With the celebration of the Holy Thursday Liturgy begins the shortest of the Church's Liturgical seasons: the Sacred Triduum. We remember our priests particularly today as we celebrate the institution of the Holy Priesthood and the Holy Eucharist. 

In the Ordinary Form Gospel for Wednesday of Holy Week, the Church poses us this question: How are you preparing to celebrate the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ? Are you preparing like Judas to betray your Friend and Savior? Or are you preparing like the faithful disciples to do His Holy Will?

The gateway to the Passion, Palm Sunday begins triumphantly with the crowd acclaiming Jesus as King and strewing palm branches before him. We received our palms today blessed with the beautiful blessings of the Church. As with other sacramentals, the blessed palms can dispose us to receive grace and by the power of Christ exercised through the Church they can be the instruments of God's protection, as is reflected in the traditional Collect at the end of the procession:
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"O Lord Jesus Christ, our King and Redeemer, in Whose honor we have borne these palms and gone on praising Thee with song and solemnity: mercifully grant that where ever these palms are taken, there the grace of Thy blessing may descend, and may every wickedness and trickery of the demons be frustrated; and may Thy right hand protect those it hath redeemed....Amen."

We began this great solemnity with a beautiful Missa Cantata in honor of good St. Joseph. It was a small foretaste of the glories to come - flowers on the altar, white vestments, the statue of St. Joseph unveiled, and the Gloria ringing out like the welcome voice of a long-absent friend, but in the midst of the festivity the shadow of the Passion was still present in the violet and veiled images. Today was a particularly full day of doing God's holy will with sisters going to the sacristy to prepare for Palm Sunday, moderating the young ladies' Sodality, presenting to the Little Flowers girls, practicing for choir, and giving retreat talks, all flowing from our precious time with Our Lord. It was a pleasure to go from duty to duty with St. Joseph, asking that we may perform each one with the sentiments of love with which he would have performed them for the love of the Divine Child.

Good St. Joseph, be our model. Obtain for us the grace to rise each morning eager to do God's will as thou rose from the profound silence of the night to obey God's command with all your heart. Thou who loved the Divine Child so tenderly and His Mother so purely, obtain for us like sentiments and an ever-increasing fidelity to the interior life.

The sisters were honored to be able to serve our priests and the people of the diocese by assisting to prepare the Cathedral and participating in the choir. May God bless each of our priests and reward them for their selfless service!

As women religious, our primary duty is the contemplation of divine things and assiduous union with God in prayer (cf. Canon 663), but from this union with God flows an abundance of apostolic works.

This past week, the sisters...