Today is Tuesday of the 4th week of Easter. The liturgical color is white.
Saints & Celebrations:
On May 1, in both the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St. Joseph the Worker, spouse of the Blessed Virgin Mary. In the Ordinary Form, it is an optional memorial, and in the Extraordinary Form, it is a Class I day.
If you’d like to learn more about St. Joseph, 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:
Since May is a “marian month,” let us take the occasion to begin a series on devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary. According to the Holy See’s Directory on Popular Piety:
183. Popular devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary is an important and universal ecclesial phenomenon. Its expressions are multifarious and its motivation very profound, deriving as it does from the People of God’s faith in, and love for, Christ, the Redeemer of mankind, and from an awareness of the salvific mission that God entrusted to Mary of Nazareth, because of which she is mother not only of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, but also of mankind in the order of grace.
Indeed, “the faithful easily understand the vital link uniting Son and Mother. They realise that the Son is God and that she, the Mother, is also their mother. They intuit the immaculate holiness of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and in venerating her as the glorious queen of Heaven, they are absolutely certain that she who is full of mercy intercedes for them. Hence, they confidently have recourse to her patronage. The poorest of the poor feel especially close to her. They know that she, like them, was poor, and greatly suffered in meekness and patience. They can identify with her suffering at the crucifixion and death of her Son, as well as rejoice with her in his resurrection. The faithful joyfully celebrate her feasts, make pilgrimage to her sanctuary, sing hymns in her honor, and make votive offerings to her. They instinctively distrust whoever does not honor her and will not tolerate those who dishonor her.”
The Church exhorts all the faithful – sacred minister, religious and laity – to develop a personal and community devotion to the Blessed Virgin Mary through the use of approved and recommended pious exercises. Liturgical worship, notwithstanding its objective and irreplaceable importance, its exemplary efficacy and normative character, does not in fact exhaust all the expressive possibilities of the People of God for devotion to the Holy Mother of God.
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