Kitchen Catechism: Words of Wisdom

Prayer is always the remedy.

“The people of God” have called upon the Archangel St. Michael - through the ages - to defend and protect them whenever they were in danger of any attack - whether warfare, pestilence, plague, persecution or other dire circumstances. “Through the ages” is so easy for me to say but in this case it really became clear when I started to do some research. I received a booklet from Lois Donahue about St. Michael. It was published in 1949 by the Benedictine Press and titled “Neath St. Michael’s Shield”.

The very first page reads:

“Lucifer has placed his stamp upon the present age. Open and secret revolt against God and his Church, the spirit of criticism, unbelief and immorality are rampant. The haughty and insolent boast of Lucifer, “I will be like the Most High!” is re-echoed today throughout the world. Puffed up with their discoveries and their progress in material science, men are loudly proclaiming their self-sufficiency and denying the existence of a Supreme Being. Governments and secret societies, plotting against God and striving to blot out from homes and schools, from offices and factories, all traces of Christianity, show plainly under whose standard they are assembled. Never before in the history of the world were the rights of God so blasphemously mocked and denied, or the rights of man so arrogantly asserted, as they are today.

(Reading this –material science and then the last sentence – right away made me think of today’s cloning)

Now, back to “through the ages” – my next research was from a book I dearly treasure, which was purchased from a garage sale several decades ago and titled “The Holy Catholic Faith” a reference Encyclopedia. It was published in 1907. I used this book because it was right at my fingertips and as many of you know I am still very much constrained by time and distance. Lois’s booklet had informed me that Pope Leo XIII had composed a prayer to St. Michael that was said after every Mass around the world until the 1960’s when Vatican II made changes to the Liturgy and this prayer was dropped. So in “The Holy Catholic Faith” I looked up Leo XIII and to my surprise the paragraph from the booklet of 1949 appears to be the very words of the Pope who died in 1903.

Here we are in the year 2002, a whole new Millennium, and the words of Pope Leo XIII still seem to apply.

What I found interesting is that St. Michael the Archangel has been found in the religions of people of many faiths since long before the coming of Christ.

Ancient Jewish scholars accorded him rulership of the Fourth Heaven. In art and literature Michael is the head of God’s mighty, invisible army. Sources have linked him with the pillar of fire and the cloud that went before the people of Israel, cutting down all who would oppose them in their journey to the Promised Land. According to Jewish tradition as well as the Book of Revelation, it is Michael who protects God’s people against ultimate destruction and to this day watches over Israel. St. Michael, too, will lead the forces of God against the Enemy in the last battle at Armageddon.

In the Muslim tradition Michael is placed in their Seventh Heaven with a body covered with saffron hairs. Each hair contains a million faces and mouths with tongues that, in a million dialects, implore the pardon of Allah upon the sins of humankind.

With Christianity – though, everything is accepted from the ‘Old Testament’, where the Archangel Michael is mentioned several times – I discovered the early Christians looked on St. Michael as a healer rather than a warrior and gave to him the care of their sick. At the place where he was first venerated, by the followers of Jesus, his prestige as angelic healer obscured his interposition in military affairs. In the earliest ages medicinal springs spouted, attributed to the intercession of St. Michael, and it is recorded that all the sick who bathed there, invoking the Blessed Trinity and St. Michael, were cured. St. Michael was the great heavenly physician but he is also associated with death. Here is a quote from the 1949 Booklet: “In her beautiful prayers in the Mass for the Dead, the Church with maternal solicitude places the souls of her departed children in the hands of St. Michael, that he may lead them into the kingdom of everlasting light.”

These early Christians - so close to the time Jesus walked the earth, some had probably even heard The Sermon on the Mount ‘live and in person’ - looked on St. Michael as a loving healer rather than a warrior. I have to think it was because Jesus preached a message of love – the great ‘Commandment of Love’ – Love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength and being and then love and respect all other people. Jesus gave no advice for advancing in material wealth or possessions. He emphasized the importance of spending time on earth gaining the rewards of eternal life and His earliest followers looked to His emissary, the great Archangel Michael, to be a compassionate healer for suffering mankind and when called from this life to guide them through the Gates of Heaven.

It has taken me a long time to write this Commentary – I’ve had constant interruptions but along with the frustrations also great consolations where I realized how good God is to me, especially when I came upon the words of two women saints I greatly admire.

St. Therese of Liseaux, The Little Flower lived an obscure life in a cloistered convent where she practiced each day what she called the ‘little way’. She died at the age of 24 in 1897, and after her death her autobiography, which she wrote under obedience to her superior, was published. It was an immediate best seller all over the Catholic world and thousands began to practice the ‘little way’ she advocated. She was canonized a saint in 1925, and in 1997, Pope JohnPaul II declared this simply-educated, unsophisticated, little nun a Doctor of the Church. Her name sits up there with the greatest, most renowned theologians the Catholic Church has ever known and she is only the third woman to receive this high honor. Following are some of her very words:

“People must not think that our ‘little way’ is a restful one, full of sweetness and consolation. It’s quite the opposite. To offer oneself as a victim to love is to offer oneself to suffering, because love lives only on sacrifice; if one is completely dedicated to loving, one must expect to be sacrificed unreservedly.“

St. Edith Stein couldn’t be more opposite from ‘The Little Flower’. She was Jewish and a highly educated, brilliant professor of philosophy in a prestiduous university in Germany. After reading the autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila, another of the three woman Doctors of the Church, as well as other influences she converted to the Catholic faith. This caused great turmoil in her life because her mother, to whom she was very devoted, was opposed to her conversion. She was baptized in 1922 and just eleven years later she made a most courageous move and entered a cloistered Carmelite convent. Here she led a life of beautiful spirituality until the rise of Hitler with his Jewish solution, and because of her race she became a victim of the Holocaust, dying in a gas chamber in 1942. Edith Stein - known as Sr. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross in the convent – was canonized a saint of the Catholic Church by Pope John Paul II in 1998. Following are some of his words at the ceremony and a quote of Edith’s:

“In our time truth is often mistaken for the opinion of the majority. In addition, there is a widespread belief that one should use the truth even against love or vice versa. But truth and love need each other. St. Teresa Benedicta is a witness to this. The ”martyr for love”, who gave her life for her friends, let no one surpass her in love. At the same time, with her whole being she sought the truth, of which she wrote: No spiritual work comes into the world without great suffering. It always challenges the whole person.“

So we’ve come ‘through the ages’ to ‘the present time’ and we find that ‘things don’t change a lot’. The Catholic Church has been and is always there for us - through adversities, trials and jubilations - spreading God’s true message: He loves us unconditionally, there is a devil and the war between good and evil is constantly being waged.

Living through 9-11 and the aftermath, has made us very aware of the battle as well as the love – people sacrificing their very lives to save others. The Church gives us the answers and the remedies – an important part of which is always prayer. For our age, the prayer to The Archangel, St. Michael seems most appropriate.

SOURCES

CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: St. Michael the Archangel
Catholic SuperSite: St. Michael's Call

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"Nothing should
frighten or grieve you.
Let not your heart be troubled. Am I, your Mother,
not here with you?"

"Nothing should
frighten or grieve you.
Let not your heart be troubled. Am I, your Mother,
not here with you?"

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