Archbishop Fulton Sheen becomes Venerable Sheen!

Today the Vatican announced that Servant of God Archbishop Fulton Sheen has been recognized as Pope Benedict as Venerable!  This an exciting development because it brings him one step closer to canonization.  For those unfamiliar with the Archbishop, he was a man of incredible spiritual influence and sanctity. He is said to have alone converted over 52,000 people(!!!!) by means of his radio program, television show, many books and his witness.

As you may remember, the Archbishop received the title of Servant of God when the cause for his canonization was opened in 2001.  The Congregation for the Causes of Saints reviewed the over  2500 pages worth of  testimony and historical information submitted and passed their findings to Pope Benedict. Happily, today the Pope officially acknowledged the Archbishop demonstrated “heroic virtue” during his life, bestowing on him the title of Venerable!

What happens now?
The next step in the process is beatification.  Soon the Congregation will examine the miracle proposed to have occurred through Venerable Sheen’s intercession.  If (and hopefully when!) the miracle is verified as authentic, the Pope will be able to give the Archbishop the title of Blessed.  Finally, another miracle is required at which point the Pope would be able to officially name the Archbishop a Saint.

There is great reason to hope this process will happen relatively fast since Pope Benedict worked with the Archbishop during the Second Vatican Council in the 1960.  So impressed by the Archbishop’s holiness even then, and recognizing Venerable Sheen’s sanctity continued the rest of his life, Pope Benedict requested that the Congregation put his cause on the “fast track”!

The proposed miracle
The next step on this “fast track” is for the Congregation to examine the proposed miracle. The miracle is this: A baby boy in Peoria, Illinois (the Archbishop’s home diocese) was delivered stillborn, with the umbilical cord around his neck.  He was delivered at home and examined there by a nurse, who found no signs of life.  He was declared a “triple zero”: no brain waves, no heart beat, no breathing.  The paramedics examined him and found no signs of life.  In the infant emergency room of the hospital, they again found no signs of life.  In the main emergency room, they again found no signs of life.  With doctors about to declare the child dead, he took his first breath!  Though he went 61 minutes without any signs of life, he is in perfect health today, with zero medical problems!  The entire time his mother had been praying to the Archbishop.  A miracle indeed!

God willing, the Archbishop’s cause will indeed move fast as we here in America are in terrible need of his intercession.  Venerable Sheen’s beatification will enable him to touch more lives as more Americans get to know him and fall in love with him.

Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, pray for us!

*The information in this article comes from Father Andrew Apostoli, vice postulator for the cause of the Archbishop*

Why Do We Pray to Mary?

Since Catholics pray to Mary we’re sometimes accused of mariolatry, or the worship of Mary.  Yet nothing could be further to the truth.  Everything that begins with Mary always ends with Jesus, and so it is with prayer as well.

We pray to the Virgin Mary because we want her intercession.  Whenever we pray to Our Lady we are in essence asking her to pray for us, and with us, to her Son.  Could we skip Mary and go straight to Jesus?  Yes.  But this is a mistake.  We ask our family and friends to pray for us, so why would we not ask our Heavenly Mother to pray for us?  I don’t know about you, but I need all the help I can get down here.  So there’s no way I’m going to deprive myself of the help of the most powerful intercessor in the Church!

Praying to Mary doesn’t take anything away from Jesus.  In fact it honors Him, because now instead of just one person praying to Him (us), there’s two (Mary and us).  It also honors Jesus because He gave Mary to us as our Mother.  When we pray to her, we are honoring His command to take her into our homes/hearts (Jn 19:26-27)!  But when we don’t allow her that role in our lives, it is we as her children who suffer.  Like any good mother Mary loves us and wants to help.  But she can only help as much as we allow her to.  So the more we make her a part of our lives, the more she can help lead us to Jesus.

I like to think of it this way.  Mary is seated at the right of Christ (like Queen Bathsheba seated to the right of her son King Solomon in 1 Kings 2:19).  I go to her with a request, and she and I both turn to her Son with my request.  Then, knowing His divine will perfectly, she turns back to me and dispenses the appropriate and necessary graces to do His will.  Then we both turn back to Christ in thanksgiving, since it is only because of Him that those graces are there to be given.  Could we ignore Mary and only talk to Jesus?  Yes.  But she’s right there next to Him so that would be insult to both the King and Queen.

The bottom line is that Mary loves us and wants to help.  The more we “behold our Mother” (Jn 19:27), the more she can work in our lives.  Mary’s will was, and is, in perfect conformity with the will of her Son – so therefore like her Son, she desires the good for us more than we ever could for ourselves.  Let us not deprive ourselves of so great a Mother and Advocate!

Pray for us O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ!  Tota tua…

See Also: Why Bother with Mary?

St. Francis de Sales On Living For and Loving God

Today the Church celebrates the life of St. Francis de Sales.  If you’ve ever read anything by him (he’s most famous for Introduction to the Devout Life and Treatise on the Love of God), then you’ve experienced his infectious love for God.  It’s amazing that hundreds of years later his words still have the power to make readers fall more in love with the Lord!  That being said, rather than another post about St. Francis, it seemed more fitting to simply let the saint speak to you directly through quotes:

In His great love, Jesus is always pursuing our hearts…

• “Behold this divine Lover at the gate, He does not simply knock, but stands knocking; He calls the soul, come, arise, make haste, my love (Song 2:16), and puts his Hand into the lock to try whether He cannot open it.”

And the more we come to know His love for us, the more we desire to love Him…

• “When the soul sees her God wounded by love for her sake, she immediately receives from it a reciprocal wound…And we, seeing the Savior of our souls wounded to death by love of us, even to the death of the cross, how can we but be wounded for him, but wounded with a wound as much more dolorously amorous as his was amorously dolorous, and a wound as great as is our inability to love him as much as his love and death require?”

And Jesus always responds to our desire to love Him more by giving us the ability to do so…

• “For the measure in which our heart dilates itself, or rather lets itself be dilated and enlarged, and does not deny the void of its consent to the Divine Mercy, in the same measure the Divine Mercy always pour into it, sheds over it, and increasing and ever increasing inspiration under which we also increase, growing more and more in divine love”

Love of God and a life of prayer then help teach us to place God’s will above our own…

• “Our free will is never so free as when it is a slave to the will of God, nor ever so much a slave as when it serves our own will.  It never has so much life as when it dies to itself, nor ever so much death, as when it lives to itself”
• “The indifferent heart is as a ball of wax in the hands of its God, receiving with equal readiness all the impressions of the Divine pleasure; it is a heart without choice, equally disposed for everything, having no other object of its will than the will of its God, and placing its affections not upon the things of God but upon the will of God who wills them”

When we have died to ourselves we are then able to joyfully embrace all the Lord sends us…

• “Look at tribulations in themselves, and they are dreadful; behold them in the will of God, and they are love and delights…In truth, love either takes away the hardship of labor, or makes it dear to us while we feel it”
• ” God has given [crosses] to you with His holy hand; receive them, kiss them, love them.  My God!  They are all perfumed with the dignity of the place from which they come “

I hope you will meditate on some of these quotes because they are so rich!  We have so much to learn from St. Francis de Sales, and it’s my most fervent prayer that we will come to know him better and let him teach us to love God as he does!

For a more autobiographical post on St. Francis de Sales, check out The Patience & Perseverance of A Saint

Getting to Know Your Guardian Angel

Today, October 2nd, the Church celebrates the feast of guardian angels. Some think of angels as make believe, or only for children, but Scripture makes it clear they are real. There are many occasions where angels do God’s bidding: for instance, Gabriel at the Annunciation, or Raphael with Tobit, or Michael in the book of Revelation, or angels ministering to Jesus at Gethsemane. There are also many times in the Old Testament where unnamed angels do God’s work (especially in Genesis and Exodus).

Perhaps more importantly for us, though, we have guardian angels. Jesus told His disciples, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that their angels in heaven continually see the face of My Father who is in heaven” (Mt 18:10). Though in this context Jesus is talking about children, we all have guardian angels. The Church has believed this from the beginning (see Acts 12:15) and continues to teach it today. In fact, back in the 50s Pope Pius XII reminded us, “Each one of us, even the poorest of the poor, has angels watching over him. The angels are glorious, pure and splendid, but they have been given to us as companions along the way of life. They have the task of watching over you all, so that you do not stray away from Christ, your Lord.”

God has given us guardian angels to help us get to Heaven, to Him! Opus Angelorum tells us that our guardian angels are charged with the task to provide each one of us with:
1) Assistance in the Adoration of God
2) Assistance in the Contemplation of the Word of God
3) Assistance in the Imitation of the Crucified Savior
4) Assistance in the Mission and Office in the Church

God endowed angels with intellect superior to man. Further, our guardian angels have seen God(!!) and have been serving Him faithfully from the beginning! What more could we want in a guardian angel?

Talk to your guardian angel. Get to know him/her (angels are pure spirit, and so don’t have gender, but it’s generally helpful to think in terms of him or her, especially if we want to build a relationship). Ask for help. God gave you a guardian angel for your benefit! But just like with God, the more you cooperate with your angel the more he can do for you. So today, take a little time to thank your guardian angel for all he’s done and to get to know him a little better!