Newsletter 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) 19th October, 2025

Newsletter 29th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year C) 19th October 2025.pdf

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GOSPEL REFLECTION

In today’s Gospel Our Lord told His disciples a parable about the need to pray constantly.  Our Mother is the ideal example of a person who was always in prayer or always in perfect union with Our Lord. She always loved Our Lord with all her heart and, therefore was in constant union with Him.  It is understood that Our Mother even while living on the earth was also living in union with God as if she was in heaven. Our Mother describer her state to Luisa Piccaretta who died in 1947: “I was inseparable from my Creator. The Divine Will (Our Lord) being in me. I felt the rights of daughter, of being with Divine Persons, of participating in all the joys and happiness, riches and sanctity which they possess, for as much as I could partake of them filling me so much as not to be able to contain more. The Divine Will extended its Kingdom in all my acts so that my prayers, my words, my steps, the sleep that I took, the little tasks with which I helped my mother were all animated by the Divine Will”.   This is God’s plan for all of us to experience Him (as the angels and saints in heaven experience Him) and as our Blessed Mother experienced Him.  Some saints had the gift of constant prayer. Two examples are: Bl. Dina Belanger (d. 1929) was able to describe her state: “We are no longer two, Jesus and I. We are One, Jesus alone”. Venerable Conchita de Arminda a mother of 9 was told by Jesus in 1906: “I want to incarnate Myself mystically in your heart... the grace of living and growing in your soul never to leave it, to possess you and be possessed by you as one and the same substance... it is the Grace of Graces”.  St John Paul II is an inspiration of a person who had the gift of prayer:  After he lectured at Czestochowa Seminary, the rector recalled; ‘One thing struck me, Rev Prof Wojtyla spent the breaks between lectures in the Seminary Chapel and not in our Seminary refectory where the other professor priests would come for coffee or tea’.  The Soviets were busy studying him. Their intelligence service set up a special unit devoted to uninterrupted surveillance of him. By the time he was elected pope, the Soviets had compiled eighteen cartons of reports. The reports to Moscow also noted that he often spent between six to eight hours per day in prayer and meditation. Between 5:00 and 5:30am – and sometimes as early as 4:00 – Pope John Paul II would arise each morning, keeping virtually the same schedule, he had as the bishop of Krakow, to make time for prayer. Then go to the Chapel in order to prepare for 7:30 Mass. His sixty to ninety minutes of private prayer before Mass were the best part of his day. When visitors arrived to join him for Mass, they would always find him kneeling in prayer. Some said, “He looked like he was speaking with the Invisible.” One of the masters of ceremonies added, “It seemed as if the Pope were not present among us.”  More remarkable than his daily, weekly, and annual traditions of prayer was his habit of incessant prayer. Prayer became as natural and vital to him as his breath. While strolling to his next appointment, Archbishop Mieczyslaw Mokrzycki said, “He was immersed in prayer for those five minutes. He was then beyond our reach, turned off. There were dozens of moments like that during the day. Cardinal Dziwisz noticed that even times of work were “peppered with prayers, with short bursts of prayer.” One member of the Curia noted, “No sooner does he pause than he starts praying….  Cardinal Christoph Schonborn observed:  The Holy Father looked as though he never stopped praying. I never saw anyone so constantly immersed in union with Christ and God, as though it were a permanent state that led him to submit everything, he did unto the Lords hands. His attentiveness to others, his gestures, words and readings – everything he did was bathed in prayer, like the great mystics.  His favourite place to pray was before the Blessed Sacrament. He spent hours at a time – and sometimes the entire night.  The Holy Father often spent hours at a time writing before the Blessed Sacrament. In his chapel in Krakow, the kneeler was more of a prayer desk, with a desktop large enough so that he could write while kneeling or sitting before the Eucharist. Of all prayers, the Rosary was his favourite. He was never without his Rosary, and prayed it whenever he could, several times a day. His driver in Poland recalled that while they were driving, “He was praying all the time and no matter what he was doing, he was always holding a rosary in his hands. Upon arriving in Rome as a new Swiss Guard, Andreas Widmer admitted that he was curious about John Paul, and observed him closely one winter night, praying the Rosary.  As I watched him pray, softly speaking the words of the Rosary, he began radiating a sense of peacefulness and calm unlike anything I had ever encountered. The longer he prayed, the more absorbed in the prayer he became, until he seemed completely taken up in it, as if nothing and no one in the room could pull him back from the place where he’d gone. He was obviously still physically present, but his spirit seemed to be someplace else. I’d never seen anyone pray like that before. I didn’t know it was possible. What I saw was profoundly real and exceedingly desirable. Constant prayer is constant union with God.  This happens when God is our constant companion, our first love, where all other loves pale to insignificance, where God is our “all and everything.” Our Lord loves us infinitely at every single moment.  (Therefore, we are always on His mind and in His Heart). He is always giving us Himself, the Holy Spirit – all He has and all He is. Not to be aware of that at any single moment, is a great loss to us. Our challenge then is to know that God loves us infinitely at every single moment.  Our challenge is also to return that love at every single moment by desiring to give our ‘all and everything’ back to Him at every single moment. Every moment therefore we should desire to adore Him as the angels and saints in heaven do, and as Our Blessed Mother did. At every moment we are called to give glory to God, to give Grace to the world by set prayers such as the Rosary or continually reciting the Name ‘Jesus’ or just by talking to Jesus as one does to a best friend or by offering up our daily crosses and striving for perfection. Everything we do should be to give God glory and to give grace to the world. Every fibre of our being, all of our heart should be to give as much glory to God as we can and to give as much Grace as we can. It is very important to start the day with a morning offering. One example is the Scapula morning offering:  O my God, in union with the Immaculate Heart of Mary (here kiss your brown scapular*) I offer Thee the Precious Blood of Jesus from all the altars throughout the world, joining with it the offering of my every thought, word and action of this day.  O my Jesus I desire today to gain every indulgence and merit I can, and I offer them, together with myself to Mary Immaculate... that she may best apply them to the interest of Thy most Sacred Heart.  Amen.