• Queenship of the Blessed Virgin Mary. (Traditional)
• St.Petronilla (90). Virgin. (Historical)
• Trinity Sunday. (Current, Traditional)
• Visitation of Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Elizabeth. (Current)

TRINITY SUNDAY.

THE Holy Trinity is one only God in three Persons, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost, equal in all things and co-eternal. The Father gives being to the Son, and the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father and the Son: the most adorable, truly, of all mysteries, and likewise the most impenetrable! St. Anselm has endeavored to explain it from a single point of view only, and has accomplished this in a masterly yet necessarily insufficient manner.

The Father, he says, cannot exist a single instant without knowing Himself, because, in God, to know is to exist, even as to will is to act. This knowledge, personified, is “the Word,” His Son. The Son is, then, co-eternal with the Father. The Father and the Son cannot exist a single instant without loving each other; their mutual love is again personified, because in God to love is still to exist, God being love itself. This third Person, thus co-eternal with the other two Persons, is the Holy Ghost. But the inhabitants with God can alone understand these wonders, and they understand because they see them.

The free-thinker, surrounded by the mysteries of nature, and who is to himself a complete mystery, is not willing to admit of any in religion. “I only wish to believe,” he says, “what I understand!” The poor fool would not believe much were he taken at his word. He would neither believe in the food he takes, seeing that he could not explain how it imparts nourishment, nor in the light of the sun, since he does not apprehend how it brings him into relation with distant objects, nor even in his own arguments, since he does not comprehend how his mind evokes and gives them shape. 

Literally speaking, there exist no mysteries, there are only truths; but truth becomes a mystery to him who does not understand it. Writing is a mystery to one who knows not how to read; it ceases to be so to any one who has received instruction. According as we educate the soul and widen the measure of knowledge, mysteries begin to disappear in proportion; therefore is it that there are no mysteries in heaven, because the angels and the blessed behold with open gaze the objects whereof we now possess but the mysterious definition. To deserve to behold them one day in their heavenly company, one condition is requisite, namely, to adore them meanwhile with steadfast and perfect faith in the Word of God, which proposes them for our belief. In the realms of nature, a mystery is a truth not understood, which one believes withal because one sees it. In the sphere of religion, a mystery is a truth not understood, which one believes because God has revealed it.

REFLECTION: Wherefore rebel against the word of God? Is it not “as if the clay should rebel against the potter, and the work should say to the worker thereof, Thou understandest not?”

ST. PETRONILLA, VIRGIN.

AMONG the disciples of the apostles in the primitive age of saints, this holy virgin shone as a bright star in the Church. She lived when Christians were more solicitous to live well than to write much: they knew how to die for Christ; but did not compile long books in which vanity has often a greater share than charity. Hence no particular account of her actions has been handed down to us. But how eminent her sanctity was we may judge from the lustre by which it was distinguished among apostles, prophets, and martyrs. She is said to have been a daughter of the apostle St. Peter; that St. Peter was married before his vocation to the apostleship we learn from the gospel. St. Clement of Alexandria assures us that his wife attained to the glory of martyrdom; at which Peter himself encouraged her, bidding her to remember our Lord. But it seems not certain whether St. Petronilla was more than the spiritual daughter of that apostle. She flourished at Rome, and was buried on the way to Ardea, where in ancient times a cemetery and a church bore her name.

REFLECTION: With the saints the great end for which they lived was always present to their minds, and they thought every moment lost in which they did not mike some advances toward eternal bliss. How will their example condemn at the last day the trifling fooleries, and the greatest part of the conversation and employments of the world, which aim at nothing but present amusements, and forget the only important affair—the business of eternity.

WORD OF THE DAY

LEGAL MORALITY. A term sometimes applied to those politicians who resort to the distinction between what is legal and what is moral. Morality, it is argued, is a private affair that does not pertain to the State as a religiously neutral society, no matter what it does legally. Morality is also said to belong essentially to the will. Provided the intention is good, it is immaterial what the State or the people, as citizens, do or permit juridically. A person simply dissociates his or her will from an objectively bad action (such as abortion) and thereby exempts himself or herself from any guilt or complicity. At best one should not be held guilty for allowing others, even as a legislator, the legal right of doing what one’s own conscience says is wrong. "Legal morality" is a modern form of Machiavellianism.

Modern Catholic Dictionary, Fr. John Hardon SJ (Get the real one at Eternal Life — don’t accept an abridged or edited version of this masterpiece!)

May, Month of the Immaculate Heart

Maria Magnificata. Short Meditations for May, the Month on Our Lady’s Life. 31st Day — Mary’s Coronation as Queen of Heaven.