Our Sermon Series for this year’s Parish Lenten Mission is entitled: “Themes in English Catholicism: From the Mission of Saint Augustine of Canterbury to the Elizabethan Settlement, 597-1564 A.D.” The Catholic Religion is a universal religionone and the same for everyone–but it also has its peculiarities and varying textures as it finds itself accepted into the hearts of the world’s diverse peoples. The Catholic Religion “inculturates” it  self, we may say, in its mission. This does not mean that it dilutes itself nor that mixes-in with already existing religions or spiritual understandings to become a hybrid, for it does neither. What it does is it plants itself adaptively, and then when a new place receives the Gospel the people there forge something freshly new in the life of Catholic Christianity. So it was with the conversion of Britannia in the Seventh Century of our Christian era A.D. There emerged from that evangelization a distinctive “English Catholicism” of which we American Catholics are very much the inheritors, although we hardly think of ourselves as such! We begin our story with the Mission of St. Augustine in the year 597 A.D. This is a different St. Augustine than the St. Augustine of the “Confessions” and the son of St. Monica. That St. Augustine of Hippo was from Roman Africa. He died in 430 A.D. Our St. Augustine here is the one known as St. Augustine of Canterbury, England. Back in 410 A.D., Rome had abandoned its territory of Britannia, under the pressures of external enemies and internal collapse. In short order the Romano-British world was destroyed. Invaders from Scandinavia and Germany drove the British west, towards Wales and Cornwall. There were new kingdoms now of these heathen barbarian tribes over most of Britain: the Kingdoms of the Angles, the Saxons, and the Jutes. One day in Rome, Pope Gregory I (Gregory the Great), was struck by the sight of fair-haired war captives in the Roman slave-market. When he asked who these foreigners were, he was told that they were Angles. Then the Pope made a prediction: that one day these “Angles” would become “Angels”. For the new mission to conquered Britannia, Pope Gregory turned to the Benedictine monastery of St. Andrew on the Coelian Hill at Rome, wherein he, Gregory, had once been a monk. He commissioned the Prior–Augustine–and forty of the monks to go to preach the Gospel in Britannia. The year was 596 A.D. The missionaries set out as far as Provence in the south of France. Hearing of what fate likely awaited them among these fierce peoples and the dangers of crossing the Channel they tried to turn back, but Pope Gregory insisted they go on. He would not let them return. After securing interpreters from among the Franks, Augustine and his missionary band landed on the Isle of Thanet off the coast of Kent, where the barbarian King Ethelbert ruled. They disembarked, carrying a silver cross as their standard and a painting of Jesus Savior. They sent word to the King of their arrival and their purpose in coming. In reply he ordered them to stay where they were. After a few days he came to Thanet and gave them audience. The King insisted they meet in the open. (He was afraid that these foreign wizards might use spells on him, which, he reasoned, could not work in the open air.) The King then sat under an oak tree. Augustine, through his interpreter, began to speak. Ethelbert, favorably touched, gave them leave to preach to his people and convert whom they could. But for himself, he was not ready to abandon all that he held sacred. That was the opening the Holy Ghost needed. It was on Pentecost of the Year 597 that King Ethelbert and many of his nobles received Baptism at the hands of Augustine. Then on Christmas Day of that same Year, Augustine baptized upwards of 10,000 Angles in a river near York. The prediction of Pope Gregory thus turned out to be a prophecy. The “Angles”, receiving the Christian Gospel, were indeed becoming “Angels”, so much so that this transformation has been marked ever since by the new country name given to Britannia. That name we know so well is “England”, which is an abbreviation of “Engelland”–or, to use modern English: “Angel-land”.

Two weeks before the beginning of Lent the Iraqi Chaldean Catholic Mission here at Mary Immaculate of Lourdes observes a particular tradition of theirs called “Bautha”—the “Pleading of the Ninevites”. (This year, February 10th-12th) The “Bautha” is a three-day hard fast, followed on the fourth day by a thanksgiving feast. It commemorates the three days during which the Prophet Jonah lay trapped in the belly of the whale before he was spit out. He than proceeded to the heathen city of Nineveh to preach the warning of imminent destruction by God for their sins, unless they repented, which, in the event, they did. The city of Nineveh was spared. The Christian religious fast then combines the memory of the suffocating imprisonment of Jonah with the repentance of the people. As many of you will recall, the Christian heartland in Muslim Iraq remained in the northern part of the country on the Nineveh plain. The tomb of the Prophet Jonah, revered by Christians but also by many Muslims, was preserved in the modern-day city of Mosul. The ISIS conquest of Mosul and the Nineveh plain in 2014 destroyed it. The Chaldean Christians in exile, however, keep alive their tradition. The memory of Jonah in the whale and the Pleading of the Ninevites has a wider, universal application to Christians of all rites and traditions. Our Lord explicitly compares the “Sign of Jonas” to His own Death and Resurrection. “An evil and adulterous generation seeketh a sign: and a sign shall not be given it, but the sign of Jonas the Prophet. For as Jonas was in the whale’s belly three days and three nights: so shall the Son of Man be in the heart of the earth three days and three nights.” (Matthew 12:39-40) The week after next we shall be beginning our Lent by receiving the mark of the Ashes on our foreheads. (Ash Wednesday is March 5th.) The Pleading of the Ninevites is a perfect image for us of the spirit of Lent. A Christianity without a vigorous awareness of sin and the effects of sin is but a soft-soaped, knock-off version of itself. Beware of any Christian spirituality which would leave you complacently in your sins rather than challenging you to take on the hard personal work of really becoming a Christian!

In the Year 1858, a 14 year-old girl named Bernadette Soubirous, from the Pyrenean mountain town of Lourdes, received 18 APPARITIONS of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Blessed Virgin appeared to her in the cleft of a great rock known to the local people as the “Massabielle”. Bernadette received a total of 18 Apparitions. The first occurred on February 11th which has since become the Feast-day of Our Lady of Lourdes. That year it was the Thursday before Ash Wednesday, the first day of Shrovetide. According to the Liturgical Calendar of that Year, the Apparitions corresponded to the following days: First Apparition: Thursday of Shrovetide 2nd Apparition: Shrove Sunday 3rd Apparition: Thursday after Ash Wed. Apparitions 4-15, “The Fortnight” — From Friday after Ash to Thursday of the Second Week in Lent. Apparition 16: March 25th, the Feast of the Annunciation. Also, that year: Thursday in Passion Week. 17th Apparition: Easter Wednesday 18th Apparition: July 16th (Mt. Carmel) THE TWO GREAT SIGNS GIVEN TO THE WORLD AT LOURDES: THE FIRST SIGN: THE SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF THE FRESH SPRING OF WATER OUT OF THE SIDE OF THE GREAT ROCK OF THE MASSABIELLE, FEBRUARY 25th, at the NINTH APPARITION, A CLEAR SYMBOL OF THE WATER FLOWING FROM CHRIST’S SIDE ON THE CROSS AND THE BAPTISMAL REGENERATION.  THE SECOND SIGN: MARY IDENTIFIES HERSELF WITH HER SINGULAR PRIVILEGE OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION. SHE SAID TO BERNADETTE: “I AM THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION”. THIS OCCURRED AT THE 16th APPARITION, ON THE FEAST OF THE ANNUNCIATION ITSELF, MARCH 25th. THE MYSTERY OF MARY’S FULLNESS OF GRACE IS INDICATED IN THE ANGEL GABRIEL’S GREETING: “HAIL, FULL OF GRACE, THE LORD IS WITH THEE.”

Prayer of Saint Francis de Sales: Do not look forward to what may happen tomorrow. The same everlasting Father who takes care of you today will take care of you tomorrow and every day. Either He will shield you from suffering or He will give you unfailing strength to bear it. Put aside all anxious thoughts and imaginations and say continually, “The Lord is my strength and my shield; my heart has trusted in Him and I am helped. He is not only with me, but in me, and I in Him.”

In the life of St. Gregory the Wonderworker (+270) we have the example of a Saint who fulfilled Christ’s words of the Gospel in a literal way: “ Amen I say to you that whosoever shall say to this mountain, Be thou removed and be cast into the sea and shall not stagger in his heart, but believe that whatsoever he saith shall be done: it shall be done unto him. (Mark 11:23) St. Gregory, the Bishop of Neocaesarea, performed great signs and wonders in the Name of Christ. As we read in the Roman Breviary: By his prayer he removed a mountain which was an obstacle to the building of a church. He also dried up a lake which was a cause of dissension between brothers. The River Lycus, which was inundating and devastating the fields, he restrained by fixing in the bank his stick, which immediately grew into a green tree, and served as the limit which the river henceforth never overpassed. The most powerful effect of St. Gregory’s prayers, however, was the graces of conversion for his city which he obtained: When he was dying, he asked how many infidels remained in the city of Neocaesarea: and on being informed that there were only seventeen, he gave thanks to God, and said: When I was made bishop, there were but seventeen believers. Indeed for anyone at all to be truly converted to Christ is the equivalent of a mountain being moved. And yet it does happens. May we be good instruments by prayer and good example.

Thursday of this week, the Vigil of All Saints (All Hallows’ E’en) our new Archbishop, His Excellency Richard Henning formally takes possession of his Episcopal See of Boston with a Mass of Installation at the Cathedral of the Holy Cross. This is an event of great significance for us as we receive our new Chief Shepherd. Our Thursday evening Mass at 5:30 PM will be offered for Archbishop Henning’s special intention.

Today we are observing theFeast of Our Lady of the Rosary as an “External Solemnity”. (The actual Feast-day is October 7th.) The Feast has its origins as a Feast of Thanksgiving for the deliverance of Christendom from an Ottoman Turk invasion by sea. As we read in the summary from Dom Guéranger’s Liturgical Year: The Turkish fleet had already mastered the greater part of the Mediterranean, and was threatening Italy, when, on October 7th, 1571, it came into action, in the Gulf of Lepanto with the pontifical galleys supported by the fleets of Spain and Venice. It was Sunday: throughout the world the Confraternities of the Rosary were engaged in their work of intercession. Supernaturally enlightened, St. Pius V watched from the Vatican the battle undertaken by the leader he had chosen, Don Juan of Austria, against the three-hundred vessels of Islam. The illustrious Pontiff, whose life’s work was now completed, did not survive to celebrate the anniversary of the triumph; but he perpetuated the memory of it by an annual commemoration of Our Lady of Victory. His successor, Gregory XIII, altered this title to Our Lady of the Rosary, and appointed the first Sunday of October for the new feast …  It is to be emphasized here that the spectacular victory of the under-dog Christian navy against the invader was, on the higher, spiritual plane, a gratuitous gift of the Divine Mercy in answer to the earnest prayer of faith and so it was recognized by the people of that day. It was not in any way a matter of the Rosary as “spellcasting”, as if large numbers of people praying the same prayer could have generated a forcefield of energy to achieve the desired result. Our prayers, in and of themselves, are nothing. It is rather God compassionating our prayers that makes the difference. The clearer we are on this distinction, the stronger our prayer life will be and the greater our gratitude to God.

The Feast of St. Michael Archangel, also known as “Michaelmas” (Michael + Mass), is our gateway into the Mystery of the Holy Angels in God’s Plan of Redemption. In addition to being the Month of the Rosary, October is also the Month of the Holy Angels. October 2nd is the Feast of the Holy Guardian Angels. The two kinds of creatures of highest intelligence God created are Angels and Men (human beings). The Angels are pure spirits, of higher intelligence than us. We men are hybrids, with spiritual souls and physical bodies. In the beginning of creation, some of these pure spirits rebelled against God. “There was war in Heaven.” (Apoc. 12:7) The faithful Angels, led by Michael, “fought with the dragon, and the dragon fought, and his angels. And they prevailed not: neither was their place found anymore in Heaven. And that great dragon was cast out, that old serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, who seduceth the whole world. And he was cast unto the earth: and his angels were thrown down with him.” (ibid, vv. 7b-9) As best we can understand it from the content of Divine Revelation, Satan had some claim on divine justice to try to seduce the human creatures into sin, which, in the Original Sin of Adam and Eve, he succeeded in doing. When Christ comes into the world as the Man-God, we see Him doing battle with Satan, as He must do if He is to be truly the Second Adam. The Victory of Christ’s Cross is complete and irreversible over Satan’s power and his “right-of-conquest”, which he was holding over the sinful earth with the purest malice. All that is left to defeated Satan now until the Second Coming of Christ is to fight a “rear-guard” action by trying to snatch human souls who will perversely reject the graces offered them for salvation to the very last moment when death separates their immortal souls from their mortal bodies. This is what is meant by the phrase “final damnation”. Of all the evils in the world, the only absolute one for us is that one: final damnation. We most definitely have need then of St. Michael, the “Prince of the Heavenly Host”, and all the good angels to come to our aid against the “wickedness and the snares of the Devil.” Let us give praise and thanks to God today for the ministry of His Angels!

Today on the Nativity of Our Lady we will offer the Blessing of Seeds and Seedlings at the end of Mass. We will repeat this Blessing on Saturday morning, September 14th, at the end of our 9 AM Mass for anyone who was not prepared for the blessing of their seeds for planting today. It is a beautiful Ritual Blessing which beseeches God, as the “Sower and Tiller of the heavenly world” to “cultivate the field of our hearts with heavenly tools, hearken to our prayers, and pour forth bountiful blessings upon the fields in which these seeds will be sown. By Thy protecting Hand turn away the fury of the elements, so that this entire fruit may be filled with Thy blessing and may be gathered without hindrance into the granary.”