St. Josaphat, Bishop, Martyr

St. Josaphat, a monk of the Order of St. Basil and afterwards Archbishop of Polotsk, labored for the reunion of the schismatic Greek Church with the Church of Rome. He was murdered by the schismatics in 1623.

Happy patronal feast day to St. Josaphat parish in Detroit! We miss you and all of our dear friends there very much. Seeing Dcn. and Mrs. Bloomfield especially was the second best part of our Sunday mornings (after the holy Mass, of course)! Third best was the breakfast afterwards... St. Josaphat, pray for us! and pray for the return of the Greek Churches to the One True Church of Christ.

In an almost completely unrelated vein, I stumbled across some words of the Venerable Pope Puis XII that gave me pause. It's not everyday that one encounters such prophetic wisdom. I share them with you hoping to hear some of your reflections. I have put in bold some of the phrases which resonated with my own experiences.

The words of Pius XII (then Secretary of State of Pius XI) to his friend Jean Guitton as recorded by his biographer Msgr. Roche, Pius XII Devant L’Histoire, pp. 52-53:

Imagine, dear friend, that communism be only the most visible of the means of subversion against the Church and against the tradition of divine revelation, then we will assist at the invasion of all that is spiritual, philosophy, science, law, teaching, the arts, the press, literature, the theatre and religion. I am obsessed by the confidences of the Virgin to the little Lucy of Fatima. This obstinacy of the good Lady in front of the dangers which threaten the Church is a divine warning against the suicide represented by the alteration of the faith in its liturgy, its theology, in its soul. I hear all around me innovators who want to dismantle the Holy Chapel, destroy the universal flame of the Church, throw away her ornaments, give her a remorse of her historical past. Well my dear friend, I have the conviction that the Church of Peter must assume her past or she will dig her own grave. A day will come when the civilized world will deny its God, when the Church will doubt like Peter doubted. She will be tempted to believe that man has become God, that his Son is a mere symbol, a philosophy like many others and in the churches Christians will seek in vain the red light where God waits for them, like Magdalen weeping before the empty tomb, 'Where have they taken Him?'

Pope Pius XII, a few days before he died: The day the Church abandons her universal tongue [Latin] is the day before she returns to the catacombs.