Pentecost X
✠ The Bishop’s Corner ✠
What a delightful taste of Autumn Wednesday’s cool bright morning brought us, and lingered for a few days. Wednesday fittingly, for it was the feast of Our Lady of the Snows. Such a refreshing prospect would snow be in the midst of Summer heat. These beautiful mornings are a reminder and invitation to prayer, to Mass even as you start your day. Daily Mass attendance continues relatively strong. On Sundays we continue to attract visitors, who take the place of former regulars. People float anymore, but our anchor is the steady Catholic, our virtual as well as actual faithful.
We wonder what the world, the future, holds for us in these days of worldwide Marxist revolution. It seems that all of the “news” and all of the rules are based on lies, lies within lies, within lies. We do well to concentrate on our Faith, our family, our friends, and to move away from the other things, for they have been taken away from us in large measure, anyway. The rest is only servitude and deception. How sad it is to see a masked nation, muzzled like dogs, as Fr. Lehtoranta commented after his recent trip to Milwaukee. Mass brainwashing, the paralysis of fear. “Be not afraid of their fear.”
We envy the Sisters, in a way, as they have moved now to rural Louisiana, and to a more contemplative life. (St. Benedict is joining them, but we’re thinking this opens up a space for God’s Grandmother, good St. Anne.) But the truth is that no one can, or will be allowed to escape the coming New World Order. They will come for everyone in due time. That is why a sane, spiritual, balanced but realistic viewpoint is crucial. Reorder your priorities, so that you may not be caught unprepared.
But in the meantime, do what you can. Thursday’s public procession is a good opportunity. Come and pray with us, while you still can. How many threatened revolutions and Godless regimes were defeated by the Rosary?
And if Thursday evening’s Rosary Procession is important, and it is, how much more so the Saturday feast of the Assumption, a Holy Day of Obligation? Let us give God His due, and honor His Mother, and They shall look after us.
Fr. McGuire is taking a short break these days. I’ve gone to Milwaukee (with some trepidation), my first trip since Fr. Cekada’s strokes started in January, and the Plandemic was imposed in March. But the faithful at St. Hugh need Confirmation, and Fr. McKenna is kindly looking after Father, still weak after his latest hospital stay. Busy days these, much juggling of schedules and many arrangements to make things work. But everyone helps in different ways.
I still need to figure out a way, if possible, to attend to my foreign missions, for an Ordination and Confirmations. How life has changed in a few months’ time.
But on the local front and the bright side, we are anticipating an excellent school enrollment for September, our largest in years. Several families have moved here for the school, others for the Church. It is an excellent instinct to gather together around the Mass and Blessed Sacrament. The angels have surely protected us here. St. Gertrude the Great is, in a way, as much a monastic or religious community, as it is a church, and certainly a kind of family. Thank you for being part of it, for assisting us, and each other, in so many ways. “Juncta juvant,” they say. “It helps to be together,” you could translate this.
But pray, pray very hard. The lesson of last week’s Transfiguration is to seek Jesus, to see “no one, but only Jesus,” and then, strengthened, to do your duty. He touches us, the Lord does, and tells us not to be afraid.
Pax vobis.
–Bp. Dolan