A Devotion to St. Bernadette

Posted by Caroline Murphy on Mar 12, 2020 7:02:00 AM

Editorial Note: This post is a part of our saint devotion series, in which one of our staff or faculty members explores their relationship with a particular saint. In honor of International Women's Day, we are highlighting female saints this week.

Messages. We’re surrounded by them. Phones are ever-messaging, ever-announcing, ever-calling out to us, as is our environment, saturating our senses with advertisements, music, screens, and images. Messages consume our attention and punctuate our consciousness. Their demand for our engagement can be overwhelming; not responding to every tug at our attention becomes a psychological survival mechanism. When we do respond, we often polish and curate what we say from a safe distance. 

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Topics: communion of saints, prayer, saints, spirituality, devotions, saint devotions

A Devotion to St. Gianna Beretta Molla

Posted by Jessica Keating on Mar 11, 2020 7:30:00 AM

Editorial Note: This post is a part of our saint devotion series, in which one of our staff or faculty members explores their relationship with a particular saint. In honor of International Women's Day, we are highlighting female saints this week.

Saints are often most well known for a luminously singular event in the popular imagination—a radiant moment of faith, hope, or charity. For St. Gianna Beretta Molla this moment is surely her insistence that the life of her unborn child be protected and preserved, even at the cost of her own.

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Topics: communion of saints, prayer, saints, spirituality, devotions, saint devotions

A Devotion to St. Hildegard of Bingen

Posted by Carolyn Pirtle on Mar 10, 2020 7:03:00 AM

Editorial Note: This post is a part of our saint devotion series, in which one of our staff or faculty members explores their relationship with a particular saint. In honor of International Women's Day, we are highlighting female saints this week.

On my desk and bulletin board is a smattering of icons, statues, and a rotating collection of inspiring quotes and prayers. Amid this mish-mash are two images of a woman with whom I’ve had a strange relationship over the past 18 years: St. Hildegard of Bingen. One is a retablo by artist Lynn Garlick; the other, a woodcut by Julie Lonneman.

In the retablo, Hildegard holds a book and a feathered quill and looks up to heaven, where rays of light reach out in response to her gaze, penetrating her inquisitive mind. In the woodcut, Hildegard smiles serenely, eyes closed, as rays of light emanate from her head.

Both images speak to the active contemplation, or contemplative activity, which defined Hildegard’s life. No one who reads even a cursory biography could call her inactive: Hildegard composed music and dramas for her nuns to perform. She wrote poetry, as well as medical treatises offering remedies using plants and herbs. She traveled up and down the Rhine on a preaching tour during the latter years of her life—unheard of for a woman at that time (perhaps for our own time too). Men in power sought her counsel, including royals, clergy, even the Pope.

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Topics: communion of saints, prayer, saints, spirituality, devotions, saint devotions

Living and Handing on the Faith

The McGrath Institute Blog helps Catholics live and hand on their faith in Jesus Christ, especially in the family, home and parish, and cultivates and inspires everyday leaders to live out the fullness and richness of their faith in the simple, little ways that make up Church life.

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