IHS
Fifteenth Sunday after Pentecost—17 September AD 2017
Ave Maria!
Please pray for Alfie Evans, 14 Months old ,
another hostage of socialized medicine in Britain.
https://www.facebook.com/groups/alfiesarmy/Please join us in the Fifty-four day Rosary Novena
For the return of Christian civilization under Christ the King and Mary His Queen.
www.rosarychurch.net/mary/54_day_novena.html
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Our Lady of CharityCatholic history is filled with accounts of the Blessed Virgin Mary coming to the aid of her faithful clients in many miraculous ways. Many accounts concern her intercession in military manners. Our own church, dedicated to Our Lady of the Rosary, commemorates a great naval battle on Sunday, October 7, 1571 during which Pope Pius V lead the Catholic faithful in praying the Rosary while a hopelessly outnumbered Don Juan of Austria and his navy gained a signal victory over the Moslems who had been tyrannizing the Mediterranean.[2]
The Eastern churches celebrate Pocrova, the “Holy protection” of Constantinople from the Moslems in A.D. 911 by the Blessed Virgin:
She held a veil (omophor) over the attacked city as a sign of assured protection. To the great joy of the inhabitants the Christian soldiers were blessed with a striking victory over the Moslems.[3]
Just a few days ago we observed the feast of the Holy Name of Mary (September 12) instituted by Pope Innocent XI when the Moslems were repelled from the gates of Vienna by John Sobieski under the patronage of our Blessed Lady.
In 1716, Clement XI inscribed our feast of the HolyRosary on the calendar of the Universal Church, in gratitude for the victory gained by Prince Eugene in Serbia, on August 5, the feast of Our Lady of the Snow.
More recently, at Hiroshima, on August 6th, 1945, a group of German Jesuits survived the nuclear bomb blast in a house that was a mere eight city blocks from the explosion site. Everything around, except for their house, was leveled, and a half million people died. The Jesuits attributed their protection from the blast to the fact that they recited Mary’s Rosary together every day.
Today, people are drawn to the false god of materialism. The threat of Islam looms as it did in the middle ages. Marxism and the errors of Russia threaten the Church and all of Western civilization, not just Russia and Ukraine. The threat of nuclear annihilation is greater than ever before. The Blessed Virgin has promised to remedy all of these if we would do penance and honor her Immaculate Heart as requested at Fatima.
Someone once said that “All history is military history” referring, or course to the reality that battles and bombs and wars do fill most of the pages of our history book. But we must not lose sight of the fact that the Blessed Virgin is more than the patroness of generals and admirals—she is the patroness of all faithful Catholics when they face situations more than they can handle with their own resources. She is the Health of the Sick, our Lady of Consolation, Help of Christians, Refuge of Sinners, Comforter of the Afflicted, Virgin Most Powerful, Virgin Most Merciful —and the titles go on and on.
This past Wednesday, I received an email from a good friend—a man I had worked with in industry, and who has answered his vocation to the religious life as a deacon in the Diocese of Richmond, Virginia. He is of Cuban ancestry and may still have relatives living in Miami, which was very much in the path of Hurricane Irma back on September 7th. He wrote: “I have been thanking Our Lady of Charity that you and the east coast were spared and things were not as dire as painted.”
Of course I had heard of Nuestra Señora de la Caridad del Cobre for she was highly venerated both in Cuba and in Miami (where I lived for some years), but I wanted to know more. It turns out that she is venerated in a number of countries and is often associated with her protection of common people who faced more than they could handle with respect to wind and water—poor people, often desperately adrift on the waves.
What I found most remarkable is that the feast day of Mary as Lady of Charity is observed on her birthday, September 8th—the day that Hurricane Irma changed her course!
If you don’t see something miraculous in this, I invite you to look at the pictures taken twelve years ago when Hurricane Wilma (a mere Category 3) storm ripped the face off this building and left us two Sundays in a row in heat and the darkness.[5] Compare that to the fact that our exterior was untouched by Irma which reached Category 5—not even a letter of our sign blew down (and we have had them blow down when it rains hard)—and the power was restored with days to spare for Sunday.
I didn’t know this when I wrote this sermon, but have since learned that our parishes on the Florida West coast went similarly unscathed—“no broken windows, just minor junk all over”—even though Hurricane Irma traveled up that coast. Another miracle.
The big, spectacular, Marian miracles may be the military miracles, defending Christendom from its many enemies. But I am very happy to be among the common people whom Mary, our Lady of Charity, has preserved from the wind and the water.
September 8th will always be a special day for this parish!
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