Today is Saturday of the 7th week of Easter. The liturgical color is white.
In the Extraordinary Form, the liturgical color for today is red.
In the Extraordinary Form, it is the Vigil of Pentecost.
Saints & Celebrations:
On May 26, in both the Ordinary and the Extraordinary Form, we celebrate St. Philip Neri, priest, founder of the Oratorians, and confessor, who died in A.D. 1595. In the Ordinary Form, it is a memorial, and in the Extraordinary Form, it is a Class III day.
In the Extraordinary Form, we also celebrate St. Eleutherius, pope and martyr, who died in A.D. 192. This celebration is a commemoration.
If you’d like to learn more about St. Philip Neri, you can click here.
If you’d like to learn more about St. Eleutherius, 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:
9. If the perfection of Christian prayer cannot be evaluated using the sublimity of gnostic knowledge as a basis, neither can it be judged by referring to the experience of the divine, as Messalianism proposed.9 These false fourth century charismatics identified the grace of the Holy Spirit with the psychological experience of his presence in the soul. In opposing them, the Fathers insisted on the fact that the soul’s union with God in prayer is realized in a mysterious way, and in particular through the sacraments of the Church. Moreover, it can even be achieved through experiences of affliction or desolation. Contrary to the view of the Messalians, these are not necessarily a sign that the Spirit has abandoned a soul. Rather, as masters of spirituality have always clearly acknowledged, they may be an authentic participation in the state of abandonment experienced on the cross by Our Lord, who always remains the model and mediator of prayer.10
10. Both of these forms of error continue to be a temptation for man the sinner. They incite him to try and overcome the distance separating creature from Creator, as though there ought not to be such a distance; to consider the way of Christ on earth, by which he wishes to lead us to the Father, as something now surpassed; to bring down to the level of natural psychology what has been regarded as pure grace, considering it instead as “superior knowledge” or as “experience.”
Such erroneous forms, having reappeared in history from time to time on the fringes of the Church’s prayer, seem once more to impress many Christians, appealing to them as a kind of remedy, be it psychological or spiritual, or as a quick way of finding God.11
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