Dear Friends in Christ,
Welcome to our weekly Sunday update. This Sunday (April 28, 2024) is the Fourth Sunday after Easter. Even in this season of joy, there is an element of sadness; as the Gospel reading recalls for us the farewell discourse delivered by Our Lord to his disciples at the Last Supper: But I told you not these things from the beginning, because I was with you. And now I go to him that sent me, and none of you asketh me: Whither goest thou? But because I have spoken these things to you, sorrow hath filled your heart (John 16:5-6). Saddened by the news that Jesus is to leave them, the disciples do not know where He is going and perhaps are afraid to ask.
Sorrow was shortly to be followed by the shock of actual loss when the Master they had loved and served unquestioningly is arrested, tried, convicted, tortured and finally put to death. The abyss between the living and the dead of which He had once spoken in a parable now lies between Jesus Himself and those who had believed in Him.
And then, beyond belief, He returns, having risen from the dead. But even the joy His followers experience upon learning of His return is tempered by a sobering awareness of the change in their relations with the one who was dead but lives again. He has not come back to pick up where things left off. When Mary Magdalen sees him at the site of the empty tomb, she might have embraced Him had He not told her: Do not touch me: for I am not yet ascended to my Father (John 20:17).
If He later allowed Thomas to touch Him, it was only to rebuke him for his lack of faith. After making physical contact with the wounds of the Risen Christ, Thomas explicitly acknowledged the momentous change in relations brought about by the Resurrection when he said, “My Lord and My God” (John 21:28).
The final separation was yet to come with the Ascension of the Risen Lord into Heaven. Afterward the disciples would withdraw into the upper room to pray and await the promised Paraclete who was to comfort them even as they lingered in sorrow at having been left behind. And they would remember what Jesus had said in bidding them farewell: But when he, the Spirit of truth is come, he will teach you all truth. . . . And the things that are to come, he shall shew you (John 16:13).
Calendar of Saints and Special Observances
Celebrations are those listed in the Roman Missal of 1962 unless otherwise noted.
DAY, DATE – FEAST (CLASS)
Sunday, April 28 – Fourth Sunday after Easter (II)
Monday, April 29 – Saint Peter of Verona, OP, Martyr (III)
Tuesday, April 30 – Saint Catherine of Siena, OP, Virgin and Doctor (III)
Wednesday, May 1 – Saint Joseph the Worker, Spouse of the Blessed Virgin
Mary (I)
Thursday, May 2 – Saint Athanasius, Bishop, Confessor and Doctor (III)
Friday, May 3 – Ss. Alexander, Pope, and his Companions, Eventius and
Theodulus, Martyrs, and St. Juvenalis, Bishop and Confessor (IV)
Saturday, May 4 – Saint Monica, Widow (III)
Note: Saint Paul of the Cross, Confessor and Founder of the Passionists, a third-class feast celebrated on April 28 in most years, is displaced by the Fourth Sunday after Easter this year.
Fourth Sunday after Easter
The links provided below can be used to download printable copies of the Proper Prayers of the Mass in the Extraordinary Form for the Fourth Sunday after Easter with either English or Spanish translation. The English version includes a commentary on the Gospel reading by Dom Prosper Guéranger, OSB, excerpted from The Liturgical Year. In addition, we offer a link to an essay on “The School of Love in the Collect for the Fourth Sunday after Easter” by Dr. Michael P. Foley for New Liturgical Movement.
Latin Mass Schedule: Fourth Sunday after Easter (April 28th)
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: As a reminder, travelers may wish to contact parish offices to confirm Mass times, since local schedules are sometimes subject to change without public notice.
Upcoming Special Latin Masses
Feast of Saint Joseph the Worker - Wednesday, May 1
Annual St. Dominic Savio Mass for Altar Servers (all are invited)
Ascension of Our Lord – Thursday, May 9
Announcements
Blessing of Palms on the Feast of Saint Peter of Verona, Monday, April 29 – This Monday, April 29th, is the Feast of Saint Peter of Verona (also known as Saint Peter Martyr), a 13th century Dominican inquisitor who was martyred while combating the heresies of his time. His spilled blood helped to convert his assassin who was later beatified. St. Peter’s feast day is only celebrated universally according to the 1962 liturgical calendar. An ancient custom calls for the blessing of palms on his feast day. The traditional belief is that the palms, when buried on one’s property, can help protect against natural disasters.
Father Reid has graciously agreed to bless palms on April 29th, and the Carolina Traditional Liturgy Society hopes to distribute them at our Latin Mass tables at Saint Ann and Saint Thomas Aquinas parishes next weekend for those who do not already have them. To learn more about the great Dominican saint celebrated in this custom please consult the following articles:
Special Camp for Young Men – Jason Craig and Craig Taffaro, Latin Mass attendees at Saint John the Baptist in Tryon, will be conducting a special camp for young men (18 or older) called Camp Capable from May 12 to May 17. The tagline for the camp is “Be Competent. Be Contemplative.” Inspired by Saint Benedict’s “Ora et labora” and a desire to offer an alternative to the prevailing artificiality of the electronic media-and-technology-driven culture, they have organized the weeklong camp for young men to help them enter into the formative discipline of real work with real men, through which they can develop real competency. Additionally, they will be praying the traditional Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary in the morning and at night, and plans call for attendance at a Traditional Latin Mass at Saint John the Baptist at least one day during the week. To learn more and to register, please visit Camp Capable.
Holy Face Devotions
Prayers of Reparation to the Holy Face of Jesus are offered each week at the following churches on the indicated days:
Latin Mass and Liturgical News
Saints and Special Celebrations
Saint Catherine of Siena was one of 13 children born into the family of Jacopo Benincasa and his wife, Lapa di Puccio di Piagente, who are known to have survived to adulthood. Twelve did not. When Catherine and her twin sister, Giovanna, were born on the Feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1347, their 40-year-old mother had already given birth to twenty-two children. The fact that Lapa had been almost continuously pregnant for more than two decades meant that she had never been able to nurse her own offspring. Catherine was the first. As Giovanna died in infancy and a second Giovanna, born a few years later, did not survive for long, Catherine remained the youngest member of the Benincasa family.
When she was about six years old Catherine had an experience that was to determine the course of her life. She had been to visit her married sister, Bonaventura, and was walking home with her brother, Stefano, and another boy in the twilight at the end of the day. Ahead of them, on the other side of a valley, stood the great stone abbey church of San Domenico. Looking up, Catherine saw Jesus, the Savior of the world, seated on a throne just above the church, dressed like a bishop and wearing the triple crown of the pope. Saints Peter, Paul and John stood beside him. Catherine stopped and stood, enraptured by the vision, as the Lord Jesus smiled lovingly at her and lifted his hand to bless her with the sign of the cross. She might never have moved; but the boys, who had walked on, looked back and saw her rooted to the spot at the top of the street where she had stopped. Stefano called to her but got no response, so he trudged back up the street and took her by the arm to move her along. At his touch, Catherine emerged from her trance and, bursting into tears, wept for the loss of her beatific vision.
This was the first of her many mystical experiences and the beginning of an intimate relationship with Jesus that would continue throughout Catherine’s relatively brief life. As she was growing to womanhood, she came under increasing pressure to find her vocation in marriage; but, having made a secret vow to Christ that she would give herself entirely to Him, she met the efforts of her parents to steer her toward married life with unrelenting resistance. She had been remarkably devout since her mystical vision at the age of six, but now she increased the time she spent in prayer as well as the frequency of her days of fasting. When Bonaventura died, leaving her husband, Niccolo, with the prospect of having to raise numerous children alone, Jacopo and Lapa thought it might only be right for their daughter to take her sister’s place; but she refused. The crisis came when she resisted their campaign on behalf of another highly suitable suitor they wished to bring into the family. A Dominican monk, Fra Tommaso della Fonte, a friend of the family, was called upon to counsel Catherine regarding her Christian duty to respect the wishes of her parents. Instead, when Catherine revealed to him the secret vow she had made to Christ, he suggested she divest herself of her beautiful hair in order to make herself less attractive to suitors. She did so immediately.
When her mother saw what Catherine had done, she was horrified; her father and brothers were enraged and promised to make her life miserable unless she changed her mind about marriage. Indeed, her family treated her very severely while waiting for the regrowth of her hair to make her marriageable again. They even did all they could to curtail her prayer and other devotional activities in an attempt to reorient her thinking about married life. But the One who had lovingly gazed down on her from above the church of San Domenico had other plans for Catherine.
One night Catherine had a dream in which a throng of saints and martyrs appeared to her, among them St. Dominic with a white lily in his hand, bearing a habit which she recognized as that of the Dominican third-order Sisters of Penitence. “Beloved daughter, take courage,” he told her. “Be afraid of nothing, for you shall surely be clothed in this robe which you desire.” She wept for joy and awakening, her cheeks bathed by tears, resolved to reveal at last the secret of the vow she had made that she would belong to Christ and to Him alone. The whole Benincasa household was grief-stricken at the realization that all hope was lost of seeing her settled in marriage with a good man who would be a valuable addition to their family. But Jacopo, the paterfamilias, knew there was nothing to be gained from opposing the will of God and promised his daughter that never again would the family interfere with her spiritual pursuits.
Three days after her sixteenth birthday Catherine was accepted into the Sisters of Penitence. As a tertiary she was able to continue living at home rather than having to enter a convent. This suited a young woman who had always looked upon her parents as representing Jesus and Mary in her life. She spent the next five years ministering to the poor and the sick in Siena. The lengths to which she went in her ministrations on behalf of those stricken with cancer and other dreaded diseases, in order to relieve their suffering, were especially remarkable. Her humility, cheerfulness and self-denial endeared her to all she met during this period of quiet work in service to the Lord.
After her 21st birthday, Catherine began to expand the ambit of her beneficent influence in the world, putting her mind as well as her hands to work for the Lord. The other tertiary sisters may have taught her to read and write; but the evidence indicates that, of the hundreds of letters she addressed to recipients in the 12 years that remained to her, most were dictated to amanuenses. In these letters she counseled princes and popes, making the case for peace between warring city-states and advancing the cause of reform in the Church. She also traveled widely in order to make personal appeals to those whom she hoped to enlist in her causes. She was instrumental in convincing Pope Gregory XI to leave Avignon and return to Rome, the rightful home of that city’s bishop, the head of the worldwide Church.
Her voluminous correspondence included 382 letters that survived to be considered collectively a monumental work in the literature of Tuscany. The collection of treatises entitled Libro della Divina Dottrina (which bears the English title, Dialogue of Divine Providence) is her spiritual masterpiece. She also composed some 26 prayers in the last year-and-a-half of her life. Exhausted by her labors and weakened by frequent fasting, St. Catherine of Siena died in Rome on April 29th in the year 1380. She was 33 years old. Pope Urban VI celebrated her requiem Mass in the Basilica of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome where her remains were afterward interred.
Catherine was beatified on December 29th in the year 1460 and canonized six months later, on June 29, 1461, by Pope Pius II. In 1970 Pope Paul VI declared her to be a Doctor of the Church. Her feast day, celebrated in accordance with the traditional Roman Calendar, is April 30th.
Closing Commentary
We close with a commentary excerpted from The Liturgical Year of Dom Prosper Guéranger, OSB, and provide a link to the full text of the entry for the Fourth Sunday after Easter below.
Fourth Sunday After Easter
Our Jesus has organized his Church, and confided to his Apostles the sacred deposit of the truths which are to form the object of our faith. We must now follow him in another work, of equal importance to the world, and to which he gives his divine attention during these forty days: it is the institution of the Sacraments. It is not enough that we believe; we must, moreover, be made just, that is, we must bear upon us the likeness of God’s holiness; we must receive, we must have incorporated within us, that great fruit of the Redemption, which is called Grace; that thus being made living members of our divine Head, we may be made joint-heirs with him of the Kingdom of heaven. Now, it is by means of the Sacraments, that Jesus is to produce in us this wondrous work of our justification; he applies to us the merits of his Incarnation and Sacrifice but he applies them by certain means, which he himself, in his power and wisdom, has instituted.
Being the sovereign Master of his own gifts, he can select what means he pleases whereby to convey Grace to us; all we have to do is to conform to his wishes. Thus, each of the Sacraments is a law; so that it is in vain that we hope for a Sacrament to produce its effects, unless we fulfill the conditions specified by our Redeemer. And here, at once, we cannot but admire that infinite goodness, which has so mercifully blended two such widely distinct operations in one and the same act—namely, on the one side, the humble submission of man and, on the other, the munificent generosity of God.
We were showing, a few days back, how the Church, though a spiritual society, is also visible and exterior, because man, for whose sake the Church was formed, is a being composed of body and soul. When instituting the Sacraments, our Lord assigned to each an essential rite; and this rite is outward and sensible. He made the Flesh, which he had united to his Divine Person, become the instrument of our salvation by his Passion and Death on the Cross; he redeemed us by shedding his Blood for us:—so is it in the Sacraments; he follows the same mysterious plan, taking physical things as his auxiliaries in effecting the work of our justification. He raises them to a supernatural state, and makes them the faithful and all-powerful conductors of his grace, even to the most intimate depths of our soul. It is the continuation of the mystery of the Incarnation, the object of which is to raise us, by visible things, to the knowledge of things invisible. Thus is broken the pride of Satan; he despised man because he is not purely a spirit, but is spirit and matter unitedly; and he refused to pay adoration to the Word made Flesh.
Moreover, the Sacraments, being visible signs, are an additional bond of union between the members of the Church: we say additional,
because these members have the two other strong links of
union—submission to Peter and to the Pastors sent by him, and profession
of the same faith. The Holy Ghost tells us, in the Sacred Volume, that a threefold cord is not easily broken.
Now we have such a one; and it keeps us in the glorious unity of the
Church—Hierarchy, Dogma, and Sacraments, all contribute to make us One
Body. Everywhere, from north to south, and from east to west, the
Sacraments testify to the fraternity that exists among us; by them, we
know each other, no matter in what part of the globe we may be, and by
the same we are known by heretics and infidels. These divine Sacraments
are the same in every country, how much soever the liturgical formulæ of
their administration may differ; they are the same in the graces they
produce, they are the same in the signs whereby grace is produced, in a
word, they are the same in all the essentials. [Fourth Sunday after Easter]
We wish our readers a blessed Eastertide. Christus Resurréxit! Resurréxit Vere!