Cry out with joy to God, all the earth: serve the Lord with gladness.
Year: C(I). Psalm week: 2. Liturgical Colour: Green.
Other saints: St Leonard of Porto Maurizio (1676 - 1751)
Hexham & Newcastle
Leonard was born in Porto Maurizio in 1676, the son of a master mariner. He joined the Franciscan order and for forty-seven years preached, wrote letters and sermons, and travelled the whole length of Italy. The popularity of the Stations of the Cross is much due to the impetus he gave to the devotion. He died at Rome in 1751.
Other saints: Saint John Berchmans (1599-1621)
26 Nov (where celebrated)
John Berchmans was born in Diest, Belgium. He joined the Jesuit novitiate when he was seventeen. Sent to Rome to study philosophy at the Roman College in 1619, he surprised both masters and classmates: he joined an exquisite charity and friendliness to a brilliant intelligence and great emotional maturity. His spiritual diary also reveals the depth of his interior life, which bespeaks a true mystical union with God. His health suffered from the effort he put into studying for his final examination, and he became steadily weaker as he prepared for the disputation. On July 8 1621, he passed his final examination brilliantly, but soon after he fell seriously ill with dysentery and died on 13 August 1621.
About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:
Second Reading: St Macarius (300 - 391)
Saint Macarius the Great was one of the Egyptian desert recluses and a disciple of Saint Anthony. Fifty Spiritual Homilies were ascribed to Macarius a few generations after his death. Modern patristic scholarship doubts this attribution but concludes from internal evidence that the author was from Upper Mesopotamia, where the Roman Empire bordered the Persian Empire, and that the homilies were written not later than 534. None of this, of course, affects the spiritual value of the homilies themselves.
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 1:16-17 |
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At that time I told your judges: You must give your brothers a fair hearing and see justice done between a man and his brother or the stranger who lives with him. You must be impartial in judgement and give an equal hearing to small and great alike. Do not be afraid of any man, for the judgement is God’s.
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| Noon reading (Sext) | Isaiah 55:8-9 |
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My thoughts are not your thoughts,
my ways not your ways – it is the Lord who speaks.
Yes, the heavens are as high above earth
as my ways are above your ways,
my thoughts above your thoughts.
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| Afternoon reading (None) | 1 Samuel 16:7 |
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God does not see as man sees; man looks at appearances but the Lord looks at the heart.
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