St. Catherine of Alexandria Catholic Church

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus names love of God and neighbor when a scholar challenges him to identify the greatest commandment. Since love (caritas) is wha...t God is, it is also that virtue that conforms us most dramatically to God. Thomas Aquinas says, in eloquently simple language, that caritas is friendship with God. In his great farewell discourse, offered the night before his death, Jesus says to his disciples that he no longer calls them servants, but friendsand in this he opens up a new world. In any other religion, a human being could be called, vis-à-vis God, a creature, a penitent, an eager supplicant, but only in Christianity could she be called an intimate of God. This is true because in Christ, God has become one of us, thereby establishing a parity beyond our capacity even to imagine. The participation in what God is is what Aquinas means by caritas, friendship with God. The moral challenge, of course, is to live out the implications of that friendship, listening and speaking to God, obeying the promptings of his voice, opening one’s heart to him, and, above all, loving what he loveswhich is to say, everyone and everything. https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/102520.cfm

Happy Feast of Saint John Paul II !

ST. TERESA OF AVILA St. Teresa of Avila (15151582), also known as St. Teresa of Jesus, was born in Spain to a large, devout, and prominent Catholic family. Fascinated with the lives of the saints taught to her by her pious parents, as children she and a brother tried to run away from home to seek martyrdom among the Moors. After an uncle found them and returned them home, they built hermitages for themselves in the family garden. At the age of 14 Teresa was plunged into ...sorrow upon the death of her mother; to find consolation she asked the Virgin Mary to be her new mother. When she began to exhibit worldly vanities, her father placed her in a convent to be educated with other ladies of her social class. Determined to avoid marriage, and motivated more by the need for security than love for God, at the age of twenty Teresa entered religious life as a Carmelite nun. For two decades she led what she describes as a mediocre prayer life, hindered by too much socialization with visitors. However, an intense prayer experience in her forties helped her to renounce worldly attachments and enter deeper into a life of prayer. She advanced rapidly and taught others to do the same, being encouraged by a vision of the place reserved for her in hell if she was unfaithful to God's graces. She had many profound mystical experiences for which she was often slandered and ridiculed. After the reform of her own life she worked hard to reform the laxity of many Carmelite convents, and was successful even while being greatly opposed in her efforts. She was a strong and important female figure of her era, and her great progress in the spiritual life led her to write the spiritual classics Interior Castle and The Way of Perfection. For these works St. Teresa of Avila was named the first female Doctor of the Church. Her feast day is October 15th. See more

Today we celebrate the Anniversary of the Miracle of the Sun. Our Lady of Fatima Pray for Us!

LIVE: Cardinal Agostino Vallini celebrates Mass with the rite of Beatification of Carlo Acutis, at the Basilica of St. Francis in the Italian town of Assisi. Broadcast begins at 4:20 PM Rome time. (English-language commentary is provided.)

Venerable Carlo Acutis, pray for us and our young adults in this world. May we encounter Jesus in the Eucharist, like you did.