Pope Benedict's general prayer intention for October is: "That Catholic Universities may more and more be places where, in the light of the Gospel, it is possible to experience the harmonious unity existing between faith and reason."

His mission intention is: "That the World Mission Day may afford an occasion for understanding that the task of proclaiming Christ is an absolutely necessary service to which the Church is called for the benefit of humanity."

St. Jerome

St. Michael the Arcangel

The Pope speaks about school

“Dear children”, said the Pope in his remarks, “you go to school and you learn naturally, and I am recalling that seventy-seven years have now passed since I began school. I lived in a small village of three hundred inhabitants, … yet we learned the essential things. Most importantly, we learned to read and write. I think it is a great thing to be able to read and write, because in this way we can know other people’s ideas, read newspapers and books. We can also know what was written two thousand or more years ago; we can know the spiritual continents of the world and communicate with one another. Above all there is one extraordinary thing: God wrote a book, He spoke to us human beings, finding people to write the book containing the Word of God. Reading that book, we can read what God says to us”.

The Holy Father went on: “At school you learn everything you need for life. You also learn to know God, to know Jesus and thus you learn how to live well. At school you make a lot of friends and this is a beautiful thing because in this way you form one big family, but among our best friends, the first we meet and know should be Jesus Who is a friend to everyone and truly shows us the path of life.”

Padre Pio Miracle Story

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Mother talking to a son

As we walked back to the car, my son visibly happy that church was over, I said a prayer that he might eventually be drawn into the holy sacrifice of the Mass. And, as soon as I said it, something clicked. I thought of a new way to explain the Mass to him that I’d never tried before.

“What would you do if someone bought you a present?” I asked.

“Say thank you?” he offered, not sure where I was going with this.

“OK, now, what if it were someone you’d hurt very badly, and he still bought you a present? Do you think you might give him an even bigger thank-you?”

“Yeah!”

“Now, what if you’d done something that hurt him really super extra badly, and he bought you the most awesome present in the world — like your own jumbo bouncy castle?”

“Whoa!”

“You’d spend even more time thanking him, right?”

“A ton!”

“But wait…what if you didn’t feel like it? What if it made you feel bored to spend all that time saying thanks?”

“It wouldn’t matter.”

Finally, I had a way to explain it: “Well, that’s how it is with church,” I said. As my husband helped all the other kids into the car, I talked to my son about what Jesus has done for us, and pointed out that one of the many reasons we go to Mass is simply to say “thank you.” And when you’re giving thanks for something enormous and undeserved, it takes a while — and how you feel about it is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter if it’s not fun.

St. Matthew

From the Pope's Homily

Cardinal Newman’s motto, Cor ad cor loquitur, or “Heart speaks unto heart”, gives us an insight into his understanding of the Christian life as a call to holiness, experienced as the profound desire of the human heart to enter into intimate communion with the Heart of God. He reminds us that faithfulness to prayer gradually transforms us into the divine likeness. As he wrote in one of his many fine sermons, “a habit of prayer, the practice of turning to God and the unseen world in every season, in every place, in every emergency – prayer, I say, has what may be called a natural effect in spiritualizing and elevating the soul. A man is no longer what he was before; gradually … he has imbibed a new set of ideas, and become imbued with fresh principles” (Parochial and Plain Sermons, iv, 230-231). Today’s Gospel tells us that no one can be the servant of two masters (cf. Lk 16:13), and Blessed John Henry’s teaching on prayer explains how the faithful Christian is definitively taken into the service of the one true Master, who alone has a claim to our unconditional devotion (cf. Mt 23:10). Newman helps us to understand what this means for our daily lives: he tells us that our divine Master has assigned a specific task to each one of us, a “definite service”, committed uniquely to every single person: “I have my mission”, he wrote, “I am a link in a chain, a bond of connexion between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do his work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place … if I do but keep his commandments and serve him in my calling” (Meditations and Devotions, 301-2).

Conversion Story

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GK Wisdom

Unless this broad truth be grasped, the whole story is seen askew. Pessimism is not in being tired of evil but in being tired of good. Despair does not lie in being weary of suffering, but in being weary of joy. It is when for some reason or other the good things in a society no longer work that the society begins to decline; when its food does not feed, when its cures do not cure, when its blessings refuse to bless. We might almost say that in a society without such good things we should hardly have any test by which to register a decline; that is why some of the static commercial oligarchies like Carthage have rather an air in history of standing and staring like mummies, so dried up and swathed and embalmed that no man knows when they are new or old. But Carthage at any rate was dead, and the worst assault ever made by the demons on mortal society had been defeated. But how much would it matter that the worst was dead if the best was dying?

Our Lady of Sorrows

Exaltation of the Cross

POPE BENEDICT XVI

CHRIST IS CALLING EACH OF YOU
TO WORK WITH HIM
AND TO TAKE UP YOUR RESPONSIBILITIES
IN ORDER TO BUILD UP
THE CIVILIZATION OF LOVE

"the only possibility for happiness is living for something outside of the self"
-- Msgr. Lorenzo Albacete

With my mind divided and torn to pieces by so many problems, how can I meditate or preach wholeheartedly without neglecting the ministry of proclaiming the Gospel? Moreover, in my position I must often communicate with worldly men. At times I let my tongue run, for if I am always severe in my judgments, the worldly will avoid me, and I can never attach them as I would. As a result I often listen patiently to chatter. And because I too am weak, I find myself drawn little by little into idle conversation, and I begin to talk freely about matters which once I would have avoided. What once I found tedious I now enjoy.

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