 Between the Joyful and Sorrowful mysteries chronologically lie the Luminous, as between Christmas and Lent we celebrate the Our Lord's Baptism and hear of His public ministry in the Gospels at Mass. This is a beautiful time of the year to reflect upon the "Mysteries of Light" from Our Lord's life.
 As we give thanks to Almighty God for His many gifts in 2025, there are a few highlights from the past couple months that we would like to share.
 As Mary's daughters, we spend time with her each day contemplating the life of Christ in the mysteries of the Rosary. In this season of the Incarnation, we give special emphasis to the Joyful Mysteries. We customarily introduce each mystery with the intention written by St. Louis Marie de Montfort which shine a particular light on each portion of Christ's life.
 Inspired by National Vocation's Awareness Week, which we celebrated earlier this month, the Sisters took a few minutes to reflect and share about the gift of their vocations.
 Transfiguration by Raphael During our initial years of formation in religious life, each of us Sisters reads and studies Vita Consecrata or The Consecrated Life. This apostolic exhortation of Pope St. John Paul II begins with a beautiful reflection on the mystery of the Transfiguration. It is a Feast in which the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ shine forth, leading us to meditate upon the mysteries of the Incarnation and the communion of persons that is the Most Holy Trinity.
 We have all heard the phrase: “You are what you eat”; perhaps it could just as accurately be said: “You are what you read”! The thoughts and images we imbibe from books and media form our minds and hearts. Because of this, daily spiritual reading is an integral part of our religious life. It fills our minds with thoughts of God and provides a storehouse from which we pull ideas to speak to Him in our meditation and throughout the day. The Sisters’ will often choose reading directed toward the themes of particular liturgical seasons. During Lent, the Sisters’ prie-dieus are full of books about Our Lord’s Passion, Our Lady’s Sorrows, the Seven Last Words, the Stations of the Cross, and personal repentance and conversion. As we reach the culmination of the Lenten season, the Sisters shared some choice quotes from their spiritual reading to inspire your Holy Week:
"[St. Augustine] says that God preferred to bring good out of evil rather than to prevent evil. And indeed it is worthy of divine wisdom, love, and power to be able to draw out of those dark depths some magnificent good. Jesus Christ, who came to transform all things, who elevated, sanctified, and divinized them, did not wish to suppress evil, but gave us the divine secret of getting good out of it" (Archbishop Luis Martinez, The Sanctifier). "Sinlessness is not common to our Mother and to us. But sorrow is. It is the one thing we share, the one common thing betwixt us. We will sit with her therefore, and sorrow with her, and grow more full of love, not forgetting her grandeurs but pressing to our hearts with fondest predilection the memory of her exceeding martyrdom" (Father Faber, The Foot of the Cross). "A final dimension of [Mary's] faith is its tenacity. Hers was a faith delicate in its beauty, intricate in its design, but steadfast in its courage and tenacity. Of Mary, to whom much was given, much was expected! ... It is important for us to remember that this faith of Mary must be the model of our own… As in Mary, so also in us, Christ must live by faith. He must inhabit us. We do not have that fullness of receptivity for God's Word that was Mary's. But God has given us in our created reality and uniquely in our Baptism that radical capacity to hear and receive his Word" (James Cardinal Hickey, Mary at the Foot of the Cross: A Retreat Given to John Paul II and the Papal Household).   After a hiatus, we return to our document study of Pope St. John Paul II’s encyclical: Ecclesia de Eucharistia. Read parts I, and II.
 “Lent is like a long ‘retreat’ during which we can turn back into ourselves and listen to the voice of God, in order to defeat the temptations of the Evil One. It is a period of spiritual ‘combat’ which we must experience alongside Jesus, not with pride and presumption, but using the arms of faith: prayer, listening to the word of God and penance. In this way we will be able to celebrate Easter in truth, ready to renew the promises of our Baptism.”
- Pope Benedict XV |
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