Sunday, November 29, 2015

MONTH OF HOLY SOULS - TWENTY-SECOND DAY


               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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