Thursday, February 24, Seventh Week in Ordinary Time
Illustrations include the Belludi chapel in Padua; Luca invoking St. Anthony's intercession; and the saint and his disciple.
BLESSED LUCA BELLUDI (Italy, 1200-1285)
Franciscan priest, Disciple and Companion of St. Anthony of Padua
Tradition says that Luca, a young noble student at the University of Padua, walked up to Anthony after
hearing him preach and asked to join the Franciscans, and that Anthony was so impressed by him that
he eventually had him ordained by St. Francis himself. In any case, he became Anthony's devoted
companion in his travels and preaching for the rest of his life. After Anthony died, Luca was named
to succeed him as head of the Franciscans in Padua and he started to build the basilica in his honor. But
a local tyrant took over Padua and Luca was exiled. He is said to have asked for Anthony's intercession
to liberate the city. He came back to continue building the basilica, founded other monasteries and carried
on St. Anthony's work for another 30 years. He was credited with working miracles like Anthony did, and
when he died, he was buried in the same tomb as Anthony. His remains were separated only in 1971, and
are now kept in the Belludi chapel of the Basilica in Padua. An inscription said of him: “Disciple and
companion of St. Anthony, he was a truly learned man, most excellent of preachers, and in his teaching
and life little different from his master". Always called 'Beato Luca' since his death, he was not formally
beatified until 1927.
Readings for today's Mass: www.usccb.org/nab/readings/022411.shtml
OR today.
At the General Audience, the Pope cites St. Robert Bellarmine:
'There can be no reform in the Church
unless there is personal reform first'
Other stories on page 1: International leaders call on Libya's Qaddafi to stop killing protesters against his regime; continuing updates on Arab unrest, as the King of Bahrain says he is open to dialog; another story on the worldwide shortage in grain production this year, driving prices up further. In the inside pages, a very belated report on the Sunday penitential Mass in Dublin with victims of priestly sex abuse (hard to explain why it took the OR four days to report on this!); and a feature about the late Italian priest Francisco Bertoglio, who as rector of the Pontifical Lombard Seminary in Rome during World War II, hid 80 Jews in the seminary under Pius XII's orders to all reliigous institutions at the time, and who was declared by the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem last June as a 'Righteous among the Nations', Israel's supreme honor for all non-Jews who rescued or saved at least one Jew during World War II. Bergoglio's seminary was raided and he and his wars were all taken to Nazi headquarters, but he managed to talk his way out of the jam and subsequently placed all his Jewish wards in other religious institutions in Rome.
Bergoglio's wartime heroism is told in a new book entitled Il Papa lo vuole: Le direttive di Pio XII e gli ebrei romani salvati dal Pontificio Seminario Lombardo (The Pope wished it so: The directives of Pius XII and the Pontifical Lombard Seminary). (I underscore this item because it clearly shows the hypocrisy of the State of Israel in its patently unjust persecution of Pius XII, whose actions saved thousands of Jewish lives in amply documented ways. Of course, they are right to honor Father Bergoglio, but for more reason, Pius XII should have been among the very first of the 'Righteous among Nations' to be proclaimed by them, alongside icons like Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler!]
PAPAL EVENTS TODAY
The Holy Father met with
- H.E. Michel Sleiman, President of the Republic of Lebanon, with his wife and delegation
- Seven bishops from the Philippines (northern region, Group 1) on ad limina visit. Individual meetings.
The Holy Father has accepted the resignation of Cardinal Georg Maximilian Sterzinsky as Archbishop of Berlin
for having reached canonical retirement age.
At the same time, he has named Mons. Franz-Josef Overbeck, Bishop of Essen, to the Military Ordinary for
the Federal Republic of Germany.
A few items of interest earlier this week that deserve mention and later postings, perhaps:
- Father Z writes about an American 'priestette' who has seen the error of her ways (I believe she's the first one to do so).
- The married Lutheran minister whom Cardinal Meisner of Cologne ordained last weekend as a Catholic priest, and whose wife is now a Caremlite nun.
- An Anglo-Catholic Lutheran church in the US seeking to join an Ordinariate (I did not even realize there was such a denomination!).
- Canon lawyer Ed Peters getting bombarded by some leftist Catholics in the US media for having said that under the Code of Canon Law, the divorced Catholic Governor of New York, Andrew Cuomo, should not be given Communion (and should not seek Communion) since he is living in open concubinage with his girl friend. Cuomo has replied his faith is 'a private matter' - but communion is a public act that, in Cuomo's case, does cause 'public scandal' for the Catholic faithful.
- An assessment of the ultra-liberal Cardinal Mahony of Los Angeles as he prepares to retire, and the prospects under his successor, Archbishop Jose Gomez, named Coadjutor Archbishop by the Pope last year to be in place for the succession.
[Modificato da TERESA BENEDETTA 24/02/2011 18:01]