A Church Built on Bones
Volume XXIV, Number 6 – April 3, 2019
Dear CatholiCity Citizen,
Hey, good lookin'.
No, no, don't sing "whatcha got cookin?"! (Too late?)
Hearing Voices?!?'best part of writing, for me at least, is deceptively simple: when you hear me. What a strange and wonderful thing it is when we hear each other's voices in our minds. I am imagining you (in your home, at your desk at work, at a lunch table) sharing my thoughts.
It's quite humbling. And thrilling (for me, a nobody from New Jersey). So thank you for welcoming me back onto whatever screen into which you are gently gazing.
(This just struck me: If thoughts were food, I hope I'm like the Big Three: pizza, burgers, or wings. My ideas are definitely not fancy French cuisine.
Mystery GuestToday I shall be brief. Or boxer. (Or the third option!)
I have a very special presentation from a Surprise Guest about relics and why they are so important to our beloved Catholic faith.
Given these trying times, and because saints and thinkers are better than I ever will be at writing, I have more than the usual CatholiCity Quotes on the S-themes: sickness, sadness, suffering, and the soul. You, my friend, shall have Saint Francis de Sales and Joe Wood and other geniuses sharing their voices in your mind on this bright day.
I found an ancient prayer for healing (try sixteen-hundred-years-old-ancient!) we can all pray together, and that's pretty much it. So hey ho...
...let's go!
Relics and Father and Me and YouMost of you are familiar with longtime friend and spiritual advisor to the Mary Foundation (CatholiCity's parent organization), Father John O'Brien SJ.
An old balding dude in his 40s now, Father John and I became friends when he started editing my novels just after college (his dad, Micheal O'Brien, is the famous Catholic novelist and painter). He is a vocations director in Canada. He's also been our spiritual director for two pilgrimages to bring your intentions to the Holy Land, Rome, and France in 2018 and 2019.
John and I are always conspiring (literally, in Latin, "with-spirit", that is, sharing a spirit; we hope the Holy Spirit!).
We both have had "a thing" for relics for decades. Because so many of you are now distributing the Coronavirus Prayer Card with a Miraculous Medal touched to my True Cross relic and first class relics (the actual bones) of Saints Joseph, Jude, Therese, and Anthony, among others, this week Father John created a brief Youtube presentation on relics just for you.
Share his spirit, my friends.
Now, look, I know that when I link to a podcast or video, the great majority of you skip it. Please cut that out right now, at least for today.
Let Father John blow your mind about the importance of relics. Don't you want to see what he looks and sounds like? I one-hundred-percent assure you will learn very, very important new truths about how the Catholic Church, from the start, has been built on bones.
So, listen now. Hearing his voice is better than hearing mine:
Did you know that every altar in every Catholic Church on the planet has a bone of a saint imbedded into it? Did you know that Saint Peters Basilica in Rome is literally built upon the bones of Saint Peter, where I took your intentions on two occasions?
(Here is a very cool part: It was a tradition that Saint Peters Basilica was built over his bones, until his bones were dug up in 1953. Tradition became archeological and historical fact.)
Or that the beautiful "cupola" altar in Saint Peters and those famous four twisting columns are filled with...the bones of saints and martyrs.
We all know the earliest persecuted Christians gathered below for Mass in the catacombs of ancient Rome to escape detection. You will recall that catacombs are burial grounds with tombs. The first altars were stone coffins of martyrs. Those first Masses were offered over bones!
Did you know that items touched to first class relics (such as the Miraculous Medal that comes with our Coronavirus Prayer Cards--and to the boxes holding all the CDs, and books, and booklets we have shipped out to you by the tens of millions) are considered "third class" relics.
They forever possess a holy character. They are forever "connected" to the particular saint.
The reality is not that a piece of stamped metal has magical power.
The reality is that anyone to whom you give a third class relic such as our special new Miraculous Medal, and then wears or carries such a medal will have Saint Joseph (Terror of Demons), Saint Jude (Hope of the Helpless), Saint Anthony (Miracle Worker of Padua), Saint Therese of Lisieux (The Little Flower), Saint Maximilian (Apostle of Consecration to Immaculate Mary), Saint Francis Xavier (Conquerer of Souls for Christ as the Greatest Evangelist in History), Our Lady of Lourdes (Lourdes water) and Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal interceding for them to bring Jesus into their lives via the True Cross Upon from which Sin was Vanquished on Easter Morn!
Bones are real. Share my thought, my brothers and sisters: bones are real. Saints are alive in heaven. Saint Anthony procures more miracles in heaven than he ever did on earth.
Relics. You can touch holiness.
So help yourself to these Miraculous Medals attached to Coronavirus Prayer Cards. They are tools for evangelization like everything else we offer.
Order four. Order a score. Or order more. (Or ignore--we won't be sore!)
Catholic Quotations
"On no account give way to sadness, the enemy of devotion."
-Saint Francis de Sales
"He who in pleasing God displeases man, has no grounds for sadness. But he who in pleasing men displeases God or who thinks he displeases both God and man, if sadness does not come upon him, is far from the virtue of wisdom."
-Pope Saint Gregory I
"Make sickness itself a prayer."
-Saint Francis de Sales
"Long illnesses are good schools of mercy for those who tend the sick, and of loving patience for those who suffer."
-J.P. Camus
"The human soul is the actuality of an organism, which is its instrument--not, however, for every activity, for some activities of the soul surpass the range of the body."
-Saint Thomas Aquinas
"Pulled and driven by fallen nature out of the heaven of the womb, from the doctor's first smack and the instantaneous struggle to take that first breathe--and what is worse than not being able to breathe?--we all know suffering.
Not everyone knows how to suffer with Christ, which is a terrible loss, not only on a theological level because all suffering joined to Jesus brings grace into the Kingdom of God, yet also because no suffering is worse than suffering alone.
Thus, if you have no one here on earth to suffer with you or care for you, then you could say that suffering alone here while you suffer with Jesus only, is a perfect kind of suffering."
-Joseph Wood
"A faint faith is better than a strong heresy."
-Saint Thomas More
"Each soul is as great as the world, and in each soul there is room for all the tragedies of the world to be reenacted, as every puddle is great enough to hold the sun."
-Robert Hugh Benson
"He who knows how to suffer will enjoy much peace. Such a person is a conqueror of himself and lord of the world, a friend of Christ, and an heir of heaven."
-Thomas a Kempis
Let us all who are reading this Message join each other, tens of thousands of us, while keeping ever on our hearts all of our brothers and sisters around the world suffering from the Coronavirus and other diseases, those risking their lives to care for them, and those suffering materially and mentally from the dispossessions caused by the economic distress.
Please take a moment, lifting your minds and even your hand. (Yes, if you wish, hold one of your hands up in the air; you will understand as we pray this ancient fourth century prayer from the Sacramentary of the Serapion). We begin in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit...
and grant that all the sick may be healed.
Grant them to be counted worthy of health!
Free them from the sicknesses that lie upon them!
Let them be healed in the name of your Only-Begotten.
May His holy name, Jesus,
be to them a medicine for health and soundness.
Amen.
Hey, that's me and my enormous right meathook, and Father John O'Brien at the Saint Joseph Oratory in Montreal where we brought your intentions in 2017.
With Immaculate Mary,
Bud Macfarlane
Founder
