From Our January 2020 Newsletter

Our Next Gathering

We will hold our monthly gathering on Sunday, January 12th at 12:30 pm.

We will participate in ongoing formation, have some social time with our fraternal family, and then recite the Franciscan Crown Rosary and the Liturgy of the Hours.

If you are unable to fulfill your obligation to attend the monthly meeting, please call Pat Simon at 610-352-5390

“And we will be involved in the monthly meeting as an act of worship and a building of community.”

~ The Lay Franciscan Monthly Pledge

Prayer Petitions

Please contact Fran Urso at francesurs@aol.com or 215-389-5854 if  you would like to include a petition in the newsletter. A new list will be generated each month.

• CW – spiritual and emotional healing
• Dolores and Joy – Physical and financial healing
• Velvet – healing of facial paralysis from shingles
• Jim S. – New kidney healing
• FA – health and healing
• Piccone family – health and healing
• Michelle – heart health and relief from anxiety
• Andrew – needs better job
• Shieman family – health and healing
• Antoinette – Repose of her soul
• JWF – healing and emotional strength

St. Francis Inn Needs

• Men’s & Women’s Underwear (especially men’s boxer shorts) — All Sizes
• Powdered Milk
• Spray Air Freshener or Deodorizer
• Toilet Paper
• Prayers

Formation Information

For the January ongoing formation session, Brother Kip will be showing the first part of a two-part video presentation called, “The Characteristics of a Franciscan Moral Vision.” After the video, there will be Q&A time and discussion.

Food for Thought

Francis of Assisi tells us we should work to build peace but there is no peace without truth! There cannot be true peace if everyone is his own criterion, if everyone can always claim exclusively his own rights, without at the same time caring for the good of others, of everyone, on the basis of the nature that unites every human being on this earth.

~ Pope Francis

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The spirit of the Gospel is eminently that of the “open” type which gives, asking nothing in return, and spends itself for others. It is essentially hostile to the spirit of calculation, the spirit of worldly prudence and above all to the spirit of religious self-seeking and self-satisfaction. For what is the Pharisee but a spiritual bourgeois, a typically “closed” nature, a man who applies the principle of calculation and gain not to economics but to religion itself, a hoarder of merits, who reckons his accounts with heaven as though God was his banker? It is against this “closed,” self-sufficient moralist ethic that the fiercest denunciations of the Gospels are directed. Even the sinner who possesses a seed of generosity, a faculty of self-surrender, and an openess of spirit is nearer to the kingdom of heaven than the “righteous” Pharisee; for the soul that is closed to love is closed to grace.

~  Christopher Dawson, “Catholicism and the Bourgeois Mind”

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Francis sends us to the gospel, which is, at the same time, both beginning and end. But, in a certain sense, the gospel also points to Francis, who shows us how to live the gospel with simplicity of heart and integrity of faith. And we Franciscans must, live the gospel; all that we are and do must be informed by the gospel, without limiting ourselves to a “careful reading” or intellectual contemplation.

~  Emanuela De Nunzio, OFS, “Twentieth Anniversary of the Rule,” The Cord 48.3 (1998)

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We know that St. Francis read and meditated upon the Word of God until it was integrated into his very being. In body and soul, St. Francis was altered by the Gospel. His identity changed as he became conformed to the likeness of Christ. St. Francis went beyond imitation. He became one with the beloved. Francis proved that the Gospel could be lived. It was a process for him. It continues to be a process for us. It is what our Rule calls ongoing conversion. If we wish to be changed in the process, we must become one with the Lord.

~  Anne Mulqueen OFS, “Our Identity as a Secular Franciscan,” (FUN Manual)