Universalis
Saturday 25 November 2023    (other days)
Blessed Niels Stensen, Bishop 
 on Saturday of week 33 in Ordinary Time

Using calendar: Denmark. You can pick a diocese or region.

Christ is the chief shepherd, the leader of his flock: come, let us adore him.

Year: A(I). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: White.

Blessed Niels Stensen (1638-86)

Niels Steensen was born as the son of a Copenhagen goldsmith. After studying medicine in Copenhagen, he went on a European study trip, where in the Netherlands he encountered a religious and philosophical diversity that brought him into a religious crisis. He overcame the crisis and found a fervent faith in God’s providence, but he could no longer find the Protestant faith of his homeland convincing.
  After a series of anatomical discoveries and a stay in Copenhagen, he set out in 1664 on a new study trip, and in Florence he found friends and well-wishers. There he converted to the Catholic Church in 1667 and in the following years made a number of further anatomical and geological discoveries. After a stay in Copenhagen 1672-74, he gave up science and was ordained a priest in 1675 to devote himself to pastoral care among foreign travellers in Tuscany.
  In 1677 he was made a bishop and sent to Northern Germany, where he worked in Hanover, Münster, Hamburg and finally Schwerin, where he died in the reputation of sanctity. His mortal remains were taken to Florence and today lie in the Medici burial church of San Lorenzo. In 1988 he was beatified by Pope John Paul II. He is loved not only for his pastoral zeal, his deep spirituality and his love for poverty and the poor, but also as an example of the cohesion of natural science and religious knowledge.

Other saints: Saint Colman of Cloyne (522 - 600)

Ireland
He was a royal bard who in later life became a bishop. He founded several churches, including the church at Cloyne: he is patron saint of the diocese. See the article in Wikipedia.

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

Second Reading: St Thomas Aquinas (1225 - 1274)

Thomas was born of a noble family in southern Italy, and was educated by the Benedictines. In the normal course of events he would have joined that order and taken up a position suitable to his rank; but he decided to become a Dominican friar instead.
  He studied in Paris and in Cologne under the great philosopher St Albert the Great, at a time of great philosophical ferment, when the writings of Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of the ancient world, had been newly rediscovered and were becoming available to people in the West for the first time in a thousand years. Many feared that Aristotelianism was flatly contradictory to Christianity, and the fact that Aristotle’s works were coming to the West from mostly Muslim sources did nothing to help matters.
  Thomas’ clarity of thought ensured that the truth would be recognised whatever its source. He inaugurated a form of disputation which would bring ideas together not so that one would win and the other lose through clever tricks of debate, but so that the single unifying truth behind them should be found. He thus not only transformed the practice of theology but also laid the foundations of the modern scientific revolution.
  As well as producing major philosophical and theological works, Thomas, at the request of Pope Urban IV, composed the Divine Office for the newly-created feast of Corpus Christi.

Liturgical colour: white

White is the colour of heaven. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate feasts of the Lord; Christmas and Easter, the great seasons of the Lord; and the saints. Not that you will always see white in church, because if something more splendid, such as gold, is available, that can and should be used instead. We are, after all, celebrating.
  In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)1 Kings 8:60-61 ©
May all the peoples of the earth come to know that the Lord is God indeed, and that there is no other. May your hearts be wholly with the Lord our God, following his laws and keeping his commandments as at this present day.

Noon reading (Sext)Jeremiah 17:9-10 ©
The heart is more devious than any other thing, perverse too: who can pierce its secrets? I, the Lord, search to the heart, I probe the loins, to give each man what his conduct and his actions deserve.

Afternoon reading (None)Wisdom 7:27,8:1 ©
Although she is alone, Wisdom can accomplish everything. She deploys her strength from one end of the earth to the other, ordering all things for good.

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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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