dominican spirituality

 

st josef freinademetz (29 jan)

 ST. JOSEPH FREINADEMETZ , SVD ( April 15, 1852 - January 28, 1908). MIssionary to China

Feastday: January 29

Joseph was born on April 15, 1852, the fourth child of Giovanmattia and Anna Maria Freinademetz. The family eked out a living on their poor and small farm as did their neighbors. Years later, the little farm house and quiet hamlet of Oies in the Gader Valley changed when Joseph Freinademetz, SVD, was beatified in 1975 by Pope Paul VI and then canonized a saint in the Roman Catholic Church on October 5, 2003, by Pope John Paul II in Rome.

Joseph’s early years were uneventful. He helped in the farm chores, attended daily Mass at his local parish and, on the advice of the parish priest, attended a school some eleven hours walk from his home. He eventually entered the major seminary and was ordained a priest for the Brixon Diocese in 1875. His initial assignment was to be a teacher. But soon an article in the local diocesan newsletter about the new Mission House at Steyl, Holland, founded by Fr. Arnold Janssen caught his attention. Joseph went to visit the Mission House. The visit was enough to convince Joseph that this was where he could follow his vocation to be a missionary priest. He joined the fledgling group at Steyl in 1878, and barely a year later he received his mission cross along with Fr. John Baptist Anzer, SVD. He had one more brief visit to his family home to say goodbye for the last time, as he would never return to his homeland again. He was to be a missionary in China. In 1881, the Mission House had received its own mission territory, the Province of Shandong. Joseph was so devoted to his mission that, except to recover from an illness, he never left Shandong.

As so many missionaries have discovered, the foundation of their mission work is first and foremost a STRONG PERSONAL PRAYER LIFE. Joseph had promoted this amongst the clergy along with the words, “Do you imagine you can become holy without meditation, something no saint was able to do? Without meditation life is lost.” He said his daily Mass and prayed his Divine Office with the same intense dedication as he did with his missionary work. Joseph had unwavering hope and belief in the power of God and the sacraments. During such difficult times as the Boxer Rebellion in which two young Divine Word Missionaries were martyred, he remained at his mission post. Well before his death, the Chinese people and others with whom he worked recognized him as a saintly man for his humility, for his FIRM YET GENTLE approach to his work, and for his total love of his people. Toward the end of his all-too-few years, he was appointed the Provincial for the Society of the Divine Word, a post he held until his death from tuberculosis in 1908 at age 46.

He was beatified on October 19, 1975 by Pope Paul VI and canonized on October 5, 2003 with Arnold Janssen by the same pope.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/849413028449725/?hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen&multi_permalinks=4916102291780758

sto tomas de aquino (jan 28)

 https://www.facebook.com/groups/849413028449725/?hoisted_section_header_type=recently_seen&multi_permalinks=4911295512261436

ST.THOMAS AQUINAS. (1225 – March 7, 1274). wrote theSumma Theologica. He is the preeminent spokesman of the Catholic tradition of reason and of divine revelation. He is one of the great teachers of the medieval Catholic Church, honored with the titles Doctor of the Church and Angelic Doctor.

Feastday: January 28

Thomas, ay age five, was given to the Benedictine monastery at Monte Cassino in his parents’ hopes that he would choose that way of life and eventually became abbot. In 1239, he was sent to Naples to complete his studies. It was here that he was first attracted to Aristotle’s philosophy.

By 1243, Thomas abandoned his family’s plans for him and joined the Dominicans, much to his mother’s dismay. On her order, Thomas was captured by his brother and kept at home for over a year.

Once free, he went to Paris and then to Cologne, where he finished his studies with Albert the Great. He held two professorships at Paris, lived at the court of Pope Urban IV, directed the Dominican schools at Rome and Viterbo, combated adversaries of the mendicants, as well as the Averroists, and argued with some Franciscans about Aristotelianism.

His greatest contribution to the Catholic Church is his writings. The unity, harmony, and continuity of faith and reason, of revealed and natural human knowledge, pervades his writings. One might expect Thomas, as a man of the gospel, to be an ardent defender of revealed truth. But he was broad enough, deep enough, to see the whole natural order as coming from God the Creator, and to see reason as a divine gift to be highly cherished.

The Summa Theologiae, his last and, unfortunately, uncompleted work, deals with the whole of Catholic theology. He stopped work on it after celebrating Mass on December 6, 1273. When asked why he stopped writing, he replied, “I cannot go on…. All that I have written seems to me like so much straw compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me.” He died March 7, 1274.

servant of god archbishop teofilo camomot of carcar, cebu

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_RSIqlfnoDM&t=224s

https://www.archbishopcamomot.ph/biography/

https://www.archbishopcamomot.ph/blog/

https://www.archbishopcamomot.ph/camomot-papers-to-reach-vatican/

NB: his remains have recently decomposed but his clothes & the tomb remained intact without smell or odor of decay or insect infestation