Newsletter Pentecost Sunday (Year A) 24th May 2026

Newsletter Pentecost Sunday (Year A) 24th May, 2026.pdf

Download PDF • 822KB

GOSPEL REFLECTION:

Ten days previously Our Lord Ascended into heaven. On the day of His Ascension, He commanded His disciples: “Go therefore to all the nations to proclaim the Good News.” Then the apostles locked themselves in a room, “for fear of the Jews.”  Ten days later, on a Sunday morning, tradition has it that the apostles, with Our Lady, had just celebrated Mass.  They were in adoration when suddenly, the Holy Spirit descended on each of them. They then acquired an invincible love for Jesus. They were no longer men of fear, but of unbounded courage.  St Peter, for example, had the courage to preach with such fire that 3000 souls agreed to be baptized – as a result of that one sermon alone (Acts 2:41).  St Peter must have preached with great fire.  The apostles then had the courage to do everything Our Lord commanded them.  They began to preach and “signs and wonders accompanied them” (Acts 2:43).  What’s more, “they sold all their possessions and distributed them to the poorest” (Acts 2:45).  St Thomas, according to tradition, preached the Gospel as far as India.  The apostles were so fearless that nothing seemed to stop them.  St Bartholomew was skinned to death.  St Peter was crucified upside down rather than denounce the faith.   (Not bad from the same man who, before Pentecost, had out of fear, denied Our Lord three times.)  Therefore, the first Pentecost was a powerful anointing on the apostles. In 1962 Pope St John XXIII prayed (with all the participants at the Second Vatican Council) on behalf of the Church, for a New Pentecost.  In 1967 a group of students in the USA at Ducene University were praying before the Blessed Sacrament.  One of the students, Paddi Mansfield, suddenly became, as she put it: “overwhelmed with God’s personal love.”  She and others began to speak in tongues.    Soon other students and teachers had the same experience.  What is now called the Catholic Charismatic Renewal began to spread at a rapid rate throughout the world.  Participants experienced a personal relationship with Our Lord, greater desire to read scripture, Eucharistic Adoration, holiness and vocations etc.  What we are waiting for today is a New Pentecost where every person, every man, woman and child will experience what the apostles experienced 2000 years ago (and what the students at Ducene University experienced in a more limited way 1967.)  One of the most outstanding prophecies regarding a new Pentecost or an outpouring of the Holy Spirit was one made by Our Lord to Luisa Piccarreta in Italy.  Luisa died in 1947.  In the last 64 years of her life her only food was Holy Communion.  Our Lord explained to Luisa that the time before Christ (the time of the Old Testament) was the time of creation, or the time of God the Father.  The two thousand years from the coming of Christ (the Annunciation) to about the year 2000 was the time of Redemption, or the time of God the Son and from the year 2000 is the time of Sanctification or the time of God the Holy Spirit. And what will the Holy Spirit do? The Holy Spirit will give graces never heard of and work miracles that will astonish everyone.  He will give even the most hardened souls the Grace to overcome their fallen nature and become copies of Himself and He will re-establish God’s Kingdom.  Through the Holy Spirit we become divine incarnations. As God became flesh or human (incarnate).  We who are flesh or human will share in God’s divinity, or rather, God, the Holy Spirit lives in us fully.  St Paul wrote: It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”  As Our Lord said to Venerable Conchita de Arminda, a mother of 9 in Mexico in 1906: “I want to incarnate Myself mystically in your heart (in other words, Our Lord wants to live in her) 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.”  As Bl Dina Belanger wrote in Canada in 1929: “We are no longer two, Jesus and I, we are one, Jesus alone.”  On September 12, 1928, Bl Dina wrote: “Jesus is allowing me to participate in the joy of His Heart in Heaven.  The joy that He derives from perfect union with His Father.” (In other words, Our Lord is giving her the joy that He has in Heaven by being One with His Father). Through the possession of the Holy Spirit, we fulfill the prayer of Our Lord to His Father (John Chapter 17): “That they may be One as We are One.” (In other words, we may be One in Christ as Christ is One with His Father.) “May they be completely One.”  (completely or perfectly One in Christ) “So that the love with which You loved Me may be in them so that I may be in them.”  The greatest example of a person open to the Holy Spirit is Our Blessed Mother.  Our Blessed Mother is “full of grace” or full of the Holy Spirit.  Our Blessed Mother described herself to a Luisa Piccarreta: “I have my heaven within Me, and I was inseparable from my Creator. I felt the rights of a daughter of participating in all the joys and happiness, riches and sanctity of God, for as much as I could partake of them, filling Me so much as not to be able to contain more. The Holy Spirit 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 Holy Spirit.” There is no limit to Our Lord’s love for each of us, therefore, He wants to give us all of Himself, all of the Holy Spirit, so that we become one in Him. Therefore, in order to receive all that God’s love wants for us, we should pray as much as we can, especially in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament.  Let us finish by praying for the Holy Spirit to come with power: “Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of Your faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Your Love.  Send forth your spirit and they shall be recreated, and you shall renew the face of the earth.”