Yesterday's Mass was offered for Ray Asser (+). Mass was offered this morning for Patrick Trayner (+). May they be blessed and may the souls of the all the faithful departed rest in peace.
Today is also the memorial day of Saint Bernadette Soubirous, the young seeress of Lourdes, who died on this day in 1879. I have spent the last three weeks reading through the Song of Bernadette, a novelisation of Bernadette's story, written very affectionately by the Jewish Franz Werfel. This man, fleeing from tyranny during the second World War, had found haven in Lourdes and had made a vow to tell the Lourdes story if he ever reached succour in the United States. This book is the fulfilment of his vow. It certainly has given me a greater appreciation of the Life of the Saint. I have just come to the point where she is told by the mysterious Lady of the grotto that she (the lady) is the Immaculate Conception. The parish priest argues and tells Bernadette that she may be the fruit of the Immaculate Conception, but she can't be the Immaculate Conception itself. There are little details like that throughout, and there are marvellous characterisations of various characters in the story, and of the atheistic and revolutionary politics of the time and the delicate balance that had been reached between Church and state. It is certainly a good read. There was a film made with the same name in the forties, and it is fully available on Youtube:
Our readings at Mass these two days continue along the narrative tangent. The first reading tells of the healing of the cripple by the two disciples, Saint Peter and Saint John, in the name of Christ at the Temple. When the people seemed disturbed by this, Peter sets forth again the truth of the Resurrection and then speaks of Christ as the prophet that Moses had promised centuries ago would come after him. The Gospel narrative told us yesterday of Christ coming to the two disciples walking from Jerusalem to the nearby village of Emmaus. In that story, Christ had not made physical contact with the disciples, but had stayed to supper with them and had vanished at the breaking of the bread. If they had had any doubts about his physical reality then, he returns to them, after they have hurried back to Jerusalem with their story, appearing to them in a larger company in today's gospel reading, apparently coming through the walls of the room with several people in it and declaring himself substantial and not a ghost; to prove it, he eats some baked fish. He continues on this occasion, as at Emmaus, to explain and expound his place in the prophecies of the several centuries before.
Sometimes people think that Christ could have accomplished much more if he had stayed longer in ministry before his Sacrifice. I don't think that was his aim. Some scholars think that John the Baptist had a longer and more influential ministry than Christ himself, although John deferred to Christ at the end and many of John's disciples became Christians. Traditionally, Christ spent three years in ministry, and he spent much of that time preaching and teaching, so that his disciples called him Rabbi or Rabboni. But his work was not, finally, centred on teaching. He had come to die in a definite and prescribed manner, which he carefully arranged right down to the details of the entry into Jerusalem on Palm Sunday and the Last Supper on Holy Thursday. The bulk of the preaching and teaching would be accomplished by the Apostles, the bishops and the missionaries of the Church, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, after Pentecost Sunday. And that is the narrative of our first readings this week.
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