Carmelite Blessed Nuno to be canonized

Due to the miracle of a blind woman in Portugal, our Carmelite brother, Blessed Nuno de Santa Maria Alvares Pereira will be canonized on April 26, 2009 in Rome.

For more information on Blessed Nuno click here:

http://www.blessednuno.org/about_us.html

July 13, 2008

Beatification of St. Therese's parents

ALENCON, France, JULY 13, 2008 (Zenit.org).- Louis and Marie-Zélie Martin, parents of St. Thérèse of Lisieux, will be beatified on Mission Sunday at the Cathedral of Lisieux.Cardinal Saraiva Martins, retired prefect of the Congregation for Saints' Causes, made the announcement Saturday when he presided at a Mass at Notre-Dame Church at Alencon to mark the couple's 150th wedding anniversary.Mission Sunday is celebrated this year on Oct. 19.The news comes days after Benedict XVI recognized a miracle attributable to the intercession of Louis and Marie-Zélie Martin. It involved the healing of Pietro Schiliro of Monza, Italy.Pietro was born in 2002 with a fatal lung malformation. Italian Carmelite Father Antonio Sangalli suggested that the child's parents pray a novena to Thérèse's parents to receive the strength to endure their suffering.However, Pietro's mother decided to do the novena to ask for her son's cure. When Pietro regained his health, he and his parents went on pilgrimage to Lisieux to thank the Martins.

Sainthood path for Sr. Lucia, OCD

Published: February 15, 2008
Pope Benedict has decided to fast-track Fatima visionary Sr. Lucia’s road to sainthood waiving the obligatory five year waiting period to start the canonisation process. Catholics World News and Catholic News Service reports the decision by the Pope means that the diocesan phase of the sainthood process can begin immediately. Vatican Congregation for Saints' Causes head Cardinal Jose Saraiva Martins said, at a Mass in Coimbra on Wednesday commemorating the third anniversary of Sister Lucia's death, that Pope Benedict had reduced the waiting to three years. On May 13, 1917, when Sister Lucia was 10 years old, she and her cousins - Francisco, 9, and Jacinta, 7 - claimed to have seen the Virgin Mary at Fatima, near their home. The apparitions continued once a month until October 1917 and later were declared worthy of belief by the Catholic Church. In 2000 Pope John Paul II beatified Sister Lucia's cousins, who died as children. Sr Lucia, who spent most of her life as a Carmelite nun, died at the age of 97 at her monastery in Coimbra, near Fatima, in Portugal.

SOURCE: (Catholic World News 14/02/08) and (Catholic News Service 14/02/08)

February 14, 2007

During the closing liturgy of our Plenary Council, Deacon Bro. Robert blessed the icon, "The Rule of Carmel". This icon, written by Bro. Claude Lane, OSB, of Mount Angel Abbey, was commissioned by our Province in honor of the eigth centenary of our Holy Rule.

This event icon depicts the writer, St. Albert of Jerusalem, handing on the rule to Bro. Brocard, who is believed to be the Prior of the early Carmelite hermits. In the mandorla of the icon we see the past as represented by our spiritual Father, St. Elijah, and St. Paul, in recognition of the many references to St. Paul's letters in the Rule. The present is seen in the event - the actual handing on of the Holy Rule to Bro. Brocard. And the future is seen in our Holy Mother, St. Teresa, as she stands beside Bro. Brocard.

December 14, 2007

Solemnity of Our Holy Father

Saint John of the Cross

"Endeavor to remain always in the presence of God, either real, imaginative, or unitive insofar as is permitted by your works."

Saint John of the Cross

Degrees of Perfection

Happy Feastday

Fr. John (Melka) of the Cross, OCD

November 19, 2007

St. Raphael Kalinowski, OCD

born: September 1, 1835
professed: November 27, 1881
ordained: January 15, 1882
died: Novmeber 15, 1907
feastday: November 19




Centenary of the death of St. Raphael Kalinowski, OCD

Letter from Fr General Luis Aróstegui to the Provinces of Krakow and Warsaw on the First Centenary of the death of St Raphael Kalinowski (1907-2007)


Dear Brothers and Sisters of the Teresian Carmel,

This present year, 2007, is the one hundredth anniversary of the death of St Raphael of St Joseph, (Józef Kalinowski), and you are celebrating it in a fruitful manner by different cultural and spiritual events. I would like to unite myself to your celebrations by means of this letter to you, the contents of which will be made known to the whole Order.

Raphael Kalinowski, a Carmelite in heart and mind, was born at Vilna on 1st September 1835 and returned to the house of the God of life on 15th November 1907 at Wadowice. He was inscribed in the list of saints by the then Holy Father, John Paul II, on 17th November 1991 during the Eucharist celebrated in St Peter’s Basilica in Rome. His sanctity, confirmed by the Church, is the guarantee that the Saint found and realized in full the mission entrusted to him by Divine Providence. For us, this signifies that, while taking into account perhaps errors and obstacles, we can and ought to have the faith that it is possible for us to reach the goal that the Lord has kindly marked out for us and renews.

The saints are accessible to us at every moment without limits of time and place. But anniversary commemorations take on special importance when the community turns its gaze on the saint and allows itself to be inspired and queried by him, welcoming the questions that apply to one’s own identity and mission.

The experience and teaching of Christ Jesus, concerning the dignity of human persons and their eternal destiny to life in the communion of the Holy Trinity, represents for the Church, for all of us, the enduring basis underlying the changeable events of humanity. It is a life that realizes itself in the mission to transform and improve the world, both physical and spiritual, so that it might become an inviting place for the growth of humanity in communion.

"We cannot doubt that God, in his mercy, has assigned to everyone a duty to be accomplished in this world. If you want to become a saint, to become perfect, carry out faithfully your duties” - wrote St Raphael Kalinowski.

During his hard life, he did not have freely at his disposition ready replies to the questions that assailed him, on the value of the suffering caused by his deportation to Siberia and separation from those he loved, for the profound crisis of faith that excluded him from the life of the Church for a certain period of his life, on the excruciating human fates he experienced in exile and elsewhere, on the future of his own nation. Far from surrendering to passivity, he sought light in intimacy and events and remained listening for signs and voices.

This humble attitude of listening allowed him to glimpse the challenges that stood out in his life, in which he gradually found help from God as light and energy for good, as well as the deep interior thrust to do good to many people, to help those who had lost their way, to comfort the desperate, to reawaken dignity by means of education, to share what little he had.
St Raphael Kalinowski was a born educator. He was instinctively so in the workplace and in deportation, and afterwards as a private tutor, then in the Minor Seminary at Wadowice, which he founded. This attitude of his, together with a spontaneous welcoming quality and the empathy he possessed in accompanying the human and spiritual growth of people, we see deeply developing itself in his devotion to the sacrament of penance and spiritual direction. He felt himself the custodian of divine mercy and therefore received penitents with affection, gentleness and zeal.

In the events of his life, he experienced in many ways the division among Christians and the sad lot of those who were discriminated against and persecuted. He felt this division as “the greatest enemy of our society”. He entered Carmel to serve Christ and to work for unity of the Church, an intention that was his constant companion right to the end. God in his goodness "will still permit me, by his grace, to work through the Carmel of Our Lady for unity of the Church”. “Sacred unity! Holy union! At present this same word fills the heart with pain, but at the same time it set light to the flame of hope”.

I wish to underline with pleasure that he had at heart the restoration of the Polish province of the Order, which had been so flourishing in the past, and which also was the origin of the Lithuanian province. It was therefore necessary to encourage new foundations. But a true and deep restoration meant for him nothing less than regaining the memory of the past. For this reason he set out to search for and save these documents and to publish the chronicles of some of the monasteries and convents. In the same way he saw the need for Carmel and its spirituality to take root and above all to draw near to the spiritual needs of people, to present the events and the more famous figures of the Polish Carmel. Modestly, he is a representative of the Order’s tradition of printing. Along the same lines, among many other initiatives, he organized the Secular Order and confraternities for the laity.

It is well-known that, as a mature young man, he was a patriot of his homeland that had been wiped from the list of nations. He was against the shedding of blood, because he was convinced that his country “had need of sweat rather than the shedding of blood; already too much had been poured out”. He actively collaborated in the insurrection, with the intention of saving human life. For this he was arrested, condemned to capital punishment which was mitigated to ten years of forced labor in Siberia. I make mention of these well-known facts to record simply his human and evangelical attitude, and the fact he never renounced his convictions on what was just regarding the rights of people, a conviction that included yearning for the union of the people, and above all, yearning for communion with God in prayer and in eternity.

His was a dramatic life: for the external events in which he took part, and none the less for the interior journey of the Saint. His activity, manifold and zealous, his commitment to others, faithful and caring right to the end, found its source and mysterious unity in the Eucharist and the sacrament of reconciliation, in filial devotion to Mary and continuously in silent prayer.
To fulfil one’s own mission in life, there is a need to listen to the voice, born of a Christian conscience, in the midst of the social, cultural and religious situations of our own concrete life. Then, for certain, mission cannot be separated from suffering, from the capacity of spiritual sacrifice. This capacity is the measure of the authenticity of our sentiments and our proposals. In every case, this should be a suffering that is assimilated and made peaceful in prayer.
I nourish the hope that, in our world of rapid and deep change, and of dissension and drama, the awareness and prayerful meditation of the message of St Raphael Kalinowski would represent for us a stimulus for accepting and verifying, with truth and joy, our call to the tradition of Carmel. His courage in searching, his perseverance, his ability to relate with comprehension and compassion, his attentiveness to surrounding needs, the natural union of contemplation and action are some of the characteristics of what he hands down to us.

Rome, 20th July 2007
Very Rev. Fr. Luis Aróstegui Gamboa, OCD - Superior General

October 28, 2007

Two Priests who served in our Province are beatified

Bl. Lucas of St. Joseph (Tristany), O.C.D.
Born: December 14, 1872 Lerida, Spain
Ordained priest: May 27, 1899
Parish Assignments: Holy Cross, Morenci, AZ 1914
Assumption of BVM, Florence, AZ 1915
Holy Family (first pastor), Tucson, AZ 1915-1924
Santa Cruz, Tucson, AZ 1919
Martyred: July 20, 1936 Barcelona

Bl. Eduardo of the Child Jesus (Farré), O.C.D.
Born: April 3, 1897 Torms, Lerida, Spain

Ordained priest: June 13, 1920

Parish Assignments: Holy Family, Tucson, AZ 1926-1927,1930-1932
Santa Cruz, Tucson, AZ 1932-1933

Martyred: July 25, 1936 Montcada, Spain

32 Discalced Carmelites Friars were among the 498 Martyrs of Spain who were beatified on October 28, 2008 by Our Holy Father, Benedict XVI in St. Peter's Square. Our Vicar Provincial, Fr. Matthew Williams and Bro. David Guzman (who grew up in our Santa Cruz Parish, Tucson, AZ) joined the four members of our Province who are presently stationed in Rome to attend the beatification ceremony.

In addition to the new Carmelite Friar "Blesseds" (14 Friars from Barcelona, including one seminarian, 1 from Oveda and 16 from Toledo) there were also 5 Carmelite sisters from aggregated communities of the Order (4 Carmelite Missionaries and 1 Carmelite of Charity) who were beatified in the same ceremony.

Their feast day will be celebrated on November 6.

October 15, 2007

Solemnity of Our Holy Mother,

Saint Teresa of Jesus

While at St. Joseph's in Avila, on the vigil of Pentecost, I was in the hermitage of Nazareth reflecting upon a very great favor our Lord had granted me on that day, more or less twenty years before, when an intense spiritual impulse and fervor began which caused my faculties to be suspended. In this great recollection I heard from our Lord the following:

That I should tell the Discalced Fathers that for their part they ought to strive to observe four things and that as long as they keep them their religious order will grow, and that when they fail to do so they will be falling away from their original purpose. The first is that their leaders be in accord. The second, that though they have many houses, there be few friars in each. The third, that they speak little with seculars, but that when they do, it be for the good of these persons' souls. The fourth, that they teach by works more than by words.

This happened in the year 1579. And because it is very true, I sign it with my name:

Teresa of Jesus

October 1, 2007

Feast of St. Therese of the Child Jesus

"O Jesus, why can't I tell all little souls how unspeakable is Your condescension? I feel that if you found a soul weaker and littler than mine, which is impossible, You would be pleased to grant it still greater favors, provided it abandoned itself with total confidence to Your Infinite Mercy. But why do I desire to communicate Your secrets of Love, O Jesus, for was it not You alone who taught them to me, and can You not reveal them to others? Yes, I know it, and I beg you to do it. I beg you to cast Your Divine Glance upon a great number of little souls. I beg You to choose a legion of little Victims worthy of your LOVE!"

St. Therese

Story of a Soul (manuscript B)

Happy Feastday to:

Fr. Kevin of St. Therese of the Child Jesus

Fr. Cyprian of St. Therese of the Child Jesus

Fr. James of St. Therese of the Child Jesus

Fr. Donald of St. Therese

Fr. Adam Gregory of St. Therese