Our Saint of the Day was a nurse whose beloved patients attended her canonization! 🙏
Hello John, I am grateful for every person who contributed to our Ash Wednesday matching gift appeal. Your gifts raised over $13,000! As Lent continues, we are called to deepen our faith and live out our baptismal call. It is a time to practice the three pillars of Lent: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. One way to do all three is to support Franciscan Media by starting or increasing a sustaining gift this Lent. You can help produce high-quality, relevant, engaging content that can transform the world. Join our faithful community today and start a sustaining gift this Lent. |
Christopher Meyer
Director of Development |
Saint of the Day for February 26: Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin (October 6, 1888 – October 20, 1922) Saint Maria Bertilla Boscardin’s Story If anyone knew rejection, ridicule and disappointment, it was today’s saint. But such trials only brought Maria Bertilla Boscardin closer to God and more determined to serve him. Born in Italy in 1888, the young girl lived in fear of her father, a violent man prone to jealousy and drunkenness. Her schooling was limited so that she could spend more time helping at home and working in the fields. She showed few talents and was often the butt of jokes. In 1904, she joined the Sisters of Saint Dorothy and was assigned to work in the kitchen, bakery, and laundry. After some time Maria received nurses’ training and began working in a hospital with children suffering from diphtheria. There the young nun seemed to find her true vocation: nursing ill children. Later, when the hospital was taken over by the military in World War I, Sister Maria Bertilla fearlessly cared for patients amidst the threat of constant air raids and bombings. She died in 1922 after suffering for many years from a painful tumor. Some of the patients she had nursed many years before were present at her canonization in 1961. Reflection This fairly recent saint knew the hardships of living in an abusive situation. Let us pray to her to help all those who are suffering from any form of spiritual, mental, or physical abuse. |
Be inspired and motivated this Lent with powerful reflections from Monsignor Frank Bognanno's Three Minutes with God: Reflections to Inspire, Encourage, and Motivate! |
Choose to Love If we choose to love, if we decide to accept the demands of being a loving person, we immediately take on the responsibility of being for others, in service and in times of opposition, in trials and persecution, also in peace and joy. We accept this dynamic not in the way we would like, but as determined by the needs of others around us. Frequently, this means putting more heart into what we are about in all the ordinary tasks of daily life; it means reaching deeper into the source of our energy when it seems like it is too hard to allow the ministry or a child or another to keep making demands. It takes a self-possessed, mature person to respond thus. But these same people know freedom; they are free from self and free for others, free to live the challenge of the gospel and open to the most that life can call forth. Such people know joy!
—from the book In the Footsteps of Francis and Clare by Roch Niemier, OFM |
In Simplicity, Spirituality, Service, you'll discover how three cherished saints who lived centuries ago offer practical solutions for us in the 21st century! |
Nothing Is Impossible Reflect It’s never too late to go back to school, to change jobs, to move, to buy a house. It’s never too late to start going back to Mass, to start praying again, to go on a retreat. Pray Lord, help me to see that nothing is impossible with you.
I give you permission:
Permission to work in my life; permission to change my heart;
permission to enlighten my mind.
Help me let go, help me to imagine and to dream,
help me to trust in you.
Amen. Act Write down one thing you’ve dreamed of or that you would like to change. Imagine how that could come to fruition. Ask for God’s helping hand and believe that he can make it happen.
Today's Pause+Pray was written by Natalie Ryan. Learn more here! |
This newsletter is not free to produce! Please consider making a donation to help us in our efforts to share God's love in the spirit of Saint Francis. |
|
