TEMPORARY MASS SCHEDULE

While Father Kidd is offering our Sunday Masses, we will have to make Sunday Mass at 8AM.

The following are the Sundays where there are confirmed Sunday Masses :

October 13

 

October 27

 

November 10

 

November 24

 

December 8

If Fr Kidd's schedule allows more Masses, he will announce upcoming Masses from the pulpit.

Thank you for your patience and flexibility!

My first Sunday Mass after returning home will be December 22.

In Christo per Mariam,

Fr Eric

VISITOR FROM UNA VOCE (TOKYO)

Mr Shinsuke Yoshikawa is a member of Una Voce and a TLM community in Tokyo.  This was his 2nd trip to Guam and today he attended Mass with us.  After Mass, a small group from our community went to lunch with him.  We hope he will have more visits to Guam in the future.

MASS GUIDE FOR CHILDREN - 13

The bread has now been changed into the true Body of Jesus, just as He said, "This is my Body."

And just as Jesus changed the wine into His blood afterward, in a separate action, the chalice of wine is now changed by the priest, acting in the place of Jesus, into His true Blood.

Why?  For the forgiveness of sins.

Our sins are forgiven because the Lord Jesus was willing to sacrifice His life, His Body and Blood, for our forgiveness.

And Jesus wants us to "do this in memory of Him."  That is why we must attend Mass on Sundays and Holy Days of Obligation and even on more days when we can!

When we attend Mass, we are blessed in so many ways, but most especially by the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus for our salvation.  Through It, we can go to heaven!

7TH DISTINCTION

7th Distinction : Her Coronation

 

Mary enters Heaven and is Crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth

Twelve stars formed a crown and was seen by Saint John on the head of a woman in heaven, clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet (Rev 12:1).

 

God Exalts the Humble

One of the traits of a loving God is His generosity in sharing His glory and authority with His creatures.  Look how He worked through Moses, a man imperfect in speech and whose faith faltered a bit when he struck the rock twice.  Yet God made Moses His agent on earth, upholding the great authority of Moses.

Look how God worked through the prophets; humans with their own human limitations as well.  Finally, look how our Lord worked through the Apostles, sharing with them awesome divine prerogatives, such as the forgiving of sins!  And our Lord tells them that at the Judgment, the Apostles will sit on "twelve thrones to judge the twelve tribes of Israel (Matthew 19:28)."

God loves His faithful children and shares with them His glory and authority.  Would He do less with the Mother of God the Son?  She who never - not once - faltered in her faith and obedience?

She herself said, "The Lord hath done great things for me" and "He hath exalted the humble." (Luke 1:46-55)

She who had heaven inside her (the child Jesus) is now in heaven as Queen.  Her dignity as the Bearer of God entitles her to this.  It was she who assisted God in His plan to bring Christ into the world; she now assists Christ in His plan to save the world till the end of time.

As Queen, she has her own prerogatives.  She has direct access to her Son, and her wishes are commands to Him, for she can want nothing that her Son also does not want.

Higher than the Seraphim

Of all creatures, none can claim to have been the Mother of the Son nor the Spouse of the Holy Ghost.  The Seraphim, the highest order of angels, pale in comparison to Mary, who housed within her own body God Almighty, and brought Him into the world through the power of the Holy Ghost who overshadowed her.

Now, all creation - the angels and the saints - bow before her, because, while she was on earth, she bowed before all.  In her humility, she obeyed an Angel - Gabriel.  In her charity, she went to assist her pregnant cousin Elizabeth.  Now, all the angels and saints bow to her queenship.

Even nature bows before her, as she is wrapped in the light of the sun and stands on top of the humble moon.  Twelve stars crown her; twelve representing the Church (the Old Israel of twelve tribes; the New Israel of twelve Apostles).  She is Queen of the Church.

If God is to be adored and obeyed, let His Vessel also be highly honored and obeyed.

A Queen with One Mission

In earthly kingdoms, it is often the Queen who attends, in greater part, to the service of the poor and needy.  She is personally attending, in this regard, to one of the King's duties towards His subjects.

It was the Queen who often funded and ran hospitals for the sick and gave material relief to the destitute.  Many times, the Queen sold her own treasures in order to do this.

We have in our own historical example in the Marianas, a Queen who personally funded the Catholic missions, seeking the spiritual welfare of the people.

Our Lady is Queen in the same way.  She has only one project, one concern : the salvation of mankind.

In a sense, Our Lady's one goal is to see us crowned : with the crown of life (Rev 2:10), of glory (1 Peter 5:4), of righteousness (2 Tim 4:8), of rejoicing (1 Thess 2:19) which lasts forever (1 Cor (9:24-25).

God is a God who crowns His righteous ones, and at the highest level, His own Mother, Queen of Heaven and Earth.

6TH DISTINCTION

5th Distinction : Her Assumption into Heaven

 

The Church has solemnly defined that Mary is now in heaven, body and soul.

It would have been very strange had Mary's body remained in her earthly tomb, and no one claim to have it!  The early Christians valued the physical location of religious events, and they valued whatever relics could be had of the saints, including their bodies.

Different towns and cities competed with each other, claiming to have this or that relic.

But Christianity knows of no tomb of Mary with her body still in it.  Not even a tomb where her body was once for many years, until the body was stolen or destroyed in war.  None at all.

It is the universal belief of the ancient Church that the body of Mary is no longer on earth, and has not been on earth for a very long time.

In 1950, Pope Pius XII put the matter to rest, solemnly defining the Dogma of the Assumption.  At the end of her earthly life, not many years after, Mary was assumed into heaven, body and soul.

 

How it Happened

Again, the Church herself does not formally define how the Assumption happened; only that it did.  But, there is our honorable tradition, which goes along these lines :

As we mentioned in the last post, Saint Thomas was the only Apostle not swept in a cloud and transported immediately to the bedside of Mary.  We do not know for sure why God left him out, but we can speculate that God did this so that what followed could have happened.

On the third day after Mary's soul left her body, and thus in imitation of Christ's three days in the tomb, Saint Thomas, who was in India, was swept up into the air.

In the middle of the air he saw the Blessed Virgin also in the air.  He asked her where she was going.  She didn't answer.  She simply gave the Apostle her cincture and continued on her way upwards.

Reaching Jerusalem, Saint Thomas asked the Apostles to allow him to see the body of Mary in the tomb, since he was much grieved to have been missing when she passed from this life.  The other Apostles obliged, and when they opened the tomb, they saw no body!  All that remained were the burial cloths, and a wonderful fragrance!

Other traditions state that the Apostles heard angelic singing during the three days Mary's body was in the tomb, and that flowers sprung up in the tomb where her body had been laid.

The painting above shows the Apostles standing around the empty tomb of Mary, with flowers instead of a body in the tomb.

 

The Salvation of the Creature is Complete

The Assumption of Mary show us that Christ has truly accomplished His work; men and women can be saved!  He Himself ascended into heaven with His human body.  But Christ is not a human person.  He is a divine person, with two natures.  His divine nature He has had for all eternity.  His human nature He took on at the Incarnation.

When Christ assumed a human nature; when He did all He did and suffered all He went through in His human nature; when His human will obeyed God's will unto death; when He rose from the dead - in all these things Christ saved human nature.  The curse of sin which wounded human nature was cured.

But does the cure work?  Where is the purely human person, a creature, who has been totally cured?

Mary!

She is in heaven, body and soul.

Christ's salvation does its job!  Christ can save us, because He has already done so in Mary.

Enoch and Elijah

There are some who wonder about these two Old Testament figures, who, in different ways, are said to have somehow escaped natural death and to have left the earth.  In Elijah's case, Scripture says, "into heaven."

But the Church has not solemnly defined that they went body and soul into heaven, meaning the abode of God.  It is possible that they were placed in some natural, celestial place above the earth (heaven in the sense of the realm above the earth) until the opening of heaven when Christ died.  The Church allows us to believe, but does not oblige us to believe, that perhaps Enoch and Elijah went to the heavenly abode of God by special privilege.

The Church also has not solemnly defined if the bodies of those who rose from the dead on Easter morning (see Matthew 27:52-53) went to heaven.  Matthew says these resurrected people went into the city and appeared to many people.  Did they eventually rise into heaven? Did they die and were buried again?  What happened after that is unknown.

It is Mary alone, among the creatures of God, whom we have been obliged by Holy Mother Church to believe has been taken up to heaven, body and soul.  Her salvation is complete in all respects, and our salvation has the fullness of hope knowing that she is there!

5TH DISTINCTION

5th Distinction : Her Passing from this World

 

Our Lady was blessed with the most beautiful passing from this world.

The Church has not dogmatically defined that Our Lady underwent a death like ours.  In the solemn definition of the dogma of the Assumption of Mary, Pope Pius XII stated that,

"Mary...after the completion of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into the glory of heaven." (Munificentissimus Deus, 1950)

The sobriety of the Church, when it comes to some matters on which the Scriptures are silent and on which Church Tradition is not wholly unanimous, especially in a number of details about the end of her life, allows her to say simply that Our Lady completed her life on earth.

But just because the Church has not solemnly defined a dogma does not mean that the Church does not hold something as true.

The greater bulk of Tradition holds that Mary's soul separated from her body.  Doctors of the Church, the ancient Fathers and many saints teach that Our Blessed Mother's soul left her body.  She died.  But what a different, most blessed and sweet death it was!

Those, in the minority, who say that she did not die at all make some points that are important to know.  For, if they do not clearly show that Mary did not die, these points at least help explain why her death was so different from ours.

Death, as the Bible says, is the wages of sin.  Men die because of Original Sin.  But Mary was conceived without Original Sin.  Therefore, there is no penalty for her to suffer.  Just as labor pains are another penalty due to sin (Genesis 3:16), and Mary did not suffer those when she gave birth to Christ (see Isaiah 66:7-8 for a foreshadowing of that), this smaller group of theologians assert that Mary similarly did not die.

But Our Lord, too, was completely sinless, and yet He died.  He didn't have to die; He voluntarily died, for our salvation.

Mary did not need to die, as if obliged to pay a debt; she voluntarily died, because she wanted to share in everything her Son underwent.  The Mother is not superior to the Son. 

And she also wanted to be a Mother to us, her children.  She wanted to share in what we will all undergo, and to show us that, if we are one with her and Christ, we do not need to fear death when we die in the state of grace.

This was also the will of God, that she die.  But there would also be great differences between her death and ours, just as Christ died differently from us in some respect, and just like us in other respects.

How Our Lady Passed From this Life

The overwhelming teaching of tradition says that Our Lady moved back to Jerusalem from Ephesus, with the Apostle John.  She would visit the places where her Son had suffered His passion and death, and where He was buried, and she would weep in sorrow.  She prayed that God would let her know in advance of her death, and that she be surrounded by the Apostles when her time had come.

Gabriel appeared some time later and told her the time had come.  She, in turn, told her guardian, the Apostle John, who sent out word to the other Apostles, scattered throughout the world.  The tradition states that God brought them all, except Saint Thomas, to Jerusalem in a cloud.

With the Apostles and many believers at her side, she told them she would not leave them orphans but would always be with them and pray for them, even more boldly now before the Throne of God in heaven. 

On August 15, surrounded by the Apostles, with much prayer said among them all and many words of encouragement, Christ appeared with great splendor, accompanied by many angels.  The love between Christ and His Mother was intense; they spoke; she laid back and Christ took her soul into His own hands.  She died without pain, violence or fear.  She died in peace and in joy, knowing she was leaving this vale of tears to join her Son forever in heaven.

The painting above shows Jesus receiving the soul of Mary in the form of a child.  Mary, as it were, is born again, into eternal life!

The Church leaves alone the question whether Our Lady died of natural causes.  What is certain is that she died for love, for love of her Son whom she wanted to join in death and in resurrection.  Saint Francis de Sales says that she died because her soul was ravished with an intense love for her Son.  In a sense, she could no longer remain on earth.  Her love for Jesus beckoned her to heaven.

A sweet perfume came from her lifeless body, which suffered no decay or corruption from the time of death.  The next morning, they placed her body in a new tomb in Gethsemane, and closed it shut.

Our Death

For someone in love with Christ, death is not something to be feared morbidly.  The holy person is humble and does not presume.  The holy person is even more aware of his or her defects and asks for prayers and the sacraments.  He or she calls on the mercy of the Lord, but has confidence in that mercy!  The holy person dies with an intense desire to see God, not to evade Him, as if that were possible.

Nothing can be more sad than the death of those who fear seeing God and fear death.  Their guilty consciences sting them.  They regret so many decisions in life.  Some regret having been born at all.  Yet, many of them still cannot find it in themselves to ask God for mercy.  Many people die a sad, bitter death.

How blessed to die like Mary!  "Oh blessed in the eyes of the Lord is the death of His just ones!" (Psalm 116)  Let us follow her in life and in death.

4TH DISTINCTION

4th Distinction : Her Unique Maternity

 

Mary had a unique, and never-to-be-repeated, distinction; the unfathomable, highest dignity, of being the Mother of her own Creator!

What divine humility!  The Supreme Being, whom all the universe cannot contain, makes Himself small and lives for nine months in the womb of Mary.

The wonders of this God-child's dependence on His human mother!  She must supply Him with oxygen.  It is her liver which removes waste products from His blood. 

Our little child Jesus is enveloped in the placenta, which catches nutrients from Our Lady's blood and transports them to Him.  Besides obtaining nutrition from what Our Lady herself eats and drinks, the Lord receives nutrition from Our Lady's own body.

After His birth, He drinks from the milk of her breasts, as the painting above shows.  God, the Source of Life, drinks from the body of His own creature whom He has made His Mother!

In all this, our Lord is redeeming fallen humanity.  Not only is humanity brought back to its original innocence, it is raised to an even higher dignity, for a woman, a daughter of Adam and Eve, is made Mother of God.

She is not Mother of God in the sense that she gave Jesus His divine nature.  She is Mother of the One who was conceived in her womb; of the One who was born from her womb.  In her womb, she carried God Himself, not just the human nature of Jesus.  Otherwise, why did Elizabeth say to Mary, "But whom am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me?" (Luke 1:42)

Elizabeth, inspired by God the Holy Ghost, acknowledges that Mary is not mother just of the human Jesus, but also of Jesus who is Lord.

She carried all of Jesus, who is God made man.  He is man thanks to her maternity.

Our Mother, too

Mary never stopped being a mother.

She loved her Son forever more; following Him, suffering with Him, burying Him, reigning with Him.

Because her Son married a Bride, the Church, she became Mother of the Church.

She remains in heaven interceding for us, just as she did for the wedding party in Cana.

To paraphrase Saint Bonaventure, God could have made a more majestic and beautiful world, with more amazing landscapes, vegetation and animal life.

But God couldn't have made a more beautiful Mother.  She was to be Mother of the Perfect God-man Jesus.  She had to be, as far as a human mother of a divine Son can be, a perfect Mother.

And she is ours!