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Divine Savior Jesus Christ, Thou are the Good Shepherd who gives His life for His sheep. Oh, be in a very special way the Good Shepherd of those poor lost priests who are also appointed by Thee to be leaders of Thy people, but who have broken the oath of their holy ordination and have become unfaithful to their exalted calling. Bestow upon these poorest of the poor the very fullness of that pastoral solicitude with which Thou dost so faithfully seek the sheep that are lost! Touch their hearts with the irresistible ray of grace which emanates from Thine all-merciful love! Enlighten their minds and strengthen their wills, that they may turn away from all sin and error and come back to Thy holy altar and to Thy people. O most compassionate Savior! Remember that Thou didst once redeem the souls of Thine erring priests with Thy Precious Blood and in infinite preferential love didst impress upon them the indelible character of the priesthood. Put wholly to shame those miserable helpers of Satan who lay snares for the virtue of priests and endanger the holy ideal of the priesthood. Most graciously accept our prayers and sacrifices for poor priests who have gone astray and hear our earnest petition. Amen

St. Anthony of Padua, defender of the Holy Eucharist, obtain for us holy priests.

St. John-Mary Vianney, model of sacerdotal holiness, obtain for us holy priests.

St. Francis Xavier, patron of missionary priests, obtain for us holy priests.

St. Therese of the Child-Jesus and of the Holy Face, victim offered for the sanctification of priests, obtain for us holy priests.

Saints and Servants of God, obtain for us holy priests.

Imprimatur - Bishop John F. Null (April 18, 1948)

O Maid conceive without a stain,
O Mother bright and fair,
Come thou within our hearts to reign,
And grace shall triumph there.
Hail, Mary, ever undefiled!
Hail, Queen of purity!
O make thy children chaste and mild,
and turn their hearts to thee.

Thou art far purer than the snow,
Far brighter than the day;
Thy beauty none on earth can know,
No tongue of men can say.
O Mother of all mothers blest,
Who soothest every grief,
In thee the weary find their rest,
And anguished hearts relief.

O then for us, thy children, plead;
Thy pity we implore,
That we, from sin and sorrow freed,
May love thee more and more.
Hail, Mary, ever undefiled!
Hail, Queen of purity!
O make thy children chaste and mild,
and turn their hearts to thee.

Source: Manual of the Sodality of the Blessed Virgin Mary 1893

"Mary is the model of all Christian womanhood. Women are endowed by the Creator with fine sensibilities and a most noble love. They are meant to be the inspiration of men. If the ideal of womankind is high, if she is exalted in men's estimation, if she is loved for her virtue, then the opportunity for good that is afforded mankind is tremendously great.

Paganism degraded womanhood and robbed her of her native dignity with which the Creator had endowed her. Mary's advent into the world, bringing the Savior of mankind, changed all that. She is "our tainted nature's solitary boast." But alas, the new days of paganism are with us. This time again, the sad opportunity is afforded women to step down. A changing world in the guise of emancipation offers womankind an opportunity to lower her standards, to degrade her dignity, to debase her prerogatives for childbearing and motherhood.

The Church has through the centuries watched over and guided the noble prerogatives of womankind, not because the Church bestowed these sacred rights, but because she preserves what has been restored through our Lady and the Redemption. When woman is an ideal, man is, strictly speaking, a builder of the spirit. He builds within himself the great edifice of a spiritual character where the Holy Spirit dwells as in a temple. When woman is an ideal, men build homes, and children are received as the hope of a better world. The boy is looked up to so that he will carry on and build again as did his father, and the girl is cherished as the sweet daughter and mirror of the wife whose inward beauty grows more graceful with the passing years.

But the new paganism is threatening again! It is, of course, always in the name of emancipation women are to be freed from the very duties that make them beautiful with a lasting beauty - motherhood and sharing in creation!

Women are meant to be builders, too, in the strictest sense of the term. They are the heart of the home. It is through then that men learn to live and to love great ideals and to build character. It is through the mother, definitely closer to the child than any other living human, that young habits and fine characters are formed. Women are the cornerstone of civilization in this respect. They are the hope of the world! "The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world."

Anyone who calls himself a Christian and a follower of Christ must think often of the Mother of Our Blessed Savior who was closest to Him all through the years that led up to Calvary. Anyone who respects women must know that it was Mary's role in Christian history to place women on the high pedestal they now enjoy. Anyone who has forebodings regarding the changes in our modern world will go to Mary and fervently pray that the rights, spiritual rights, of women be preserved, that they become modern Bethlehem's in which Christ comes to dwell and not worldly inns that refuse children's birth.

None of us can live through a social revolution and come out of it unchanged ourselves. The world changing simply means that men and women of our day are changing. We must hold fast to Christian ideals, particularly the ideal of womankind as it come to us from our Savior and from His Blessed Mother. If we loose this ideal, if women degrade themselves, they are not meeting, as we would have them meet the challenge of a pagan world. They are succumbing! They are delivering themselves to the enemies of Christian civilization. They are undoing the work of Redemption. They are despising our Lady. That is unthinkable! Women are the builders of a more secure world, where men may live as brothers because they have a common Father and a Blessed Mother.

Prayer: Our Lady of the hills and the valleys, look down from your throne in heaven an intercede with God in our behalf. As we live in a vale of tears preparing for the day when we may ascend the hill of heaven, pray for us, O Mary, that we may be worthy of the promises of Christ.

Intercede with God, that we may in imitation of you, follow Jesus along the way, though it be sorrowful - via dolorosa - out to the clear blue of the day, all the way up the hill, like you, to Calvary. We are sinners, like Magdalene. Accept us into your company. Few of us are like John, the beloved disciple. None of us is like you. Teach us to love Calvary and to see the sweet wood of the cross upon which hangs the Redeemer and our hope for eternal life."

Source: Spiritual Steps to Christmas by Very Rev. Msgr. Aloysius Coogan 1953

"Our catechism teaches us that avarice is an inordinate love of the goods of this world.
 
Yes, my children, it is an ill-regulated love, a fatal love, which makes us forget the good God, prayer, the Sacraments, that we may love the goods of this world - gold and silver and lands. The avaricious man is like a pig, which seeks its food in the mud, without caring where it comes from. Stooping towards the earth, he thinks of nothing but the earth; he no longer looks towards heaven, his happiness is no longer there. The avaricious man does no good til after his death. See how greedily he gathers up wealth, how anxiously he keeps it, how afflicted he is if he loses it. In the midst of lying on a heap of corn, he is dying of hunger; he has everything, my children, and dares not touch anything; his gold is a sacred thing to him, he makes it his divinity, he adores it...

O my children! how many there are in theses days who are idolaters! How many there are who think more of making a fortune than of serving the good God! They steal, they defraud, they go to law with their neighbor; they do not even respect the laws of God. They work on Sundays and Holy Days: nothing comes amiss to their greedy and rapacious hands...

Good Christians, my children, do not think of their body, which must end in corruption; they think only of their soul, which is immortal. While they are on the earth, they occupy themselves with their soul alone. So you see how assiduous they are at the Offices of the Church, with what fervor they pray before the good God, how they sanctify the Sunday, how collected they are at holy Mass, how happy they are! The days, the months, the years are nothing to them; they pass them in loving the good God, with their eyes fixed on their eternity....

Seeing us so indifferent to our salvation, and so occupied in gathering up a little mud, would not any one say that we were never to die?

Indeed, my children, we are like people who, during the summer, should make an ample provision of gourds, of melons, for a long journey; after the winter, what would remain of it? - nothing.

In the same way, my children, what remains to the avaricious man of all his wealth when death comes upon him unawares? A poor covering, a few planks, and the despair of not being able to carry his gold always with him. Misers generally die in this sort of despair, and pay eternally to the devil for their insatiable thirst of riches.

Misers, my children, are sometimes punished even in this world.

Once St. Hilarion, followed by a great number of his disciples, going to visit the monasteries under his rule, came to the abode of an avaricious solitary. On their approach, they found watchers in all parts of the vineyard, who threw stones and clods of earth at them to prevent their touching the grapes. This miser was well punished, for he gathered that year much fewer grapes than usual, and his wine turned into vinegar.

Another solitary, named Sabbas, begged him, on the contrary, to come into his vineyard and eat the fruit. St. Hilarion blessed it, and sent into it his religious, to the number of three thousand, who all satisfied their hunger; and twenty days after, the vineyard yielded there hundred measures of wine, instead of the usual quantity of ten.

Let us follow the example of Sabbas, and be disinterested; the good God will bless us, and after having blessed us in this world, He will also reward us in the other.

Source: The Spirit of the Cure d'Ars by Abbe Monnin, p 236, 1865

8. We adore Thee, Sovereign Lord of the universe, to Whom all knees both in heaven and earthy should bend, all reverence be paid! And in order to repair the many blasphemies against thy honor, we offer up to Thee the praises and homage of the Principalities. Eternal praise and thanksgiving be to the Most Holy and Most Divine Sacrament.

O Queen of heaven and earth, hope of mankind, who adores thy Divine Son incessantly! We entreat thee, that, since we have the honor to be of the number of thy children, thou would interest thyself in our behalf and make satisfaction for us, and in our name, to our Eternal Judge, by rendering to Him the Duties which we ourselves are incapable of performing. Amen

Saint Joseph, God has appointed you patron of the Catholic Church because you were the head of the Holy Family, the starting-point of the Church. You were the father, protector, guide and support of the Holy Family. For that reason you belong in a particular way to the Church, which was the purpose of the Holy Family's existence.

I believe that the Church is the family of God on earth. Its government is represented in priestly authority which consists above all in its power over the true Body of Christ, really present in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, thus continuing Christ's life in the Church. From this power, too, comes authority over the Mystical Body of Christ, the members of the Church -- the power to teach and govern souls, to reconcile them with God, to bless them, and to pray for them.

You have a special relationship to the priesthood because you possessed a wonderful power over our Savior Himself. Your life and office were of a priestly function and are especially connected with the Blessed Sacrament. To some extent you were the means of bringing the Redeemer to us -- as it is the priest's function to bring Him to us in the Mass -- for you reared Jesus, supported, nourished, protected and sheltered Him.

You were prefigured by the patriarch Joseph, who kept supplies of wheat for his people. But how much greater than he were you! Joseph of old gave the Egyptians mere bread for their bodies. You nourished, and with the most tender care, preserved for the Church Him who is the Bread of Heaven and who gives eternal life in Holy Communion.

God has appointed you patron of the Church because the glorious title of patriarch also falls by special right to you. The patriarchs were the heads of families of the Chosen People, and theirs was the honor to prepare for the Savior's incarnation. You belonged to this line of patriarchs, for you were one of the last descendants of the family of David and one of the nearest forebears of Christ according to the flesh. As husband of Mary, the Mother of God, and as the foster-father of the Savior, you were directly connected with Christ. Your vocation was especially concerned with the Person of Jesus; your entire activity centered about Him. You are, therefore, the closing of the Old Testament and the beginning of the New, which took its rise with the Holy Family of Nazareth. Because the New Testament surpasses the Old in every respect, you are the patriarch of patriarchs , the most venerable, exalted, and amiable of all the patriarchs.

Through Mary, the Church received Christ, and therefore the Church is indebted to her. But the Church owes her debt of gratitude and veneration to you also, for you were the chosen one who enabled Christ to enter into the world according to the laws of order and fitness. It was by you that the patriarchs and the prophets and the faithful reaped the fruit of God's promise. Alone among them all, you saw with your own eyes and possessed the Redeemer promised to the rest of men.

Saint Joseph, I thank God for your privilege of being the Patron of the Church. As a token of your own gratitude to God, obtain for me the grace to live always as a worthy member of this Church, so that through it I may save my soul. Bless the priests, the religious, and the laity of the Catholic Church, that they may ever grow in God's love and faithfulness in His service. Protect the Church from the evils of our day and from the persecution of her enemies. Through your powerful intercession may the church successfully accomplish its mission in this world -- the glory of God and the salvation of souls! Amen.

Source: Saint Joseph: The Family Saint, by Fr. Lawrence Lovasik, 1956

"Pride is that accursed sin which drove the angels out of paradise, and hurled them into hell. This sin began with the world.

See, my children, we sin by pride in many ways. A person may be proud in his clothes, in his language, in his gestures, even in his manner of walking. Some persons, when they are in the streets, walk along proudly, and seem to say to the people they meet, "Look how tall, how upright I am, how well I walk!" ... Others, when they have done any good action, are never tired of talking of it; and if they fail in any thing, they are miserable, because they think people will have a bad opinion of them; ... Others are sorry to be seen with the poor, if they meet with anybody of consequence; they are always seeking the company of the rich;... if, by chance, they are noticed by the great people of the world, they boast and are vain of it. Others take pride in speaking. If they got to see rich people, they consider what they are going to say, they study fine language; and if they make a mistake of a word, they are very much vexed, because they are afraid of being laughed at. But, my children, with a humble person it is not so ... whether he is laughed at or esteemed, or praised or blamed, whether he is honored or despised, whether people pay attention to him or pass him by, it is all the same to him.
My children, there are again people who give great alms, that they may be well thought of - that will not do! These people will reap no fruit from their good works. On the contrary, their alms will turn into sins.

We put pride into every thing, like salt. We like to see that our good works are known. If our virtues are seen, we are pleased; if our faults are perceived, we are sad. I remark that in a great many people; if one says any thing to them, it disturbs them, it annoys them. The saints were not like that - they were vexed if their virtues were known, and pleased that their imperfections should be seen.

A proud person thinks everything he does is well done; he wants to domineer over all those who have to do with him; he is always right, he always thinks his own opinion better than that of others; ... that will not do! A humble and well-taught person, if he is asked his opinion, gives it at once, and then lets others speak. Whether they are right or whether they are wrong, he says nothing more.

When St. Aloysius Gonzaga was a student, he never sought to excuse himself when he was reproached with anything; he said what the thought, and troubled himself no further about what others might think: if he was wrong; he was wrong; if he was right, he said to himself, "I have certainly been wrong some other time."

My children, the saints were so completely dead to themselves, that they cared very little whether others agreed with them. People in the world say, "Oh, the saints were simpletons!" Yes, they were simpletons in worldly things; but in the things of God they were very wise. They understood nothing about worldly matters, to be sure, because they thought them of so little importance that they paid no attention to them."

Source: The Spirit of the Cure d'Ars, by Abbe Monnin. p. 98, 1865