattered; how many hopes have been buried… But our efforts have been in vain.

Now, Lord, come to our aid! Grant us peace, teach us peace; guide our steps in the way of peace. Open our eyes and our hearts, and give us the courage to say: "Never again war!"; "With war everything is lost". Instill in our hearts the courage to take concrete steps to achieve peace.

Lord, God of Abraham, God of the Prophets, God of Love, you created us and you call us to live as brothers and sisters. Give us the strength daily to be instruments of peace; enable us to see everyone who crosses our path as our brother or sister. Make us sensitive to the plea of our citizens who entreat us to turn our weapons of war into implements of peace, our trepidation into confident trust, and our quarreling into forgiveness.

Keep alive within us the flame of hope, so that with patience and perseverance we may opt for dialogue and reconciliation. In this way may peace triumph at last, and may the words "division", "hatred" and "war" be banished from the heart of every man and woman. Lord, defuse the violence of our tongues and our hands. Renew our hearts and minds, so that the word which always brings us together will be "brother", and our way of life will always be that of: Shalom, Peace, Salaam!

Amen.

RARE BUTTERFLIES IN OUR ISLANDS

 

In 1998, the ISLAND MARBLE (Euchloe ausonides insulanus), thought to be extinct since 1908, was discovered during a prairie butterfly survey at American Camp on San Juan Island. The only known specimens had previously been found on Vancouver Island and Gabriola Island in British Columbia. Scientists now believe American Camp, along with scattered locations on San Juan and Lopez islands, to be the only viable population in the world. This finding is based on multiple studies and monitoring since 2008. 

Scientists believe there are only about 200 of these butterflies left in the wild.

The Island Marble  does not migrate and is only known to now be found only in our San Juan Islands. It lives its entire life cycle in upland prairie-like habitat, but prairies, like the butterfly itself are becoming rarer and rarer. It is also found in sand dunes or coastal lagoon habitat.

The Island Marble’s wings have a fascinating color scheme of marbled green and white. It feeds on the flowers of  wild mustard. It has a wingspan of between 1.5 and 2 inches, and the caterpillar is about 3/4 of an inch long. It is green or blue-gray and dotted in black with white with yellow stripes down its back and sides. The marble butterfly can be confused it with the more common Cabbage White, which is mostly white with a yellow underside and feeds on the same plants.

After their long overwinter, the butterflies emerge from their chrysalis but only fly for 6-9 days, which means, the butterflies spend their time feeding, finding their mates to fertilize eggs, and then laying the eggs of the next generation.

 It will lay its eggs on two non-native mustards, field mustard (Brassica rapa) and tumble mustard (Sisymbrium altissimum). Virginia pepperweed (Lepidium virignicum) is the only native plant they will successfully lay eggs on.

The park has established a captive breeding program at American Camp where butterflies are reared and then reintroduced into the prairies. It is approximated that only 5% of eggs laid each year will survive to become adult butterflies. And yet the discovery of this lovely butterfly is a symbol of hope in a world where so many species are disappearing.

 Another butterfly found in our islands, which is not as rare as the Island Marble, but is considered  regionally rare, is the imperiled PROPERTIUS DUSKYWING (Erynnis propertius), a chocolate-brown skipper found only on the Pacific Coast of North America. Most of the Duskywings in Washington state are found in San Juan County, principally on San Juan Island. It is classified as a state Species of Greatest Conservation Concern.

The Duskywing is the only animal species that cannot survive without Garry Oak trees. Adult butterflies, which emerge in May, mate around oak trees and lay their eggs on the leaves. The caterpillars then roll themselves up in leaves to pupate. The leaves fall to the ground in the autumn with the pupae, still rolled up inside, stay dry and safe through winter, awaiting spring.

Duskywings are threatened by climate change and the loss of Garry Oaks, which is expected to shrink even more over the next century. Unlike the Island Marble, the Duskywing does not limit its food supply and feeds on many varieties of flowers.

 Several dozen old oaks remain at Mount Young (elevation of 650'), where they support most of the island’s Duskywing population. A few Duskywings have been seen on the south of Turtleback Mt. on Orcas Island. While the major part of the San Juan Island Duskywing population is still likely to be in the National Park, small numbers of these butterflies may establish in Garry Oaks elsewhere on the island, and care should be taken not to disturb fallen oak leaves until June.  Burning, and bagging leaves are to be avoided, as well as any spraying near the oaks.

 

SWISS CONNECTIONS

 

Father introduced me to a mystic I had heard of but never looked into- I think mainly because her books are out of reach  in cost.

SISTER MARY OF THE TRINITY (Luisa Jaques) was born in 1901 in South Africa, where her father was a Protestant pastor and founder of missions in Pretoria and Johannesburg in the midst of the Second Boer War.

Her mother died in childbirth, and Louise was raised in Switzerland, her family’s country of origin, with her two elder sisters, by an aunt whom she calls her "little mother". Luisa completed her schooling in the summer of 1917 without a state certificate, as her education had been limited to private schools. She matured to be a subtle and highly sensitive person with lasting health problems caused by a weak lung.

 At the end of 1917, the sixteen-year-old Luisa took up her first job as a secretary with a socially and politically committed couple named Horber, who helped organize the founding of a "Swiss Federation for Transitional Reforms" in the Swiss post-war period. Weakened by anemia and with the beginnings of tuberculosis, the following year Luisa went for treatment at the sanatorium "L'Espérance" in Leysin, run by a Dr. Olivier. There she made the acquaintance of Bluette de Blaireville, who became her lifelong friend. She also met, among others, Adrienne von Speyr, cousin of Dr. Olivier and a classmate of Bluette..

After her dismissal in May 1919, Luisa took a short-term job as an accountant with a notary in Lausanne. In 1920/21, she took care of her elderly and ailing aunt Alice. In March 1924 she again found work as a typist with the theologian and later pastor Lydia von Auw, a friend of her family. An acute hemorrhage shortly after she started work resulted in her being referred to the "Béthanie" house in Lausanne, run by deaconesses, for tuberculin treatment.

 Repeated disappointments at work, a failed relationship with a married man, and great loneliness due to her beloved family being so far away, brought her, at the age of twenty-five to not understanding the meaning of life and to make the bitter pronouncement: “There is not God”.

During a stay with her friend Bluette, on the night of February 13/14 she had a mystical experience – a kind of vision of a religious woman wearing a deep brown garment, belted with a cord – which gave her the inner certainty that she must enter a contemplative order.

 From this moment on she was reborn in an “irresistible attraction” to the cloister, and an ardent desire to receive the Eucharist. Thus began the journey that would lead her into the Catholic Church.

Having moved to Milan in October 1926 because of a job, Luisa decided, through the mediation of a priest, to take catechism classes with the Sisters "Nostra Signora del Cenacolo" in that city. Mother Reggio prepared her for baptism.

Although she was invited several times by her father to South Africa and by her sister Alice to America, she decided to stay in Italy. A change in her job as a tutor and educator introduced her to the world of the Milanese aristocracy, particularly the family of Countess Agliardi. In this context, she completed a kind of Montessori training with Countess Borromeo, who was a sister of her new employer.

Amazingly she tried three orders in one  but through the help of Bluette, Luisa  met the community of the Daughters of the Sacred Heart of Mary, which she entered in 1931. There  she obtained a state diploma at the Teacher Training College. She then taught at the Catholic parochial school in Neuchâtel. In this religious community, which offered her the framework of solid intellectual and spiritual formation, she remained for a total of five years, twice renewing her temporary vows but leaving before final vows.

Due to her unquenched longing for a contemplative monastic life, she left the community in 1936, after having met in Neuchâtel the priest Maurice Zundel. He was known for his (then) controversial books of mystical theology.  He encouraged her to join the Poor Clares and from this point on, Father Zundel was her spiritual advisor.

On September 1, 1936 she joined the Poor Clares in Evian as a postulant, but remained only until April 10, 1937, when the mentally ill abbess dismissed her. After this upsetting convent experience, Louisa worked temporarily as a nanny in Lausanne with a working-class family which had six children, and then again with Countess Agliardi in Cortina d'Ampezzo. Her prospects for a convent life seemed to have disappeared.

Luisa decided to visit her family in South Africa, together with her sister Alice and her children, and arrived in Johannesburg on August 28, 1937, where she was reunited with her parents and siblings. Still uncertain about her future, she took up employment as a home teacher in various Jewish families over the next few months.

In 1938, motivated by reading the writings of  (St.) Charles de Foucauld, she decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land reaching Jerusalem. There she entered the convent of the Poor Clares on June 30. 

In the Poor Clare monastery in Jerusalem, Sr. Marie of the Trinity finally found refuge where God was awaiting her and an interior voice, the Lord Jesus. On August 28, 1939, she was clothed as Sr. Mary of the Trinity. Two years later she made an extraordinary vow of total devotion. In June 1942, typhus fever broke out in the convent. Sr. Maria died of it on June 25, 1942.

 She found direction in the day-to-day of a life offered up in in fraternal charity, silence, service. In His own time, the Lord Himself revealed its meaning: “You must forget yourself and discover My Voice” In obedience to her spiritual father, Sr. Marie wrote these “Notes”.

Through her confessor, Fr. Sylvère Van den Broeck, she was urged in the last two years of her life to put down in writing her vocational journey and also to record the words of the "inner voice" she heard. After her death, he published her writings. This edition of 1943, translated into various languages in the years that followed, brought about an unprecedented awareness and engagement with the spiritual content of these writings, especially in Italy through the work of the Franciscans of the Custody of the Holy Land.

The works of Sister Mary of the Trinity have been published in French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Slovenian, Croatian, German, Arabic, Hungarian, Portuguese and English editions.

 This notebook, with the story of her conversion and vocation, has been published and translated in over seven languages.

In his preface to the French edition Hans Urs Von Balthasar emphasizes the main lines of her spirituality : listening to the interior voice of the Lord, profound awareness of the free will God allows his created beings in choosing to respond to him, and the Vow of Victimhood considered as “a high degree of availability and non-resistance to all God’s decisions” within a profound Eucharistic orientation.

 In her short life, she experienced much suffering, and one wonders how much joy, until her last few years. She is an example of fortitude and perseverance in one's call to the Lord.

Notes:

Adrienne von Speyr (d. 1967) was a Swiss Catholic convert, physician, mystic, and author of some sixty books of spirituality and theology.

 Father Maurice Zundel  (Swiss- d. 1975) was one of the great, if often-forgotten, theologians of the 20^th century. Sometimes student of Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, he wrote various works of Catholic philosophy in conversation with existentialism, Protestantism, and personalism. This wide-ranging and erudite scholarship led soon-to-be-Saint Paul VI to call him “a mystical genius.”

Hans Urs von Balthasar ( d.1988) was a Swiss theologian and Catholic priest who is considered an important Catholic theologian of the 20th century. Pope  St. John Paul II announced his choice of Father Balthasar to become a cardinal, but he died shortly before the consistory.

ADORATION

 

 

In his recent trip to France (once called the daughter of the Church), the Holy Father urged the faithful to get back to adoration, and to use time with Jesus in the Eucharist to intercede for others. He said today “we have lost the meaning of adoration a little bit and we need to get it back”.

“One cannot know the Lord without the habit of adoring, of adoring in silence. I believe — if I am not mistaken — that this prayer of adoration is the least known among us; it is the one we engage in the least. To waste time — if I may say it — before the Lord, before the mystery of Jesus Christ. To adore, there in the silence, in the silence of adoration. He is the Lord and I adore Him.”

I can’t speak for the Church in France or other countries, but I do know there is a resurgence of Eucharist adoration in our country, from Hawaii to Connecticut.

More and more we see young priests and laity who go to frequent adoration. And statistics show that where there is Holy Adoration, there are vocations.

A new study shows that almost two-thirds of adult Catholics in the United States believe in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. This is a significantly different result from the 2019 Pew Research study that suggested only one-third of adult Catholics in the U.S. believe in the Church’s teaching on the Blessed Sacrament. This study comes amid the second year of the U.S. bishops’ Eucharistic revival, which was launched in part because of the Pew Research poll. Could it be that people are waking up and listening to the Holy Spirit?

 It seems the Revival is making an impact as it stresses  Eucharistic devotion  by strengthening our liturgical life through the celebration of the Mass and Eucharistic adoration.

“So I recommend it to you – all these forms of prayer will be crowded with the faces of those whom Providence places on your path. You will bring with you their eyes, voices, and questions to the Eucharistic Table, before the tabernacle, or to the silence of your room, where the Father sees you.”