A Reading From The Gospel Of John On All Souls' Day - 2 November

Based on the Gospel of John, All Souls' Day ought not to be for only the souls in Purgatory and the souls faithful to God but also for all the souls "that have done good things". [1]

John 5:25-29 is the Gospel reading for the first of three Masses on All Souls' Day in the 1962 Roman Catholic Daily Missal.  The passage quoted below is from Biblegateway - Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition (DRA) [Emphasis  added] [2]:

25 Amen, amen I say unto you, that the hour cometh, and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that hear shall live.

26 For as the Father hath life in himself, so he hath given the Son also to have life in himself:

27 And he hath given him power to do judgment, because he is the Son of man.

28 Wonder not at this; for the hour cometh, wherein all  that are in the graves shall hear the voice of the Son of God.

29 And they that have done good things, shall come forth unto the resurrection of life; but they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of judgment.

[1] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=John+5%3A25-29&version=DRA

[2] Ibid.

All Souls' Day - 2 November

Quoted in part from Learn Religions [1]:

All Souls['] Day is a solemn celebration in the Roman Catholic Church commemorating all of those who have died and are now in Purgatory, being cleansed of their venial sins and the temporal punishments for the mortal sins that they had confessed, and being made pure before entering into the presence of God in Heaven.

From worldometer.com [2]:

1,204,883 people have died so far from the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak as of November 01, 2020, 23:20 GMT. 

A prayer for the deceased, from Divinum Officium [3]:

Fidélium ánimæ per misericórdiam Dei requiéscant in pace. Amen. (Latin)

May the souls of the faithful, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen. (English)

 

From 2 Maccabees 12:44 [4]:

for if he were not expecting the fallen to rise again, it would have been superfluous and foolish to pray for the dead.

[1] https://www.learnreligions.com/what-is-all-souls-day-542460

[2] https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/coronavirus-death-toll/ (this link does not always work)

[3] https://divinumofficium.com/cgi-bin/horas/officium.pl,Tertia.

[4] https://bible.usccb.org/bible/2maccabees/12, at 44.

Feast Of All Saints - 1 November

Quoted from Learn Religions [1]:

All Saints Day is a special feast day on which Catholics celebrate all the saints, known and unknown. While most saints have a particular feast day on the Catholic calendar (usually, though not always, the date of their death), not all of those feast days are observed. And saints who have not been canonized — those who are in Heaven, but whose sainthood is known only to God — have no particular feast day. In a special way, All Saints Day is their feast.

Quoted from CHURCH TIMES [2]:

The glory of the saints is the fruit of their contemplation. The Psalmist writes that we must “look upon [the Lord] and be radiant”. [3] Commenting on this verse, St[.] Thomas Aquinas writes that “God is light and the one who approaches the light will be illuminated.”

The earthly lives of the saints testify to an important spiritual reality. The closer human beings draw to God, the greater their awareness of their sinfulness is. As our Gospel reminds us, true sanctity involves poverty of spirit. It is utterly opposed to the self-congratulation of an “in-group” who know themselves to be especially worthy of esteem, or especially favoured by God. As they grow in virtue, the saints feel even more keenly both their imperfection and their total dependence on the Lord.

...

“The reason that the world does not know us”, [Saint John the Apostle] writes, “is that it did not know him.” [4] The saints reveal to us a God whose character is quite different from our worldly fantasies of glory and dominion. The Beatitudes describe a series of qualities — poverty, meekness, undergoing persecution — which the world sees as signs of weakness and failure. Yet these are the qualities made manifest in Jesus’s earthly life, and in the lives of his saints.

[1] https://www.learnreligions.com/what-is-all-saints-day-542459, quoted without hyperlink.

[2] https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/articles/2020/30-october/faith/sunday-s-readings/all-saints-day

[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2034%3A5&version=NIV

[4] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1John+3%3A1&version=NIV

Selected Feast Days In November

Below are some of the feast days in November:

1.  Feast Of All Saints - 1 November

2.  All Souls' Day (or Feast Of All Souls) - 2 November

3.  Feast Of Saint Albert The Great ("Albertus Magnus") - 15 November

4.  Feast Of Saint Gertrude The Great - 16 November

5.  Feast Of Saint Elizabeth Of Hungary 19 November

6.  Feast Of The Presentation Of The Blessed Virgin Mary - 21 November

7.  Feast Of Saint Andrew The Apostle - 30 November

Feast Of Saint Simon And Saint Jude, Apostles - 28 October

 Quoted below, in part, is from Catholic News Agency [1]:

St. Jude Thaddaeus

St. Jude, known as Thaddaeus, was a brother of St. James the Lesser, and a relative of Jesus. Ancient writers tell us that he preached the Gospel in Judea, Samaria, Idumaea, Syria, Mesopotamia, and Lybia. According to Eusebius, he returned to Jerusalem in the year 62 and assisted at the election of his brother, St. Simeon, as Bishop of Jerusalem. 

He is an author of an epistle (letter) to the Churches of the East, in particular the Jewish converts, directed against the heresies of the Simonians, Nicolaites, and Gnostics. This Apostle is said to have suffered martyrdom in Armenia, which was then subject to Persia. The final conversion of the Armenian nation to Christianity did not take place until the third century A.D.

St. Jude was the one who asked Jesus at the Last Supper why He would not manifest Himself to the whole world after His resurrection. Little else is known of his life, but legend claims that he visited Beirut and Edessa.

He was beaten to death with a club, then beheaded post-mortem in 1st century Persia. His relics reside at Saint Peter's in Rome, at Rheims, and at Toulouse, France.

...

St. Simon the Zealot

Little is known about the post-Pentecost life of St. Simon, who had been called a Zealot. He is thought to have preached in Egypt and then to have joined St. Jude in Persia. Here, he was supposedly martyred by being cut in half with a saw, a tool he is often depicted with. However, the 4th-century St. Basil the Great says he died in Edessa, peacefully.

[1] https://www.catholicnewsagency.com/saint/st-jude-thaddeus-and-st-simon-the-zealot-apostles-541

Feast Of The Kingship Of Our Lord Jesus Christ - Last Sunday Of October (25 October 2020)

An error was made in the 2 October 2020 post now entitled Notable Feast Days In October 2020.  It has been corrected to show that the Feast of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ for 2020 is 25 October 2020, not  31 October.

"In 1970 its Roman Rite observance was moved to the final Sunday of Ordinary Time. Therefore, the earliest date on which it can occur is 20 November and the latest is 26 November." [1]  "Roman Catholics adhering to the Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite use the General Roman Calendar of 1960, and as such continue to observe the [the Feast of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ] on its original date of the final Sunday of October." [2]

Stated another way, "The Feast of Christ the King is the Last Sunday in October on the Traditional Calendar.  In the Novus Ordo  it falls on the Sunday before the First Sunday of Advent." [3]

The Gospel reading for the Feast of the Kingship of Our Lord Jesus Christ is Jn. 18:33-37 [4]:

AT THAT time: Pilate said to Jesus: Art thou the King of the Jews? Jesus answered: Sayest thou this thing of thyself, or have others told it thee of Me? Pilate answered: Am I a Jew? Thy Own nation, and the chief priests, have delivered Thee up to me: what hast Thou done? Jesus answered: My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, My servants would certainly strive that I should not be delivered to the Jews: but now My kingdom is not from hence. Pilate therefore said to Him: Art thou a king then? Jesus answered: Thou sayest that I am a King. For this was I born, and for this came I into the world; that I should give testimony to the truth, Everyone that is of the truth, heareth My voice. 

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feast_of_Christ_the_King, quoted without hyperlinks.

[2] Ibid.

[3] http://www.catholictradition.org/Christ/cking-feast2.htm

Boring Abstract Thoughts Inspired By A Report On Two Catholic Churches Burned In Santiago, Chile

Quoted from ChurchPOP [1]:

Rioters set fire to and destroyed two Catholic Churches in Chile on Sun., Oct. 18[, 2020]. The riots “commemorate” last year’s anti-government protests.

Vandals destroyed both the St. Francis Borgia Church and the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Santiago, Chile. Built in 1876, they are the oldest churches in Santiago.

(There are photos and videos in the article cited above.)

America The Jesuit Review  reported as follows [2]:

St. Francis Borgia Church also was vandalized, and religious items were removed, church official said. The parish is home to institutional ceremonies for the “Carabineros,” Chile’s national police, a force unpopular with protesters over accusations of it employing repressive tactics, including 345 eye injuries from the use of pellets shot from anti-riot weapons, according to a U.N. report.

...

The assailing of two parishes comes as Chile’s Catholic Church suffers the fallout from accusations of clergy sexual abuse and the hierarchy’s improper response to such crimes. A January survey from polling firm Cadem found that 75% of respondents disapprove of the church’s performance.

 

The Catholic Church is blameless; the evilness of some of those in charge of it ought to be weighed against the evilness of those who desecrate it.  The evilness in others, secular or religious, is neither a reason nor an excuse to perform evil deeds in retaliation.  Evil doers have set God aside or have rejected God which leaves a vacuum in the soul for Satan to enter, inhabit and ruin.

There are people who believe that the ultimate goal in life is to have everything their way, not Christ's way.  Satan plays along with their self-centered, prideful delusion by providing temptations and means to satisfy their insatiable craving.  Satan is not interested in bringing all kinds of pain into people's lives.  It is a waste of time because every life has a preset expiration date.  Since souls never cease to exist, Satan works tirelessly to entice them to follow a disguised path that leads to eternal suffering.

The soul is a separate entity apart from the physical being.  This blog entry asserts that it has a closer and deeper connection to God than either of the heart or the mind.  An ineffable longing connects the soul to God.  The eternal soul is free to make an irrevocable choice to sever this connection, with Satan's encouragement, and does so by influencing and controlling thoughts and actions.

Matthew 22:37 supports the claim that the soul is independent from the heart and the mind [3]:

Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’

[1] https://www.churchpop.com/2020/10/19/rioters-set-fire-celebrate-destruction-of-two-historic-catholic-churches-in-chile/

[2] https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2020/10/19/demonstrators-burn-two-catholic-churches-chile-anniversary-protests

[3] https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=matthew+22:37, quoted without references.