Guardian Angels

03-10-2021, 07:06angels, care, Children, faith, watchfulPermalink

Matthew 18:1-5, 10

Today we celebrate the feast of the Guardian Angels. The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: “From its beginning until death, human life is surrounded by their watchful care and intercession. Beside each believer stands an angel as protector and shepherd leading him to life. Already here on earth the Christian life shares by faith in the blessed company of angels and persons united in God” (para. 336).

Are you comfortable with this teaching? Do you think it's a spiritual reality that is relevant to our daily lives? For sure, in our post-modern and post-Christian society, belief in angels and their opposite, demons, can be – for many – hard to accept and embrace. The Church, however, has always stood firm in its affirmation of this doctrine of faith because angels have been present since creation and throughout the history of salvation.

Therefore, when confronted with aspects of our faith that we find hard to accept, we are encouraged by Jesus to adopt the disposition of a child (Matt. 18:4). What does this mean? After all – as every parent and guardian knows – children do not always display the qualities of a saint, which is why they need their parents. And also, as is self-evident, the nature of life is to grow and mature into adulthood. When we were children, we thought and acted like children, but now as adults we think and act like adults (see 1 Cor. 13:11). Jesus, of course, is referring to a fundamental disposition in children: an openness, a trust, an innocence, which, when adopted by Christians, becomes the impulse of faith which puts all their hope and trust in God.

Greatness then, as far as the kingdom of heaven is concerned, is to do with the heart and our interior disposition. The child of faith in us can easily and readily accept that we and all believers have a guardian angel. Armed with this attitude we pray to our angel, asking for every spiritual blessing and for a pouring out of God's grace upon our lives.

'Angel of God, my guardian dear,

to whom God's love commits me here,

ever this day, be at my side,

to light and guard, rule and guide. Amen.

Chris

from Bible Alive

Baruch 4:5–12, 27-29 • Psalm 68(69):33–37 • Proper of Saints: Matthew 18:1–5, 10

St Peter's Parish, Biggleswade

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Pope Benedict's Christmas Homily

25-12-2012, 08:45Adult Education, Children, Organisation, Parish, Prayers, Sacraments, WitnessPermalink

MIDNIGHT MASS

SOLEMNITY OF THE NATIVITY OF THE LORD

HOMILY OF HIS HOLINESS BENEDICT XVI

Saint Peter's Basilica
Monday, 24 December 2012

[Video] Spoken in Italian

Dear Brothers and Sisters!
Again and again the beauty of this Gospel touches our hearts: a beauty that is the splendour of truth. Again and again it astonishes us that God makes himself a child so that we may love him, so that we may dare to love him, and as a child trustingly lets himself be taken into our arms. It is as if God were saying: I know that my glory frightens you, and that you are trying to assert yourself in the face of my grandeur. So now I am coming to you as a child, so that you can accept me and love me.
I am also repeatedly struck by the Gospel writer’s almost casual remark that there was no room for them at the inn. Inevitably the question arises, what would happen if Mary and Joseph were to knock at my door. Would there be room for them? And then it occurs to us that Saint John takes up this seemingly chance comment about the lack of room at the inn, which drove the Holy Family into the stable; he explores it more deeply and arrives at the heart of the matter when he writes: “he came to his own home, and his own people received him not” (Jn 1:11). The great moral question of our attitude towards the homeless, towards refugees and migrants, takes on a deeper dimension: do we really have room for God when he seeks to enter under our roof? Do we have time and space for him? Do we not actually turn away God himself? We begin to do so when we have no time for God. The faster we can move, the more efficient our time-saving appliances become, the less time we have. And God? The question of God never seems urgent. Our time is already completely full. But matters go deeper still. Does God actually have a place in our thinking? Our process of thinking is structured in such a way that he simply ought not to exist. Even if he seems to knock at the door of our thinking, he has to be explained away. If thinking is to be taken seriously, it must be structured in such a way that the “God hypothesis” becomes superfluous. There is no room for him. Not even in our feelings and desires is there any room for him. We want ourselves. We want what we can seize hold of, we want happiness that is within our reach, we want our plans and purposes to succeed. We are so “full” of ourselves that there is no room left for God. And that means there is no room for others either, for children, for the poor, for the stranger. By reflecting on that one simple saying about the lack of room at the inn, we have come to see how much we need to listen to Saint Paul’s exhortation: “Be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Paul speaks of renewal, the opening up of our intellect (nous), of the whole way we view the world and ourselves. The conversion that we need must truly reach into the depths of our relationship with reality. Let us ask the Lord that we may become vigilant for his presence, that we may hear how softly yet insistently he knocks at the door of our being and willing. Let us ask that we may make room for him within ourselves, that we may recognize him also in those through whom he speaks to us: children, the suffering, the abandoned, those who are excluded and the poor of this world.
There is another verse from the Christmas story on which I should like to reflect with you – the angels’ hymn of praise, which they sing out following the announcement of the new-born Saviour: “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace among men with whom he is pleased.” God is glorious. God is pure light, the radiance of truth and love. He is good. He is true goodness, goodness par excellence. The angels surrounding him begin by simply proclaiming the joy of seeing God’s glory. Their song radiates the joy that fills them. In their words, it is as if we were hearing the sounds of heaven. There is no question of attempting to understand the meaning of it all, but simply the overflowing happiness of seeing the pure splendour of God’s truth and love. We want to let this joy reach out and touch us: truth exists, pure goodness exists, pure light exists. God is good, and he is the supreme power above all powers. All this should simply make us joyful tonight, together with the angels and the shepherds.
Linked to God’s glory on high is peace on earth among men. Where God is not glorified, where he is forgotten or even denied, there is no peace either. Nowadays, though, widespread currents of thought assert the exact opposite: they say that religions, especially monotheism, are the cause of the violence and the wars in the world. If there is to be peace, humanity must first be liberated from them. Monotheism, belief in one God, is said to be arrogance, a cause of intolerance, because by its nature, with its claim to possess the sole truth, it seeks to impose itself on everyone. Now it is true that in the course of history, monotheism has served as a pretext for intolerance and violence. It is true that religion can become corrupted and hence opposed to its deepest essence, when people think they have to take God’s cause into their own hands, making God into their private property. We must be on the lookout for these distortions of the sacred. While there is no denying a certain misuse of religion in history, yet it is not true that denial of God would lead to peace. If God’s light is extinguished, man’s divine dignity is also extinguished. Then the human creature would cease to be God’s image, to which we must pay honour in every person, in the weak, in the stranger, in the poor. Then we would no longer all be brothers and sisters, children of the one Father, who belong to one another on account of that one Father. The kind of arrogant violence that then arises, the way man then despises and tramples upon man: we saw this in all its cruelty in the last century. Only if God’s light shines over man and within him, only if every single person is desired, known and loved by God is his dignity inviolable, however wretched his situation may be. On this Holy Night, God himself became man; as Isaiah prophesied, the child born here is “Emmanuel”, God with us (Is 7:14). And down the centuries, while there has been misuse of religion, it is also true that forces of reconciliation and goodness have constantly sprung up from faith in the God who became man. Into the darkness of sin and violence, this faith has shone a bright ray of peace and goodness, which continues to shine.
So Christ is our peace, and he proclaimed peace to those far away and to those near at hand (cf. Eph 2:14, 17). How could we now do other than pray to him: Yes, Lord, proclaim peace today to us too, whether we are far away or near at hand. Grant also to us today that swords may be turned into ploughshares (Is 2:4), that instead of weapons for warfare, practical aid may be given to the suffering. Enlighten those who think they have to practise violence in your name, so that they may see the senselessness of violence and learn to recognize your true face. Help us to become people “with whom you are pleased” – people according to your image and thus people of peace.
Once the angels departed, the shepherds said to one another: Let us go over to Bethlehem and see this thing that has happened for us (cf. Lk 2:15). The shepherds went with haste to Bethlehem, the Evangelist tells us (cf. 2:16). A holy curiosity impelled them to see this child in a manger, who the angel had said was the Saviour, Christ the Lord. The great joy of which the angel spoke had touched their hearts and given them wings.
Let us go over to Bethlehem, says the Church’s liturgy to us today. Trans-eamus is what the Latin Bible says: let us go “across”, daring to step beyond, to make the “transition” by which we step outside our habits of thought and habits of life, across the purely material world into the real one, across to the God who in his turn has come across to us. Let us ask the Lord to grant that we may overcome our limits, our world, to help us to encounter him, especially at the moment when he places himself into our hands and into our heart in the Holy Eucharist.
Let us go over to Bethlehem: as we say these words to one another, along with the shepherds, we should not only think of the great “crossing over” to the living God, but also of the actual town of Bethlehem and all those places where the Lord lived, ministered and suffered. Let us pray at this time for the people who live and suffer there today. Let us pray that there may be peace in that land. Let us pray that Israelis and Palestinians may be able to live their lives in the peace of the one God and in freedom. Let us also pray for the countries of the region, for Lebanon, Syria, Iraq and their neighbours: that there may be peace there, that Christians in those lands where our faith was born may be able to continue living there, that Christians and Muslims may build up their countries side by side in God’s peace.
The shepherds made haste. Holy curiosity and holy joy impelled them. In our case, it is probably not very often that we make haste for the things of God. God does not feature among the things that require haste. The things of God can wait, we think and we say. And yet he is the most important thing, ultimately the one truly important thing. Why should we not also be moved by curiosity to see more closely and to know what God has said to us? At this hour, let us ask him to touch our hearts with the holy curiosity and the holy joy of the shepherds, and thus let us go over joyfully to Bethlehem, to the Lord who today once more comes to meet us. Amen.

Anonymous

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Biggleswade Chronicle Village News

09-12-2012, 17:13Children, Fund-raising, Sacraments, SocialPermalink

St Peters Catholic Church Biggleswade. Last Sunday saw the first reading of the Church’s new year (Luke 21:25-28, 34-36);Year C in the Liturgical calendar. It was also the first Sunday of Advent. As humans our wisdom is limited in comprehending the divine mysteries. In the hearts of every man and woman bids questions about the end of their own lives and that of the end of the world. These may seem strange thoughts as we enter Advent and start to celebrate the becoming of Jesus. During the past two weeks we saw how humans were powerless against disasters of nature in our own country through heavy rains that caused floods ruining homes and taking lives. In biblical times it was thought that Jesus would return within their life time. It was in Luke’s community some decades after Christ’s crucifixion that they realized that the second coming of Jesus was not just around the corner as they had expected. From Luke’s perspective the sufferings of the present may well be a prelude to a new experience of the presence of God in the world. Perhaps Jesus is reminding us to be vigilant during this time of Advent and pray to prepare ourselves and try to live our lives as He would have done.

Christmas Bazaar (held on December 1^st ) A huge thank you to all those Parishioners who freely gave their time to make this a great success. We will be able to confirm the amount raised next week.

Catecheses- We are looking for Catecheses to run our confirmation program, if you would be interested please contact the Parish Office

First Holy Communion, forms in church porch, please complete and hand into Parish Office by 16^th December. Classes commence Sunday 13^th January 2013. Sacrament of Confirmation, if you wish to be considered please complete forms in the church porch and return to Parish Office.

Anonymous

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Notices in Biggleswade Chronicle Village News

25-11-2012, 11:14Children, Fund-raising, Organisation, Parish, Sacraments, SocialPermalink

HELP Needed for Christmas Bazaar see Chris's post below

St.Peters Church,Biggleswade.

Last Sunday’s gospel Mark 13:24-32, Jesus said to his disciples: "In those days, after the time of distress, the sun will be darkened, the moon will lose its brightness, the stars will come falling from heaven and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. And then they will see the Son of Man coming in the clouds with great power and glory;” At this time early Church Fathers believed that rather than meaning ‘their generation’ that this gospel referred to the age of Christianity and compared it to the ‘old testament’ and ‘new testament’ being different generations. Although the meaning may have changed down the ages two questions remain unanswered When will he come? And how will he come? Sceptics now refer to the worlds television cameras showing that the world is indeed passing away when we see/hear of nations brandishing nuclear weapons; others starve as society’s economies fall in times of another brandished saying ‘austerity cuts’. When there is so much that we can have little control over maybe time would be best spent concentrating on our inner strength - faith, in turn our developed relationship with God will build courage to deal with life’s’ burdens. From then we can feel reassured that when earth passes away God’s love will not. We must not be preoccupied with predictions of the day or hour that the Lord will come, these matters far less than how He will find us living on his arrival.

First Holy Communion, forms in church porch, please complete and hand into Parish Office by 16^th December. Classes commence Sunday 13^th January 2013.

Sacrament of Confirmation, if yu wish to be considered please complete forms in the church porch and return to Parish Office.

Carmel in Beds- Carmelite Prayer group next meeting Wednesday 28^th November commences at 6.30 pm. Parish Room. Everyone welcome, the aim is to further the cause of the Church by prayer and good works.

Christmas Bazaar Saturday 1st December 11-2pm, help required for setting up etc, baking, donating gifts, sell Grand Draw raffle tickets.

-Grand Draw ticket stubs need returning on 25th November

Anonymous

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04-10-2009, 12:52Children, Ministries, SacramentsPermalink

The dates are set for next year's First Holy Communion and the classes are being organised. Please see the First Communion page for more details, but the deadline for making your applications fast approaches ...

Chris

St Peter's Parish, Biggleswade

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26-10-2008, 13:01Children, Fund-raisingPermalink

Kodzo Selormey, a volunteer with the Society, was at Church today talking about the Society and its work. He emphasised that the work continued, notwithstanding its move away from the Catholic Church because of new laws governing adoption agencies. He thanked the Parish for its support over the years and asked us to continue that support: by considering adoption, providing financial donation and by praying for the Society and the children that it helps.

Chris

St Peter's Parish, Biggleswade

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