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Friends of the Rosary,

Yesterday, we honored St. Stephen, who by his words and by laying down his life for his faith, bore witness to Christ. Today, December 27, we receive the testimony of John, Apostle and Evangelist (d. 101).

The Church celebrates the Feast of this Galilean fisherman born in Bethsaida, son of Zebedee and Salome, and brother to St. James the Greater, who became the beloved disciple of Jesus.

John and James were called by Jesus to be disciples as they were mending their nets by the Sea of Galilee.

The pure and spiritual life of John kept him very close to Jesus and Mary, resting on the Master’s breast at the Last Supper and being filled with divine wisdom.

He wrote the fourth Gospel (about sixty-three years after the Ascension of Christ), three Epistles, and an excellent and mysterious Book of the Apocalypse or Revelation.

John is the evangelist of the divinity and fraternal love of Christ. With James, his brother, and Simon Peter, he was one of the witnesses of the Transfiguration.

He was permitted to witness His agony in the Garden. At the foot of the cross, Jesus entrusted His Mother to his care as He hung dying on the Cross.

St. John was the only one of the Apostles who did not forsake the Savior in the hour of His Passion and Death.

He was brought to Rome and, according to tradition, cast into a caldron of boiling oil by Emperor Domitian’s order, but he was miraculously preserved unhurt. He was later exiled to the Island of Patmos, where he wrote the Apocalypse.

In his extreme old age, he continued to visit the churches of Asia. Every time he preached, he said: “My dear children, love one another.”

St. John died in peace at about ninety-four years old at Ephesus in the hundredth year of the Christian era, or the sixty-sixth from the crucifixion of Christ.

Ave Maria
Come, Holy Spirit, come!
To Jesus through Mary!

Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
Please give us the grace to respond with joy!

+ Mikel Amigot w/ María Blanca | RosaryNetwork.com, New York

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Leo XIV