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Lietuvi
AT ST. CASIMIR PARISH?|
ST. DOMINIC
Priest August 8th |
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A man who governs his passions is master of the world. We must either rule them, or be ruled by them. Arm yourself with prayer instead of a sword; be clothed with humility instead of fine raiment. Words of St. Dominic Dominic was born in 1170 in Spain, the youngest of four children. He was educated by his uncle, a priest. After further studies, Dominic became a priest and joined a religious community. He and the other monks created a community similar to the community of the early Christians. Soon he became prior (head of the community). In 1204, while on a journey to northern Europe with his bishop, Dominic encountered a group that was preaching false ideas about the Catholic faith. This group originated in Albi, France and was named Albigensians. They taught that people do not have a free will to do God’s will, that marriage was bad, and that suicide and the killing of elderly or fatally ill people could be good. Ordinary people admired that the Albigensians lived strict lives with little comfort. The people were not impressed by the Catholic missionaries who traveled with horse and retinues, stayed at the best inns, and had servants. Therefore, Dominic began itinerant preaching according to the gospel ideal. He continued this work for 10 years, being successful with the ordinary people but not with the leaders. Dominic and his fellow preachers gradually became a community, and in 1215 he founded a religious house at Toulouse. This was to be the beginning of the Dominican Order. Dominic is known as a great preacher, but is also recognized for his love of truth, his clear thought, his organizing ability, and his sensitive, loving nature that reached out to all people. For Dominic, love for people was part of his love for God and for the Church. Source: IN HIS LIKENESS by Rev. Charles E. Yost, SCJ,STL, SAINT OF THE DAY, Leonard Foley, O.F.M., editor, SAINTS AND FEAST DAYS SUPPLEMENT, Loyola University Press |
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THOUGHTS FROM THE CATECHISM OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH |
The Passions
#1763 The term “passions” belongs to the Christian patrimony. Feelings or passions are emotions or movements of the sensitive appetite that incline us to act or not to act in regard to something felt or imagined to be good or evil.
#1764 The passions are natural components of the human psyche; they form the passageway and ensure the connection between the life of the senses and the life of the mind. Our Lord called man’s heart the source from which the passions spring.
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REFLECTION |
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THE SCANDAL OF
Dorothy Day (1897 -
1980), author of this reflection |
In the following article Dorothy Day reflects on the difficulties we sometimes encounter when practicing the Works of Mercy. She gives a rather extreme experience of someone who wrote her a letter, but most of us can give an example in our own lives for the phrase "no good deed goes unpunished." (A time when we tried to do a good deed, but it didn't work out.)
The Works of Mercy are a wonderful stimulus to our growth in faith as well as love. Our faith is taxed to the utmost and so grows through this strain put upon it. It is pruned again and again, and springs up bearing much fruit. For anyone starting to live literally the words of the Fathers of the Church – “The bread you retain belongs to the hungry, the dress you lock up is the property of the naked.” “What is superfluous for one’s need is to be regarded as plunder if one retains it for one’s self.” “Our faith, more precious than gold, must be tried as though by fire.” – there is always a trial ahead.
Here is a letter we received today: “I took a gentleman, seemingly in need of spiritual and temporal guidance, into my home on a Sunday afternoon. I let him have a nap on my bed, went through the want ads with him, made coffee and sandwiches for him, and when he left, I found my wallet had gone also.”
I can only say that the saints would only bow their heads and not try to understand or judge. This is expecting heroic charity, of course. But these things happen for our discouragement, for our testing. We are sowing the seeds of love, and we are not living in the harvest time. We must love to the point of folly, and we are indeed fools, as Our Lord himself was who died for such a one as this. We lay down our lives, too, when we have performed so painfully thankless an act. It is agony to go through such bitter experiences, because we all want to love; we desire with a great longing to love our fellows, and our hearts are often crushed at such rejections. But, as a Carmelite nun said to me last week, “It is the crushed heart which is the soft heart, the tender heart.”
Source: THE WAY OF MERCY, pp. 109-110, ed. Christine M. Bochen, Orbis Books