A hymn of blessing and an invocation for help
- Parent Categories: Spirituality
by Ottavio De Bertolis
We continue our reflection on the words of the most common Catholic prayer after the Our Father, essentially following the same method indicated by St. Ignatius in the so-called "second way of praying", when he invites us to reflect and intimately enjoy the individual words of the prayers vowels known to us. “Blessed are you among women”: as is known, Hebrew does not have a superlative in adjectives, and therefore uses a periphrasis: so this expression actually means “you are the most blessed”, which in some way connects us to what was said just before, that is, "full of grace, the Lord is with you". However, these words are not from the Angel greeting the Virgin, but from Elizabeth, in the episode of the visitation.
"Having Easter" with the Lord
- Parent Categories: Spirituality
of Sea Anna Maria Cánopi
Holy Week is the heart of the liturgical year, since from the Paschal mystery, solemnly celebrated in it, flows the river of grace, the gift of salvation.
Every Christian who during the weeks of Lent has committed himself to the fight against evil and who, in the effort of his own purification, has kept his gaze simultaneously turned towards God and himself, is now invited by the Liturgy to have eyes only for Christ. It is only his Person - his words, his gestures, his silences - that fills all this sacred time and attracts all our attention, to the point of identifying with Him, to share His Passion in an impulse of authentic empathy, of profound "compassion".
Let's make a "collection" as a family
- Parent Categories: Spirituality
by Giosy Cento
The Eucharistic Celebration is the maximum prayer that the Christian community can offer to the Father through Jesus and with the work of the Holy Spirit. There are two moments during the Holy Mass in which the priest explicitly says the word let us pray: after the Gloria and after Communion. In the original Liturgy this prayer is called Collect, a word which means, from the Latin, "to make a collection". In common language we use it to indicate a collection of money for some particular need. Here it indicates that the celebrant, at that moment, collects the prayer of each and everyone in the community, and, on behalf of everyone, offers this... Bouquet of prayers", like flowers, to the Father. it is therefore a very important prayer because it is the whole community that is represented by the priest and presents itself united before its Lord. it is a great prayer that concludes with the text, sometimes too obvious for our ears, but very profound: welcome our invocation for our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who is God and lives and reigns with You in the unity of the Spirit Holy, forever and ever. And then the prayer becomes strong and irresistible on the heart of the Father because it is said to Him, recommended by He who is our Lord (because he gave his life for us and becomes our guarantor!).
With Jesus, God begins the pastoral care of affection
- Parent Categories: Spirituality
by Gianni Gennari
At the end of our previous meeting we arrived at the true "new", the true God of our Christian and Catholic creed. God, after having "in many circumstances and in many ways" (Hebrews 1, 1) spoken to His people, reveals himself definitively and gives himself in Jesus of Nazareth, born from the womb of a woman of the people, offered fraternally as "bread" which it breaks for everyone, water that flows from the womb of God and invades history, also making use of those Twelve, poor sinful men who formed the first community of Christians, and opens the way to the salvation of men in history and up to eternal life . Christ, who died and rose again, returned to the Father, but he did not leave us alone.
Pentecost is the invasion of the Holy Spirit into our lives. Our whole life, if we want, is guided, supported, caressed by God, even when we don't feel it: Jesus was loved by the Father even when on the cross it seemed that he was forgotten. "Hope - says Paul - does not disappoint because the love of God has been poured into our hearts". (Romans 5,5)