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Prayer is the intimacy of being honestly human and letting God be God. In this intimacy, we gently learn to trust and open our hearts to God. The Creator and the Spirit’s love are the courage, generosity, and compassion that inspired Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection. “Not what I will...
A Portal Into Mystery The common and best-known definition of icons is, “They are windows into mystery.” In short, the result of reading and praying icons is a spiritual experience. In the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help, the “window” is plentiful redemption. Where is the entrance point for us...
The icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help is a powerful instrument of evangelization. The message of the Gospel can be found in the heritage of the Marian tradition that is reflected in the liturgical life of the Church. The Mass text for the feast of Our Mother of Perpetual...
The Rosary: A Creative Prayer of Love In his apostolic letter On the Most Holy Rosary, Pope John Paul II writes: “With the rosary, the Christian people sit at the school of Mary and are led to contemplate…the depths of [Christ’s] love.” Unfortunately, a complaint people have about praying the...
More than 100 years ago, in a tiny mountain village hidden in the Pyrenees, our Lady appeared to Bernadette, a fourteen-year-old peasant. Since then, Lourdes has become a center of Christian devotion—perhaps the greatest Christian shrine to our Lady. A journalist once asked a priest visiting Lourdes, “What is the...
Redemptorists invite Liguorian readers to join them in the preparations leading to June 27, 2016—the 150th anniversary of the celebration of our order’s charge to restore public veneration to the icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. Please help us continue the worldwide celebration that began April 26 by praying...
The Icon In 1968, while the Soviet Union gripped his part of the world, a courageous Redemptorist Ukrainian bishop named Vasyl Velychkovsky, CSsR, wrote a book titled A History of the Miraculous Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. He wrote this book for the centennial of the presentation of...
The Icon The celebration of the 150th anniversary of the veneration and restoration of the Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help began this spring, and you can be a part of it. This year is a year of preparation for the 2016 event. Redemptorists will reflect on the special...
It’s sometimes hard to measure up to the expectations we place on ourselves, let alone those of others. No day or hour goes by without our feeling the guilt of inadequacy. It seems we feel we never do enough and what we do is never done well enough. Generally the...
The Icon In May, the month of Mary, parishes hold special devotions and processions. A special procession inRome with the Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help on April 26, 1866, marked the return of that image for public veneration. During the procession, the miraculous icon of Holy Mary of...
Believe it or not, before Vatican II, it was generally believed that the Mother of God was not only exempt from original sin but also from the pangs of childbirth, fatigue, doubt, temptation, ignorance, and death. These human experiences, it was reasoned, were a consequence of sin, and Mary was...
Veneration of the icon means focusing our attention on a specific element, such as Mary’s face or her right hand, which points to the image of the Child—any aspect that communicates an exchange of energy, a divine presence. The icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help presents no written words...
The Redeemer, Mary and You September 2014 The Icon-The Journey of an Icon: Part I The Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help was entrusted to The Redemptorists in 1866; its history extends far beyond the years it has been under Redemptorist care. Although there is no written record about...
July-August 2014 When Jesus was asked where the reign of God was to be found, he simply responded that the reign of God is in our midst—in the midst of our families, our faith community, and our neighborhoods—in the midst of our world. The reign of God is especially found...
July-August 2014 The Miraculous Icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help is the official title of this famous image of Mary. An icon is called miraculous when, through the prayers, devotion, and the sincere faith of those who come to the person represented in the icon, miracles occur. Not because...
May/June 2014 Since the Second Vatican Council, the Church has reflected on the Virgin Mary’s place in the divine mystery. Recent popes have positioned Mary as one who, by her acceptance of the message of the angel at the annunciation, became the dwelling place of the Incarnate Word. The early...
May/June 2014 When the Communists were trying to take over Spain during the Spanish Civil War, an event caught the attention of many people. The Alcázar, an ancient fortress and training school for Spanish army officers, was under the command of Colonel José Moscardó. When Moscardó was ordered to surrender...
March 2014 The power of an icon lies in the sacred presence it invites us into as we pray and read the image before us. (Iconographers use the word written instead of painted because icons are considered another way of writing the gospel message. Therefore, instead of simply looking at...
March 2014 The story is often told of a father and daughter who were part of a traveling circus in Poland during World War II. During their act, the teenage daughter would jump from a high wire—without a net—and her father would catch her. One morning the father had gone...
February 2014 In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (HarperOne, 2009), Dorothy Day shares her experience with prayer. She was a single mother living on her own and lacking money, with no clue as to what to do with her life. She went to the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception...