Pope Francis has given us the new feast of Mary, Mother of the Church, celebrated on the Monday after Pentecost. In this meditation we pray about the background of the feast, considering:
The Second Vatican Council called Our Lady “model of the virtues”. In this meditation we use texts from the New Testament to consider how Mary teaches us various aspects of the virtue of charity:
In the Last Supper, Christ instituted the Eucharist and gave the apostles his Body and Blood as Holy Communion for the first time. In this meditation we use texts of Scripture, the Catechism, St Josemaria Escriva and St John Vianney, the Cure of Ars, to consider how:
On Holy Thursday we celebrated the institution of the Eucharist by Christ in the Last Supper, in what was his last celebration of the Passover. Even though In these extraordinary times of a pandemic most of us are unable to attend Mass, we can still be very united to the Masses being celebrated and so be, in the words of St Josemaria, “Eucharistic souls”. In this meditation we consider how:
On 27 March 2020 at St Peter’s Basilica in Rome Pope Francis conducted an hour of prayer broadcast around the world to pray for God’s help in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic sweeping the world. He based his homily on that occasion on the Gospel passage of Christ calming the storm on the Sea of Galilee when the apostles begged him for help. In this meditation we use Pope Francis’ homily to consider how:
When the Angel Gabriel appeared to Mary in the Annunciation, he invited her to welcome the Son of God into her womb and into the world. She said yes and our redemption was at hand. In this meditation we ponder this great event as related by St Luke and consider that:
Prayer is one of the three principal focuses of our Lenten discipline, along with fasting and almsgiving. In this meditation we consider how:
It has often been said that the quality of our interior life is the quality of our prayer. In this meditation we use especially the Catechism of the Catholic Church and St Josemaria’s book The Way to consider how we can improve our personal conversation with God in mental prayer through such means as:
Everyone loves Christmas, when we celebrate the birth of Christ in Bethlehem. In this meditation we use the Catechism of the Catholic Church and texts of St Josemaria to pray about why God became man and the consequences this has for us. According to the Catechism, God became man for four reasons:
Pope Francis called the Communion of Saints one of the most consoling truths of our faith. Indeed it is. In this meditation we use texts of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, St Bernard, St Therese of Lisieux, St Josemaria, Pope Francis and Kimberly Hahn to pray about this union of the saints in heaven, the souls in purgatory and the faithful on earth, all helping one another on the way to heaven. We consider how:
