Universalis
Monday 10 February 2025    (other days)
The Shipwreck of Saint Paul, Patron of Malta 
Solemnity

Using calendar: Malta - Gozo. You can change this.

The Lord is the King of apostles: come, let us adore him.

Year: C(I). Psalm week: 1. Liturgical Colour: White.

The Shipwreck of Saint Paul

As related in the Acts of the Apostles, the ship taking Saint Paul as a prisoner to Rome was shipwrecked on the coast of Malta. Paul and his companions were welcomed by Publius, the prefect of the island, and spent three months on Malta, preaching and performing miracles. The event is celebrated as the birth of the Maltese Church.

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: St Bonaventure (1218 - 1274)

Bonaventure was born at Bagnoregio in Etruria in about 1218. He became a Franciscan in 1243 and studied philosophy and theology at the University of Paris. He became a famous teacher and philosopher, part of the extraordinary intellectual flowering of the 13th century. He was a friend and colleague of St Thomas Aquinas.
  At this time the friars were still a new and revolutionary force in the Church, and their radical embracing of poverty and rejection of institutional structures raised suspicion and opposition from many quarters. Bonaventure defended the Franciscan Order and, after he was elected general of the order in 1255, he ruled it with wisdom and prudence. He is regarded as the second founder of the Order.
  He declined the archbishopric of York in 1265 but was made cardinal bishop of Albano in 1273, dying a year later in 1274 at the Council of Lyons, at which the Greek and Latin churches were (briefly) reconciled.
  Bonaventure wrote extensively on philosophy and theology, making a permanent mark on intellectual history; but he always insisted that the simple and uneducated could have a clearer knowledge of God than the wise. He was declared a Doctor of the Church in 1588 by Pope Sixtus V.

Liturgical colour: white

White is the colour of heaven. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate feasts of the Lord; Christmas and Easter, the great seasons of the Lord; and the saints. Not that you will always see white in church, because if something more splendid, such as gold, is available, that can and should be used instead. We are, after all, celebrating.
  In the earliest centuries all vestments were white – the white of baptismal purity and of the robes worn by the armies of the redeemed in the Apocalypse, washed white in the blood of the Lamb. As the Church grew secure enough to be able to plan her liturgy, she began to use colour so that our sense of sight could deepen our experience of the mysteries of salvation, just as incense recruits our sense of smell and music that of hearing. Over the centuries various schemes of colour for feasts and seasons were worked out, and it is only as late as the 19th century that they were harmonized into their present form.

Local calendars

General Calendar

Europe

Malta

Gozo


  This web site © Copyright 1996-2025 Universalis Publishing Ltd · Contact us · Cookies/privacy
(top