How God Alone is our True End (I)

[Weedy]

How God Alone is our True End (I)

CHRIST.
My son, I must be your supreme and final End, if you desire true
happiness. Fixed on Myself, your affection which too often is wrongly
inclined to yourself and creatures, will be cleansed. For whenever you
seek yourself, at once you become discouraged and desolate. Therefore,
refer all things to Me, for it is I who have given all to you.
Consider everything as springing from the supreme Good, (Ecclus.1:5)
since to Myself, as their Source, must all things return.
--Thomas à Kempis --Imitation of Christ Bk 3, Ch 9

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July 15th – Blessed Anne Marie Javouhey
(also known as Nanette)

Assistance to the “colored,” slave or free, was not high on the
Christian agenda in the early 19th century. Hence Blessed Anne Marie
Javouhey, pioneering in her international educational work among them,
was a trailblazer.

Born at Jallanges, Burgundy, France, on November 10, 1779; died Paris,
France, July 15, 1851; beatified in 1950. Anne Marie was the fifth of
ten children of a wealthy farmer, Balthazar Javouhey, and his wife,
Claudine. She grew up during the terror of the French Revolution. She
received her First Communion about a week before the Constituent
Assembly in Paris that moved to confiscate all Church property and
required that clergy swear an oath of allegiance to the secular state.
Practicing priests who refused to take the oath were considered to be
criminals; those who took it, including four of 135 bishops and about
half the priests, were excommunicated. Throughout her teen years she
became accustomed to hiding and caring for persecuted priests. She
would keep watch as they said Mass.

When peace returned and religious orders could again function, Anne
tried two orders for a while but felt that neither quite suited her.
While with the Cistercians, however, she had a dream of standing in a
room filled with “colored” children, and hearing a voice, “These are
the children God gives you. I am Teresa, and I will look after your
congregation.”

A Trappist monk confirmed her conviction that this was an invitation
to set up her own religious community. She persuaded three of her
blood–sisters to join her. They presented themselves to Pope Pius VII
when he came to France in 1805, and he praised and blessed their
project. They opened a school and quickly won admiration for their
progressive methods. In 1807 “Nanette,” her sisters and five other
postulants launched the “Congregation of St. Joseph of Cluny” to
engage in teaching and aiding the aged and ill. Soon invitations came
in to them to start other schools. One was in Paris.

During their first decade, the sisters taught only white children.
Then in 1817 they accepted a mission to run a school on the isle of
Bourbon (now Reunion), a French island east of Madagascar in the
Indian Ocean, where the population was black, south Indian, and
otherwise Asiatic. Next, Mother Anne was asked to go to Africa proper:
Senegal, Gambia, Sierra Leone. At Senegal her community started to
train black blacks for the priesthood. Their project floundered, but
she still deserves credit for innovating it. All along the line, Bl.
Anne had to deal with many problems and disappointments, but her
strong leadership did not permit her to be discouraged. Indeed, King
Louis-Philippe said of her, “Madame Javouhey is a great man!”

From Africa, the Cluniacs were called to the New World. They
established schools, hospitals and other institutions in the Lesser
Antilles and at St. Pierre and Miqueelon, south of Newfoundland. But
Mother Anne’s main efforts were expended in French Guiana, South
America. The French government invited her in 1828 to found a colony
in the Mana District, where the men earlier assigned to the same task
had failed. Good executive that she was, Mother Javouhey, after much
hard work, had the colony going after four years.

In 1834 she was called back to Man to perform a still more difficult
task. It was planned to free 600 black slaves, but the government
wanted them to be trained first in the arts of civilization, for they
were thus far uncivilized, and might, if released without civic
training, become mutinous. Bl. Anne organized these blacks into a
Catholic village. She was practically queen: “Governor,” employer, and
spiritual counselor. Local slave owners accused her of abolitionism
and even tried to kill her. But when the blacks of Man were manumitted
in 1838, they were a self-supporting community well trained in
citizenship.

By the time of her death in 1851, Mother Anne Marie had made
foundations in India and Tahiti, and had welcomed many Indian young
women into her congregation. Today her sisterhood has over 300 houses
around the world, and over 3,000 members. One third of the sisters are
native vocations.

In 1950 Pope Pius XII declared “blessed” this “good seed” of the
French Revolution: a missionary for whom the color of one’s skin was
completely beside the point.
–Father Robert F. McNamara


Saint Quote:
Would not traders go thither were gold to be found there, and can I
hesitate when there are souls to be saved instead?
--St. Francis Xavier

Bible Quote:
Therefore put away all filthiness and rank growth of wickedness and
receive with meekness the implanted word, which is able to save your
souls. [James 1: 21] RSVCE


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You have not the Time
--Sermon from the Cure de Ars--Concerning Prayer and Work

We can only find our happiness on earth in loving God, and we can only
love Him in prayer to Him. We see that Jesus Christ, to encourage us
often to have recourse to Him through prayer, promises never to refuse
us anything if we pray for it as we should. But there is no need to go
looking for elaborate and roundabout ways of showing you that we
should pray often, for you have only to open your catechism and you
will see there that the duty of every good Christian is to pray
morning and evening and often during the day--that is to say,
always....

Which of us, my dear brethren, could, without tears of compassion,
listen to those poor Christians who dare to say that they have not
time to pray? You have not the time! Poor blind creatures, which is
the more precious action: to strive to please God and to save your
soul, or to go out to feed your animals in the stable or to call your
children or your servants in order to send them out to till the earth
or to tidy up the stable? Dear God! How blind man is! .... You have
not the time! But tell me, ungrateful creatures, if God had called you
to die that night, would you have exerted yourselves? If He had sent
you three or four months of illness, would you have exerted
yourselves? Go away, you miserable creatures; you deserve to have God
abandon you in your blindness and leave you thus to perish. We find
that it is too much to give Him a few minutes to thank Him for the
graces which He is giving us at every instant! ....

You must get on with your work, you say.

That, my dear people, is where you are greatly mistaken. You have no
other work to do except to please God and to save your souls. All the
rest is not your work. If you do not do it, others will, but if you
lose your soul, who will save it?