Day: March 17, 2020

Saint Patrick

Bishop, Apostle of Ireland
(373-464)

If the virtue of children reflects honor on their parents, much more justly is the name of Saint Patrick rendered illustrious by the innumerable lights of sanctity which shone in the Church of Ireland during many ages, and by the colonies of Saints with which it peopled many foreign countries. The Apostle of Ireland was born in Scotland towards the close of the fourth century, in a village which seems to be the present-day Scotch town of Kilpatrick, between Dumbarton and Glasgow. He calls himself both a Briton and a Roman, that is, of mixed extraction, and says his father was of a good family named Calphurnius. Some writers call his mother Conchessa, and say she was the niece of Saint Martin of Tours.
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Meditations for Each Day of Lent by St. Thomas Aquinas

Tuesday After the Third Sunday

Christ is truly our Redeemer

You were redeemed with the precious blood of Christ, as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled.–I Pet. 1. 19.

By the sin of our first parents, the whole human race was alienated from God, as is taught in the second chapter of the epistle to the Ephesians. It was not from God’s power that we were thereby cut off, but from that sight of God’s face to which His children and His servants are admitted.

Then again we descended beneath the usurped power of the devil. Man had consented to the devil’s will and, thereby, had made himself subject to the devil; subject, that is to say, as far as lay in man’s power, for since he was not his own property, but the property of another, he could not really give himself away to the devil. Continue reading →