Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Year of Saint Joseph

Catholic Schools Week

In other years: Saint John Bosco (1815-1888)

Readings of the Day

RB: Ch 7:34

Mass: Dt 18:15-20; Resp Ps 95; 1 Cor 7:32-35; Mk 1:21-28

If today you hear His voice, harden not your hearts.

I SHOULD LIKE YOU TO BE FREE FROM ANXIETIES.

(1 Cor 7:32)

Thank you for this Saint Paul. No matter our state in life, we go on with anxieties about this and that. Sometimes we lose sight of what we are about as disciples of Jesus who keep our minds fixed on Him and constantly "seek the things that are above" (Col. 3:1). We strive to do the will of God in all things and yet we get distracted with the daily in the form of struggles, aches and pains, misunderstandings, irritations, joys and sorrows too. And our anxieties are exacerbated in these difficult times. Yet Saint Paul tells the Corinthians and us about the cause of some anxieties in today's first reading for this reason: "I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint on you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction" (Cor 7:35). 

We have to be reminded day in and day out and throughout each day too not to be distracted. It seems that the great Saint John Bosco was someone able to keep focused in the midst of many distractions including a cholera epidemic that hit Turin [Italy] in 1854. John and his co-workers looked after the sick and dying while the population as a whole refused to handle them. By the time the epidemic receded, "with a death toll of 1,400", neither John nor any of  his "boys" were infected. 

On Easter Sunday 1934, John Bosco was canonized a saint. At his canonization, Pope Pius XI, who had visited John Bosco some 50 years earlier, recalled this: "A man who was attentive to everything that happened around him and yet at the same time could not be said to be concerned about anything, his thoughts being elsewhere. And it was really so: he was elsewhere, he was with God". Saint John Bosco was extraordinary. At his funeral, "forty thousand people filed past his body while it lay in the church, and virtually the whole population of Turin lined the streets for his funeral ... he was the first canonized saint in whose honour a national holiday was declared in Italy, for the day following his canonization" (Butler's Lives of the Saints, January, pp. 226-230).

God will always save His Church, and the Madonna, who visibly protects the contemporary world, will know how to make redeemers rise up.

(Saint John Bosco)

May the Virgin Mary, who always kept Jesus' words and gestures in her heart, and followed Him with total willingness and faithfulness, help us to listen to Him and follow Him, to experience the signs of His salvation in our life.

(Pope Francis, Sunday Angelus Address, January 31, 2021) 

SAINT JOHN BOSCO,

PRAY FOR US.

SAINT JOSEPH,

PRAY FOR US.

© Gertrude Feick 2021