We at Catholic Business Journal wish you and your loved ones an especially blessed Holy Week and Easter Triduum during this unusual time in the world.
The quarantine forces us to reflect on how much we take for granted—shopping when and where we want, full shelves, internet, hopping in a car, freely going where and with whom we wish, including Mass and Adoration—and to remember to be grateful for the little things we take for granted every day.
How many individuals throughout history, throughout the world, and even now in the 21st century, cannot freely attend Mass, let alone Holy Week and Easter Liturgy, because they are elderly, infirm or because they live under a communist or repressive government?
How many new souls are now in Purgatory due to recent death?
Please join us in remembering each of these suffering souls as we offer up our own sacrifice of quarantine during this year’s Holy Week and Easter Triduum. – ed.
Please also consider meditating one of Saint Cardinal Newman’s beautiful, meditation-provoking sermons during this week: Sermon 7: The Cross of Christ the Measure of the World, culled from Plain and Parochial Sermons, by St. Cardinal John Henry Newman.
His conclusion at the close of this sermon:
… And so, too, as regards this world, with all its enjoyments, yet disappointments. Let us not trust it; let {93} us not give our hearts to it; let us not begin with it. Let us begin with faith; let us begin with Christ; let us begin with His Cross and the humiliation to which it leads. Let us first be drawn to Him who is lifted up, that so He may, with Himself, freely give us all things. Let us “seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness,” and then all those things of this world “will be added to us.” They alone are able truly to enjoy this world, who begin with the world unseen. They alone enjoy it, who have first abstained from it. They alone can truly feast, who have first fasted; they alone are able to use the world, who have learned not to abuse it; they alone inherit it, who take it as a shadow of the world to come, and who for that world to come relinquish it.
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