Christ is the son of Mary: come, let us adore him.
Year: C(I). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: White.
The Immaculate Heart of Mary
Devotion to the Immaculate Heart of Mary began as early as the twelfth century. During the seventeenth century in France, St John Eudes popularised this devotion along with that to the Sacred Heart. St Luke’s Gospel twice mentions that Mary ‘kept all these things in her heart’, pondering the word of God. Mary shows us how to listen to the words the Holy Spirit speaks to us in the depths of our hearts, and how to respond in faith.
In other years: Saint Boniface (675? - 754)
For the first forty years of his life Boniface was known as Wynfrith. He was born in Devon and educated at the monastery at Exeter, and then joined the Benedictine abbey at Nursling, near Southampton. He was a teacher and preacher, but he desired to preach the gospel in a foreign land. In 718, Pope Gregory II commissioned him to do so, at the same time changing his name from Wynfrith to Boniface.
Boniface left England, never to return, and took the gospel to the heathen tribes of Germany, where he had great success. He himself was created Bishop of Mainz, and he founded or restored dioceses in Bavaria, Thuringia, and Franconia. In his later years he worked with King Pepin the Short to reform the Frankish church, and then, over seventy years old, set out to evangelize Friesland (part of modern Holland) where he was set upon and murdered, on 5 June 754.
He is buried at Fulda, near Frankfurt, in the monastery he founded himself, and is honoured as the apostle of Germany.
About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:
Second Reading: St Laurence Justinian (1381-1456)
He joined a community of canons regular on the island of St Giorgio in Alga in the Venetian lagoon. He was ordained in 1407, became prior of the community in 1409, Bishop of Castello in 1433, and, when the seat of the diocese was moved to Venice in 1451, became the first Patriarch of Venice. He wrote many sermons, letters and ascetic treatises, which are still reprinted and read.
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) | Zephaniah 3:14,15 © |
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Shout for joy, daughter of Zion, Israel, shout aloud! Rejoice, exult with all your heart, daughter of Jerusalem! The Lord, the king of Israel, is in your midst; you have no more evil to fear.
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| Noon reading (Sext) | Zechariah 9:9 © |
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Rejoice heart and soul, daughter of Zion! Shout with gladness, daughter of Jerusalem! See now, your king comes to you; he is victorious, he is triumphant.
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| Afternoon reading (None) | Judith 13:18-19 © |
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May you be blessed, my daughter, by God Most High,
beyond all women on earth;
and may the Lord God be blessed,
the Creator of heaven and earth,
by whose guidance you cut off the head
of the leader of our enemies.
The trust you have shown
shall not pass from the memories of men,
but shall ever remind them
of the power of God.
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