Let your light shine

Christ is the true light which enlightens every person who comes into
the world. This light shines in the darkness, but the darkness has not
received the light. No one receives this light but those who are poor
in spirit and have stripped themselves of self-love and self-will.
   Dear, dear children, you must strive after this, sparing no effort
of body or soul, so that you may taste this, so that this light may
shine in the depths of your souls, so that you may come back to your
true source, where this true light shines. Do all that you can, do
more than you can, to long and to pray that this may come to you. Do
everything in your power, and ask those who love God to help you.
Cling to those who cling to God, so that they may draw you with them
to God. And may our loving God himself help us to this end.
--John Tauler

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May 22nd - St. Humility, Widow

THE foundress of the Vallombrosan nuns was born at Faenza in the
Romagna in the year 1226. Her parents, who were people of high rank
and considerable wealth, called her after the town of Rosana, with
which they were in some way connected, but she has always been known
by the name of Humility, which she adopted when she entered religion.
Her parents practically compelled her when she was about 15 to marry a
local nobleman called Ugoletto, a young man as frivolous as his bride
was earnest and devout. She had the misfortune to lose both her sons
shortly after their baptism, and for nine years she strove, apparently
in vain, to appeal to her husband’s better nature. A dangerous
illness, however, then brought him to death’s door and upon his
recovery he was induced by his doctors to consent for his own benefit
to his wife’s request that they should from thenceforth live as
brother and sister. Soon afterwards they both joined the double
monastery of St. Perpetua, just outside Faenza, he becoming a
lay-brother and she a choir nun.

Humility was then 24 years of age. She discovered before long that the
rule afforded her insufficient opportunity for solitude and austerity,
and she withdrew first to a house of Poor Clares and then to a cell,
which was constructed for her by a kinsman whom she had cured of a
painful infirmity of the feet. It adjoined the church of St.
Apollinaris, and into this there was an opening--what archaeologists
call a “squint”--which enabled her to follow Mass and to receive holy communion. The church seems to have been served by religious from a
priory dependent on the Vallombrosan abbey of St. Crispin, the abbot
of which, following the ceremonial provided for in such cases,
solemnly enclosed her in her cell. Her life was now one of heroic
mortification : she subsisted on a little bread and water with
occasionally some vegetables; she wore a cilicium of bristles, and the
short snatches of sleep she allowed herself were taken on her knees
with her head leaning against a wall. She had never consented to see
her husband after she had left the world, but he could not forget her;
and in order that he might keep in touch with her, he left St.
Perpetua’s to become a monk at St. Crispin’s, where he died three
years later. After Humility had lived 12 years as a recluse, the
Vallombrosan abbot general persuaded her to emerge from her retirement
to organize a foundation for women. At a place called Malta, outside
the walls of Faenza, she established the first Vallombrosan nunnery,
of which she became abbess and which was known as Santa Maria Novella
alla Malta. Long years afterwards, actually in 1501, the convent was
removed for safety into the city and occupied the site once covered by
the monastery of St. Perpetua. Before her death St. Humility founded
in Florence a second house, of which she was also abbess and where she
died at the age of eighty on May 22, 1310.

Tradition credits St. Humility with the authorship of several
treatises—she is said to have dictated them in Latin, a language she
had never studied. One of these deals with the angels and in it she
speaks of living in constant communion with two heavenly beings, one
of whom was her guardian angel.
A contemporary life is printed in the Acta Sanctorum, May, vol. v,
from a manuscript notarially attested in 1332 to be an exact copy.
There is a modern biography by M. Ercolani (1910), and a shorter one
by Dame M. E. Pietromarchi, S. Umilta Negusanti (1935). The Latin
tractates of St. Humility were edited by Torello Sala at Florence in
1884; they are said to be very obscure and the Latin to be stiff and artificial.


Bible Quote
I give thanks to my God, always making a remembrance of thee in my
prayers. 5 Hearing of thy charity and faith, which thou hast in the
Lord Jesus, and towards all the saints: 6 That the communication of
thy faith may be made evident in the acknowledgment of every good
work, that is in you in Christ Jesus.  (Philemon 1:4-6)

Saint Quote:
Remember, that you must treat not only bodies, but also souls, with
counsel that appeals to their minds and hearts rather than with cold prescriptions to be sent in to the pharmacist.
-- Saint Giuseppe Moscati from a letter to one of his students

Note: Saint Giuseppe Moscati was the first modern doctor to be canonized.

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For the Most Forgotten Soul

O Lord God Almighty, I beseech Thee by the Precious Body
and Blood of Thy divine Son Jesus, which He Himself on the
night before His Passion gave as meat and drink to His
beloved Apostles and bequeathed to His Holy Church to be
the perpetual Sacrifice and life-giving nourishment of His
faithful people, deliver the souls in purgatory, but most of all,
that soul which was most devoted to this Mystery of infinite
love, in order that it may praise Thee therefore, together with
Thy Divine Son and the Holy Spirit in Thy glory for ever.
Amen.

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