MAY 17 – ST. PASCHAL BAYLON.
FROM a child Paschal seems to have been marked out for the service of God; and amidst his daily labors he found time to instruct and evangelize the rude herdsmen who kept their flocks on the hills of Aragon. At the age of twenty-four he entered the Franciscan Order, in which, however, he remained, from humility, a simple lay-brother, and occupied himself, by preference, with the roughest and most servile tasks. He was distinguished by an ardent love and devotion to the Blessed Sacrament. He would spend hours on his knees before the tabernacle—often he was raised from the ground in the fervor of his prayer—and there, from the very and eternal Truth, he drew such stores of wisdom that, unlettered as he was, he was counted by all a master in theology and spiritual science. Shortly after his profession, he was called to Paris on business connected with his Order. The journey was full of peril, owing to the hostility of the Huguenots, who were numerous at the time in the south of France; and on four separate occasions Paschal was in imminent danger of death at the hands of the heretics. But it was not God’s will that His servant should obtain the crown of martyrdom which, though judging himself all unworthy of it, he so earnestly desired, and he returned in safety to his convent, where he died in the odor of sanctity, May 15th, 1592. As Paschal was watching his sheep on the mountainside, he heard the consecration bell ring out from a church in the valley below, where the villagers were assembled for Mass. The Saint fell on his knees, when suddenly there stood before him an angel of God, bearing in his hands the Sacred Host, and offering it for his adoration. Learn from this how pleasing to Jesus Christ are those who honor Him in this great mystery of His love; and how to them especially this promise is fulfilled: “I will not leave you orphans; I will come unto you.” John xiv. 18.
REFLECTION: St. Paschal teaches us, never to suffer a day to pass without visiting Jesus in the narrow chamber where He, whom the heaven itself cannot contain, abides day and night for our sake.
WORD OF THE DAY
PROCESS THEOLOGY. A view of reality, including what Christianity calls God, which sees everything still in the process of becoming what it will be, but nothing really is. It is called theology because it is a form of evolutionary pantheism which postulates a finite god who is becoming perfect, but is not (as Christianity believes) infinite and all-perfect from eternity. It is called “process” because it claims that the universe (including God) is moving toward completion, without identifying what this completion is or when or whether it will be reached. On these terms nothing is stable, nothing certain, because nothing really is. There are no determined moral laws, no absolute norms of conduct, no certain principles of thought, and no means of knowing anything. There is no “thing,” since what people call “things” are moving functions that keep changing in their very being. Everything, including the thinking mind, is ever becoming what it was not and ceasing to be what it was.
Not all adherents of what is called process theology are consistently evolutionary pantheists. But once they postulate a finite god who is still growing in perfection, logically all the rest follows. The main contributors to present-day process thought were the skeptic David Hume (1711-76 ),the philosophers Georg Hegel (1770-1831), Herbert Spencer (1820-1903), Henri Bergson (1859-1941), and Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947), and the Marxist writer Ernst Bloch (1885-1977).
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!)
This article, MAY 17 – ST. PASCHAL BAYLON. is a post from The Bellarmine Forum.
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