APRIL: REVERENCE FOR GOD

"God has made a special commandment out of the natural duty and obligation of respecting His Name. That this should be necessary sometimes strikes as as very strange. God is Father, Provider, Preserver of us all; He became Man and died for us on the Cross, He resides in the tabernacles of our churches to be near us, and He wanted to regard us all with a happiness that will never end. "...we are bound to love God with all our heart and souls and mind and will, and love is diametrically opposed to disrepect, irreverence, scorn and contempt in using a lover's name." (1)

Saint for April:
St. Catherine of Siena, Doctor of the Church

1347-1380
Feast Day, April 29
Patron of Nursing Service, Women Involved in Catholic Action, and Fire Prevention


Reverence for God filled Catherine’s short life of 33 years. She was 6 when she first experienced a vision of Our Lord seated in glory with St. Peter, St. Paul, and St. John. At 16 she became a Dominican Tertiary, and she lived a humble life in her family home. Her extraordinary love of God and work as a Tertiary in hospitals motivated her to tend to the dying and the sufferers of plague, as well as to visit those condemned to execution. Our Lord blessed her with abundant graces and revelations. She reconciled enemy factions, wrote to all the rulers in Europe, persuaded the Holy Father to return to Rome from “captivity” in Avignon, France, and worked to end the Great Western Schism. She received the Stigmata in 1375; it was visible only after her death. Although she had no formal education and did not write, she was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1970. Catherine was one of the most gifted literary persons of her day and had one of the most brilliant theological minds in the Church. She dictated all of her works, including 400 letters to Popes, rulers, family, acquaintances, and strangers. Her most mystical work “The Dialogue” was dictated under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Together they form the body of her spiritual doctrine which expresses immense reverence for God. (2)


LETTER FROM ST. CATHERINE

TO THE KING OF FRANCE
Catherine's letters to great personages whom she did not know are, as would be expected, less searching and fresh than the many written with a more personal inspiration, but they afford at least an interesting testimony to the breadth of her interests. This letter to Charles V. was evidently written during her stay at Avignon, where she formed relations with the Duke of Anjou, and received his promise to lead in the prospective Crusade. Avignon was a centre of intellectual life and of European politics, and Catherine must have been quickened there to think more than ever before in large terms and on great issues. To think of a matter is always, for her, to feel a sense of responsibility toward it; she writes, accordingly, to Charles V., urging him to make peace with his brother monarch: "For so," says the maid of Siena serenely to the great King--"So you will fulfill the will of God and me."


In the Name of Jesus Christ crucified and of sweet Mary:
Dearest lord and father in Christ sweet Jesus: I Catherine, servant and slave of the servants of Jesus Christ, write to you in His precious Blood: with desire to see you observe the holy and sweet commands of God, since I consider that in no other way can we share the fruit of the Blood of the Spotless Lamb. Sweet Jesus, the Lamb, has taught us the Way: and thus He said: "Ego sum Via, Veritas et Vita." He is the sweet Master who has taught us the doctrine, ascending the pulpit of the most holy Cross. Venerable father, what doctrine and what way does He give us? His way is this: pains, shames, insults, injuries, and abuse; endurance in true patience, hunger and thirst; He was satiate with shame, nailed and held upon the Cross for the honour of the Father and our salvation. With His pains and shame He gave satisfaction for our guilt, and the reproach in which man had fallen through the sin committed. He has made restitution, and has punished our sins on His own Body, and this He has done of love alone and not for debt.
This sweet Lamb, our Way, has despised the world, with all its luxuries and dignity, and has hated vice and loved virtue. Do you, as son and faithful servant of Christ crucified, follow His footsteps and the way which He teaches you: bear in true patience all pain, torment, and tribulation which God permits the world to inflict on you. For patience is not overcome, but overcomes the world. Be, ah! be a lover of virtue, founded in true and holy justice, and despise vice. I beg you, by love of Christ crucified, to do in your state three especial things. The first is, to despise the world and yourself and all its joys, possessing your kingdom as a thing lent to you, and not your own. For well you know that nor life nor health nor riches nor honour nor dignity nor lordship is your own. Were they yours, you could possess them in your own way. But in such an hour a man wishes to be well, he is ill; or living, and he is dead; or rich, and he is poor; or a lord, and he is made a servant and vassal. All this is because these things are not his own, and he can only hold them in so far as may please Him who has lent them to him. Very simple-minded, then, is the man who holds the things of another as his own. He is really a thief, and worthy of death. Therefore I beg you that, as The Wise, you should act like a good steward, made His steward by God; possessing all things as merely lent to you. (3)


PRAYERS FOR THE MONTH

ST. CATHERINE’S TRINITARIAN PRAYERS

Love of Jesus, Fill us. Holy Spirit, Guide us. Will of the Father, Be done.

Power of the eternal Father, help me! Wisdom of the Son, enlighten the eye of my understanding! Tender mercy of the Holy Spirit, enflame my heart and unite it to yourself!
(Prayers, 48)

(And in a longer variation) You, Godhead, one in being and three in Persons, are one vine with three branches if I may be permitted to make such a comparison. You made us in your image and likeness so that, with our three powers in one soul, we might image your trinity and your unity. And as we image so we may find union: through our memory, image and be united with the Father, to whom is attributed power, through our understanding, image and be united with the Son, to whom is attributed wisdom; through our will, image and be united with the Holy Spirit, to whom is attributed mercy, and who is the love of the Father and the Son. (Prayers, 42) (4)

ENDNOTES
1. Examination of Conscience for Adults by Rev. Donald F. Miller, C.SS.R.
2. www.ewtn.com/library/MAVR/CATSIENA/htm
3. www.domcentral.org/trad/cathletters.htm
4. www.spiritualitytoday.org