Click here for today’s Scripture readings.
Ecclesiastes 3:1-11
Luke 9:18-22
“From their place in heaven they guide us still.” That’s what the church in her official prayers says of the apostles; I think the same can be said of all the saints as well. They’re still treasures of wisdom and knowledge.
That’s true of St. Vincent Strambi, the saintly Passionist bishop who died in 1824 and whose feast we celebrate today. He was a tireless preacher of the gospel who once wrote to one of his friends that he would die if he couldn’t preach. Give us preachers like him today!
Strambi’s strength as a preacher, according to Fabiano Giorgini, his recent Passionist biographer, was in catechizing people. He knew how to teach people simply, clearly and persuasively about their faith, and he did this in the many missions he preached in central Italy in the 18th century when religious ignorance was so widespread. On the many missions he preached with others, Vincent Strambi was always the catechist.
That’s another thing we need today in our confused times, I think. Give us good catechists today!
Vincent Strambi also had a great devotion to the Precious Blood of Jesus. His biographer points out that this devotion didn’t come from a pious book or ritual. A “motivation for Strambi’s focus on Jesus’s blood could have been the French Revolution, which spilled so much innocent blood in France and then in Europe through armed occupation and wars. The sight of that blood must have moved Strambi, just as it did his contemporaries, among them Saint Gaspare del Bufalo, and must have compelled him to ask God, through the innocent blood of Jesus, to put an end to the shedding of the blood of men by the works of other men.” (Giorgini)
Faced with the bloodshed of wars and revolutions, Strambi sought meaning and relief in Jesus Christ, who shed his blood for us. Give us the grace to see the sufferings of others as one with the sufferings of Christ!
Read more about Saint Vincent Strambi at: http://www.thepassionists.org/Vincent_Strambi.html
Fr. Victor Hoagland, CP is the Director of Passionist Press and a member of the Passionist Community in Union City, NJ.
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