Venite Prandete

  THE ASCENSION PROCESSION IN ORCIVAL, IN THE AUVERGNE REGION OF FRANCE ASCENSIO N DAY 13th MAY NOTRE DAME DES FERS (Our Lady of the Irons (or Shackles)) Orcival is situated in the Auvergne region of France, the most beautiful and historic town, with an ancient church, Notre Dame d’Orcival, in which a truly beautiful black Madonna is situated in a glass case on the altar of the Basilica, brought to the original church more than 1,000 years ago and said to have been carved by St Luke himself. The statue is called “Notre Dame Des Fers” or “Our Lady of the Shackles”, its special place in Catholic history illustrated by the many leg irons and shackles that are hung from the walls of the Basilica. These shackles are the irons of slaves, many of them captured French, Celt or Slavic people. The statue was brought to the primitive church (the church preceding the current Basilica) but was buried at a time when the area was invaded by barbarians. The place where she was buried is called La...

  INTERNATIONAL HOLOCAUST REMEMBRANCE DAY 27th JANUARY      Bishop Kazimierz Majdanski with Pope John Paul II. The word ‘Holocaust’ is, at best, an inaccurate description for the mass murder by a totalitarian regime of innocent people: it connotes ‘sacrifice’ in propitiation to God, reminiscent of the holocausts offered by the Jewish people in the Temple and carried through to the Sacrifice of the Mass. The extermination of millions of people, however, was not an act of God, but of man; man who had turned his back on God and was, in many instances, demonic in his hatred of God and all who stood for Him. The Jewish people call the genocide committed on their people the “Shoah”. However, today, in remembering that time as International Holocaust Remembrance Day, we commemorate this terrible time of human history, a time when the ability to kill presented itself on an industrial scale; when the absence of God from men’s hearts enabled them to rationalize the perpetrat...

  ALBAN BARTHOLOMEW ROE AND THOMAS REYNOLDS MARTYRED 21st JANUARY 1642. Bartholomew Roe was born in 1583, in Suffolk. He was brought up a Protestant. He was converted when he tried to convert an imprisoned Catholic to Protestantism, but found himself defeated in argument. The Wikipedia entry provides as follows: “From this time, according to Richard Challoner, "Mr. Roe was very uneasy in mind upon the score of religion; nor did this uneasiness cease till by reading and confessing with Catholic Priests he was thoroughly convinced of his errors and determined to embrace the ancient faith. Having found the treasure of God’s truth himself, he was very desirous to impart the same to the souls of his neighbours.” With his brother James, both converted to Catholicism and both became Benedictine monks. In 1607 Roe studied for the priesthood at the English College at Douai. He had a temperament that seems to have been distinctly unsuitable for monastic life, being explosive and unpredictab...

  PERE JACQUES The Christ-like French priest - His Spiritual Battle in the Face of Evil So often we like to tell ourselves that, confronted by something so immoral and patently evil as the mass murder by the Nazi war machine, we would withstand the pressure to conform and would emerge with a morality unbowed. Perhaps we would join the Resistance. Perhaps we might not be so brave, but, in any event, we would never succumb to the brutal descent into the abyss of evil that the world witnessed in the Holocaust. The reality is never so sharp – of course ordinary people, confronted by an order to commit murder would not comply in normal circumstances. The situation that prevailed in the Nazi holocaust, however, as stated by Hannah Arendt, was not ‘normal circumstances.’ Hannah Arendt, in her study of Adolf Eichmann, (1) observed that the prevailing assumption is that a ‘normal person’ would not commit such atrocities as committed by Eichmann or those in the Nazi command - those who perf...

  PERE JACQUES ARRESTED 15TH JANUARY 1945 MARTYRED BY THE NAZIS We have characters presented to us as ‘heroes’ by our unfortunate popular culture – one-dimensional personalities, possessed of superficial bravery or worldly qualities that are socially esteemed, who grab our attention momentarily but whose stories fail to provide a standard of any depth or lasting value. And yet, right in front of us, we have real people in our Catholic history who provide to us an example by which we have profound and lasting guidance on how to live a rich and fulfilled life – how to strive to attain the best of ourselves. Pere Jacques is one such person, a man whose inspirational character and Christ-like love for his fellow man grew in adversity, in the horrors and evil of World War II, with all its attendant cruelty and human failures, a man possessed of incredible bravery - a courage that was founded, not on worldly qualities, but on an abandonment of self and a focus on the eternal, the presenc...