Come, ring out our joy to the Lord; hail the God who saves us, alleluia.
Year: C(I). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: Green.
In other years: Saints John de Brébeuf, Isaac Jogues and Companions
Between 1642 and 1649 these eight members of the Society of Jesus, who had travelled to North America to preach the true faith, were killed by the native Huron and Iroquois tribes after horrible tortures. Isaac Jogues died on 18 October 1647, and John de Brébeuf on 16 March 1648.
In other years: St Paul of the Cross (1694 - 1775)
He was born at Ovada in Liguria. As a young man he helped his father, who was a merchant. He aspired to a perfect life, abandoned all his possessions and started to live in the service of the poor and sick. He gathered companions to help him in the task.
He became a priest and worked more and more for the salvation of souls. He founded the Passionist Order, set up houses for his congregation and devoted himself to apostolic labours. He inflicted harsh penances on himself. He died at Rome on 18 October 1775.
In other years: Saint Frideswide (-735)
Saint Frideswide was a member of the royal family of Wessex who founded a minster at Oxford; the date of her death is traditionally given as 19 October 735. The site of her monastery is probably the present-day Christ Church College where the medieval Church of St Frideswide (now the Cathedral of the Anglican Diocese of Oxford) contained her shrine until the Reformation. She was adopted in the Middle Ages as the Patron of both the City and University of Oxford.
Other saints: St Philip Howard (1557-1595)
Arundel & Brighton
Philip Howard was born at Arundel House, London, 18 June 1557, and died in the Tower of London on 19 October 1595. He was educated partly under John Foxe, the Church of England martyrologist and partly at Cambridge. He married Anne, Countess of Arundel and Surrey. In 1580 he succeeded to the Earldom of Arundel. He frequented the Court, and knew and entertained the queen. Towards the close of the year he was present at the disputations of Edmund Campion in the Tower and this proved the first step in his conversion, though his life was then the reverse of virtuous, and for a time he deserted his wife. As the Catholic revival gained strength, the earl found himself suspected and out of favour, and his difficulties were increased by his wife’s conversion. He was now wholly reconciled to her, and in September 1584, was received into the Catholic Church, and became a fervent Catholic. The change of life was soon noticed at Court, on which Philip resolved to leave the country, which he did (1585), after writing a detailed letter of explanation to Elizabeth. But he was captured at sea and confined in the Tower of London. He was at first sentenced to a very substantial fine, and imprisonment at the queen’s pleasure. Then in the aftermath of the Armada, he was tried for having favoured the excommunication of the queen, and for having prayed for the invaders. He was condemned and left to die in prison. Shortly before he died he wrote a long and moving letter to his wife asking forgiveness for the way he had treated her in the past. On another occasion he wrote: “The Catholic and Roman faith which I hold is the only cause (as far as I can in any way imagine) why either I have been thus long imprisoned or why I am now ready to be executed.” His last prayer to see his wife and only son, who had been born after his imprisonment, was refused except on condition of his coming to the Church of England church, on which terms he might also go free. He was buried in the Tower Church. In 1624 his remains were moved to Arundel where they still rest.
Other saints: St Peter of Alcántara (-1562)
Shrewsbury
St Peter of Alcántara was a 16th century Spanish Franciscan of the Stricter Observance and a confessor and spiritual director of St Teresa of Avila. He was chosen as patron of Shrewsbury Cathedral by Bertram, the 17th Earl of Shrewsbury, who paid for the building of the cathedral but died aged 23 two months before it was opened in 1856. A Catholic, the Earl had a great devotion to the saint.
Peter Garavita was born at Alcántara, a small town in the province of Estremadura in 1499 and decided to join the Franciscans at the age of 16 shortly after he was sent to university in Salamanca by his stepfather.
He was a man of remarkable austerity and poverty who travelled throughout Spain preaching the Gospel to the poor. He wrote a Treatise on Prayer and Meditation which was considered a masterpiece by St Teresa, St Francis de Sales and Louis of Granada.
St Peter was ordained to the priesthood in 1524 and in 1538 was made minister provincial of the Franciscan province of St Gabriel of Estremadura but resigned when his plans to enforce severe rules among the friars were opposed.
He then left for Portugal where he built his first hermitage on Arabida, a barren mountain on the mouth of the River Tagus opposite Lisbon, where he attracted followers – the Alcantarines – who were distinguished by their ascetic practices, never wearing shoes, eating meat or drinking wine. In 1554 St Peter returned to Spain to establish a friary at Pedrosa using a stricter form of the Franciscan Rule, insisting, for instance, that every cell should be no more than 7ft long.
Two years before his death he arrived in Avila on a visitation where he was introduced to St Teresa. He supported her case that her visions and prayer were from God and that she was not afflicted by delusions caused by an evil spirit.
It is from St Teresa’s autobiography that the life of St Peter and his spiritual gifts are more thoroughly understood. The saint said she saw for herself his great raptures and transports of divine love when he was in prayer. She also marvelled at his austerity, telling of how he would deliberately leave the window and door of his cell open during snaps of cold weather and how he would deny himself sleep as a form of bodily mortification and penance, a practice which has led him to become regarded as the patron saint of night watchmen.
St Peter was credited as doing more than anyone else in helping St Teresa in her historical reforms of the Carmelite order. Seized by a mortal illness, he died in 1562 while kneeling in prayer in the convent of Arenas.
About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:
Second Reading: St Augustine of Hippo (354 - 430)
Augustine was born in Thagaste in Africa of a Berber family. He was brought up a Christian but left the Church early and spent a great deal of time seriously seeking the truth, first in the Manichaean heresy, which he abandoned on seeing how nonsensical it was, and then in Neoplatonism, until at length, through the prayers of his mother and the teaching of St Ambrose of Milan, he was converted back to Christianity and baptized in 387, shortly before his mother’s death.
Augustine had a brilliant legal and academic career, but after his conversion he returned home to Africa and led an ascetic life. He was elected Bishop of Hippo and spent 34 years looking after his flock, teaching them, strengthening them in the faith and protecting them strenuously against the errors of the time. He wrote an enormous amount and left a permanent mark on both philosophy and theology. His Confessions, as dazzling in style as they are deep in content, are a landmark of world literature. The Second Readings in the Office of Readings contain extracts from many of his sermons and commentaries and also from the Confessions.
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 John 4:16 |
We ourselves have known and put our faith in God’s love towards ourselves. God is love and anyone who lives in love lives in God, and God lives in him.
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Noon reading (Sext) | Galatians 6:7-8 |
What a man sows, he reaps. If he sows in the field of self-indulgence he will get a harvest of corruption out of it; if he sows in the field of the Spirit he will get from it a harvest of eternal life.
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Afternoon reading (None) | (Galatians 6:9-10) |
We must never get tired of doing good, and then we shall get our harvest at the proper time. While we have the chance, we must do good to all, and especially to our brothers in the faith.
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