Sign-up for the St. Gianna
Novena!
Dear Friend,
St. Gianna to me is an especially inspirational saint for us to
imitate today.
As a lay person, she exemplified holiness at every level inside her
triple vocation as wife, mother and doctor. In each of those seemingly
ordinary roles, she exercised virtue to a heroic degree. Because of
this, St. Gianna is often called the “saint of the ordinary.” Even her
husband Pietro Molla affectionately said of her when he discovered his
wife’s cause for canonization was opened, “Look, I know I married a
fantastic woman. But she was so normal!”
But normal for us Catholics today, is not the “normal” of the
average person. As Catholics, you and I are faced with our own
spiritual and moral battles with temptations and the practice of
virtue. We have the obligation to always echo the true doctrines of
the Catholic Church in our daily example amid the onslaught of
relativism with which we and our families are bombarded.
As husbands and wives, fathers and mothers – leaders in the home –
in the ordinary course of our lives we must contend with spiritual
threats on our path to holiness. St. Gianna is a perfect model to help
us from Heaven to overcome these struggles. She is the
“extra-ordinary” response we need to fend off the influences of our
modern and godless culture.
In the ordinary business of our lives, let’s invoke St. Gianna who
showed us how to be in the world, but not of the world. As Our Lord
rose from the dead to life, let us resurrect in our hearts new
enthusiasm to bolster our daily resolve to practice to a heroic degree
the Beatitudes just as St. Gianna did.
For this reason, I want to invite you to pray with me a Novena to
St. Gianna to begin on Holy Saturday, April 20th and end on April
28th, her Feast Day. Since she is also a patroness for Catholic Action
for Faith and Family, we will be delving deep into the story of her
life along the path of this Novena, making the connections between
this modern saint and her heroic practice of the Beatitudes.
Please join me in this Novena of prayer to St. Gianna! When you
sign-up, you will receive a new e-mail every day with a link to the
Novena.
Sign-Up to Pray the Novena to
St. Gianna Beretta Molla April 20-28
Your friend in Jesus and Mary,
Thomas J. McKenna Founder and President Catholic
Action
Catholic Action For Faith And Family http://www.catholicaction.org/
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