Universalis: Today

Using calendar: Latin America. You can choose a country.

Pages

About Today · Readings at Mass · Office of Readings · Morning Prayer · Terce · Sext · None · Evening Prayer · Night Prayer · Yearly calendar

Links

· Donate · Tweet · Show QR code

Christ the Lord was tempted and suffered for us. Come, let us adore him.
Or: O that today you would listen to his voice: harden not your hearts.

Year: A(II). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: Violet.

Other saints: Saint Macartan (- 506)

Ireland

He was a convert from paganism and a companion of St Patrick, who made him bishop of Clogher in 454. He is the patron saint of the diocese.

Other saints: St Oscar Romero (1917-1980)

Trinidad & Tobago

Óscar Arnulfo Romero y Galdámez was born in El Salvador in 1917. He originally trained as a carpenter but early decided to become a priest. He was ordained in Rome in 1942. Returning to his home country, he became a parish priest, then rector of a seminary, and finally, in 1977, as Archbishop of San Salvador, the primate of the country.

The country was in an unstable state, with enormous divisions in society and terror on every side, both from insurgent movements and from the government: each side seeming to have no option other than outdoing the other in violence. More and more people were being terrorised or tortured or murdered. Romero responded to the situation. His weekly homilies listed disappearances, tortures and killings across the country. Broadcast on national radio, they had a larger audience than any other programme.

Romero’s definitive broadcast was on 23 March 1980, when he called on the army, whose members were sworn to be servants of the people and were also, most of them, baptised Christians, to cease from repression and disobey any orders that were contrary to the law of God. His assassination the next day underlined his message in blood. He was beatified in San Salvador in 2015 canonised by Pope Francis in Rome in 2018.

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

Second Reading: Pope St Leo the Great (- 461)

Leo was born in Etruria and became Pope in 440. He was a true shepherd and father of souls. He constantly strove to keep the faith whole and strenuously defended the unity of the Church. He repelled the invasions of the barbarians or alleviated their effects, famously persuading Attila the Hun not to march on Rome in 452, and preventing the invading Vandals from massacring the population in 455.

Leo left many doctrinal and spiritual writings behind and a number of them are included in the Office of Readings to this day. He died in 461.

Liturgical colour: violet

Violet is a dark colour, ‘the gloomy cast of the mortified, denoting affliction and melancholy’. Liturgically, it is the colour of Advent and Lent, the seasons of penance and preparation.