PathToHoliness

I know Chelsea is posting each day about the Novena to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel.

This is the statue of her in the Carmelite chapel where the novena is held each evening during Mass.

I’ve only been able to attend one evening so far due to travel.

As Chelsea said in an earlier post, the nuns like to decorate with flowers and you can see some of them below the statue here.

As you have probably noticed, much of the Mt. Carmel novena has focussed on the scapular – shown on the right. But what about the scapular? The sisters at our Carmelite monastery use a booklet for their novena that offers some information on this popular devotion that is often associated with the novena:

Ask someone about the “Scapular” and you will likely be told it is a religious object associated with the Blessed Virgin.
The Brown Scapular consists of two small panels of cloth joined by strings and worn over the shoulders. Generally, one panel bears a woven or printed image showing the vision of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel to St. Simon Stock, while the other bears the image of Our Lady with the Child Jesus.
For centuries, the Scapular has been one of the most popular Marian devotions, second only to Our Lady’s Rosary. As a sacramental, it has been enriched by the Church with many spiritual blessings.
On July 16, 1261, at Aylesford in Kent England, according to tradition, Our Lady appeared to St. Simon Stock, a Carmelite, and made the Scapular a sign of her protection. With it came the promise that whoever wore her “habit” devoutly would be assured of eternal salvation. This is the Scapular promise of eternal perseverance.
Carmelites have always regarded themselves as “Brothers of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel,” and place their lives of Christ-centered prayer under her patronage.
~ Rev. Eamon R. Carroll, O. Carm.

Signs in Ordinary Human Life
The world in which we live is full of material things which have symbolic meaning to us, such as, light, fire and water.
There are also, in every day life, experiences of relationships between human beings. These experiences express and symbolize deeper meanings in our lives. Sharing a meal is a sign of friendship; joining together in a national celebration is a sign of our identity.
We need signs and symbols to help us understand what is happening at present, or what happened before, and to give us an awareness of who we are, as individuals and as groups.

Signs in Christian Life
Jesus is the great sign and the embodiment of the Father’s love. he founded the Church as a sign and instrument of His love.
Christian life also has its signs. Jesus used bread, wine and water to help us understand higher things…things which we can neither see nor touch.
All our Christian celebrations, particularly the sacraments, are signs with special meaning. At the Eucharist the sign is bread and wine; during baptism it is water; as hands are laid on the sick it is the anointing with oil; and in the marriage ceremony it is the giving and receiving of rings. Each of these signs brings us into communion with God, Who, in different ways, is present in each of them.

The Scapular is a Sign of Mary
It is a sign approved by the Church and endorsed by the Crmelite Order as an external sign of Mary’s love for us. It confirms our love and trust in her, and our commitment to live like her.
With the passage of time,l people began to give symbolic meaning to the Scapular as a sign of commitment to follow Jesus Christ, our Savior, in the spirit of Mary.

The Scapular is not:

A magical charm to protect you
An automatic guarantee of salvation
An excuse for not living up to the demands of the Christian life

However the Scapular:

points to a renewed hope of encountering God in eternal life with the help of Mary’s protection and intercession
stands for thee decision to follow Jesus and imitate Mary, calling us to be…
– open to God and to His Will
– guided by faith, hope and love
– close to the needs of people
– prayerful, penitent and chaste
– conscious of God present in all that happens around us

I have been wearing the brown Scapular for a number of years and it has become like a kind of uniform for me. Actually, in the art of spiritual warfare, I have often heard it referred as just that – the Rosary is our weapon and the Scapular our uniform or shield. I think of it as an extra little sign, a personal reminder of devotion and commitment to the Blessed Virgin, through whom we strive to know and love Jesus and work for the salvation of souls.

Fourth Day

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pray for us.

Third Day

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pray for us.

Second Day

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pray for us.

The Prelate of Opus Dei, Bishop Javier Echevarría, has written a letter to the faithful which you can find online. In it he urges the faithful to consider the ordinary but exemplary life of the first Christians.

To explain Opus Dei’s mission, St. Josemaría often turned to those first sisters and brothers of ours in the faith. If you want a point of comparison, he would say, the easiest way to understand Opus Dei is to consider the life of the early Christians. They lived their Christian vocation seriously, seeking earnestly the holiness to which they had been called by their Baptism. Externally they did nothing to distinguish themselves from their fellow citizens. Similarly, he added, the faithful of Opus Dei are ordinary people. They work like everyone else and live in the midst of the world just as they did before they joined. There is nothing false or artificial about their behavior. They live like any other Christian citizen who wants to respond fully to the demands of his faith, because that is what they are.

Last week I stayed in Oklahoma City for a few days and had the pleasure of attending week day Mass at St. Francis of Assisi.

It’s a beautiful church and situated with the Rosary Catholic School.

Inside the church and building next door where they have the chapel for weekday Mass you’ll find some beautiful stained glass windows.

They’ve got pictures of them on their website as well as a virtual tour.

Today is the start of the Novena to Our Lady of Mt. Carmel. Every year we try to pray this novena with the Carmelites who live in the cloistered monastery next door to our Cathedral parish. It is always a very popular event among devoted Catholics in our town. I look forward to it every year. I especially love to see the beautiful floral arrangements that the nuns put together around their chapel. It’s like they bring their entire garden inside for these nine days of prayer.

First Day

Our Lady of Mount Carmel, pray for us.

Also, get readyf

The basic message of Opus Dei is holiness in ordinary life, sanctifying one’s work. That was the message of the vicar of Opus Dei in the United States’ homily commemorating the feast day of Opus Dei founder St. Josemaria Escriva:

“So much depends upon our living the lives that God wants us to,” said Msgr. Bohlin, emphasizing that “every baptized Christian” has a “call to heroic Christian holiness in the hustle and bustle of everyday life.”

…Describing Opus Dei’s founder “as a modern-day saint” familiar with 20th-century life, Msgr. Bohlin said the charismatic St. Josemaria advocated “an apostleship of friendship” in which Catholics “from all walks of life” reach out “one on one” to those near them in the workplace, family, school and community.

American culture suffers from what some call “friendship-deficit syndrome,” he said, noting that “so many are surrounded by people but have few friends.”

Source: Catholic Online

See: Opus Dei Message

I promised you pictures, so here they are!

The pro-life table – Most of the visitors are attracted to the fetal development models and it is frequently pregnant women, people who know someone who is pregnant and parents showing their young children what they used to look like in the womb. Oh and the balloons and candy (we had lollipops and gum with precious feet on them) helped attract visitors also:

The Catholic table – these are the only good pictures we got of the Catholic side. Most of the devotional items we had were hand made locally. Both I and a woman from our parish made the 5 decade rosaries and the Carmelite nuns who live in a cloistered monastery next to our parish made some of the brown scapulars.

I just got back from another busy Fourth of July. Every year I help set up a pro-life table at our downtown 4th of July festivities with a woman from my parish and a number of the home schooled kids in my area. This year, as president of our Legion of Mary praesidia, I decided to do a Catholic information table with some help from the Knights of Columbus. Everything worked out well, as it always does. We gave out lots of good information to the people who needed to see it. I hope to get my pictures up tomorrow – I’m pooped right now! I’m actually in bed getting ready to call it a night. We were set up downtown from about 11am to 7pm and I was there for the whole thing. It was very warm and very tiring for me! I hope everyone had a very blessed holiday! Here’s a great poem that I posted on my blog earlier today:

I Am An American

I am endowed by my Creator
With the inalienable right to life
Just like you, and every other American.
You know who I am.
Now that you can see my face,
Will you use your voice?
Please tell America,
I am an American, too.

America, it’s time to protect your children again.

That is a poem I have on one of my pro-life t-shirts and it fits very nicely with the 4th of July. As we celebrate our freedom this Independence Day we would do well to remember the millions of Americans whose freedom has been taken away in this country and pray for its restoration.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

Happy 4th of July!
God Bless you all!

The PEW Research Center has new survey results out that show that most Americans have moved children to number 8 on the list (was #3 in 1990) of things people associate with a “successful marriage.” This is seriously sad and I’m sure a result of a society that has so devalued faith and life. So what are the top things on the list? “sharing household chores,” “good housing,” “adequate income,” “happy sexual relationship,” and “faithfulness.” The new Pew survey also finds that, by a margin of nearly three-to-one, Americans say that the main purpose of marriage is the “mutual happiness and fulfillment” of adults rather than the “bearing and raising of children.”

What’s interesting to note though is how important children still are in a marriage when a different question is asked.

Asked to weigh how important various aspects of their lives are to their personal happiness and fulfillment, parents in this survey place their relationships with their children on a pedestal rivaled only by their relationships with their spouses – and far above their relationships with their parents, friends, or their jobs or career. This is true both for married and unmarried parents. In fact, relatively speaking, children are most pre-eminent in the lives of unwed parents.

I think it’s also interesting to note that they only bring religion into the survey by asking the participants what church they belong to and calling that “religiosity.” No where do they get into matters of faith and belief and relate that to these questions.

Today is the feast of the first martyrs in Rome. These are the martyrs who suffered death under the emperor Nero after the burning of Rome. Their blood helped build the early Church. On this feast day let us pray for those who are still being martyred in all parts of the world. Here is a video about Christians in Palestine who are heavily persecuted for their faith:

But even we, here in America, face a different kind of persecution. We are very often ridiculed for our deeply held convictions which causes many of the faithful to reject those beliefs altogether. It is not popular to be Catholic in the western world today. We are a target for criticism, hatred and any sort of mockery under the sun. So let us pray to those first martyrs in Rome to obtain for us the strength to face this current persecution with the same grace, faith and hope in the love and mercy of our Lord Jesus. Whether we are being tortured and killed in Palestine or ridiculed and marginalized in America, may our faithfulness and humility win for our Lord the heart and soul of even the most ruthless sinners.

We didn’t have a special feast day Mass here locally on June 26 but they sure did in Sacré Coeur of Bucharest on June 9, 2007. D. Alberto Steinvorth and a Catholic priest from Buzau, P. Pavel con-celebrated.

The St. Josemaria Institute is collecting pictures from various celebrations and says they’ll be posting them on their website soon.

Earlier this month I told you that it has been long rumored that Tony Blair was on the way to becoming Catholic. In a meeting with Pope Benedict XVI, he and the pontiff shared a “frank exchange” on “particularly delicate subjects” – which probably refers to the delicate subject of Blair’s support for abortion, gay adoption, same-sex marriage and stem-cell research. After that meeting, during the Angelus the Pope mentioned a need for “true conversion,” stating:

“Today, as the Church celebrates the birth of St John the Baptist, let us ask for the gift of true conversion and growth in holiness, so that our lives will prepare a way for the Lord and hasten the coming of His Kingdom.”

True conversion is not simply switching from one church to another, but changing one’s entire being – abandoning oneself to the will of the Heavenly Father and striving for holiness. Who knows what Tony Blair’s reasons for possibly converting actually are, regardless, we should pray that he will soon have a change of heart and soul which will lead him to love an appreciate the Church and all of her teachings, especially regarding human life.