Today is Thursday of the 12th week of Ordinary Time. The liturgical color is red.
Note: In some parts of the world (like England and Wales but not the United States or Canada), tomorrow is a holyday of obligation (St.s Peter and Paul, Apostles). If you live in one of those places, be sure to go to Mass either this evening or tomorrow.
In the Extraordinary Form, this is the season after Pentecost, and the liturgical color for today is violet.
Saints & Celebrations:
On June 28, in the Ordinary Form, we celebrate St. Irenaeus, bishop and martyr. It is a memorial.
In the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate the Vigil of St.s Peter and Paul, apostles. It is a vigil.
If you’d like to learn more about St. Irenaeus, you can click here.
If you’d like to learn more about the Vigil of St.s Peter and Paul, 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 Letter on Some Aspects of Christian Meditation:
28. Some physical exercises automatically produce a feeling of quiet and relaxation, pleasing sensations, perhaps even phenomena of light and of warmth, which resemble spiritual well-being. To take such feelings for the authentic consolations of the Holy Spirit would be a totally erroneous way of conceiving the spiritual life. Giving them a symbolic significance typical of the mystical experience, when the moral condition of the person concerned does not correspond to such an experience, would represent a kind of mental schizophrenia which could also lead to psychic disturbance and, at times, to moral deviations.
That does not mean that genuine practices of meditation which come from the Christian East and from the great non-Christian religions, which prove attractive to the man of today who is divided and disoriented, cannot constitute a suitable means of helping the person who prays to come before God with an interior peace, even in the midst of external pressures.
It should, however, be remembered that habitual union with God, namely that attitude of interior vigilance and appeal to the divine assistance which in the New Testament is called “continuous prayer,”34 is not necessarily interrupted when one devotes oneself also, according to the will of God, to work and to the care of one’s neighbor. “So, whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God,” the Apostle tells us (1 Cor 10:31). In fact, genuine prayer, as the great spiritual masters teach, stirs up in the person who prays an ardent charity which moves him to collaborate in the mission of the Church and to serve his brothers for the greater glory of God.35