TWENTY-SECOND DAY
GIVING SUFFRAGES TO THE SOULS IN PURGATORY IS AN OBLIGATION OF PIETY.
Children are bound by feelings of piety to honour
their parents, having received their life from them. Honour thy father, says the Wise Man, with thy whole heart, and forget not the groanings of
thy mother; remember that thou hadst not been born but through them, and make a
return to them, as they have done for thee. Besides the life of the body, how
many blessings, spiritual as well as temporal, have not children received from
their parents! They are, therefore,
bound to be dutiful towards them, especially after their death. Married people
also are bound by natural piety to assist each other mutually. Conjugal love,
when constantly kept alive by the assistance of the grace of the Sacrament,
obliges them to look upon each other with the same affection as that wherewith
Christ has loved the Church, His spouse. But how can it be said that they have
borne to each other a mutual love resembling this, if the one does not afford
to the other, when dead, spiritual assistance? Heaven forbid that we should see
in any Christians a hardness of this sort towards their departed relatives.
Ejaculation
Say to these widowed souls at last, Say, sweetest
Jesus, "Come, Come, Spouses that have earned My love, To your eternal
home.''
De
profundis
Out of the depths I have cried to thee, O Lord:
Lord, hear my voice. Let thy ears be attentive to the voice of my supplication.
If thou, O Lord, wilt mark iniquities: Lord, who shall stand it. For with thee
there is merciful forgiveness: and by reason of thy law, I have waited for
thee, O Lord. My soul hath relied on his word: My soul hath hoped in the Lord.
From the morning watch even until night, let Israel hope in the Lord. Because
with the Lord there is mercy: and with him plentiful redemption. And he shall
redeem Israel from all his iniquities.
St. Elizabeth, daughter of the king of Hungary,
Tertiary of the order of St. Francis, will be the protectrix of this day, of
whom Surius relates, that she cherished a special piety to the souls of the
dead, liberating some of them with her suffrages from the pains of purgatory,
and, amongst others, her mother, who appeared to her. (In ejus vita, Nov. 19.)
Example
Although men depart from us by death, yet they
live in the memory of living men, and so have reason to hope for succour from
them, particularly if, in addition to the love common to all, they are united
also by the ties of blood. Take this as an example: The good father of the
venerable virgin Catharine Palazzi, having departed to the other life, his holy
daughter gave herself up for eight days together to fervent prayers and rigid
penances, to procure his liberation from purgatory. At the end of this octave,
she got the funeral office said, with several Masses de Requiem, at which she
was present, with exemplary piety; at which time she was rapt into ecstasy, in
which the Saviour appeared to her, with her patroness, St. Catharine of Sienna,
who conducted her in spirit, by unknown ways, into purgatory. There she heard
the lamentable voice of her father, who was suffering much in a whirl pool
of flaming fire, and conjured her, with sobs and sighs, to prosecute her suffrages
further, till she had set him free from his most grievous pains. The daughter,
moved at such a spectacle, turned herself to her Jesus, and, with warm tears,
besought Him to use His infinite mercy towards her suffering parent, expressing
herself ready to pay in her mortal body the debt of pains due from her father.
At such a pious prayer, the Saviour was arrested, drew the sufferer from the
flames, and lifted him, along with Himself, to the joys of heaven. After seeing
this, Catharine returned to her senses, and found the tears of sadness change
into those of consolation. O, how happy a lot for us, if, in imitation of this
servant of God, we were to send, with our suffrages, all our
departed parents
into paradise! Let us set to work, and be hopeful. (Marches, in vit. ven.
Cath. Pulaz.)
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