Daily Masses - Tuesday of the fifth week of Easter and the feast day of our Lady of Fátima

Mass was offered yesterday for the repose of the soul of Padraig Quinn (+), and today for the repose of the soul of Patrick McClare (+); may their souls and the souls of all the Faithful departed rest in peace.

In yesterday's gospel reading, Christ says this to us:

"'He who is to befriend you, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send on my account, will in his turn make everything plain, and recall to your minds everything I have said to you. Peace is my bequest to you, and the peace which I will give you is mine to give; I do not give peace as the world gives it. Do not let your heart be distressed, or play the coward. You have heard me say that I am going away and coming back to you. If you really loved me, you would be glad to hear that I am on my way to my Father; my Father has greater power than I.'" - Gospel of S. John, 14: 26-28

You may of course remember that bit from the rite of Holy Communion at Mass, when the priest says,

"Lord Jesus Christ, who said to your Apostles, 'Peace I leave you, my peace I give you,' look not on our sins, but on the faith of your Church..."

But look at the context. The line from the Mass comes just before the offering of peace from the priest to the people, and nowadays we all turn to one another with smiles and grins and say Peace be with you, etc. But Christ says in the gospel reading that he does not give peace as the world understands it, which is rather what we seem to understand it. Christ is talking about peace in the midst of distress, when one is tempted to play the coward! What can that mean? 

Since the feast day of the English Martyrs, just over a week ago, I have been slowly reading through an account by the English Jesuit Father John Gerard (aka. Jarrett) of his life and work in England in the turmoil of the Elizabethan years between roughly 1588 and until her death and then until he finally left England for permanent exile in the reign of King Charles in the 1610s. In those years, especially under Elizabeth's government, Catholics were viciously persecuted, many (both priests and laity) were brutally tortured and executed as traitors. And... from Father Gerard's account, the most heroic ones took it all with great patience and suffered everything for Christ, refusing to provide information to the government officials of other Catholics who could be thus dragged down into suffering themselves. In the circumstances of suffering, it is easy to play the coward, and submit to the governmental religion. Father Gerard called such Catholics who submitted 'schismatics,' because they wished to try and be Catholic in a different way from the Old Religion of the country. To avoid persecution. I have reached the point in the book where Father has been arrested and imprisoned in a most foul prison in London, in a room near an open toilet and with his legs heavily chained. And he says that he was at peace and able to pray and meditate.

'Peace I leave you, my peace I give you.' Today is the feast day of our Lady of Fatima. In 1917, Europe was in the utmost turmoil, after years of war. In Portugal, after the regicides of about a decade previously, the spirit of the Revolution had gutted the Catholics, and atheistic and anti-Catholic agents of the government were in authority everywhere. In those circumstances, three little shepherd children had an astonishing visit from an angel who called itself the Angel of Portugal. The angel had come to prepare the way for another and more important visitor and taught the children to pray. This was one of the prayers the angel gave them.

"Most Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, I adore Thee profoundly.

I offer Thee the Most Precious Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity

of Jesus Christ, present in all the tabernacles of the world,

in reparation for the outrages, sacrileges, and indifference

by which He is offended.  And through the infinite merit

of His Most Sacred Heart, and the Immaculate Heart of Mary,

I beg of Thee the conversion of poor sinners."

When the Lady in white appeared first on the 13th day of May, she helped the children say the rosary. In a series of visits on the 13th day of almost every month until October, she gave them hope for the future and asked them to pray and do much penance for sinners. Note the mention in the Angel's prayer of outrages, sacrileges and indifference that would soon become the mark of the post-modern world in which we live today. The children were so touched by the plight of 'poor sinners' that for the next two years or so, until her death, little Jacinta Marto would keep talking about making sacrifice for the 'pobres peccadores.' The situation of the harassment of the people by the government in Portugal after 1910 would have been familiar to the English Catholics under Queen Elizabeth. Christ had once said that we would be persecuted, because they had first persecuted Him. In our gospel reading yesterday, He says to us, Do not be distressed, stay faithful, and you shall have peace in the midst of suffering. Between Father Gerard's account, the story of Saint Bernadette that I finished a few weeks ago and the diary of Saint M. Faustyna Kowalska which I'm in the middle of now, there is the extraordinary similarity that the many physical sufferings of these holy people and their mental anguish was bathed in what they all called 'consolations.' Divine consolations, that is - the peace that the world cannot give.

Good heavens, this is a long post. Have a nice video: this is the trailer from a dramatic telling of the Fátima story that was made about ten years ago: