To My Boys: September 3, 2020
Good morning!
If you pick up a liturgical calendar and turn to any day of the year, you will always find one saint or another whose feast day is being celebrated. More often than not, you see some obscure saint that you have never heard of before. This one is from some remote village in eastern Europe and is the patron saint of one-legged butchers and this one is from the mountains of Slovenia and is attributed the miracle of having mended a wishbone after two shepherds pulled on it hoping for their wish to come true. There is a saint for everything that ails you and another for everything that concerns you. There is a saint for rain and another one to stop it. The list goes on and on.
Today we get one of the really great ones, St. Gregory the Great. One of only a very few who carry the title “great,” he gets it because of his great influence, not only on the Church of his time but even the Church of today. He was born in 540 A.D. in Rome, the son of a senator and his saintly wife Silvia. She too is a canonized saint, by the way. St. Silvia is the patron saint of pregnant women. Early on, she dedicated her life to giving her children an extraordinary education. When they were all grown up and her husband passed away, she became a religious nun. It was this relationship, in turn, that helped guide young Gregory into religious life himself.
Gregory was elected pope in 590 A.D. and quickly went about making extraordinary reforms in the Church. He initiated a great missionary movement in England, wrote and promulgated liturgical music (Gregorian Chants are named after him), and worked particularly hard in making sure that the poor were always taken care of. It was St. Gregory who coined the title “Servant of the Servants of God” for all future popes to use. He was so highly respected and loved because of his work, he was quickly proclaimed a saint by the masses of people that gathered in Rome days after his death in 604 A.D. Since then he has had a prominent place in the history of the Church and was even declared a Doctor of the Church.
So today, when you offer your morning, afternoon, or evening prayer, take a moment and ask St. Gregory the Great to intercede for you. Ask that his greatness, always at the service of God’s holy Church, rub off on you and the holy Church of today. Keep battling like a Wolverine!
Auspice Maria
BELEN JESUIT PREPARATORY SCHOOL
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
500 SW 127th Avenue, Miami, FL 33184
phone: 305.223.8600 | fax: 305.227.2565 | email: webmaster@belenjesuit.org
Belen Jesuit Preparatory School was founded in 1854 in Havana, Cuba by Queen Isabel II of Spain. The task of educating students was assigned to the priests and brothers of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits), whose teaching tradition is synonymous with academic excellence and spiritual discipline. In 1961, the new political regime of Cuba confiscated the School property and expelled the Jesuit faculty. The School was re-established in Miami the same year, and over the next decade, continued to grow. Today, Belen Jesuit sits on a 30-acre site in western Dade County, only minutes away from downtown Miami.