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MEDITATION of the day

Glorifying God for What He Has Accomplished

This is the victory which overcomes the world, our faith (1 Jn 5:4). The beloved apostle of our Lord was not only full of confidence in the promises of his heavenly Master, but likewise endowed with the Spirit of prophecy when he announced with so much assurance the victory of Christian faith over a world fortified against its doctrines by inveterate prejudices and ready to come forward with all the means of resistance…. What the apostle foretold came to pass. The faith of Christ overcame the world. The doctrine of the Gospel enlightened mankind; the darkness and delusions of false religions faded before the resplendent light of Christianity; the Church of God rose conspicuous on their ruins and has always remained in the public profession of the same faith, in the teaching of the same doctrines, in the administration of the same sacraments, in the possession of the same ministry uninterruptedly derived from Christ and his apostles, in the offering of the same one, holy, adorable sacrifice to the Eternal Father, and in retaining its distinguishing and characteristic title of Catholic….

Some few of you, my children in Christ, are to be admitted today to that sacrament [confirmation] which was specially instituted by our Blessed Lord that through it and by it you may receive into your souls that Holy Spirit, who with his other gifts brings with him the gift of fortitude and magnanimous faith, of which the apostle speaks when he says that it overcomes the world. But though the Sacrament will be now administered only to a few, yet almost all of you have been made heretofore partakers of it. The grace then conferred on you may be stirred up and revived even in your souls this day…. Saint Paul writing to his beloved son in Jesus Christ, Timothy, whom he had ordained to the ministry of the Church, exhorts him to reanimate the grace received by the laying of his hands (2 Tm 1:6). In the same manner I now entreat you…to revive in your souls the grace of confirmation, the grace which was infused into them by the coming of the Holy Spirit.

Archbishop John Carroll

Archbishop Carroll († 1815) was a Jesuit priest and the first bishop of the United States. / Excerpts from American Jesuit Spirituality, The Maryland Tradition, 1634-1900, Robert Emmett Curran, s.j., Ed. © 1988, Paulist Press, Inc., New York/Mahwah, NJ. Used with permission. www.paulistpress.com.