Messenger (Volume 50) (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: BLESSED MADELEINE-SOPHIE BARAT. When at Vespers, on May 24, the Sovereign Pontiff knelt in the basilica of St. Peter's to venerate the Blessed Madeleine Louise Sophie Barat, he closed solemnly the long and laborious scrutiny into her life, work, writings and virtues, which was begun unofficially soon after her death, and carried on officially for the last thirty years. The Decree pronouncing her Blessed, which was read solemnly after the Gospel of the Mass in the morning in the same basilica, has already been made to resound throughout the world. The newly beatified Virgin has been praised, venerated and invoked in chapel and oratory, in many tongues, by multitudes of clients of every people of the earth. At the Mass celebrated on the day of her beatification, she is saluted with the refrain from the Psalm: " Thou hast loved justice and hated iniquity: wherefore the Lord, thy God, hath anointed thee with the oil of gladness above thy fellows " . . . with thy comeliness and beauty, set out, proceed prosperously and reign." And in the Epistle we are reminded: " For not he who commendeth himself is approved, but he whom God com- mendeth." We are, therefore, permitted and invited to venerate this woman clad about with strength and beauty, and to repeat her praise. The invitation is all the more agreeable because there is so much to praise, although during her life she endeavored to conceal it, and since her death her daughters, true to her spirit, have guarded jealously the wonderful things they knew about her until the Church should have proclaimed her Blessed. The beatification of Mother Barat, as she will always be known, happening as it does at this precise moment, is not without a deep spiritual and political significance. Although the process has not been hastened in order...