• June 2, 2021, Today’s Holy Rosary on YouTube — Daily broadcast at 7:30 pm ET
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Friends of the Rosary:
The pastor in charge of the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Uvalde, Texas, Fr. Eduardo Morales, is sending a powerful message to the families and friends of the victims these days:
“Do not let anger corrode into hatred. Hold onto your faith.”
“Allow their love, their spiritual presence, to continue to be with us,” he said during Mass on Saturday.
“When we don’t believe, that is when they truly die, and that’s not fair to them. Allow them to continue to live among us, allow them to continue to be part of us.”
The belief in eternal life and the warmth of togetherness is what keeps the good people of Uvalde alive.
In Uvalde, a largely Mexican American city, Catholicism has remained part of the community’s cultural bedrock, providing charitable support and advocating for impoverished families and undocumented immigrants.
Still, some families have drifted, pulled by the ascendance of evangelical congregations, dissatisfaction with leaders as the global Roman Catholic church became engulfed in scandal or a broader societal shift away from institutional religion.
The Rev. Eduardo Morales, who grew up in the church and has been its pastor for six years, teared up as he described the ties he had to those who were lost.
This is when the Church tends to be at it`s very best. When the pain and heartache is inconsolable; and words are completely not enough; the true faith is the only thing that people can turn to when confronted with pure evil. For those who don`t. get it no explanation is possible. For those who do t it no explanation is necessary. Does it end the pain? No Does it make that pain bearable? Yes. Jacqueline Kennedy spoke of this after the assassination of John. The light shines on in the darkness. And for those who refuse to end this end insane madness by common sense regulations; may God have mercy on you!
The Visitation
And Mary rising up in those days went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda. [Lk. 1:39]
How lyrical that is, the opening sentence of St. Luke’s description of the Visitation. We can feel the rush of warmth and kindness, the sudden urgency of love that sent that girl hurrying over the hills. “Those days” in which she rose on that impulse were the days in which Christ was being formed in her, the impulse was his impulse.
Many women, if they were expecting a child, would refuse to hurry over the hills on a visit of pure kindness. They would say they had a duty to themselves and to their unborn child which came before anything or anyone else.
The Mother of God considered no such thing. Elizabeth was going to have a child, too, and although Mary’s own child was God, she could not forget Elizabeth’s need—almost incredible to us, but characteristic of her.
She greeted her cousin Elizabeth, and at the sound of her voice, John quickened in his mother’s womb and leapt for joy.
I am come, said Christ, that they may have life and may have it more abundantly. [Jn. 10, 10] Even before He was born His presence gave life.
With what piercing shoots of joy does this story of Christ unfold! First the conception of a child in a child’s heart, and then this first salutation, an infant leaping for joy in his mother’s womb, knowing the hidden Christ and leaping into life.
How did Elizabeth herself know what had happened to Our Lady? What made her realize that this little cousin who was so familiar to her was the mother of her God?
She knew it by the child within herself, by the quickening into life which was a leap of joy.
If we practice this contemplation taught and shown to us by Our Lady, we will find that our experience is like hers.
If Christ is growing in us, if we are at peace, recollected, because we know that however insignificant our life seems to be, from it He is forming Himself; if we go with eager wills, “in haste,” to wherever our circumstances compel us, because we believe that He desires to be in that place, we shall find that we are driven more and more to act on the impulse of His love.
And the answer we shall get from others to those impulses will be an awakening into life, or the leap into joy of the already wakened life within them.
Ave Maria!
Jesus, I Trust In You!
+ Mikel A. | RosaryNetwork.com, New York
[ Second Year Anniversary | In the Memory of María Blanca ]
