The Church Year: Mar. 8, 2012

Today is Thursday of the 2nd week of Lent. The liturgical color is violet.

 

Saints & Celebrations:

On March 8, in both the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St. John of God, religious, confessor, and founder of the Brothers Hospitallers, who died in A.D. 1550. In the Ordinary Form, it is an optional memorial, and in the Extraordinary Form, it is a Class III day.

If you’d like to learn more about St. John of God, you can click here.

For information about other saints, blesseds, and feasts celebrated today, you can click here.

 

Readings:

To see today’s readings in the Ordinary Form, you can click here.

Or you can click play to listen to them:

 

Devotional Information:

According to the Holy See’s Directory on Popular Piety:

64. The Magisterium also highlights the importance of popular piety for the faith-life of the People of God, for the conservation of the faith itself and in inspiring new efforts at evangelization.

It is impossible to overlook “those devotions practised in certain regions by the faithful with fervour and a moving purity of intention”; that authentic popular piety “in virtue of its essentially Catholic roots, is an antidote to the sects and a guarantee of fidelity to the message of salvation”; that popular piety has been a providential means of preserving the faith in situations where Christians have been deprived of pastoral care; that in areas in which evangelization has been deficient, “the people for the most part express their faith primarily through popular piety”; that popular piety is an important and indispensable “starting point in deepening the faith of the people and in bringing it to maturity.”