NEWS & UPCOMING EVENTS
Please keep the following in your prayers that we may do the will of God in all things:
New Prayer Book In the Works! We are working on revising the prayer book we used to have for sale and make it more user friendly and easy to read.
New Website Section by June 15th! We are working to release the “Spiritual Warfare” section by June 15th! After, we will be working on the “Eucharist and Eucharistic Miracles” section and updating the prayers section.
Monthly Prayer Intentions
· The Souls in Purgatory
· The Souls in Danger of Hell
· Those Suffering from Attachments
· Those Who do not Know Christ in Their Hearts
Contact Us
There are many ways you can reach out to us:
· General Contact: info@miraclerosarymission.org
· Newsletter Ideas & Article Subissions: editor@miraclerosarymission.org
· Prayer Requests: PrayerRequest@miraclerosarymission.org
· Text: 985-228-1126
· Contact Page: https://www.miraclerosarymission.org/contact
Spotlight
In this section, we will explore one main person, idea, topic, etc. we consider important enough to be brought first within each issue.
As the editor, I sometimes have the chance to have a little fun with the board for your benefit! In the future, this will be a place where I provide information on random, interesting facts about the 12 and the Mission. Email me at editor@miraclerosarymission.org and let me know what you would like to find out!
For instance: Fun Fact about the Bennett’s family. The three children have favorite saints, which isn’t too odd. However, it has somewhat become a competition on which favorite saint is best! Mel’s favorite saint is St. Theresa the Little Flower. Joe’s favorite is St. Anthony of Padua. John, who has gone before us, had St. Michael as his favorite.
Let’s hear from you! Let us know who your favorite saints are and why! We’d love to hear! We may even feature it in next month’s newsletter!
Who is Your Favorite?
St. Theresa the Little Flower
St. Anthony of Padua
St. Michael the Archangel
St. Jude
In the Footsteps of Jesus
The Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
Author: Fr. Dean Danos
The Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus (Liturgical Color is White) is the Friday following the 2nd Sunday of Pentecost.
On the Feast of the Sacred Heart, we celebrate our Savior’s limitless love. Christ, who suffered, died, and rose for our sins, proved his endless love for all of humanity. So, we honor his Sacred Heart, a heart full of love yet wounded by our sins.
Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque is credited with establishing the devotion to the Sacred Heart as revealed to her through visions of Christ. The details of these visions included the Feast of the Sacred Heart, the first Friday devotion, and further devotion to Eucharistic adoration.
Religious art depicts the Sacred Heart exposed, pierced, surrounded by flames and a crown of thorns, topped with a cross. The flame symbolizes Christ’s intense love for us. The wound symbolizes the wound from our sins. The cross and crown of thorns represent Christ’s suffering, death, and resurrection that brought us the gift of new life.
Though we set aside this special day to honor the Sacred Heart of Jesus, many Catholics observe this devotion throughout the entire year through attending Mass frequently, the first Friday devotion, and praying daily for the forginess of the sins of the world.
Did you know?
Some of the Saints who held special devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus include St. Bernard, St. Bonaventure, St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and St. Francis de Sales.
Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary
Author: Fr. Dean Danos
The Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary is the Saturday following the Feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with a liturgical color of white.
Mary, free from sin, is blessed with a heart full of pure love and virtue. Scripture gives us example after example of her exceptional love.
· When the Angel Gabriel tells her she was chosen to be the Mother of God, Mary obediently trusted in God’s plan.
· When she learns of Elizabeth’s pregnancy, she hurries to share her joy.
· When Elizabeth greets Mary with praise, Mary responds with the immense praise to God.
· When the shepherds tell Mary and Joseph what the angel told them, “Mary treasured all these words and pondered them in her heart.” (Luke 2:19)
· When the host of the wedding feast in Cana ran out of Wine, Mary asked Jesus to intervene.
· When Jesus agonized and died on the cross, Mary did not leave her son’s side.
· When the apostles remained in the upper room praying and waiting for the Holy Spirit to come, Mary prayed with them.
As the Mother of the Church, she loves us with a blessed, motherly love. For all of these reasons we celebrate her Immaculate Heart.
Prayer:
O God, our Father in Heaven, You blessed Mary with a pure heart filled with heavenly love. Please bless me with a heart like Mary’s heart, overflowing with love for you and compassion for others. Amen.
Home Enthronement to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the Pure Heart of St. Joseph
Author: Fr. Dean Danos
Please consider enthroning your home to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Immaculate Heart of Mary, and the Pure Heart of St. Joseph during this month dedicated to Christ’s Sacred Heart. Home enthronement comes with promises of abundance of blessings for the home and the family of the home. If you are interested in having the home enthronement, please contact your parish priest.
Moments of the Month
SAINT OF THE MONTH
Saint Anthony of Padua
Did you know? The tongue of St. Anthony of Padua is incorrupt. https://www.messengersaintanthony.com/content/oh-blessed-tongue
Story of St. Anthony: https://youtu.be/o3WO7MMel4g?si=pnuyCT53llXacW1G
Apparition of St. Anthony: https://youtu.be/uhQtv98pK78?si=WqJzw9XtgEUdqqk1
Celebration of the Month
Author: Fr. Dean Danos
Father’s day is the third Sunday of June. It is a special day for celebrating fathers: biological, adoptive, step-fathers, foster fathers, godfathers, and grandfathers. Let us also not forget our priests! We celebrate the love they share and the roles that they play in our lives. We shower them with attention, appreciation and love. Families gather for dinner, spend the day with Dad, and thank God for the precious gift they know and love as Dad.
Prayer:
Heavenly Father, we thank you for the gift of our father, dad, as he is lovingly called. We thank you for the gifts he shares with us – his faith, his time, his love. Please bless those whose fathers have died.
May we all grow closer to you, our heavenly Father. This we pray in the name of Your Son. Amen.
BOOK OF THE MONTH
“Enthronement of the Sacred Heart in the Home”
Certificate
Angelus Press: https://angeluspress.org/products/sacramental-record-enthronement-of-the-sacred-heart-8-x-10
“Imitation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus” by Rev. Fr. Peter J. Arnoudt S.J.
Amazon: https://a.co/d/fsPB7wb
APPARITION OF THE MONTH
Queen of Peace
· Apparition: https://www.knockshrine.ie/history
Virtue - Habit of the Month
“Basing our stand on pure reason and natural philosophy, we can assure you that if you train your mind for one month on the same subject, you will have acquired the habit of it.” – St. Peter Julian Eymard
This month, the challenge is to get closer to God through the virtue of hope.
Flashback
This section brings back articles from the original Thy Kingdom Come issues.
From the Writings of Saint Peter Julian Eymard
Taken From Volume I of the Eymard Library: “The Real Presence”
Article from Thy Kingdom Come June 1993.
A great number of devout persons consecrate the month of June in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. For this reason it is called the month of the Sacred Heart.
Both feasts, that of the Sacred Heart and that of the Blessed Sacrament, usually fall during this month; but the latter is the more solemn and of a superior rite. It is also much more ancient in the Church and should be dearer to us.
It is a very good thing to honor the Sacred Heart as the seat of the infinite love of Jesus Christ; but Eucharistic souls should honor it in the Most Blessed Sacrament. For where is the Heart of Jesus truly and substantially living if not in the Eucharist and in heaven.
Many persons honor the Sacred Heart on pictures and make these representations the object of their devotion. This kind of worship is good; but it is only relative. We ought to go beyond the image to reality. In the Blessed Sacrament this Heart is living, beating for us. Let then this living and pulsating Heart be the center of our life. Let us learn to honor the Sacred Heart in the Eucharist. Let us never separate the Sacred Heart from the Eucharist.
In the course of the year the entire thirty days of several months are consecrated to special devotions. For example, there is a month of Mary, which is nothing other than a feast of thirty days in honor of the Most Blessed Virgin. During that month we honor all her virtues and all the mysteries of her life; and we never fail to receive some new favor or other. Ther is also the month of Saint Joseph. A special month will soon be dedicated to the fostering of every important devotion. So much the better! It is an excellent thing of great consequence to Catholic piety.
For we have the time in a month to cover the entire object of the devotion, to consider it from every angle, and to acquire a correct and appropriate meditations and by centering our acts, virtues, and prayers on the same object for a whole month, we soon get a true and solid devotion to the mystery we are honoring. When everything is focused on one thought, such a thought is powerful and exhaustive.
Our devotion must be strong and solid and must tend to a single object. Why do not a greater number of devout persons attain noteworthy sanctity? Because they have no unity in their piety. They have not enough food to provide for the nourishment and growth of their spirit of piety. They do not know how to draw up for themselves a set of truths to live by.
You are aware what excellent results a mission produces in a parish which had hitherto remained deaf to the pressing exhortations and the heroic example of its pastor. The reason is that a mission is nothing other than an uninterrupted succession of exercises. It makes use of all the means capable of touching the heart, striking the imagination and forcing one to serious reflection. A mission is a torrent of grace formed by a gathering together of all the means of salvation. It is surprising that it triumphs over the most hardened hearts?
When all our thoughts and exercises of piety are brought together and concentrated on a single object, they lead us to the highest virtue and overthrow every obstacle.
Let us then have a devotion that is concentrated and continuous. It is said that to correct a bad habit or an ingrained vice, we must first be vigilant and fight against ourselves for some time before starting a movement of progress toward the opposite virtue. Once this initial start is given, we move ahead with giant strides.
The same holds good for the subject in which we are presently interested. It will take us some time before we succeed in loving with a strong and enlightened love the Most Blessed Sacrament, the mother and queen of the other devotions and the sunlight of piety. Devotion to Mary is good and excellent, but it must tend and be related to devotion to the Eucharist, just as Mary herself tends and is wholly related to Jesus Christ. Scripture fittingly compares her to the moon which receives all its light from the sun and reflects it back to the sun.
Well, since the month of Mary effects so many conversions, produces so much good in souls, and obtains so many graces of every kind, what will not the month of the Most Blessed Sacrament do, since you are asked to honor the virtues, the sacrifices and virtues to the Eucharist, you shall have won some great victory over yourself by the end of the month. Your love shall have grown; and your grace will be more powerful.
Our Lord has said that he who eats His Flesh and drinks His Blood shall have life in him. What will it be if you supplement your sacramental Communion by a continuous communion of thirty days to His love, His virtues, His holiness, and His life in the Most Blessed Sacrament?
That is what we mean by unity in piety. Without it you can have good thoughts, but you will not have a real principle of life. A passing rainstorm merely skims over the soil. But a fine, persistent rain soaks into the earth and makes it fertile. The thought of the Eucharist, fostered consistently for a whole month, will become a rich fountainhead that will make your virtues thrive, a divine force that will make you advance rapidly on the road to holiness. Basing our stand on pure reason and natural philosophy, we can assure you that if you train your mind for one month on the same subject, you will have acquired the habit of it.
Do not fear lest concentration on a single thought narrow your outlook. The Eucharist contains all the mysteries and all the virtues; it offers you the means of making them live anew and of considering them in action in their living exponent, present before you. This greatly facilitates meditation. For you see Jesus Christ in the Eucharist; you see His sacramental garment; you know through your very senses that He is there. The Host speaks to you; it rivets your attention; it presents our Lord to your senses.
May this month then be a month of happiness for you, during which you can live in close intimacy with Jesus! You know His conversation is never boresome. “His conversation hath no bitterness.” May He make you take a giant strike toward sanctity!
How should you spend this month in order to derive real profit from it? You must in the first
place have some book on the Blessed Sacrament and read a little of it every day. Do not be afraid of exhausting the subject matter; the depths of the love of Jesus are unfathomable. Jesus is the same in the Eucharist as in heaven; He is ever beautiful, ever new, ever infinite. You need not fear lest this infinite source should run dry; Jesus has so many graces, so much glory to give us!
Take a book, therefore, that treats of the Eucharist. I am fully aware that books do not make saints, and that on the contrary it is saints that make good books. For this reason, I recommend books only as a means to instruct you and awaken thought in you, which you are to develop and use as food for meditation.
Take for example the fourth book of the “Imitation of Christ”. It is so beautiful! It must certainly have been an angel that composed it!
Take the “Visits to the Blessed Sacrament”, by Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri. When this book was first published, it revolutionized piety. It has produced and continues to produce the most abundant fruits of salvation.
There are so many others to choose from. Pick one out that pleases you. Drop your other devotions during this month; you will lose nothing by plunging wholly into the sun.
Pay more frequent and longer visits to the Blessed Sacrament.
Receive Communion with greater fervor.
Practice some virtue that is related to the state of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament: His silence, or His meekness, especially His life of prayer in His Father, and His self-abasement.
Make some special sacrifice for the Blessed Sacrament. Have some fresh flower to offer Him every day. He deigns to let us draw near His adorable Person to present our offering to Him. Indeed, the great ones of the earth are not so easy to approach. Let us not reject this favor of His love and our right as children of the family.
I sum up what I said: To spend this month well, you must practice a Eucharistic virtue and do some reading on the Blessed Sacrament. That is more necessary than you think. With a book, you will have new ideas. Without a book, you will fall into spiritual dryness, saying the same things over and over again…ut jumentum…(“I am become as a beast before Thee.”) The book alone in nothing; but if you draw it close to your heart, you will give it life. Holy Writ itself must be read with the heart; if it is read without faith or love, it will be a source of ruin for us just as it hardens the heart of certain unbelievers who read it every day.
Perhaps you will say: “I do not like books because I do not find in them everything my soul is seeking for. They do not satisfy me.” It is fortunate they do not. It would be a great pity if books were to constitute our whole prayer and be exhaustive of all we have to say; we would become mere talking machines. Our Savior will not let books satisfy us altogether in prayer. We must earn His grace by our own labor, at the sweat of our brow. Never will the life of a saint be the greatest in the Church, entirely suit you. And why? Because you are not that saint; because you have a personal grace adapted to your nature; because you possess a personality of your own which you cannot completely ignore.
Read, therefore, but expect the full fruit of your reading only from your own meditation.
“I would indeed make my adoration, or a visit, but I cannot come to the church during the day.” Do not let that stop you. Our Lord sees as far as your home; He listens to you from His tabernacle. He can see us from heaven; why could He not see us from the Sacred Host? Adore Him from where you are; you will make a good adoration of love, and our Lord will understand your desire.
It would indeed be unfortunate if we could be in touch with Jesus in the Eucharistic only in His churches. The light of the sun envelops and illumines us even when we do not stand directly beneath its rays. In the same way, from His Host, our Lord will find the means to send some rays of His love into your home to bring you warmth and strength. There are currents in the supernatural order as the natural. Do you not at times feel unexpectedly recollected and transported with love? The reason is you have come upon a beneficial ray, a current of grace. Have confidence in these currents, in these relations that can be had with Jesus, even from a distance. It would be a sad thing were Jesus to receive adorations from us only when we come to visit Him in church. No, no! He sees everywhere, He blesses everywhere, He unites Himself everywhere to those who want to communicate with Him. Adore Him therefore from everywhere; turn in spirit toward His tabernacle.
Let your thoughts, therefore, be for Him during this month! Let your virtues and your love remains in this divine center, and this month will be one of blessings and graces.
Submitted Writings
This section is for you! This is for any articles, thoughts, ideas you send and are approved for publication! Publish by your name, anonymously, with a made-up name! Not sure? We can help with that too! Email editor@miraclerosarymission.org
Letters from Damian
The following section is reserved for one of the submitters who wish to remain anonymous and has given us the title “Letters from Damian” for their section, in honor of St. Peter Damian, Doctor of the Church.
In the series "The Chosen" there is a scene between Jesus and Little James. James asks Jesus why he has not been healed. While this scene has many thought provoking moments, there is a point Jesus makes that has shaken me. Jesus tells James God doesn't care about those things.
So, I began thinking about scripture, my faith, etc. I think Jesus was trying to tell people that what he wants from people are their hearts, not if your prayer is perfect or if a sacrifice is not flawed. He isn't looking for how much money you have or what you have.
He brought to himself religious leaders, rebels, violent zealots, tax collectors. He drew into himself those who were traditionally welcomed and unwelcomed.
He calls each of us to give him our hearts, unperfect, sinful, and he gives us so much greater than we can imagine.
He sees us. He loves us. He is always with us.
Rita’s Reflection
The following section is reserved for one of the submitters who wish to remain anonymous and has given us the title “Rita’s Reflection” for their section in honor of St. Rita.
With the Feast of the Sacred Heart approaching, I've been thinking about what living this devotion out actively.
Like I'm sure many would agree, I somewhat laughed because it's hard for me to dedicate my time and energy to any one thing for longer than a day at times. Lol.
But I guess that is the point of the devotion as well. The good Lord knows it is difficult to get my Rosary in some days, much less adding more prayers. But that's the thing. This devotion, as with prayer can come out from what we do in our lives.
I think if Jesus were here having this discussion here in person with me, he would tell me he isn't looking f
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