BENEDICTINES TO REBUILD!

All of the churches in St. Benedict’s birthplace of Norcia (Nursia), Italy, were destroyed by the October 30 earthquake that leveled the medieval Basilica of St. Benedict. Amazingly the statue of Our Father St. Benedict was left standing.

St. Benedict

Dear friends,

`”How can I even begin to describe the scene we witnessed yesterday in Norcia?  It was like those photographs of bombed-out churches from the Second World War. It reminded me of all those ruined monasteries one sees passing through the English countryside. It was an image of devastation. All the churches in Norcia are on the ground. Every single one. The roofs caved in on all of them; they are no more. What remains of them are a few corners, a facade, a window with the sun coming through from the wrong side. Inside are “bare ruin’d choirs” as Shakespeare wrote of the destroyed monasteries in his time.

The wonder, the miracle, is that there were no casualties. All the fear and anxiety following the first few earthquakes now seem a providential part of God’s mysterious plan to clear the city of all inhabitants. He spent two months preparing us for the complete destruction of our patron’s church so that when it finally happened we would watch it, in horror but in safety, from atop the town.

Basilica of St. Benedict destroyed

Is it over yet? We do not know. These are mysteries which will take years -- not days or months -- to understand. We watch and pray all together on the mountainside for Norcia and for the world. The priests go into town to visit the sick and the homeless. We are grateful for your prayers, as ever.


                      In Christ,
Fr. Benedict    Subprior  (Benedictine Monks of Norcia)

On November 2, Pope Francis called Archbishop Renato Boccardo of Spoleto-Norcia to assure the residents of Norcia of his prayers following the recent earthquake there.

The Holy Father “also said he was saddened by the collapse of so many sacred buildings, symbols of faith and identity of the people,” Archbishop Boccardo told Vatican Radio.

The prelate spoke of the “difficulties and the fear of people who are homeless or insecure in these two months of earthquakes and great loss of the heritage of faith and art located in our valley.”

We pray for the people who have lost their homes and their sacred places.

MARTYR FOR TRUTH

Having finished the difficult, but very well done movie Popieluszko, I felt I should do a blog on this courageous priest, who was greatly responsible for the downfall of Communism in Poland.  After his death, the people had enough of tyranny in their daily lives.

BLESSED JERZY POPIELUSZKO  was born September 14, 1947, on a farm in the small village of Okopy located in North Eastern Poland. His parents Wladyslaw and Mariana were devout Catholics and he was baptized Alphons Popieluszko two days after his birth. Blessed Jerzy was a fragile child but as his parents stated he made up for any physical infirmities in strength of character.  

After finishing school, he attended the priests' seminary at Warsaw. Heserved his army duties in a special force, aimed to keep young men from becoming priests. This treatment had an adverse effect on Bl. Jerzy, as, after finishing his army service, he continued his studies. As a vicar he served in parishes in Warsaw, which consisted of the common people as well as students.

In 1981 he was sent to the workers, taking part in strikers in the Warsaw Steelworks. He was associated with workers and trade unionists from the Solidarity movement who opposed the Communist regime in Poland.

He was a staunch anti-communist, and in his sermons, interwove spiritual exhortations with political messages, criticizing the Communist system and motivating people to protest. During the period of martial law the Catholic Church was the only force that could voice protest comparatively openly, with the regular celebration of Mass presenting opportunities for public gatherings in churches.

Bl. Jerzy’s sermons were routinely broadcast by Radio Free Europe, and thus became famous throughout Poland for their uncompromising stance against the regime. The Służba Bezpieczeństwa tried to silence or intimidate him. When those techniques did not work, they fabricated evidence against him; he was arrested in 1983, but soon released on intervention of the clergy and pardoned by an amnesty.

Memorial 

A car accident was set up to kill  Bl. Jerzy  on 13 October 1984 but he evaded it. The alternative plan was to kidnap him, which was carried out on 19 October 1984. He was beaten to death by three Security Police officers. They pretended to have problems with their car and flagged down Bl. Jerzy’s car for help.  He was beaten up, tied up and put in the trunk of the car. The officers bound a stone to his feet and dropped him into the Vistula Water Reservoir near Włocławek from where his body was recovered on 30 October 1984. 

An autopsy revealed that he may have still been alive when thrown into the water. News of the political murder caused an uproar throughout Poland, and the murderers and one of their superiors, Colonel Adam Pietruszka, were convicted of the crime. More than 250,000 people, including Lech Wałęsa, attended his funeral on 3 November 1984. Despite the murder and its repercussions, the Communist regime remained in power until 1989. Bl. Jerzy's murderers  were jailed but released later as part of an amnesty.

Bl. Jerzy's funeral

Bl. Jerzy was posthumously awarded the Order of the White Eagle, Poland’s highest decoration. The cause for his beatification began in 1997. On August 6th, 2010, in the presence of his mother, who was over 100  years old, Bl Jerzy was solemnly beatified

His relics carried through Warsaw

The last public words spoken by Bl.Jerzy Popieluzko during the meditation of the rosary October 19, 1984, give a summary of his life and may serve to encourage us.

“In order to defeat evil with good, in order to preserve the dignity of man, one must not use violence. It is the person who has failed to win on the strength of his heart and his reason, who tries to win by force…Let us pray that we be free from fear and intimidation, but above all from the lusts for revenge and violence.”

Movie

His mother, Marianna, was present to his beatification. Pope John Paul II said to her : “Mother, you have given us a great son”. And she responded, surprising even the pope: “Holy Father, I did not give him, but God has given him to the world through me. I gave him to the Church and I can’t take him back.” The Pope kissed her and hugged her.

Marianna received St. Rita’s International reward, which is given to people who forgive the murderers of their loved ones. She says she has forgiven the murderers of her son and she is praying for their conversion. She said that “they were fighting God, not my son”, and that they were trying to fight the Church.

NEW BENEDICTINE SAINTS- MODERN MARTYRS

October 29, 2016 Cardinal Angelo Amato, the prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, presided at the Mass of beatification of four BENEDICTINE MONKS who were martyred in 1936.

Fathers José Antón Gómez, Antolín Pablos Villanueva, Juan Rafael Mariano Alcocer Martínez, and Luis Vidaurrázaga Gonzáles were monks of the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos** in Burgos and lived in the Priory of Santa Maria de Montserrat in Madrid.

At the beginning of his homily, Cardinal Amato recalled the example of Father Jacques Hamel, the French priest slain while offering Mass this summer, and said that “he was not afraid of holiness, he was not afraid of martyrdom, nor were these four Benedictine martyrs.”

“The sociopolitical climate of the 1930s was characterized by a manifestation of terror against the Church, a bloody persecution,” he continued. “At that time there was darkness over the earth.”

After his Angelus address the following day, Pope Francis recalled the beatification of the martyrs and said, “We praise the Lord and entrust to their intercession the brothers and sisters that unfortunately, yet today, are persecuted for their faith in Christ in several parts of the world.”

**In the nineteenth century the abbey became a member of the Solesmes Congregation in France, and the singing has since been influenced by the scholarship and performance style ofSolesmes.

The monks of Silos became internationally famous for singing Gregorian chant through the album Chant, one of a number of recordings they have made. Chant became popular when re-released in 1994 and peaked at #3 on the Billboard 200 music chart, and was certified as triple platinum, becoming the best-selling album of Gregorian chant ever released.

It was followed by Chant Noël: Chants For The Holiday Season (1994) and Chant II (1995). Technically, the Silos monks are surpassed by other choirs, but they are undoubtedly authentic in the sense that they sing Gregorian chant as part of their daily worship. As a reviewer in Gramophone puts it: "The ensemble is not always perfect, but if these are not professional singers, they are, and they sound like, truly professional monks." 

A LOVER OF THE SACRED HEART

As I have said in past Blogs, anyone who has a devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, has my attention. My Jesuit adviser in college started me in the Apostleship of Prayer devotion, which I continue to this day.  Also, I tell people who come to the monastery that the world needs more lay saints. People often think the only path to holiness is in the religious life.  More and more we are seeing very holy people who lived their lives in the world, spreading the love of Christ as they went about their not so ordinary lives.

SERVANT of GOD AUGUSTE (NONC’O)  PELAFIGUE was born in a pastoral zone in Beaucens at the foot of the Pyrennees Mountains in France in 1888. This is a region near Argeles-Gazaste. He was nearly two when his parents immigrated to the United States. He and his family had a deep rooted Catholic faith upbringing instilled in them.

Their charming village, Beaucens, was about seven miles from Lourdes where the Blessed Mother appeared to St. Bernadette. Another French saint, John Vianney, the Cure Ars, was a saint Nonco modeled his life on, through prayer, good works, mortification, all for the love of God. Nonco's simplicity and later in life his spreading devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Nonco lived in Arnaudville, Louisiana. He attended school at the convent located near where the Little Flower Chapel now stands. He had a great reverence for the nuns. He read and wrote fluently in English and French. , later attending the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.  

Coteau Rodair School

In Nonco's early life, he was a teacher. Mornings he boarded a train in Arnaudville to go to Port Barre. He never married and lived a life of extreme austerity. He was noted by those who knew him to be a very kind and gentle person who did whatever he could for people.  He was very poor, but he wouldn't take money from anyone. When family members fixed food for him, he would give it away.  He lived in a small house without electricity and walked everywhere. He wouldn't accept a ride from anyone as he felt  that was part of his penance to God.  He also ministered to the sick or anyone in need.

His Home

Nonco  loved animals, especially birds  (another reason i like this man).  His property was teeming with guinea hens, bantam roosters, pigeons, exotic birds, such as parrots, and peacocks.

In 1909 at the age of 21, Nonco became a member of the Apostleship of Prayer League. He is best remembered as a promoter of the League where, it is said, he left an imprint on the shoulder of the dirt and gravel roads as he traveled on foot to deliver the Sacred Heart leaflets.

n 1953, at the age of 65, Nonco was given the Papal Degree by Pope Pius XII referring to him as a "REAL CHRISTIAN." It was not surprising that Nonco died on the Feast Day of the Sacred Heart of Jesus which was on June 6th in 19 at the age of 89.  For 68 years of his adult life, "Nonco" served the Lord, attending Daily Mass and serving St. John Francis Regis Catholic Church, Little Flower School and the Arnaudville community for little or no pay.

Feeding his birds

Thirty five years after Nonco's death, in 2012, a nonprofit corporation was formed to work towards the beatification and canonization of Auguste "Nonco" Pelafigue. The Foundation is following the procedures outlined by the church and, at the invitation of the Diocese of Lafayette, on November 9, 2014, 

ETERNITY BEGINS NOW...

Painting of Father Casimir

Amazing to see how many saints and future saints have been born in our lifetime.

SERVANT of GOD FATHER CASIMIR (MICHAEL) CYPHER was born in 1941, the 10th of 12 children from a farm family in Medford, Wisconsin. He attended St. Mary’s Minor Seminary in Illinois and joined the Conventual Franciscans. He graduated from Loyola University in Chicago and was ordained a priest in 1968. As a student, novice and seminarian he was noted for his great kindness, humor, generous spirit and simple nature. 

Many of his contemporaries noted how reminiscent of St. Francis he was. He loved nature and all of God’s creation penning poems and whimsical stories that carry canticle like feel to them. After serving as a simple parish priest in Illinois and California, Father Casimir opted to go the missions in Honduras.

Father went to Honduras to serve the campesinos (peasants) with the sacraments, education, medical care, food and the Gospel. He served in one of the poorest regions of Honduras, which itself was one of the poorest countries in Latin America. Conditions and daily life were extremely difficult for thepeople. Where Father Casimir worked the roads  were unnavigable and seasonably unusable, there was  little or no medical care for families or education for children other than that provided by the missionaries. At that time, approximately half of the child born in Olancho died before age five, a troubling statistic that bears witness to the difficulties the people faced.

Father Casimir brought the love of  offering the sacraments, running the parish and school and serving the poorest people as best he could.

At this time political strife was emerging throughout the country. On June 25, 1975 five thousand poor and landless campesinos began a six day “Hunger March” from Olancho, Honduras to the nation’s capital demanding action on promised land reforms from the military-led government.

Para-military groups under the control of wealthy landowners and the Army moved to stop the marches, they attacked the campesinos, raided the residence of the Bishop (himself a Franciscan), attacked rectories, seminaries and civil institutions tied to the reform movement.

Father Casimir was not a revolutionary. He expressed no political views and did not participate in the marches. While driving a beaten down truck to a repair shop, shots rang out in the square near where Father Casimir was. He rushed in to help the injured and dying with Last rites, prayers and first aid attention. Soldiers and armed personnel carriers surrounded the square. There, Father Casimir was seized.

It is believed he was mistaken for another priest, who served as the head of a local institute. In the end, Father Casimir was simply at the wrong place at the wrong time. He was innocent. Father Casimir was seized, stripped and beaten in the center of the square. Even as he was being humiliated by his captors he walked around the chaos at center of the plaza absolving the living and blessing the bodies of the slain.

Father Casimir, another priest and several women were arrested. That night they were taken to an abandoned farmhouse where they were judged guilty without trial, tortured and mutilated. That night several peasant prisoners were baked alive in a large communal oven on the grounds. And after numerous tortures, the priests were shot in the head. The priests’ bodies were thrown in a dry well with living victims. The well was dynamited and the area bulldozed to conceal the crime.

Several religious sisters and campesinos witnessed the crimes and reported what they had seen. An outcry arose throughout the land, and with pressure from the Conventual Franciscans, the Catholic Church in the US and Honduras, and the US State Department, an official investigation was launched, the well was discovered and the bodies exhumed.

Father Casimir’s body was taken to the Cathedral at Gualaco where his remains are buried today. Thousands of people from throughout Olancho province processed to the church and paid their respects to their “santito,” or little saint. He is fondly remembered by the people he served and his life’s witness is credited with inspiring new vocations in the diocese.

“Look for eternity in those who are near you right now. For your eternity begins today; it begins this moment. It begins right now…”

ANGEL OF MERCY

 A German priest known as the “ANGEL of DACHAU” was beatified as a martyr in Würzburg, Germany, on September 24. Like Alfred Delp, S.J. (Blog  6/3/16) he was imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis in WW II.

Icon- Lewis Williams, OFS

BLESSED ENGELMAR UNZEITIG   was born in Greifendorf, Czechoslovakia in 1911.  He entered the Marianhill Missionaries and was ordained to the priesthood in 1939. Assigned to a parish in Austria, he spoke out on behalf of Jews in his sermons. Blessed Engelmar was imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp for the last four years of his life and voluntarily ministered to typhoid patients.

As a new priest, he said Masses for French prisoners of war, though this was strictly forbidden. After a move to Glockelberg, he came to the attention of Hitler's Youth, who were bothered by his actions and words. Their reports led to his imprisonment at the age 30.. He arrived in Dachau July of 1941 and became #26147. 3,000 clergy were gathered in priest barracks and forced to wear a red triangle on their clothes. 

Threats, terror, abuse, fear, and death were his companions, day after day, for almost 4 years. He endured 12 hour workdays on little food. He said Mass,  read the Bible and ministered the Eucharist to his fellow prisoners. His letters show he never succumbed to hate, forever trusting God’s will in his life.  He wrote from this hell of suffering: ‘Even behind the hardest sacrifices and worst suffering stands God with his Fatherly love, who is satisfied with the good will of his children and gives them and others happiness.’ 

He also  studied Russian in order to be able to help the prisoners from Eastern Europe. 

In December, 1944, a typhus epidemic broke out. The sick were gathered in specific barracks, and left to die alone. 20 clergy from the two priest barracks volunteered for what in reality was a death sentence. In that last month of his life he wrote to his sister: “Love doubles one’s strength,  it really ‘has not entered into the heart of any man what God has prepared for those that love him’, and “the Good is undying.” 

During his Angelus address on September 25, Pope Francis said, “Killed in hatred of the faith in the extermination camp of Dachau, he opposed hatred with love, and answered ferocity answered with meekness: may his example help us to be witnesses of charity and hope even in the midst of trials.”

NEW CUBAN SAINT (WHO LOVED THE IRISH)

VENERABLE FELIX VARELA was born in Havana, Cuba, then still part of New Spain, and grew up in St. Augustine, Florida, the grandson of Lieutenant Bartolomé Morales, the commander of military forces in Spanish Florida, who was stationed there and who helped to raise Felix after the death of his mother in childbirth. As a teenager, he refused his grandfather's offer to send him to a military academy in Spain, returning to Cuba, where he studied to become a priest at San Carlos and San Ambrosio Seminary in Havana, the only seminary in Cuba. He also studied at the University of Havana. At the age of 23 he was ordained in the Cathedral of Havana.

Joining the seminary faculty within a year of his ordination, he taught philosophy, physics and chemistry . In his position there, he taught many illustrious Cubans, including José Antonio Saco, Domingo del Monte, and José de la Luz y Caballero. Referring to Venerable Varela, De la Luz said: "As long as there is thought in Cuba, we will have to remember him, the one who taught us how to think". 

In 1821 Varela was chosen to represent Cuba in the Cortes Generales of Spain in Madrid, where he joined in a petition to the Crown for the independence of Latin America, and also published an essay which argued for the abolition of slavery in Cuba. For such ideas, after the French invasion of Spain in 1823 overthrew the liberal government of Spain and restored King Ferdinand VII who then brutally suppressed all opposition, he was sentenced to death by the government. Before he could be arrested, however, he fled, first to Gibraltar, then to the United States, where he spent the rest of his life, settling in New York City.

In New York he published many articles about human rights, as well as multiple essays on religious tolerance, cooperation between the English and Spanish-speaking communities, and the importance of education.

In 1837, Venerable Felix  was named Vicar General of the Diocese of New York, which then covered all of New York State and the northern half of New Jersey. In this post, he played a major role in the way the American Church dealt with the tremendous influx of Irish refugees, which was just beginning at the time. His desire to assist those in need coupled with his gift for languages allowed him to master the Irish language in order to communicate more efficiently with many of the recent Irish arrivals.

He served as a theological consultant to the committee of American bishops which drew up the famous Baltimore Catechism, which began a standard teaching tool for Catholic children in the nation until the mid-20th century. He was later awarded a doctorate of Theology by St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, Maryland.

In 1848, worn out by his labors, Venerable Felix developed severe asthma, which led him to retire to St. Augustine, dying there five years later. Nearly sixty years after his death,  his body was dis-interred from Tolomato Cemetery and returned to Cuba to be laid to rest in the University of Havana's Aula Magna.

In 1997 the United States Postal Service honored him by issuing a 32-cent commemorative stamp. Because of his experiences, many in the Cuban American exile community identify with him.