Dear Friends in Christ,
Welcome to our weekly Sunday update. This Sunday (August 25, 2024) is the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost. The liturgy for Thursday, August 29th, marks our annual remembrance of the Beheading of John the Baptist. There are many martyrs on the traditional Roman Calendar but none more prominent than the Precursor who came, “ . . . preaching in the desert of Judea. And saying: Do penance: for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. For this is he that was spoken of by Isaias the prophet . . .” (Matthew 3:1-3). John’s words were echoed by Jesus at the very outset of Our Lord’s ministry: “From that time Jesus began to preach, and to say: Do penance, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand” (Matthew 4:17). John spoke out boldly against the corruption and immorality of his time and lost his head in consequence. Forerunner of the Messiah, he was also the model for all the martyrs who would come later. Like him, there are many today – too many, sadly, even in our own country – persecuted and imprisoned for expressing their faith. Let us pray for them especially on Thursday as we celebrate the martyrdom of John the Baptist.
Calendar of Saints and Special Observances
Celebrations are those listed in the Roman Missal of 1962.
DAY, DATE – FEAST (CLASS)
Sunday, August 25 – Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (II)
Monday, August 26 – Commemoration of St. Zephyrinus, Pope and Martyr
Tuesday, August 27 – St. Joseph Calasanctius, Confessor (III)
Wednesday, August 28 – St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, Confessor and Doctor (III) [Commemoration of St. Hermes, Martyr]
Thursday, August 29 – The Beheading of St. John the Baptist (III) [Commemoration of St. Sabina, Martyr]
Friday, August 30 – St. Rose of Lima, OP, Virgin (III) [Commemoration of Ss. Felix and Audactus, Martyrs]
Saturday, August 31 – St. Raymond Nonnatus, Confessor (III)
Note: The liturgical celebration of St. Louis IX, King of France, Confessor, which usually takes place on August 25th, in accordance with the traditional Roman Calendar, is displaced this year by the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.
Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost
The links provided below can be used to download printable copies of the Proper Prayers for Mass in the Extraordinary Form for the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost with either English or Spanish translation. The English version includes a brief commentary on the liturgy excerpted from The Liturgical Year of Dom Prosper Guéranger, OSB (1805-1875). We also offer a link to a New Liturgical Movement article by Dr. Michael P. Foley on “Perpetual Propitiation in the Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost.”
Latin Mass Schedule: Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost (August 25, 2024)
Charlotte Area Latin Masses
Other Diocese of Charlotte Latin Masses
Diocese of Charleston Latin Masses
Latin Mass Schedule: Weekdays
Charlotte Area Latin Masses
Other Diocese of Charlotte Latin Masses
Diocese of Charleston Latin Masses
Note: Prince of Peace resumed its regular weekday schedule of Latin Masses last Monday, August 19th, replacing the abbreviated summer schedule. Travelers are advised to contact parish offices to confirm weekday and Saturday Mass times, since local schedules are sometimes subject to change without notice, especially on or around holidays, holy days of obligation and other special feast days.
Announcements
STA First Sunday Food and Fellowship Sunday September 8 (special date)
Due to the Eucharistic Congress activities next weekend, the Latin Mass Community at Saint Thomas Aquinas will gather for their monthly First Sunday Food and Fellowship on second Sunday, September 8th (instead of September 1st), following celebration of the 11:30 a.m. Traditional Latin Mass. As always, all are invited and all will be welcome.
Help the Jacksonville (FL) Carmelites Sisters
Last winter we shared an article about the traditional Buffalo Carmelite sisters who moved to Jacksonville, Florida at the invitation of the local bishop. While they settled in well, unfortunately their house sustained damage during Hurricane Debbie a few weeks ago and need to pay for a new roof. We share this as an opportunity to provide charity to the sisters, who survive on alms.
The Jacksonville Carmelites also have a distant connection to us in Charlotte. During their move, Saint Ann parish hosted the nuns for their overnight stay in Charlotte (enroute to Florida). Additionally, the sisters’ community is likely the closest (distance wise) traditional contemplative religious community to Charlotte. To help the sisters, please click here.
Holy Face Devotions
Prayers of Reparation to the Holy Face of Jesus are offered each week at the following churches on the indicated days:
“Jesus, Your ineffable image is the star which guides my steps. Ah, You know, Your sweet Face is for me Heaven on earth” (from Canticle to the Holy Face by Saint Thérèse de Lisieux, the 19th century Discalced Carmelite nun who took the name in religion, Thérèse of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face).
Latin Mass and Liturgical News
Saints and Special Observances
Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, OCD, Martyr was a 20th-century saint canonized too late to be included on the liturgical calendar of 1962 who, nevertheless, deserves to be commemorated for her love of Christ and for taking up her cross to follow Him. She was born on October 12, 1891, in Breslau, Germany, a city that was transferred to Poland after World War II and now is known as Wroclaw. She was the youngest of 11 children born to Jewish parents on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. They named her Edith Stein. Her mother thought it a good omen that her last child had been born on the day of the festival, but the future saint would come to view it as a foreshadowing of the ultimate sacrifice she would be called upon to make as a Carmelite nun.
Edith’s father died when she was barely two, leaving her mother to run the family timber business and raise 11 children alone. By the time she enrolled in the University of Breslau, at the age of 19, Edith had ceased to believe in God. She became a radical suffragette in her first year at university but later lost interest in the cause of women’s suffrage. After two years at Breslau, she moved to Gottingen University in order to study philosophy, working as an assistant to Edmund Husserl who supervised her doctoral studies after she was awarded her undergraduate degree with distinction in January of 1915.
Moved by the suffering of soldiers in the First World War, Edith studied nursing in order to serve in a field hospital for Austrian troops; but when the hospital was closed in 1916, she went back to working for Husserl who had moved to Freiburg. She completed her doctoral dissertation on The Problem of Empathy there and was awarded the doctorate in philosophy summa cum laude in 1917. Around this time, happening to go into the cathedral at Frankfort, she saw a woman, laden with a shopping basket, enter the church and kneel to pray. She later described this as a totally novel experience, as she had only thought of churches and synagogues as places of formal worship before seeing a woman enter the cathedral for a moment of intimate conversation with God.
Having written her dissertation on the subject, Edith had a profound personal experience of empathy when Adolf Reinach, who had been an assistant to Husserl in Gottingen, was killed in Flanders. When she went to pay her respects to his widow, she was uneasy about the meeting but found herself in the presence of a woman of faith. Afterwards she described it as her “first encounter with the Cross and the divine power it imparts to those who bear it . . . the moment when my unbelief collapsed and Christ began to shine his light on me – Christ in the mystery of the Cross.”
Edith left her position as Husserl’s assistant, hoping to establish an academic career; but she was frustrated in this regard by the prejudice that barred women from the professorial ranks. Later, her Jewish heritage would prove an even greater obstacle. Returning to Breslau, she wrote about philosophy and psychology, read the New Testament and the works of Søren Kierkegaard, and studied the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. One night in the summer of 1921, while a guest at the country estate of a friend, Hedwig Conrad-Martius, she picked up the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila and read through the night. “When I had finished the book, I said to myself: this is the truth.”
Baptized on January 1, 1922, the Feast of the Circumcision, Edith wore the white wedding cloak of her friend, Hedwig, who stood with her at the fount as her godmother. One month later, on the Feast of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary, she was confirmed by the Bishop of Speyer. She went directly to Breslau to tell her mother, “I am a Catholic.” The two women wept together, and Hedwig Conrad-Martius, who had accompanied her friend, said, “Behold, two Israelites in whom there is no guile!”
Edith wished to join a Carmelite convent immediately but was discouraged from doing so by her spiritual advisors. She spent the next nine years teaching German and history at the Dominican Sister’s school and the teacher-training college at St. Magdalen’s Convent in Speyer. She was also a frequent public speaker, principally on women’s issues, believing that God had called her to serve Him this way in the world. Her scholarly efforts included translation of the letters and diaries of Henry Newman written prior to his conversion to Catholicism and a free translation of Thomas Aquinas’s Quaestiones Disputatae de Veritate.
In 1931 she quit teaching, hoping in vain to secure a professorship. At this time, she wrote Potency and Act, a study of the central concepts in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, a work she later rewrote at the Carmelite convent in Cologne under the title, Finite and Eternal Being. It would stand as the summation of her own philosophy, but the outbreak of antisemitism in Germany made it impossible for a writer of Jewish extraction to secure publication.
Edith was able to secure a post in the Roman Catholic division of the German Institute for Educational Studies at the University of Münster in 1932, but in the following year the National Socialists came to power in Germany; and she found herself barred by law from teaching. “I had heard of severe measures against Jews before,” she wrote, “but now it dawned on me that God had laid his hand heavily on his people, and that the destiny of these people would also be mine.”
Finally given permission to enter Carmel, she told the Prioress of the Carmelite convent in Cologne, “Human activity cannot help us, but only the suffering of Christ. It is my desire to share in it". Then she went to Breslau to bid her mother farewell. They parted on the 12th of October, Edith’s forty-second birthday, after going to the synagogue together on the last day of the Feast of Tabernacles. Embittered by what she perceived to be her daughter’s betrayal of the ancient faith, Edith’s mother did not respond to the letters she received from Carmel every week.
After entering the Carmelite convent at Cologne on October 14th, Edith took the habit and assumed the name Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross on April 15, 1934. She professed her temporary vows a year later and renewed them on September 14, 1936, as her mother was dying in Breslau. She was 47 years old when she took her perpetual vows on April 21, 1938, and had these words written by St. John of the Cross inscribed on her devotional picture: “Henceforth my only vocation is to love.”
Six months later, on November 9, 1938, the terror of Kristallnacht was unleashed on the Jews of Germany. The Prioress of the Carmelite Convent in Cologne sought a way to send Edith to safety abroad. On the 31st of December she succeeded in having her smuggled across the border into the Netherlands. In the Carmelite Convent at Echt, on June 9, 1939, Edith wrote her will and included these words: “Even now I accept the death that God has prepared for me in complete submission and with joy as being his most holy will for me.” She offered up her life and death, “so that the Lord will be accepted by his people and that his kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world.” Working as hard as ever at Echt, Edith rushed to complete her study of the Carmelite father, St. John of the Cross, prior to the 400th anniversary of his birth in 1942. She entitled it The Science of the Cross.
On May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded the Netherlands; five days later, the Dutch army surrendered. On January 3, 1942, the Nazi regime outlawed emigration by Jews seeking to flee the occupied nations. Four months later, the wearing of the Jewish star was mandated for all Jews living in the Netherlands. Every Jew in the nation was required to register as a “candidate for deportation.” The leaders of various Christian denominations met with Nazi authorities to protest the treatment of Jews in the Netherlands, but their efforts met with no success. The Roman Catholic bishops of the country debated whether or not it would be advisable to denounce in public the German persecution of Jews. They were deeply divided on the question, some fearing the potential consequences of challenging the regime, but a group of bishops who believed they had a moral obligation to do so ultimately prevailed.
On Sunday, July 26, 1942, a pastoral letter denouncing the persecution of Jews in the Netherlands was read in Catholic churches across the country. The authorities met the following day to decide how they should punish the Catholic bishops. Their decision was to retaliate by ordering the immediate deportation of all Catholics of Jewish heritage living in the occupied Netherlands.
Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was arrested by the Gestapo on August 2, 1942, along with her sister, Rosa, who had converted to Catholicism and was living in the Carmelite convent. Together with other Catholics taken into custody the same day they were sent to transit camps where they remained for several days awaiting transportation to Auschwitz. On August 7th, 987 Catholics arrested in the Netherlands were transported to their final destination in southern Poland. Most of them, including Edith and Rosa, are thought to have died in the gas chamber two days later.
The holy martyr once known as Edith Stein went to the death that God had prepared for her, as she had written in her will, "in complete submission and with joy,” saying a prayer “that the Lord will be accepted by his people and that his kingdom may come in glory, for the salvation of Germany and the peace of the world."
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross was beatified by Pope St. John Paul II on May 1, 1987, in a ceremony in Cologne. Her feast day on the revised liturgical calendar is August 9th, the presumed date of her martyrdom.
Closing Commentary
Determined not to overlook the author of Confessions and The City of God in the week of his feast, we offer, in closing, an excerpt from the commentary of Dom Prosper Guéranger, OSB, on the feast of St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church, followed by a link to the full text.
August 28 – St. Augustine, Bishop and Doctor of the Church
Today Augustine, the greatest and the humblest of the Doctors, is hailed by heaven, where his conversion caused greater joy than that of any other sinner; and celebrated by the Church, who is enlightened by his writings as to the power, the value, and the gratuitousness of divine grace.
Since that wonderful, heavenly conversation at Ostia, God had completed his triumph in the son of Monica’s tears and of Ambrose’s holiness. Far away from the great cities where pleasure had seduced him, the former rhetorician now cared only to nourish his soul with the simplicity of the Scriptures, in silence and solitude. But grace, after breaking the double chain that bound his mind and his heart, was to have still greater dominion over him; the pontifical consecration was to consummate Augustine’s union with that divine Wisdom, whom alone he declared he loved “for her own sole sake, caring neither for rest nor life save on her account.” From his height, to which the divine mercy had raised him, let us hear him pouring out his heart:
“Too late have I loved thee, O beauty so ancient and yet so new! Too late have I loved thee! And behold thou wast within me, and I, having wandered out of myself, sought thee everywhere without … I questioned the earth, and she answered me: I am not the one thou seekest; and all the creatures of earth made the same reply. I questioned the sea and its abyss and all the living things therein, and they answered: We are not thy God; seek above us. I questioned the restless winds, and all the air with its inhabitants replied: Anaximenes is mistaken, I am not God. I questioned the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars, and they said: We are not the God whom thou seekest. And I said to all these things that stand without at the gates of my senses: Ye have all confessed concerning my God that ye are not he, tell me now something about him. And they all cried with one great voice: It is he that made us. I questioned them with my desires, and they answered by their beauty.—Let the air and the waters and the earth be silent! Let man keep silence in his own soul! Let him pass beyond his own thought; for beyond all language of man or of Angels, he, of whom creatures speak, makes himself heard; where signs and images and figurative visions cease, there Eternal Wisdom reveals herself … Thou didst call and cry so loud that my deaf ears could hear thee; thou didst shine so brightly that my blind eyes could see thee; thy fragrance exhilarated me and it is after thee that I aspire; having tasted thee I hunger and thirst; thou hadst touched me and thrilled me and I burn to be in thy peaceful rest. When I shall be united to thee with my whole being, then will my sorrows and labors cease.”
To the end of his life Augustine never ceased to fight for the truth against all the heresies then invented by the father of lies; in his ever repeated victories, we know not which to admire most: his knowledge of the Holy Scriptures, his powerful logic, or his eloquence. We see too that divine charity which, while inflexibly upholding every iota of God’s rights, is full of ineffable compassion for the unhappy beings who do not understand those rights.
“Let those be hard upon you who do not know what labor it is to reach the truth and turn away from error. Let those be hard upon you, who know not how rare a thing it is, and how much it costs, to overcome the false images of the senses and to dwell in peace of soul. Let those be hard upon you who know not with what difficulty man’s mental eye is healed so as to be able to gaze upon the Sun of justice; who know not through what sighs and groans one attains to some little knowledge of God. Let those finally be hard upon you who have never known seduction like that whereby you are destroyed … As for me, who have been tossed about by the vain imaginations of which my mind was in search, and who have shared your misery and so long deplored it, I could not by any means be harsh to you.”
These touching words were addressed to the disciples of Manes, who were hemmed in on all sides even by the laws of the pagan emperors. How fearful is the misery of our fallen race when the darkness of hell can overpower the loftiest intellects! Augustine, the formidable opponent of heresy, was for nine years previously the convinced disciple and ardent apostle of Manicheism. This heresy was a strange variety of Gnostic dualism, which, to explain the existence of evil, made a god of evil itself; and which owed its prolonged influence to the pleasure taken in it by Satan’s pride.
Augustine sustained also a prolonged though more local struggle against the Donatists, whose teaching was based on a principle as false as the fact from which it professed to originate. This fact, which on the petitions presented by the Donatists themselves was juridically proved to be false, was that Cæcilianus, primate of Africa in 311, had received episcopal consecration from a traditor, i.e. one who had delivered up the sacred Books in time of persecution. No one, argued the Donatists, could communicate with a sinner without himself ceasing to form part of the flock of Christ; therefore, as the bishops of the rest of the world had continued to communicate with Cæcilianus and his successors, the Donatists alone were now the Church. This groundless schism was established among most of the inhabitants of Roman Africa, with its four hundred and ten bishops, and its troops of Circumcellions ever ready to commit murders and violence upon the Catholics on the roads or in isolated houses. The greater part of our Saint’s time was occupied in trying to bring back these lost sheep.