Category: Sunday 24th July 2016

… Prayer for the Church of St. John Paul II Mother of the Church, grant that the Church may enjoy freedom and peace in fulfilling her saving mission and that to this end she may become mature with a new maturity of faith and inner unity. Help us to overcome opposition and difficulties. Help us to rediscover all the simplicity and dignity of the Christian vocation. Grant that there may be no lack of “labourers in the Lord’s vineyard”. Sanctify families. Watch over the souls of the young and the hearts of the children. Help us to overcome the great moral threats against the fundamental spheres of life and love. Obtain for us the grace to be continually renewed through all the beauty of witness given to the Cross and Resurrection of your Son. … Prayer for persecuted Christians God, through the mysterious act of Your Love You let Your Church to participate in the suffering of Your Son, please strengthen our sisters and brothers who, because who are persecuted because of their faith. Give them Your strength and perseverance so that they place their trust in You in each oppression and faithfully remain Your witnesses in suffering. Give them the joy of participation in Christ’s sacrifice and grant certainty that their names are written in the Book of Life. Give them the strength to follow Christ, who will...

COLLECT O God, protector of those who hope in you, without whom nothing has firm foundation, nothing is holy, bestow in abundance your mercy upon us and grant that, with you as our ruler and guide, we may use the good things that pass in such a way as to hold fast even now to those that ever endure. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. THE FIRST READING Genesis 18:20-32 A Reading from the Book of Genesis. In those days, the LORD said: “The outcry against Sodom and Gomorrah is so great, and their sin so grave, that I must go down and see whether or not their actions fully correspond to the cry against them that comes to me. I mean to find out.” While Abraham’s visitors walked on farther toward Sodom, the LORD remained standing before Abraham. Then Abraham drew nearer and said: “Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty? Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city; would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to make the innocent die with the guilty so that the innocent and the guilty would...

Blessed Bernard Lichtenberg was born on the 3rd of December, 1875, in Ohlau in the Prussian province of Silesia, near Breslau, where he was ordained in 1899. In 1900, he began his priestly service in Berlin. He was appointed parson of the Sacred Heart parish in the quarter of Charlottenburg in 1913, where he laid the foundation for five parishes and a monastery as a pioneer in the building of Catholic communities in the ever growing metropolis and capital of the German Empire; he also was a member of the local parliament for the German Catholics’ party, called The Centre. In 1931, the first bishop of the newly erected diocese of Berlin, the Most Reverend Dr. Christian Schreiber, made him a member of the Cathedral Chapter and, in 1932, appointed him parson of St. Hedwig’s Cathedral. He became Cathedral Provost of St. Hedwig’s in 1938. Since the excesses against the jews on the 9th of November, 1939, he held evening prayers at St. Hedwig’s – thousand meters from Hitler’s Reich chancellery – interceding publicly and emphatically for them. Having protested again in August 1941 against the euthanasia programme of the Nazi government, he was arrested in October due to the denuciation of two visitors of his evening prayers and, on the 22nd of May, 1942, already gravely ill, was sentenced to two years’ imprisonment, which he endured in Christian...