Thursday of the Fourth Week of Eastertide

Year of Saint Joseph

Year of the Family "Amoris Laetitia The Joy of Love" 

Other saints: Saint Catherine of Siena, Virgin, Doctor (1347-1380)

Readings of the Day

RB: Ch 71 Mutual Obedience

Mass: Acts 13:13-25; Resp Ps 89; Jn 13:16-20

For ever I will sing the goodness of the Lord.

JESUS, CROWN OF SAINTS,

HAVE MERCY ON US.

To celebrate Saint Catherine of Siena I include one of my favorite passages from The Dialogue, a text studied in a semester long class I was privileged to take while studying in Rome. Every year on this date, along with many others, I would visit the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva near the Pantheon, where Catherine's body, or parts of it anyway, are entombed. With others, I would stand in line for not a short time to pray at her tomb. Another holy place to visit is the Basilica of San Domenico in Catherine's hometown of Siena. The pilgrim will find Catherine's head there, along with one of her fingers. Oh, the beauty of our faith tradition. 

Here is the passage from The Dialogue, sandwiched between the two scriptural passages referenced. In the margin of my book, I have written, "discovery made in prayer." Thank you to the professor, an Irish Dominican scholar and poet. 

Beloved, we are God's children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.

(1 Jn 3:2)

As the soul comes to know herself she also knows God better, for she sees how good He has been to her. In the gentle mirror of God she sees her own dignity: that through no merit of hers but by His creation she is the image of God. And in the mirror of God's goodness she sees as well her own unworthiness, the work of her own sin. For just as you can better see the blemish on your face when you look at yourself in a mirror, so the soul who in true self-knowledge rises up with desire to look at herself in the gentle mirror of God with the eye of understanding sees all the more clearly her own defects because of the purity she sees in Him.

(Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, 13)

For any one is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like man who observes his natural face in a mirror; for he observes himself and goes away and at once forgets what he was like.

(Jm 1:23-24)

SAINT CATHERINE OF SIENA,

SAINT JOSEPH,

PRAY FOR US.

Today's photo: It is fitting and right to have faithful reader Catherine's tulips today. Her patron, the great Saint Catherine of Siena, rejoices. Auguri e buon onomastica carissima Catherine!

© Gertrude Feick 2021