Indeed, how good is the Lord: bless his holy name.
Year: C(I). Psalm week: 2. Liturgical Colour: Green.
Other saints: Saint Alfonso Rodríguez
31 Oct (where celebrated)
Alfonso Rodriguez (1533-1617) was born in Segovia, Spain. His family played host to Saint Peter Faber, who prepared the young Alfonso for his First Communion. He left school at age 14 to help his widowed mother run the family wool business. At age twenty-seven, he married and had three children. Five years later, he found himself a widower with one surviving child, who died Soon after. He joined the Society of Jesus as a Brother at the age of thirty-eight. He spent the next forty-six years of his religious life as guest master and doorkeeper of the Jesuit college in Majorca, where he exercised a marvellous influence not only on the members of the college, but upon a great number of people who came to him for spiritual advice. He was a friend and advisor to Saint Peter Claver, encouraging him to go to the missions in South America. His daily routine, though ordinary, offered him opportunities for holiness of life: each time the bell rang, he looked at the door and envisioned that it was God who was standing outside. He was often heard to say “I’m just coming, Lord.”
Other saints: In Honour of St Alphonsus Rodriguez
31 Oct (where celebrated)
In honour of
St. Alphonsus Rodriguez
Laybrother of the Society of Jesus
Honour is flashed off exploit, so we say;
And those strokes once that gashed flesh or galled shield
Should tongue that time now, trumpet now that field,
And, on the fighter, forge his glorious day.
On Christ they do and on the martyr may;
But be the war within, the brand we wield
Unseen, the heroic breast not outward-steeled,
Earth hears no hurtle then from fiercest fray.
Yet God (that hews mountain and continent,
Earth, all, out; who, with trickling increment,
Veins violets and tall trees makes more and more)
Could crowd career with conquest while there went
Those years and years by of world without event
That in Majorca Alfonso watched the door.
About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:
Second Reading: Bishop Baldwin of Canterbury (- 1190)
Baldwin was born in Exeter, but his date of birth is unknown. He was ordained priest and made archdeacon by Bartholomew, Bishop of Exeter. He subsequently became a Cistercian monk at the Abbey of Ford, in Devonshire, and within a year was made Abbot of Ford. In 1180 he was promoted to the Bishopric of Worcester and in the same year was elected to the primatial see of Canterbury by the bishops of the province. The election was disputed by the monks of Canterbury, necessitating the intervention of King Henry II. Even after his appointment was ratified he was engaged in disputes with the Canterbury monks, so that King Richard and the Holy See had to become involved.
Baldwin acted as legate in Wales, where he held a visitation in 1187. In 1188 he preached the Crusade, after having himself taken the cross on hearing the news of the loss of Jerusalem. In 1190 he set out for the Holy Land, in company with Hubert, Bishop of Salisbury, and others, providing at his own expense two hundred knights and three hundred retainers. While there he acted a vicegerent of the patriarch. He died during the siege of Acre, leaving all he possessed for the relief of the Holy Land and naming Bishop Hubert as his executor.
The Spiritual Tractates were written almost entirely during the decade Baldwin lived at Ford, probably as sermons which were later re-cast. They reveal a man thoroughly and happily at home in Cistercian spirituality, an acute theologian well aware of contemporary currents, and one of the last true representatives of the rich patristic-monastic tradition. The Tractate on the Angel’s Salutation, in particular (read on Thursday of the 20th week in Ordinary Time), marks an important stage in the evolution of Marian spirituality.
Liturgical colour: green
The theological virtue of hope is symbolized by the colour green, just as the burning fire of love is symbolized by red. Green is the colour of growing things, and hope, like them, is always new and always fresh. Liturgically, green is the colour of Ordinary Time, the orderly sequence of weeks through the year, a season in which we are being neither single-mindedly penitent (in purple) nor overwhelmingly joyful (in white).
Mid-morning reading (Terce) | Deuteronomy 1:31 |
The Lord carried you, as a man carries his child, all along the road you travelled.
|
Noon reading (Sext) | Baruch 4:28-29 |
As by your will you first strayed away from God, so now turn back and search for him ten times as hard; for as he brought down those disasters on you, so will he rescue you and give you eternal joy.
|
Afternoon reading (None) | Wisdom 1:13-15 |
Death was not God’s doing, he takes no pleasure in the extinction of the living. To be – for this he created all; the world’s created things have health in them, in them no fatal poison can be found, and Hades holds no power on earth; for virtue is undying.
|