Faith is the messenger

Faith is the messenger that bears your prayers to God. Prayer can be
like incense, rising ever higher and higher. The prayer of faith is
the prayer of trust that feels the presence of God, which it rises to
meet. It can be sure of some response from God. We can say a prayer of
thanks to God every day for His grace, which has kept us on the right
way and allowed us to start living the good life. So we should pray to
God with faith and trust and gratitude.

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December 1st - Bl. Gerard Cagnoli
d. 1345

The cult which from time immemorial has been paid at Palermo and
elsewhere to this follower of St. Francis was confirmed in 1908.
Gerard, born about 1270, was the only son of noble parents in the
north of Italy. He lost his father at the age of ten, and his mother
not many years afterwards.

Resisting the persuasions of his relatives to marry, he distributed
his goods to the poor and led, until he was forty, the life of a
pilgrim and hermit, spending most of his time in the wilder parts of
Sicily. In the early years of the fourteenth century, the holiness and
miracles of St. Louis of Anjou, who though heir to a throne had become
a Franciscan, were much talked about. Gerard took him for his patron,
and about the year 1310 ended by joining the same order.

While he discharged duties of a lay-brother, his simplicity and
devotion were the admiration of all. On one great feast-day, when he
was acting as cook, being absorbed in prayer, he seemed to have
forgotten all about the dinner; when, late in the morning, the father
guardian, apprised that even the fire had not yet been lighted,
remonstrated with the brother on his neglect. Gerard, quite
unperturbed, took to the kitchen, where, assisted, it is said, by an
unknown youth of radiant beauty, he produced, punctually to the
moment, a more delicious meal than the community had ever before
eaten.

Many miracles were attributed to the intercession of the holy
brother. For example, it was said that, finding a child crying because
it had dropped and broken the glass beaker it was carrying home to its
mother, he collected the fragments, blessed them and restored the
vessel to the child as sound as it had been before. His miracles of
healing were commonly performed by anointing the sick with the oil
which burned in a lamp before a little shrine of his patron St. Louis.
His diet was bread and water, he slept upon a plank, he scourged
himself to blood, and there were many stories told of ecstasies in
which he was seen surrounded with light and raised from the ground. He
died on December 30, 1345.

See the decree of the Congregation of Rites in Analecta Ecclesiastica
(1908), vol. xvi, pp. 293-295 B. Mazzara, Leggendario Francescano
(1680), vol. iii, pp. 767-773; and Analecta Franciscana (1897), vol.
ii, pp. 489-497.


Saint Quote:
Everyone--past, present, and future--will be judged. Now, then, is the
time for mercy, while the time to come will be the time for justice
only. For that reason, the present time is ours, but the future time
will be God's only!
--St. Thomas Aquinas

Bible quote:
And answering, he said to them: Go and relate to John what you have
heard and seen: the blind see, the lame walk, the lepers are made
clean, the deaf hear, the dead rise again, to the poor the gospel is
preached: And blessed is he whosoever shall not be scandalized in me.
(Luke 7:22-23)


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Persevere in your love for Christ

I urge you to persevere in your love for Christ and your faithful
observance of the law of Christ.

Our Goal is God, the source of all good. As we say in our prayer, we
are to place our trust in God and in no one else. In his kindness, our
Lord wished to strengthen your faith, for without it, as the
evangelist points out, Christ could not have performed many of his
miracles. He also wished to listen to your prayer, and so he ordained
that you experience poverty, distress, abandonment, weariness and
scorn.

God alone knows the reasons for all this, yet we can recognize three
causes. In the first place, our blessed Lord is telling you that he
desires to include you among his beloved sons, provided that you
remain steadfast in his ways, for this is the way he treats his
friends and makes them holy.

The second reason is that he is asking you to grow continuously in
your confidence in him alone and not in others.

Now there is a third reason. God wishes to test you like gold in the
furnace. The dross is consumed by the fire, but the pure gold remains
and its value increases. It is in this manner than God acts with his
good servant, who puts his hope in him and remains unshaken in times
of distress. God raises him up and, in return for the things he has
left out of love for God, he repays him a hundredfold in this life and
with eternal life hereafter.

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Faith is the messenger

Faith is the messenger that bears your prayers to God. Prayer can be
like incense, rising ever higher and higher. The prayer of faith is
the prayer of trust that feels the presence of God, which it rises to
meet. It can be sure of some response from God. We can say a prayer of
thanks to God every day for His grace, which has kept us on the right
way and allowed us to start living the good life. So we should pray to
God with faith and trust and gratitude.

<<>><<>><<>>
January 3rd - St. Peter Balsam, Martyr

PETER BALSAM, to follow the narrative of his published “acts”, was a
native of the territory of Eleutheropolis in Palestine, who was
apprehended at Aulana in the persecution of Maximinus. Being brought
before Severus, governor of the province, the interrogatory began by
asking him his name.

Peter answered, “Balsam is the name of my family; but I received that
of Peter in baptism.”

SEVERUS: “Of what family and of what country are you?”
PETER: “ I am a Christian.”

SEVERUS: “What is your employment?”
PETER: “What employment can I have more honourable, or what better
thing can I do in the world, than to live as a Christian?”

SEVERUS: “Do you know the imperial edicts?”
PETER: “I know the laws of God, the sovereign of the universe.”

SEVERUS: “You shall quickly know that there is an edict of the most clement emperors, commanding all to sacrifice to the gods, or be put
to death.”
PETER: “You will also know one day that there is a law of the
eternal King, proclaiming that everyone shall perish who offers
sacrifice to devils. Which do you counsel me to obey, and which, think
you, ought I to choose—to die by your sword, or to be condemned to everlasting misery by the sentence of the great King, the true God?”

SEVERUS: “Since you ask my advice, it is that you obey the edict,
and sacrifice to the gods.”
PETER: “I can never be prevailed upon to sacrifice to gods of wood
and stone, as those are which you worship.”

SEVERUS: “I would have you know that it is in my power to avenge
these affronts by putting you to death.”
PETER: “I had no intention of affronting you. I only expressed what
is written in the divine law.”

SEVERUS: “Have compassion on yourself, and sacrifice.”
PETER: “ If I am truly compassionate to myself, I ought not to sacrifice.”

SEVERUS: “I want to be lenient; I therefore still allow you time to reflect, that you may save your life.”
PETER: “This delay will be to no purpose for I shall not alter my
mind; do now what you will be obliged to do soon, and complete the
work which the devil, your father, has begun; for I will never do what
Jesus Christ forbids me.”

Severus, on hearing these words, ordered him to be stretched upon the
rack, and whilst he was suspended said to him scoflingly, “What say
you now, Peter; do you begin to know what the rack is? Are you yet
willing to sacrifice?“ Peter answered, “Tear me with hooks, and talk
not of my sacrificing to your devils: I have already told you, that I
will sacrifice only to that God for whom I suffer.” Hereupon the
governor commanded his tortures to be redoubled. The martyr, far from
any complaint, sung with alacrity those verses of the royal prophet,
“One thing I have asked of the Lord; this will I seek after: that I
may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life. I will
take the chalice of salvation, and will call upon the name of the
Lord.” The spectators, seeing the martyr’s blood run down in streams,
cried out to him, “Obey the emperors! Sacrifice, and rescue yourself
from these torments!” Peter replied, “Do you call these torments? I
feel no pain: but this I know, that if I be not faithful to my God I
must expect real pain, such as cannot be conceived.” The judge also
said, “Sacrifice, Peter Balsam, or you will repent it.”

PETER: “Neither will I sacrifice, nor shall I repent it.”

SEVERUS: “I am on the point of pronouncing sentence.”
PETER: “It is what I most earnestly desire.” Severus then dictated
the sentence in this manner: “It is our order that Peter Balsam, for
having refused to obey the edict of the invincible emperors, and
obstinately defending the law of a crucified man, be himself nailed to
a cross.” Thus it was that this glorious martyr finished his triumph,
at Aulana, on January 11; but he is honoured in the Roman Martyrology
on Jan. 3.

There can be little doubt that Peter Balsam is to be identified with
the martyr Peter Abselamus, whom Eusebius (De Martyribus Palest., x,
2-3) describes as having been burnt to death at Caesarea. For this and
other reasons very different opinions have been held as to the
trustworthiness of the narrative given above. Ruinart, and even
Bardenhewer (Geschichte der altkirchl. Literatur, vol. ii, p. 640),
treat the acts as authentic. P. Allard (Hist. des persecutions, vol.
v, p. 640) and H. Leclercq (Les Martyrs, vol. ii, p. 323) believe them
to have been compiled inaccurately; Father Delehaye more logically
(Légendes Hagio­graphiques, p. 114) considers that the narrative must
be regarded as a historical romance founded on a basis of genuine
fact.


Saint Quote:
We must pray without tiring, for the salvation of mankind does not
depend on material success, but on Jesus alone.
-- Saint Frances Xavier Cabrini

Bible Quote:
Brothers, do not slander one another. Anyone who slanders a brother,
or condemns him, is speaking against the Law and condemning the Law.
But if you condemn the Law, you have stopped keeping it and become a
judge over it. There is only one lawgiver and he is the only judge and
has the power to acquit or to sentence. Who are you to give a verdict
on your neighbour? (James 4:11-12)


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Prayer against Covetousness

O Lord Jesus Christ, who though Thou wast rich yet for our sakes didst
become poor, grant that all over-eagerness and covetousness of earthly
goods may die in us, and the desire of heavenly things may live and
grow in us; keep us from all idle and vain expenditures, that we may
always have to give to him that needeth, and that giving not
grudgingly nor of necessity, but cheerfully, we may be loved of Thee,
and be made through Thy merits partakers of the riches of Thy heavenly treasure. Amen.

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