Universalis
Thursday 19 January 2023    (other days)
Thursday of week 2 in Ordinary Time 

Using calendar: Scotland - Motherwell. You can change this.

Come before the Lord, singing with joy.

Year: A(I). Psalm week: 2. Liturgical Colour: Green.

Other saints: St Wulstan (1008? - 1095)

England
St Wulstan became a Benedictine monk at Worcester Cathedral priory, and later was made prior. He reformed the monastic observance, and became known as a preacher and counsellor.
  In 1062 he became Bishop of Worcester and combined effectively the tasks of monastic superior and diocesan bishop. He is the first English bishop known to have made a systematic visitation of his diocese. Together with Lanfranc he was instrumental in abolishing the slave trade from Bristol to Viking Ireland, and later he supported Lanfranc’s policy of reform. He built parish churches and re-founded the monastery at Westbury-on-Trym. He insisted on clerical celibacy, and under him Worcester became one of the most important centres of Old English literature and culture. He was known for his abstinence and generosity to the poor.
  After the Norman Conquest he remained one of the few Englishmen to retain office. In the Barons’ Rising he was loyal to the Crown and defended the Castle of Worcester against the insurgents. He was buried in his Cathedral, and his cult began almost at once. He was canonised in 1203 and his feast was widely kept in monastic and diocesan calendars.
  In the Chapel of St Oliver Plunkett at Downside Abbey, a stained glass window depicts a less official story concerning Wulstan: that one day, whilst celebrating Mass, he was distracted by the smell of roast goose, which was wafted into the church from the neighbouring kitchen. He prayed that he might be delivered from the distraction and vowed that he would never eat meat again if his prayer were granted.
  The modern world needs stories like this more than it realises. The watered-down puritanism that serves so many of us as a moral code today equates pleasure with evil – cream cakes, the advertisements tell us, are “naughty but nice”.. or even “wickedly delicious.” Messages like this are a libel on the name of God, who created the pleasures, and on his Son, whose first recorded public act was turning water into wine. There is nothing wicked about delicious food in itself, or in any other pleasant or beautiful thing. Let us enjoy God’s creation all we can and rejoice in its creator as we do so, and if, like Wulstan, we have to deprive ourselves of something for our spiritual or bodily health, then let us suffer our deprivation cheerfully, blaming the weakness in us that made it necessary. Let us never devalue our sacrifices by denigrating the things we sacrifice, or the sacrifice will be pointless. Let us remember what God did, day after day, as he was creating the world: he looked at it, and saw it, and behold: it was very good.

Other saints: St Faolan (8th century)

Dunkeld
The fact that the saint’s name can be spelt Fillan, Filan, Phillan, Fáelán or Faolan says everything about the difficulty of disentangling the records of early Gaelic saints, and even their identities. This is nothing to worry about: saints are real people, and they remain real even when most of the facts about them have evaporated. It will happen to us.
  This St Faolan appears to be St. Fillan of Munster, the son of Feriach, grandson of Cellach Cualann, King of Leinster. He received the monastic habit in the Abbey of Saint Fintan Munnu and came to Scotland from Ireland in 717 as a hermit along with his Irish princess-mother St. Kentigerna, his Irish prince-uncle St. Comgan, and his siblings. They settled at Loch Duich. Fillan later moved south and is said to have been a monk at Taghmon in Wexford before eventually settling in Pittenweem (‘the Place of the Cave’), Fife, in the east of Scotland later in the 8th century.

Other saints: Saint Henry of Uppsala (-1156)

Denmark, Finland, Sweden
Henry was a medieval English clergyman who came to Sweden with Cardinal Nicholas Breakspear (the future Pope Hadrian IV) in 1153. He was probably designated to be the new Archbishop of Uppsala, but the independent church province of Sweden could only be established in 1164 after the civil war there, so Henry would have been sent to organize the Church in Finland, where Christians had already existed for two centuries.
  It is said that Henry entered Finland together with King Saint Eric of Sweden and died there as a martyr. But documentary evidence of this period is virtually non-existent, and all that can be said for certain is that his veneration has been established since at least the 14th century. The Catholic Cathedral in Helsinki is dedicated to him.

Other saints: The Jesuit Martyrs of the Reformation in Europe

19 Jan (where celebrated)
Saints John Ogilvie, Priest; Stephen Pongrácz, Melchior Grodziecki, Priests, and Mark of Križevci, Canon of Esztergom; Blessed Ignatius de Azevedo, Priest, and Companions; James Salès, Priest, and William Saultemouche, Religious, Martyrs
  Today we commemorate Jesuits who were killed for the Catholic Faith in the sixteenth century, after the Reformation. John Ogilvie ministered clandestinely to persecuted Catholics in Scotland. Stephen Pongracz from Hungary, Melchior Grodziecki from Poland, and Mark Krizevci, a local diocesan priest, ministered to the abandoned Catholics in Koscielny (Slovakia). Ignatius de Acevedo and thirty-nine Jesuits he had recruited from Portugal for the missions were massacred at sea by French Calvinist pirates while en route to Brazil. James Salès, a French Jesuit, ministered to straying Catholics in the Aube as, with his companion William Saultemouche, a Jesuit Brother.

Other saints: Bl Andrew of Peschiera OP (1400 - 1485)

19 Jan (where celebrated)
Dominican Friar and Priest.
  Blessed Andrew was born at Peschiera, Italy in 1400 and entered the Dominican Order in a reformed priory of the Congregation of Lombardy. Itinerant preaching was his life’s ministry, especially in the Valtelline region of the Italian Alps where he labored for forty- five years. Traveling on foot and living with the poor, he reconciled many to Christ. He died at the priory of Morbegno on January 18, 1485.

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: Saint Fulgentius of Ruspe (462/7 - 527/ 533)

Fulgentius was bishop of the city of Ruspe in the Roman province of Africa, which is in modern-day Tunisia. At that time Africa and parts of the Near East were ruled by the Vandals, who were Arians, calling themselves Christians but denying the divinity of Christ. As a result Fulgentius’ early career was marked by a series of flights from persecution, as Catholics tried to maintain their faith under Vandal rule. It was a complicated time. In 499 he was tortured for saying that Jesus was both God and man; the next year the Vandal king Thrasamund, impressed by his talents, invited him to return from exile and become a bishop (Fulgentius declined, since he knew that Thrasamund had ordered that none but Arians should be bishops); two years later he was persuaded to become bishop of Ruspe in Tunisia but shortly afterwards he was exiled to Sardinia. Thrasamund invited him back in 515 to debate against the Arians but exiled him again in 520.
  In 523, following the death of Thrasamund and the accession of his Catholic son Hilderic, Fulgentius was allowed to return to Ruspe and try to convert the populace back to the faith. He worked to reform many of the abuses which had infiltrated his old diocese in his absence. The power and effectiveness of his preaching were so profound that his archbishop, Boniface of Carthage, wept openly every time he heard Fulgentius preach, and publicly thanked God for giving such a preacher to his church.

Liturgical colour: green

The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the orderly sequence of weeks through the year, a season in which we are being neither single-mindedly penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).

Mid-morning reading (Terce)Galatians 5:13-14 ©
My brothers, you were called, as you know, to liberty; but be careful, or this liberty will provide an opening for self-indulgence. Serve one another, rather, in works of love, since the whole of the Law is summarised in a single command: Love your neighbour as yourself.

Noon reading (Sext)Galatians 5:16-17 ©
Let me put it like this: if you are guided by the Spirit you will be in no danger of yielding to self-indulgence, since self-indulgence is the opposite of the Spirit, the Spirit is totally against such a thing, and it is precisely because the two are so opposed that you do not always carry out your good intentions.

Afternoon reading (None)Galatians 5:22,23,25 ©
What the Spirit brings is very different: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, trustfulness, gentleness and self-control. Since the Spirit is our life, let us be directed by the Spirit.

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Scripture readings taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.
 
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