Thursday after Ash Wednesday

Book of Deuteronomy

Moses said to the people: "Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom.
If you obey the commandments of the LORD, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the LORD, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy.
If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods,
I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy.
I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live,
by loving the LORD, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him. For that will mean life for you, a long life for you to live on the land which the LORD swore he would give to your fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

Psalms

Blessed the man who follows not
the counsel of the wicked
Nor walks in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the company of the insolent,
But delights in the law of the LORD
and meditates on his law day and night.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
that yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
Not so, the wicked, not so;
they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
For the LORD watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked vanishes.

Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ according to Saint Luke

Jesus said to his disciples: "The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised."
Then he said to all, "If anyone wishes to come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me.
For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will save it.
What profit is there for one to gain the whole world yet lose or forfeit himself?"

St. Katharine Drexel()

St. Katharine DrexelReligious (1858-1955) Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in the United States of America, on November 26, 1858, Katharine Drexel was the second daughter of Francis Anthony Drexel and Hannah Langstroth. Her father was a well known banker and philanthropist. Both parents instilled in their daughters the idea that their wealth was simply loaned to them and was to be shared with others. When the family took a trip to the Western part of the United States, Katharine, as a young woman, saw the plight and destitution of the Native Americans. This experience aroused her desire to do something specific to help alleviate their condition. This was the beginning of her lifelong personal and financial support of numerous missions and missionaries in the United States. The first school she established was St. Catherine Native American School in Santa Fe, New Mexico (1887). Later, when visiting Pope Leo XIII in Rome, and asking him for missionaries to staff some of the Native missions that she as a lay person was financing, she was surprised to hear the Pope suggest that she become a missionary herself. After consultation with her spiritual director, Bishop James O'Connor, she made the decision to give herself totally to God, along with her inheritance, through service to Native Americans and African Americans. Her wealth was now transformed into a poverty of spirit that became a daily constant in a life supported only by the bare necessities. On February 12, 1891, she professed her first vows as a religious, founding the Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament whose dedication would be to share the message of the Gospel and the life of the Eucharist among Native Americans and African Americans. Always a woman of intense prayer, Katharine found in the Eucharist the source of her love for the poor and oppressed and of her concern to reach out to combat the effects of racism. Knowing that many African Americans were far from free, still living in substandard conditions as sharecroppers or underpaid menials, denied education and constitutional rights enjoyed by others, she felt a compassionate urgency to help change racial attitudes in the United States. The plantation at that time was an entrenched social institution where coloured people continued to be victims of oppression. This was a deep affront to Katharine's sense of justice. The need for quality education loomed before her, and she discussed this need with some who shared her concern about the inequality of education for African Americans in the cities. Restrictions of the law also prevented them in the rural South from obtaining a basic education. Founding and staffing schools for both Native Americans and African Americans throughout the country became a priority for Katharine and her congregation. During her lifetime, she opened, staffed and directly supported nearly 60 schools and missions, especially in the West and Southwest United States. Her crowning educational focus was the establishment in 1925 of Xavier University of Louisiana, the only predominantly Black Catholic institution of higher learning in the United States. Religious education, social service, visiting in homes, in hospitals and in prisons were also included in the ministries of Katharine and the Sisters. In her quiet way, Katharine combined prayerful and total dependence on Divine Providence with determined activism. Her joyous incisiveness, attuned to the Holy Spirit, penetrated obstacles and facilitated her advances for social justice. Through the prophetic witness of Katharine Drexel's initiative, the Church in the United States was enabled to become aware of the grave domestic need for an apostolate among Native Americans and African Americans. She did not hesitate to speak out against injustice, taking a public stance when racial discrimination was in evidence. For the last 18 years of her life she was rendered almost completely immobile because of a serious illness. During these years, she gave herself to a life of adoration and contemplation as she had desired from early childhood. She died on March 3, 1955. Katharine left a four-fold dynamic legacy to her Sisters of the Blessed Sacrament, who continue her apostolate today, and indeed to all peoples:– her love for the Eucharist, her spirit of prayer, and her Eucharistic perspective on the unity of all peoples;– her undaunted spirit of courageous initiative in addressing social iniquities among minorities — one hundred years before such concern aroused public interest in the United States;– her belief in the importance of quality education for all, and her efforts to achieve it;– her total giving of self, of her inheritance and all material goods in selfless service of the victims of injustice. Katharine Drexel was beatified by Pope John Paul II on November 20, 1980.

St. Cunegundes(Empress (+ 1040))

SAINT CUNEGUNDESEmpress(+1040) St. Cunegundes was the daughter of Siegfried, the first Count of Luxemburg, and Hadeswige, his pious wife. They raised her in the faith, and married her to St. Henry, Duke of Bavaria, who, upon the death of the Emperor Otho III, was chosen king of the Romans, and crowned on June 6, 1002. She was crowned at Paderborn on St. Laurence's day. In the year 1014, she went with her husband to Rome, and received the imperial crown with him from the hands of Pope Benedict VIII. She had, by St. Henry's consent before her marriage, made a vow of virginity. Calumniators afterwards made vile accusations against her. The holy empress, to remove the scandal of such a slander, trusting in God to prove her innocence, walked over red-hot ploughshares without being hurt. The emperor condemned his too scrupulous fears and credulity, and from that time they lived in the strictest union of hearts, conspiring to promote in everything God's honor and the advancement of piety. Going once to make a retreat in Hesse, she fell dangerously ill, and made a vow to found a monastery if she recovered. After recovering, she founded a monatery at Kaffungen, near Cassel, in the diocese of Paderborn, and gave it to nuns of the Order of St. Benedict. Before it was finished, St. Henry died in 1024. She recommended his soul to the prayers of others, especially to her dear nuns, and expressed her desire of joining them. She had already exhausted her treasures in founding bishoprics and monasteries, and in relieving the poor, and she had little left to give. But still thirsting to embrace perfect evangelical poverty, and to renounce all to serve God without obstacle, she assembled a great number of prelates to the dedication of her church of Kaffungen on the anniversary day of her husband's death, 1025. After the gospel was sung at Mass she offered on the altar a piece of the true cross, and then, putting off her imperial robes, clothed herself with a poor habit. Her hair was cut off, and the bishop put on her a veil, and a ring as a pledge of her fidelity to her heavenly Spouse. After she was consecrated to God in religion, she seemed entirely to forget that she had been empress, and behaved as the last in the house, being persuaded that she was so before God. She prayed and read much, worked with her hands, and took a singular pleasure in visiting and comforting the sick.Thus she passed the last fifteen years of her life. Her mortifications at length reduced her to a very weak condition, and brought on her last sickness. Perceiving that they were preparing a cloth fringed with gold to cover her body after death, she changed color and ordered it to be taken away. She was not at rest till promised she would be buried as a poor religious in her habit. She died on March 3, 1040. Her body was carried to Bamberg and buried near that of her husband. She was solemnly canonized by Innocent III in 1200.

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Category: Mass by Year / Catholic Missal 2022 / Catholic Missal of march 2022