Fri, Oct 19, 2012 - Litany Lane Blog: Hypocrisy, Psalms 33:1-13, Luke 12:1-7, St Isaac Jogues, National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville New York

Friday, October 19, 2012 - Litany Lane Blog:
Hypocrisy, Psalms 33:1-13,  Luke 12:1-7, St Isaac Jogues, National Shrine of the North American Martyrs in Auriesville New York

Good Day Bloggers! 
Wishing everyone a Blessed Week!
Year of Faith - October 11, 2012 - November 24, 2013

P.U.S.H. (Pray Until Serenity Happens). It has a remarkable way of producing solace, peace, patience and tranquility and of course resolution...God's always available 24/7.

We are all human. We all experience birth, life and death. We all have flaws but we also all have the gift knowledge and free will as well, make the most of it. Life on earth is a stepping to our eternal home in Heaven. Its your choice whether to rise towards eternal light or lost to eternal darkness. Material items, though needed for sustenance and survival on earth are of earthly value only. The only thing that passes from this earth to Purgatory and/or Heaven is our Soul, our Spirit...it's God's perpetual gift to us...Embrace it, treasure it, nurture it, protect it...

"Raise not a hand to another unless it is to offer in peace and goodwill." ~ Zarya Parx 2012

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Today's Word:  hypocrisy  hy·poc·ri·sy  [hi-pok-ruh-see]

Origin: 1175–1225; Middle English ipocrisie  < Old French  < Late Latin hypocrisis  < Greek hypókrisis  play acting, equivalent to hypokrī́ ( nesthai ) to play a part, explain ( hypo- hypo-  + krī́nein  to distinguish, separate) + -sis -sis; h-  (reintroduced in 16th century) < Latin  and Greek

noun, plural hy·poc·ri·sies.

1. a pretense of having a virtuous character, moral or religious beliefs or principles, etc., that one does not really possess.

2. a pretense of having some desirable or publicly approved attitude.

3. an act or instance of hypocrisy.

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Today's Old Testament Reading - Psalms 33:1-2, 4-5, 12-13  

 
¹ Shout for joy, you upright; praise comes well from the honest.
² Give thanks to Yahweh on the lyre, play for him on the ten-stringed lyre.
⁴ The word of Yahweh is straightforward, all he does springs from his constancy.
⁵ He loves uprightness and justice; the faithful love of Yahweh fills the earth.
¹² How blessed the nation whose God is Yahweh, the people he has chosen as his heritage.
¹³ From heaven Yahweh looks down, he sees all the children of Adam,

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Today's Gospel Reading - Luke 12:1-7

Meanwhile the people had gathered in their thousands so that they were treading on one another. And Jesus began to speak, first of all to his disciples. 'Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees -- their hypocrisy. Everything now covered up will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear. For this reason, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in hidden places will be proclaimed from the housetops. 'To you my friends I say: Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. I will tell you whom to fear: fear him who, after he has killed, has the power to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, he is the one to fear. Can you not buy five sparrows for two pennies? And yet not one is forgotten in God's sight. Why, every hair on your head has been counted. There is no need to be afraid: you are worth more than many sparrows.

Reflection

• Today’s Gospel presents a last criticism of Jesus against the religious authority of his time.

• Luke 12, 1ª: Thousands were looking for Jesus. “At that time people had gathered in their thousands so that they were treading on one another”. This phrase allows to have a glimpse of the enormous popularity of Jesus and the desire of the people to encounter him (cf. Mk 6, 31; Mt 13, 2). It makes us see also the abandonment in which people found themselves. “They are like sheep without a shepherd,” said Jesus on another occasion when he saw the crowds get close to him to listen to his words (Mk 6, 34).

• Luke 12, 1b: Attention with hypocrisy. “Jesus began to speak first of all to his disciples: “Be on your guard against the yeast of the Pharisees – their hypocrisy”. Mark had already spoken of the yeast of the Pharisees and of the Herodians and had suggested that it was a question of the mentality or of the dominant ideology of that time which expected a glorious and powerful Messiah (Mk 8, 15; 8, 31-33). In this text Luke identifies the yeast of the Pharisees with hypocrisy. Hypocrisy is an attitude which turns up side down or overturns the values. It hides the truth. It shows a beautiful cloak or cape which hides and falsifies what is the rotten that is inside. In this case, hypocrisy was like the apparent cover of the maximum fidelity to the word of God which hid the contradiction of their life. Jesus wants the contrary. He wants coherence and not that which remains hidden.

• Luke 12, 2-3: That which is hidden will be revealed. “Everything now covered up will be uncovered, and everything now hidden will be made clear. For this reason, whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the daylight, and what you have whispered in hidden places will be proclaims from the housetops”. It is the second time that Luke speaks about this theme (cf. Lc 8, 17). Instead of the hypocrisy of the Pharisees which hides the truth, the disciples should be sincere. They should not be afraid of truth. Jesus invites them to share with the others the teachings which they learn from him. The disciples cannot keep these for themselves, but they should diffuse them. One day, the masks will fall completely and everything will be clearly revealed, and will be proclaimed on the housetops (Mt 10, 26-27).

• Luke 12, 4-5: Do not be afraid. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more. I will tell you whom to fear: fear him who after he has killed has the power to cast into hell. Yes, I tell you, he is the one to fear”. Here Jesus addresses himself to his friends the disciples. They should not be afraid of those who kill the body, who torture, who trample on and make one suffer. Those who torture can kill the body, but they cannot kill liberty and the spirit. Yes, they should be afraid that fear of suffering may lead them to hide or to deny the truth and therefore, will lead him to offend God; because he who separates himself from God will be lost forever.

• Luke 12, 6-7: You are worth more than many sparrows. “Can you not buy five sparrows for two pennies? And yet not one is forgotten in God’s sight. For every hair on hour head has been counted. Do not fear you are worth more than many sparrows”. The disciples should not be afraid of anything, because they are in God’s hands. Jesus asks them to look at the sparrows. Two sparrows are sold for a few pennies and not one of them falls to the ground without the will of the Father. Even the hair on your head is counted. Luke says that not one hair falls from your head without the permission of the Father (Lk 21, 18). And so many hairs fall from our head! This is why, “Do not fear, you are worth more than many sparrows”. This is the lesson that Jesus draws from the contemplation of nature (cf Mt 10, 29-31).

• The contemplation of nature. In the Sermon on the Mountain, the most important message Jesus takes it from the contemplation on nature. He says: “Have you heard that it was said, love your neighbour and hate your enemy; but I say: love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be children of your Father in heaven, for he causes his sun to rise on the bas as well as the good, and sends down rain to fall on the upright and the wicked alike. For if you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even the tax collectors do as much? And if you save your greetings for your brothers, are you doing anything exceptional? Do not even the gentiles do as much? You must therefore set no bounds to your love, just as the Heavenly Father sets non to his” (Mt 5, 43-45.48). The observation of the rhythm of the sun and the rain lead Jesus to make that revolutionary affirmation: “Love your enemies”. The same thing is valid concerning the invitation to look at the flowers of the fields and the birds of the sky (Mt 6, 25-30). This contemplative and surprising attitude before nature led Jesus to criticize truths apparently eternal. Six times, one after another, he had the courage to correct publicly the Law of God: “It has been said, but I tell you...” The discovery made in the renewed contemplation of nature becomes for him a very important light to reread history with a different look, and discover lights which before were not perceived. Today there is new vision of the universe which is circulating. The discoveries of science concerning the immensity of the macro-cosmos and of the micro-cosmos are becoming sources of a new contemplation of the universe. Many apparently eternal truths are now beginning to be criticized.

Personal questions

• What is hidden will be revealed. Is there in me something which I fear that it be revealed?
• The contemplation of the sparrows and of the things of nature lead Jesus to have a new and surprising attitude which reveals the gratuitous goodness of God. Do I usually contemplate nature?

Reference: Courtesy of Order of Carmelites, www.ocarm.org.

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Saint of the Day:  Sts. Isaac Jogues and Rene Goupil

Feast Day:  October 19
Patron Saint:  North American Martyrs

Isaac Jogues (January 10, 1607 – October 18, 1646) was a Jesuit priest, missionary, and martyr who traveled and worked among the native populations in North America The Huron Indians. He gave the original European name to Lake George, calling it Lac du Saint Sacrement, Lake of the Blessed Sacrament.

In 1646, Jogues was martyred by the Mohawks near present day Auriesville, New York. Jogues, Jean de Brébeuf and six other martyred missionaries, all Jesuits or laymen associated with them, were canonized in 1930, and are known as "The North American Martyrs" or "St. Isaac Jogues and Companions". Their feast day is October 19, except in Canada, where the feast is celebrated on September 26. After his death his body was thrown in the St. Lawrence river.
 

St. Isaac Jogues was born in Orléans, France, and entered the Society of Jesus in 1624. In 1636, he was sent to New France as a missionary to the Huron and Algonquian allies of the French. In 1642, while on his way by canoe to the country of the Hurons, Jogues was captured by a war party of Mohawk Iroquois, in the company of Guillaume Cousture, René Goupil, and several Huron Christians. They were taken back to the Mohawk village where they were gruesomely tortured. It was during this torture that several of Jogues' fingers were cut off by his captors.

St. Isaac Jogues survived this torment and went on to live as a slave among the Mohawks for some time, even attempting to teach his captors the rudiments of Christianity. He was finally able to escape thanks to the pity of some Dutch merchants who smuggled him back to Manhattan. From there, he managed to sail back to France, where he was greeted with surprise and joy. As a "living martyr", Jogues was given a special permission by Pope Urban VIII to say Holy Mass with his mutilated hands, as the Eucharist could not be touched with any fingers but the thumb and forefinger.

Yet his ill-treatment by the Mohawk Iroquois did not dim the missionary zeal of Jogues. Within a few months, he was on his way back to Canada to continue his work. In 1645, a tentative peace was forged between the Iroquois and the Hurons, Algonquins, and French. In the spring of 1646, Jogues was sent back to the Mohawk country along with Jean de Lalande to act as ambassador among them.

However, some among the Mohawks regarded Jogues as a practitioner of magic, and when the double-calamity of sickness and crop failure hit the Mohawks, Jogues was the easiest thing to blame their now prevalent problems on. On October 18, 1646, Jogues and LaLande were tomahawked in the neck (beheaded-not clubbed as some tell the story).

Today, the Shrine of the North American Martyrs, maintained by the Jesuits, stands on or near the site (ten years after Jogues' death, Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha was born in approximately the same place). Brébeuf and five of his companions were killed in Canada in 1648 and 1649. The Mohawk Indians stripped him naked and beat him to death.

St. Issac Jogues was canonized on June 29, 1930 by Pope Pius XI along with seven other Canadian Martyrs. His Day of Remembrance is October 19. A statue of Father Jogues stands in the village of Lake George, in a park by the lake.

At Fordham University's Rose Hill Campus in the Bronx, New York, a freshman dormitory—Martyrs' Court—has three sections, which are named for the three U.S. martyr-saints: Isaac Jogues, René Goupil, and John LaLande.^[1] Dormitories at LeMoyne College in Syracuse and at Fairfield University in Connecticut are also named for Jogues.

The novitiate of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus just outside Wernersville, Pennsylvania was named for Jogues. It is now called the Jesuit Center at Wernersville, PA. [1]

References

• "Martyrs' Court". Fordham University. http://www.fordham.edu/student_affairs/residential_life/rose_hill/residence_halls_and_/martyrs_court_19847.asp. Retrieved 2012-10-17.
• The Captivity of St. Isaac Jogues. Bristol, PA: Arx Publishing. 2003. ISBN 1-889758-52-3.
• Francis W. Halsey: Jesuits and Church of England Men
• Francis Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, vol. 2 of France and England in North America (1867).
• Lomask, Milton (1956). Saint Isaac and the Indians. San Diego: Ignatius Press. ISBN 978-0-89870-355-9.
• Talbot, S.J., Francis (1935). Saint Among Savages: The Life of Saint Isaac Jogues. San Francisco: Ignatius Press. ISBN 0-89870-913-X.
• Biography at the Catholic Encyclopedia
• Biography at the Dictionary of Canadian Biography Online
• Saint Among Savages - The Life of Saint Isaac Jogues
• Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs. National Shrine of North American Martyrs. Auriesville, New York

 

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Today's  Snippet:  National Shrine of  North American Martyrs in Auriesville, New York

North American Martyrs

The National Shrine of the North American Martyrs, also dedicated as the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, is a Roman Catholic shrine in Auriesville, New York dedicated to the Jesuit missionaries who were martyred at the Mohawk Indian village of Ossernenon between 1642 and 1646. St. Rene Goupil, a Jesuit brother, was martyred in 1642. St. Isaac Jogues, a Jesuit priest, and St. John Lalande, a lay missionary, were martyred in 1646. They remain the only canonized martyrs of the United States. The first recitation of the Rosary in what is now New York State took place at the site on September 29, 1642. Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk woman, was born there in 1656. She later converted to Christianity and was baptized in what is now nearby Fonda, New York. While the missionaries were in Ossernenon and the adjacent Indian towns, she and other Mohawk converts were known for their exact Christian life, and in many instances for their exalted piety. In 1980, Blessed Kateri was beatified by Pope John Paul II.

The shrine was founded in 1885, and was dedicated to the Virgin Mary under the title Our Lady of Martyrs. In 1930, a unique Coliseum was built overlooking the Mohawk Valley, thus becoming one of the first circular churches built in the United States. The Coliseum's design allows for the efficient seating of approximately 6000 worshipers for Holy Mass. Today the grounds of the Shrine cover some 600 acres (2.4 km²).

Geography

Auriesville, New York

Auriesville is a hamlet in the northeastern part of the town of Glen in Montgomery County, New York, United States, along the south bank of the Mohawk River. It lies about forty miles west of Albany, the state capital. A Jesuit cemetery is located there.

Auries was the name of the last Mohawk known to have lived there. Settlers named the village after him. The Mohawk called the place Ossernenon, also Gandawaga and Caughnawaga.

The latter name was also given to a northern settlement on the St. Lawrence River opposite Lachine (later Montreal). Also known as Kahnawake, the Canadian settlement was founded by 1718 as a Jesuit mission for the Iroquois converts to Christianity who wanted to withdraw from 'moral corruption' by their pagan kinsmen.

History

Auriesville is the presumed site of the Mohawk village, located in Montgomery County, New York, U.S.A., in which Saint Isaac Jogues, and his companions, Saint René Goupil and Saint Jean de Lalande, were martyred by the Mohawk.

Jogues and Goupil were brought from present-day Canada to the village on the Mohawk River in 1642 as prisoners. They were tortured and then enslaved by the Mohawk. Goupil was killed in 1642, but Jogues escaped and returned to France. He returned to the village on a peace mission with Lalande, a young lay brother. Jogues was killed October 18, 1646. Lalande was killed the next day while trying to recover his body from the village path. In 1644 François-Joseph Bressani was tortured there, and later on, Joseph Poncet. They were later martyred in Canada.

In 1655-57 Le Moyne came as ambassador to make peace. In 1666 the Marquis de Tracy conducted a punitive expedition against Ossernenon and other Mohawk villages. The next year in 1667, a permanent Jesuit mission was established. There Father Boniface, James de Lamberville, Jacques Frémin, Bruyas, Jean Pierron and others laboured until 1684, when the mission was destroyed.

Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk Indian woman who has been beatified in the Roman Catholic Church, was born there and baptized in nearby Fonda, New York. While the missionaries were in control of Ossernenon and the adjacent Indian towns, Blessed Kateri and other Mohawk converts, particularly the women, were remarkable for their exact Christian life, and in many instances for their exalted piety.

The exact location of this village, closely associated with the founding of Catholicism in New York, was for a time a subject of considerable dispute. Historians such as John Gilmary Shea and Gen. J. S. Clarke of Auburn had disagreed. They finally were able to show that the present Auriesville is the place in which Father Jogues and his companions suffered death. The basic evidence is the fact that, up to the time that the villages were destroyed by de Tracy, they were on the south side of the Mohawk and west of the Schoharie River. This was clear from contemporary maps, and from the letters of Jogues, Bressani, and Poncet.

Joliet, known to be an accurate cartographer, put the village of Ossernenon at the confluence of the Schoharie and Mohawk. Jogues had written that the village was on the top of a hill, a quarter of a league from the river. Jogues described the ravine in which Goupil's body was found, with features that were extant in the 19th century. Lastly, Jogues gave the distances from the villages of Andagaron and Tionontoguen, which fixed the locality.

Commemoration

In 1884, the Rev. Joseph Loyzance, S.J., then parish priest of St. Joseph's, Troy, New York, purchased 10 acres (40,000 m²) of land on the hill. A student of the lives of the early missionaries, Father Loyzance erected a small shrine under the title of Our Lady of Martyrs. He was the first to lead a number of pilgrims to the place, on 15 August of that year. It was the Feast of the Assumption, as well as the anniversary of the first arrival of Father Isaac Jogues as an Iroquois captive. Four thousand people went from Albany and Troy on that day.

Other parishes subsequently adopted the practice of visiting Auriesville during the summer. Frequently there were as many as 4,000 to 5,000 people present. Many of the pilgrims would come fasting, would pray and receive Holy Communion there. More ground was purchased and consecrated to keep the surroundings free from undesirable development. Following the canonization of St. Isaac Jogues in 1930, the National Shrine of the North American Martyrs was built there. A large coliseum-sanctuary was built on the grounds, capable of seating 6000 worshipers. The property now includes more than 400 acres (1.6 km²).

References

• U.S. Geological Survey Geographic Names Information System: Auriesville, New York
• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Herbermann, Charles, ed. (1913). Catholic Encyclopedia. Robert Appleton Company. 

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