Blessed Elisabetta Sanna, member of the Union of Catholic Apostolate.

The Rite of Beatification of Elisabetta Sanna took place in the home parish of Elisabetta in the Basilica of the Most Holy Trinity, in Saccargia, Codrongianus, Sardinia, on Saturday 17 September. The Principal Celebrant at the out-door concelebrated Mass was Cardinal Angelo Amato, Prefect of the Congregation for the Causes of the Saints. Cardinal Amato was accompanied by the Archbishop of Sassari, other Bishops from Sardinia, Mgr Julio Ende Akamine, SAC, a Pallottine Bishop from Sao Paulo, and a very large number of priests. The Pallottine Family was well represented with almost 60 priests, brothers and seminarians from around the world, this number included Frs. John Kelly, Derry Murphy and Rory Hanly, General Secretary of the Union of Catholic Apostolate;  and with Sr. Ivete Garlet, CSAC, General Superior of the Pallottine Sisters and the General Council; Sr. Izabela Swierad, SAC, General Superior of the Pallottine Missionary Sisters, and the General Council; Sr. Adalgisa Cammarata, of the Eucharistic Sisters of St. Vincent Pallotti and by many Pallottine Sisters of both Congregations; Ms. Donatella Acerbi, President of the UAC was there and was accompanied by members of the Quinta Dimensione Community of which she is a member, and there were lay members of the Union of Catholic Apostolate from Italy, Brazil, Australia and Poland and friends of the Pallottine Family present. It all it is estimated that almost 6,000 persons took part in the open-air Mass of Beatification.

In order to be a candidate for Beatification it is necessary to have a miracle attributed to the person in consideration; a miracle attributed to the intercession of Elisabetta Sanna occurred on 18 May 2008 in Niteroi, Brazil. A 31 year old woman, Suzana, had surgery to remove a cancerous tumour from her forearm in 2003, following the surgery the muscles in her forearm and right hand atrophied and she lost all mobility in the forearm and hand. Suzana frequented a Pallottine parish in Niteroi, close to Rio de Janeiro, and in 2007 she heard of Elisabetta Sanna and because Elisabetta also had suffered a disability in her arms she began to pray to her daily. On 18 May 2008 in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in the parish church in Niteroi, while praying, Suzana rested her right arm on the altar and after a while felt a tingling in the arm and gradually, over the course of an hour, recovered full use of the hand and arm. This healing was certified by a doctor on 4 June and further medical inspections confirmed this; the Holy See subsequently certified the miraculous nature of the healing through the intercession of Elisabetta Sanna. Suzana was present at the Beatification and it was a special joy to speak with her and listen to her recount the experience of a miraculous healing.  

Derry Murphy, SAC.

First Consecration Mass of Michael Muhia, George Kamina, Faustin Morumbe, Gonzaga Mutaawe. The Mass was celebrated by Provincial Delegate Fr. Reginald Temu SAC

In the early 1960’s things were hard economically and my mother never tired of reminding us that “money doesn’t grow on trees” and that it was hard to “make ends meet.” So she was understandably furious when my older sister Maura, who was about 8 years old,  lost the thrupenny piece on the way to the shop to get something for the tea. I was with Maura when she decided to throw the money in the air to see if she could catch it. She didn’t and it got lost in the grass. It was a dark winter’s evening. The searching was intense. And it was in vain. The value of it in today’s buying power would be about €15 and it must have been near the end of the week and there was no more money. It was a very frustrating reality when you  had children to feed.

My mother, like all of us, used to stress  from time to time over the loss of hard earned material things and then came the day when she lost her daughter. Maura didn’t wake up one morning and all of our experience of loss reached an altogether different level.

Loss is such a significant part of life. The loss of money, precious material things, loss of a job, loss of relationships, loss of our own good name, loss of self-esteem or we lose our way in life. The list goes on. Sometimes what is lost is regained, like the lost sheep or the lost coin in the gospel. And often what’s lost is gone forever.

An area of loss that we are often not alert to is the spiritual loss that is so prevalent now and we don’t seem to know that it’s happening at all. Jesus asks, “what does it profit a person to  gain the whole world and lose one’s very soul?”

The loss of soul and spirit happens when we let go of God – like a little child letting go of his mother’s hand in a crowded place, ending up lost until he is found. Children cannot find themselves. They need to be found.

We similarly let go of the hand of God when we stop praying, stop believing, give up receiving Christ in the Eucharist, the mercy of God in confession; when we lose sight of the values that Christ has given us – especially the value and sacredness of every single human life.

We are a society that has become lazy and indifferent to the lives of others, the hidden, silent, insignificant lives. We respond very generously when the plight of another is put dramatically before us but we allow the powers of the world to tell us that some lives are of less value than others, have less a right to life than others. When we allow this to happen then we have lost our way and become seriously disconnected from God.

The Italian culture has long been very family and person centered, this in large part being due to the prominent place given to God in their lives. The same has been true of our own Irish culture, where faith in God expressed itself in a welcome for the stranger. But things in Italy have changed, things in ireland have changed. The human person, especially the poor stranger is often disregarded and perhaps God also is being disregarded in our modern cultures.

Rome is full of beggars who have discovered that, in order to attract the sympathy of the rich, it’s necessary to have a dog by your side. I saw this one day outside our church of San Silvestro. The beggar man and his dog were sitting there against the wall. Two well-to-do elderly ladies came along, went over to the dog, were effusive in their admiration of it, put money in the bowl but they completely ignored the man. There’s something seriously wrong here  when it is the animal and not the person that arouses our sympathy.

Today God reveals himself as the God who searches for the lost – He is the woman searching for the coin, the farmer searching for the sheep, the mother searching for her lost daughter, the father for his lost son.

Whether we are lost in a personal way, or lost as a society, the certainty of the Gospel is that God is out there looking for us. Jesus is the one who pleads on our behalf, bleeds on our behalf. And God’s mercy is that He should find us and bring us back to the place where we belong, to the fullness of joy in His presence and in the presence of each other.

God’s mercy is that we should not be defined by our loss but by our being found. As church we are given the Godly task of seeking and finding every single lost person in the world in whatever way they are lost,  the sacred duty of finding and bringing home.

https://huruma55.wordpress.com/2016/09/10/loss-the-need-to-be-found/

On September 8, 206 Norbert Mukabwa SAC and Stephen Lwebuga SAC made their Perpetual Consecration as Pallottines. The ceremony took place in the church of Our Lady of Sorrows, Galapo, Tanzania with Fr. John Onna SAC as the mai
n celebrant. Norbert, from Kenya, will spend his pastoral year in Makiungu and Stephen, from Uganda, will spend his pastoral year in Dagoreti Market, Nairobi.

We wish them every blessing and happiness in their personal lives and ministry, thanking them for giving themselves so generously  to God and His People.

May Our Lady Queen of Apostles, Mother of Divine Love and St. Vincent Pallotti be their constant companions and guides.

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My novice master is someone I love and respect greatly. He is growing old now, his health is in decline and in conversation a few months ago and he asked me, “Do you think we are in the end times?” I said, “I don’t know.” And he said, “I wouldn’t mind if we were. I wouldn’t mind dying.” To which I replied, “I wouldn’t mind dying either if I were in the state of grace.” “You are never to assess yourself” was his clear response.

I found that to be a great word of encouragement and wisdom because so often we can feel that we are actually unfit for the kingdom of heaven, that sometimes when the struggle is too great and we feel that we will never be ready. To know that we are not to assess or judge ourselves on the journey to eternal life is a blessing and a consolation. Perhaps it is similar to the way in which a doctor is not the best person to diagnose his own illness.

What we are called to do is to strive. The word that Jesus uses in the gospel is “strive to enter through the narrow door” (Luke 13:22-30).  And the narrow door is the door of God’s discipline that is spoken of in the Letter to the Hebrews (12:5-7, 11-13); that discipline that trains us for eternal life; that discipline that turns us into clean vessels in the temple of the Lord that we read about in the Prophet Isaiah (66:18-21). Ultimately you and I are called to this – to be vessels that are worthy to hold the mystery of Jesus.

I look at the chalice on the table near the altar, the chalice that waits to be filled with the wine that will become the blood of Christ and I think of the little drop of water that the priest drops into the wine. We are that drop of water – “by the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity”.

We are the drop of water, mingled with Christ and we are also the vessel, the chalice lifted up in the consecration that contains the mystery of the precious blood of Jesus, a mystery that we carry into the lives of other people.

When we think about the discipline of the Lord we need to be careful not to see it as something that is harsh. It is never designed to hurt and it is always designed to prepare, just like the discipline of the athlete is a preparation to participate in the Olympic games. It is a demanding discipline, a worthwhile discipline and we should expect nothing less from our spiritual preparation of the Kingdom of God in this world and in the next.

My mind goes back to an experience I had with my brother and his little daughter when she was about three years old. We came out from a restaurant into the car park and Dad told her to be careful because of the cars. But she did what little children will do – she ran like a hare. It’s amazing the speed of a little child! So we ran, calling her back. But the more we ran and called, the faster and further she went in the direction of the busy main road.

Her Dad had no option but to stop and he roared her name, an unmerciful roar that stopped her in her tracks and caused her to burst into tears. And what struck me was that this was the roar of love, the roar of protection, a roar of discipline designed to save a child from danger and it was the only option in that moment.

Inconsolable back in the car she said, “Daddy you shouted!” There was surprise and hurt in her voice. Daddy was hardly able to speak so I said to her, “do you know why Daddy shouted?” “Why?” she asked.

And I explained, “he shouted because he loves you and he was frightened for you when you ran near the road with all the cars that could have hurt you.”

There are times when we are like children running amok in directions of our own choosing, going towards destinations, experiences that are dangerous for our eternal spiritual wellbeing – times like these when God in His love has to roar at us in some way to stop us in our tracks to prevent us going to our own destruction, so that He can lead us to the place of safety. That He can purify us as the gold of the chalice is purified in fire, that we might know how much more precious than gold we are and that the fire by which we are made to shine is the fire of His most precious love.