Passover celebrates the freeing of the Jews from slavery; Shavuot celebrates their becoming God’s holy people by the gift and acceptance of the Law; and the counting of the days to Shavuot symbolises their yearning for the Law.

  From a strictly practical point of view, Shavuot was a very good time for the Holy Spirit to come down and inspire the Apostles to preach to all nations because, being a pilgrimage festival, it was an occasion when Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims from many countries.

  Symbolically, the parallel with the Jews is exact. We are freed from the slavery of death and sin by Easter; with the Apostles, we spend some time as toddlers under the tutelage of the risen Jesus; and when he has left, the Spirit comes down on us and we become a Church.

  Towards the end of his life she helped to convert her husband to a more pious way of life, but he was stabbed to death by his enemies not long afterwards. He repented before he died and was reconciled to the Church.

  Her sons planned to avenge their father’s death. When Rita’s pleas were unavailing, she prayed that God should take their lives if that was the only way to preserve them from the sin of murder. They died of natural causes a year later.

  Rita asked to join the convent of St Mary Magdalen at Cascia. She was rejected for being a widow, since the convent was for virgins only, and later given the impossible task of reconciling her family with her husband’s murderers. She carried out the task and was allowed to enter the convent at the age of 36. She remained there until her death at the age of 70.

  She is widely honoured as a patron saint of impossible or lost causes.

  This other way led to her marriage to Teodoro de Mas in 1799. Teodoro was someone who, like her, had considered religious life and was drawn to actively living a Christian life of prayer and charitable works. Together Joachina and Teodoro raised nine children in the midst of Napoleonic wars, retreating from Barcelona to live in the safety of Vich. Soon after moving to Vich, Teodoro joined the Spanish forces to defend Spain, leaving Joachina as the sole carer of their children. Teodoro returned to the family in 1813, after he resigned from the army, but returned weakened by warfare. When Teodoro died suddenly in 1816, Joachina was only 33 years old and left alone to raise their children. However, her unwavering life of prayer and her substantial inheritance left her with the means to care not only for her children into adulthood, but also the sick people of Vich.

  After her children had left home, Joachina resolved to direct her skills to other works of mercy. She based this ministry on the skills she had developed over previous years: teaching the young, and nursing the sick. In 1826, with the blessing of the local Bishop, Joachina established a community of nine sisters, naming the community the Carmelites of Charity. The early years of the community were spent in extreme poverty, but this did not hamper the establishment of a hospital in Tarrega, Spain. Under Joachina’s leadership and with God’s help, the community worked amidst further Spanish conflicts, their places of ministry were places of peace where wounded from either side of a conflict would be treated. In 1843 the community experienced a rapid period of growth and development, and received final approval from Rome in 1850. During the same year, Joachina’s health began to decline. She died in 1854, and was laid to rest at the mother house of the community at Vich, Spain.

  Whenever we take up a Bible we touch Irenaeus’s work, for he played a decisive role in fixing the canon of the New Testament. It is easy for people nowadays to think of Scripture – and the New Testament in particular – as the basis of the Church, but harder to remember that it was the Church itself that had to agree, early on, about what was scriptural and what was not. Before Irenaeus, there was vague general agreement on what scripture was, but a system based on this kind of common consent was too weak. As dissensions and heresies arose, reference to scripture was the obvious way of trying to settle what the truth really was, but in the absence of an agreed canon of scripture it was all too easy to attack one’s opponent’s arguments by saying that his texts were corrupt or unscriptural; and easy, too, to do a little fine-tuning of texts on one’s own behalf. Irenaeus not only established a canon which is almost identical to our present one, but also gave reasoned arguments for each inclusion and exclusion.

  Irenaeus also wrote a major work, Against the Heresies, which in the course of denying what the Christian faith is not, effectively asserts what it is. The majority of this work was lost for many centuries and only rediscovered in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1842. Many passages from it are used in the Office of Readings.