Saint Francis of Assisi October 4

Saint Francis 

of Assisi

Memorial October 4

Saint Francis was born at Assisi in 1182.  After a carefree youth, he renounced his paternal wealth and committed himself to God.  He led a life of evangelical poverty and preached the love of God to all.  He established a rule which a number of his companions followed and which gained the approval of the Holy See.  Subsequently, he founded an order of nuns and a society of laypersons who practice penance while living in the world.  He died in 1226 at age 44.

We must be simple, 

humble and pure

From a letter written to all the faithful by Saint Francis of Assisi

It was through His archangel, Gabriel, that the Father above made known to the holy and glorious Virgin Mary that the worthy, holy and glorious Word of the Father would come from heaven and take from her womb the real flesh of our human frailty.  Though He was wealthy beyond reckoning, He still willingly chose to be poor with His Blessed Mother.  And shortly before His passion He celebrated he Passover with His disciples.  Then He prayed to the Father, if it is possible, let this cup be taken from Me.

Nevertheless, He reposed His will in the will of the Father.  The Father willed that His blessed and glorious Son, Whom He gave to us and who was born for us,  should through His own blood offer Himself as a sacrificial victim on the altar of the cross.  This was to be done not for Himself through Whom all things are made, but for our sins.  It was intended to leave us an example of how to follow in His footsteps.  

And He desires all of us to be saved 

through Him, and to receive Him 

with pure heart and chaste body.

O how happy and blessed are those who love the Lord and do as the Lord Himself said in the gospel: You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart and your whole soul, and your neighbor as yourself.  Therefore, let us love God and adore Him with pure heart and mind.  This is His particular desire when He says: True worshipers adore the Father in spirit and in truth.  For all who adore Him must do so in the spirit of truth.  Let us also direct to Him our praises and prayers saying: Our Father, who art in heaven,  since we must always pray and never grow slack.

Furthermore, let us produce worthy fruits of penance.  Let us also love our neighbors as ourselves.  Let us have charity and humility.  Let us give alms because these cleanse our souls from the stains of sin.  

Men lose all the material things they leave behind in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give.  For those they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.  

We must not be wise and prudent 

according to the flesh.  

Rather we must be simple, humble and pure.  

We should never desire to be over others.  Instead, we ought to be servants who are submissive to every human being for God’s sake.  The Spirit of the Lord will rest on all who live in this way and persevere in it to the end.  He will permanently dwell in them.  They will be the Father’s children who do his work.  They are the spouses, brothers and mothers of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Taken from Liturgy of the Hours, Ordinary Time Weeks 18-34.  Francis of Assisi Memorial

St. Aelred, Abbot of Rievaulx

bbot of Rievaulx, homilist and historian (1109-66). St. Ælred, whose name is also written Ailred, Æthelred, and Ethelred, was the son of one of those married priests of whom many were found in England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. 

He was born at Hexham, but at an early age made the acquaintance of David, St. Margaret's youngest son, shortly afterwards King of Scotland, at whose court he apparently acted for some years as a sort of page, or companion to the young Prince Henry.  King David loved the pious English youth, promoted him in his household, and wished to make him bishop, but Ælred decided to become a Cistercian monk, in the recently founded abbey of Rievaulx in Yorkshire. 

Soon he was appointed master of novices, and was long remembered for his extraordinary tenderness and patience towards those under his charge. 

In 1143 when William, Earl of Lincoln, founded a new Cistercian abbey upon his estates at Revesby in Lincolnshire, St. Ælred was sent with twelve monks to take possession of the new foundation. His stay at Revesby, where he seems to have met St. Gilbert of Sempringham, was not of long duration, for in 1146 he was elected abbot of Rievaulx. 

Rievaulx Abbey, present day

In this position the saint was not only superior of a community of 300 monks, but he was head of all the Cistercian abbots in England.

Causes were referred to him, and often he had to undertake considerable journeys to visit the monasteries of his order. Such a journey in 1153 took him to Scotland, and there meeting King David, for the last time, he wrote on his return to Rievaulx, where the news of David's death reached him shortly afterwards, a sympathetic sketch of the character of the late king. 

He seems to have exercised considerable influence over Henry II, in the early years of his reign, and to have persuaded him to join Louis VII of France in meeting Pope Alexander III, at Touci, in 1162. 

Although suffering from a complication of most painful maladies, he journeyed to France to attend the general chapter of his Order. He was present in Westminster Abbey, at the translation of St. Edward the Confessor, in 1163, and, in view of this event, he both wrote a life of the saintly king and preached a homily in his praise. 

The next year Ælred undertook a mission to the barbarous Pictish tribes of Galloway, where their chief is said to have been so deeply moved by his exhortations that he became a monk. 

Throughout his last years Ælred gave an extraordinary example of heroic patience under a succession of infirmities. He was, moreover, so abstemious that he is described as being "more like a ghost than a man." 

His death is generally supposed to have occurred 12 January, 1166, although there are reasons for thinking that the true year may be 1167. 

St. Ælred left a considerable collection of sermons, the remarkable eloquence of which has earned for him the title of the English St. Bernard. 

He was the author of several ascetical treatises, notably the "Speculum Charitatis," also a compendium of the same (really a rough draught from which the larger work was developed), a treatise "De Spirituali Amicitiâ," and a certain letter to an anchoress. All these, together with a fragment of his historical work, were collected an published by Richard Gibbons, S.J., at Douai, in 1631. 

A fuller and better edition is contained in the fifth volume of the "Bibliotheca Cisterciensis" of Tissier, 1662, from which they have been printed in P.L., vol. CXCV. The historical works include a "Life of St. Edward," an important account of the "Battle of the Standard" (1138), an incomplete work on the genealogy of the kings of England, a tractate "De Sanctimonialide Watton" (About the Nun of Watton), a "Life of St. Ninian," a work on the "Miracles of the Church of Hexham," an account of the foundations of St. Mary of York and Fountains Abbey, as well as some that are lost. 

 No complete edition of Ælred's historical opuscula has ever been published. A few were printed by Twysden in his "Decem Scriptores," others must be sought in the Rolls Series or in Raine's "Priory of Hexham" (Surtees Society, Durham, 1864).

Article taken from  http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/01172b.htm