Aquinas On The Greatest Act of Kindness

Let us never forget that:

(Image source: Wikimedia Commons)

“The greatest kindness one can render to any man consists in leading him to truth.” 

St. Thomas Aquinas

A Glimpse Into the Life of A Dominican Priest

May Father's soul and the souls of all the faithfully departed rest in peace. Amen

The Rose of Peru

Today we remember St. Rose of Lima, the first canonized Saint of the Western hemisphere. She was born in Peru in 1586 and died there at the age of thirty-one. Like many who have felt a call to the Dominican Order over the centuries, Rose initially faced opposition from her family. They refused to let her enter a convent. Rose’s response was to become a Lay Dominican and to live a life of solitude and penance within the confines of her family’s home. She had a great attraction to St. Catherine of Siena, a great love for the Blessed Sacrament, and limitless compassion for the elderly, homeless and the sick, whom she would eventually care for in one of the rooms in her parents’ residence. “When we serve the poor and the sick,” she tells us, “we serve Jesus. We must not fail to help our neighbors, because in them we serve Jesus.”

Rose enthusiastically embraced a life of penance and physical suffering since she also understood that “Apart from the cross, there is no other ladder by which we may get to heaven.”

While most of us today are not willing to voluntarily subject ourselves to the penitential sufferings which Rose sought and welcomed in her short life, all of us will suffer in some fashion during our earthly life. Rather than run away from such challenges, we too should embrace them and transform them into acts of reparation for our own failings and those of others.

I suspect our Peruvian Saint was given a glimpse of the extent to which twenty-first century Catholics would avoid the gift of sacrificial suffering when she wrote the following:

It's Sunday! Give Glory, Honor, Praise and Thanks To The Creator!

The Work of His Hands!

(Photo©Michael Seagriff)

A Glimpse of Our Sister - St. Catherine of Siena

A brief glimpse of St. Catherine of Siena recently featured on Catholic Online:

Real Men Make Sacrifices and Fall Down On Their Knees!

A Few Joyful Dominicans

Just some joyful Dominicans enjoying the Jubilee: