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Monday 1 September 2025    (other days)
Monday of week 22 in Ordinary Time 

Using calendar: England - Westminster. You can change this.

Let us rejoice in the Lord, with songs let us praise him.

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

Other saints: Saint Giles (c.650 - c.710)

St Andrews & Edinburgh, Slovenia
Giles was a Greek Christian hermit saint from Athens. He settled in Gaul to escape his high reputation in Greece, and became for many years a hermit in a forest near Nîmes. He spent many years in solitude there but eventually founded a monastery. This monastery, at Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, became a place of pilgrimage and a stop on the road that led from Arles to Santiago de Compostela, the pilgrim Way of St James.
  His life and personality became a magnet for pious legends, behind which a coherent biography is sometimes hard to discern. He is the patron saint of Edinburgh.

Other saints: St Teresa Margaret Redi of the Sacred Heart (1747-1770)

1 Sep (where celebrated)
Teresa Margaret was born in Arezzo, Tuscany, in 1747 of the noble Redi family and baptised Anna Maria. At the age of nine, she was sent to a boarding school run by Benedictine nuns, St Apollonia’s in Florence. At the age of sixteen, as her time of schooling came to an end, Anna Maria discerned a call to religious life. During this time, in a quiet experience of prayer it became clear that she was called to the life of Carmel. She entered the Discalced Carmelites in Florence in 1764, taking the name Teresa of the Sacred Heart. Her writings and charity within the community attested to a deep interior life. On one occasion she writes of a special contemplative experience concerning the words of St John, “God is Love.” She worked with care and compassion in the community infirmary. A sudden onset of ill-health, in 1770, ended with her death, aged twenty-three.
MT

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

Second Reading: Thomas à Kempis (1379 - 1471)

The first thing to know about The Imitation of Christ is that it was published anonymously and that its attribution to Thomas à Kempis is not uncontested. Other possible authors have included (as his translator Betty I. Knott points out) thirty-five different people, including Gerhard Groote; Walter Hilton, the English mystic; St Bernard; St Bonaventure; Pope Innocent III; and John Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris. But on the whole Thomas à Kempis himself is still in the lead. (In any case, “Do not ask who said this,” says Book I chapter 5, “but listen to what is said”).
  The late 14th and early 15th centuries saw a miraculous outpouring of mysticism and spirituality all over western Europe, encompassing The Cloud of Unknowing, Walter Hilton, Julian of Norwich, and even the maddening Margery Kempe. Much of it was lay, and even Thomas à Kempis, who became a priest, belongs not to any of the great monastic or preaching orders but to the Brethren of the Common Life, a movement which started in the Netherlands and Rhineland in the late fourteenth century. The birth of the movement was the teaching of Gerhard Groote, who preached and taught a simple prayerful way of life which people could follow in their own homes. Groote shared most of his own large house in Deventer, in the Netherlands, with a group of devout women who lived together as a community (without taking formal vows), and Florentius Radwijns, one of the cathedral clergy and a follower of Groote’s, then hosted a similar community of men. The Brethren of the Common Life aimed to live a communal life in imitation of the simplicity and poverty of the earliest Christians, devoting themselves both to contemplation and to active works. In the time of relative ecclesial peace which preceded the Reformation the Brethren were allowed to grow and develop largely without too much interference. In due course a progression was also established whereby those Brethren who desired a more formal commitment founded, or joined, houses of regular Augustinian canons or canonesses.
  Thomas à Kempis himself was born in Kempen, a small town not far from Cologne. He went to a school founded by Gerhard Groote, and in 1399 became a member of the recently founded Augustinian house of which John, his elder brother, was the first prior. He remained a member of this community for the rest of his life.
  It was a custom of the Brethren to make collections of sayings on spiritual topics, and Thomas followed this practice from his schooldays onwards. Thus some of the Second Readings from the Imitation that we use in the liturgy read almost like a sequence of “bullet points”. In a sense this is the best use of the Imitation – as a bedside book to be read one chapter out of each night, as Monsignor Ronald Knox did in his later years. Thomas à Kempis manages, in each short chapter, to propound a theme or even sketch a situation, and to bring out of it a moral or a conclusion, food for the spirit. Knox tells us that in the days when English Protestants treated The Pilgrim’s Progress as a sort of extra book of the New Testament, The Imitation of Christ was practically the Catholic equivalent. But that does not make it a warm bath to sink oneself into. As Knox puts it:
  “The whole work… is a sustained irritant which preserves us… from sinking back into relaxation: from self-conceit, self-pity, self-love. It offers consolation here and there, but always at the price of fresh exertion… Heaven help us if we find easy reading in The Imitation of Christ.”

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)Jeremiah 31:33
This is the covenant I will make with the House of Israel when those days arrive – it is the Lord who speaks. Deep within them I will plant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people.

Noon reading (Sext)Jeremiah 32:40
I will make an everlasting covenant with them. I will not cease in my efforts for their good, and I will put respect for me into their hearts, so that they turn from me no more.

Afternoon reading (None)Ezekiel 34:31
You, my sheep, are the flock I shall pasture, and I am your God – it is the Lord who speaks.

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