5-7 June 2025
This year our entrance into the month of the Sacred Heart coincides with our preparation for the great feast of Pentecost. This is quite providential. St Thomas, referring to the fact that in the Old Covenant the sacrifices of the Law were consumed with fire, says that in the New Law, the material fire is replaced by the fire of love that burned in the Sacred Heart of Jesus. It is love that consumed Our Blessed Lord on the cross and allowed Him to offer Himself for the salvation of sinners. In a number of orations in the missal, we ask that the same fire that burnt in the Heart of our Lord might burn in ours as well. And what might that fire be? It is of course the Holy Spirit, who is personified Love between the Father and the Son. When we ask, then, to be filled with the fire of God’s love, we are asking to be filled with the Holy Spirit.
All the great intentions of these St Cecilia Triduum days find their solution in an abundant outpouring of the Holy Spirit. We must then take great care to prepare ourselves for the great feast by greater recollectedness, prayer and self-denial, for example, by limiting our screen time, shortening our recreations and thus opening ourselves to the heavenly influence that the Holy Spirit longs to pour into our hearts. In this way, we make ourselves more fit, or rather, less unfit, to be the recipients of His grace.
But there is another grace we need to ask the Holy Spirit for, and that is the grace of courage and boldness in proclaiming the truth. In the Acts of the Apostles, it is said a number of times that the apostles preach the word with boldness and audacity. They were not cowards and they feared no man. At the end of the day, it is the gift of fortitude that we need in order to fulfil our duties and to never fear what people might say if we speak the truth. At the end of the book of the Apocalypse, there is a list of evil people who will into the the lake of eternal fire, and at the head of the list there are the cowards and the fearful, those who are too afraid to speak the truth and act on it. Let’s make sure we beg the Holy Spirit for an abundance of the gift of fortitude, so needed today when many, even in the Church, are cowards when it comes to the truth.
Come Holy Ghost!
