Universalis
Tuesday 31 October 2023    (other days)
Tuesday of week 30 in Ordinary Time 

Using calendar: New Zealand - Wellington. You can change this.

A mighty God is the Lord: come, let us adore him.

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

Other saints: Saint Alfonso Rodríguez

31 Oct (where celebrated)
Alfonso Rodriguez (1533-1617) was born in Segovia, Spain. His family played host to Saint Peter Faber, who prepared the young Alfonso for his First Communion. He left school at age 14 to help his widowed mother run the family wool business. At age twenty-seven, he married and had three children. Five years later, he found himself a widower with one surviving child, who died Soon after. He joined the Society of Jesus as a Brother at the age of thirty-eight. He spent the next forty-six years of his religious life as guest master and doorkeeper of the Jesuit college in Majorca, where he exercised a marvellous influence not only on the members of the college, but upon a great number of people who came to him for spiritual advice. He was a friend and advisor to Saint Peter Claver, encouraging him to go to the missions in South America. His daily routine, though ordinary, offered him opportunities for holiness of life: each time the bell rang, he looked at the door and envisioned that it was God who was standing outside. He was often heard to say “I’m just coming, Lord.”

Other saints: In Honour of St Alphonsus Rodriguez

31 Oct (where celebrated)
In honour of
St. Alphonsus Rodriguez
Laybrother of the Society of Jesus
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
Gerard Manley Hopkins

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

Second Reading: Pope St Clement I

Clement was Bishop of Rome after Peter, Linus and Cletus. He lived towards the end of the first century, but nothing is known for certain about his life. Clement’s letter to the Corinthian church has survived. It is the first known Patristic document, and exhorts them to peace and brotherly harmony.

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)1 Corinthians 12:4-6 ©
There is a variety of gifts but always the same Spirit; there are all sorts of service to be done, but always to the same Lord; working in all sorts of different ways in different people, it is the same God who is working in all of them.

Noon reading (Sext)1 Corinthians 12:12-13 ©
Just as a human body, though it is made up of many parts, is a single unit because all these parts, though many, make one body, so it is with Christ. In the one Spirit we were all baptised, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens, and one Spirit was given to us all to drink.

Afternoon reading (None)1 Corinthians 12:24,25-26 ©
God has arranged the body and that there may not be disagreements inside the body, but that each part may be equally concerned for all the others. If one part is hurt, all parts are hurt with it. If one part is given special honour, all parts enjoy it.

Local calendars

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New Zealand

Wellington


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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