“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
— C.S. Lewis

September Meeting

Date: Thursday, September 13

Time: 7:30 pm

Location: Archdiocese Vocations Office (map)

Topic: Mary, Our Mother

Speaker: Sister Mary Joseph, DCJ

Please join us for our first meeting of the new academic year!! Come meet other college-aged and young adult women and hear Sister's wonderful talk!

Questions? Email us at: sttheresesociety@gmail.com!

Prudence is the cause of the other virtues’ being virtues at all. For example, there may be a kind of instinctive governance of instinctual cravings; but only prudence transforms this instinctive governance into the “virtue” of temperance. Virtue is a “perfected ability” of man as a spiritual person; and justice, fortitude, and temperance, as “abilities” of the whole man, achieve their “perfection” only when they are founded upon prudence, that is to say upon the perfected ability to make right decisions. Only by means of this perfected ability to make good choices are instinctive inclinations toward goodness exalted into the spiritual core of man’s decisions, from which truly human acts arise.
--Joseph Pieper

Memorial of the Martyrdom of John the Baptist

Through his birth, preaching and baptizing, St. John bore witness to the coming birth, preaching and baptism of Christ, and by his own suffering he showed that Christ also would suffer. Such was the quality and strength of the man who accepted the end of this present life by shedding his blood after the long imprisonment. He preached the freedom of heavenly peace, yet was thrown into irons by ungodly men. He was locked away in the darkness of prison, though he came bearing witness to the Light of life and deserved to be called a bright and shining lamp by that Light itself, which is Christ. To endure temporal agonies for the sake of the truth was not a heavy burden for such men as John; rather it was easily borne and even desirable, for he knew eternal joy would be his reward. Since death was ever near at hand, such men considered it a blessing to embrace it and thus gain the reward of eternal life by acknowledging Christ's name. Hence the apostle Paul rightly says: "You have been granted the privilege not only to believe in Christ but also to suffer for his sake." He tells us why it is Christ's gift that his chosen ones should suffer for him: "The sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed in us."
--St. Bede

Memorial of St. Augustine

“This love is the gift of the Lord who said: As I have loved you, you also must love one another. His object in loving us, then, was to enable us to love each other. By loving us himself, our mighty head has linked us all together as members of his own body, bound to one another by the tender bond of love.”
--St. Augustine

Memorial of St. Monica

The apostle writes: “With patient endurance we run the race of faith set before us.” For what has more power than virtue? What more firmness or strength than patient endurance? Endurance, that is, for God’s sake. This is the queen of virtues, the foundation of virtue, a haven of tranquility. It is peace in time of war, calm in rough waters, safety amidst treachery and danger.
--St. Nilus of Ancyra

Feast of St. Bartholomew

Above all I would wish that you should be animated by the pure love of Jesus Christ, and the desire of his honor, and of the salvation of the souls that he has redeemed.
--St. Ignatius of Loyola

The coming of Christ confounded earthly powers because God did not come to engage in a power struggle. God is the maker of space over which Caesar governs and the maker of time in which history is acted out. He owns space and time, and came to liberate space and time, and came to liberate space and time from the powerbrokers of the world. True power is the ability to let go, to open your hands and say, “I will not cling to anything,” like Christ Jesus who did not cling to his equality with God. From a human perspective his abandonment of power was folly, but this was the only way to evade the forces of worldly powers. When Christ reigns in our hearts, the plans of earthly powers are confounded. Let them render what they will to Caesar; we are God’s to be rendered only unto God.
--Fr. Albert Paretsky, OP

Queenship of Mary

How extensive is Mary's domain? Pope Pius XII tells us: "And her kingdom is as vast as that of her Son and God, since nothing is excluded from her dominion." Mary rules over the earth: all graces are distributed through her hands. No request that she makes of ha Son, the King, is ever refused. She rules over Purgatory: she prompts the faithful on earth to pray for them. She herself applies to them the fruits of the Redemption earned by both Jesus and herself in co-operation. Her Queenship extends even to Hell. The demons are powerless against her. It is especially humiliating for the devil to be beaten by her, for, although he must rightly expect to suffer defeat at the hands of God Himself, it is galling that a mere creature should also foil him so thoroughly. Finally, her Queenship extends to Heaven itself. All who enjoy Heaven do so by virtue of the graces earned by Jesus and Mary in co-operation, as we have seen. Even the just of the Old Law were saved only in anticipation of the merits of Calvary, in which she co-operated. She also contributes to the accidental blessedness of those in Heaven. For though the essential joy there is the direct vision of God, there is accidental happiness also from the presence of the angels and saints, whose Queen is Mary. Hence we may say that Mary is Queen of all things, without limit to her domain, in the strict sense of the word. Let us thank God for giving us a Queen who is par excellence the "Mother of Mercy."
--Fr. William Most

Memorial of St. Pius X

“Knowledge of ourselves gives birth to profound humility.”
–St. Catherine of Siena

Memorial of St. Bernard

Every day for some moments…close your eyes to the things of sense and your ears to the noises of the world, in order to enter into yourself. There, in the sanctity of your baptized soul, the temple of the Holy Spirit, say: “O Holy Spirit, beloved of my soul, I adore you. Enlighten me, guide me, strengthen me, console me…Let me know your will.” If you do this, your life will flow serenely, even in the midst of trials. This submission to the Holy Spirit is the secret of sanctity.
--Desire Cardinal Mercier

Love is very much like the sunlight that bathes the tress of the forest, which in their turn sink into the earth and centuries later are dug up as coal. When they burn, they return again their debt of light from the sun. So the human heart, after burying love within, later on returns that love to the God from whom it came.
--Archbishop Fulton Sheen

"If hope does not flourish within us, sooner or later the certainty that justice, truth, love & goodness prevail fades and we remain unfulfilled. Life is marred by an absence of hope, and when this occurs, bitterness prevails, leaving divisions, a sense of defeat, and feelings of jealousy and rivalry. However, experience has shown me that hope is indeed possible. This is truly the greatest gift that God concedes to humanity. It is the crowning glory of all other gifts, and the expression of their ultimate and reasonable fulfillment."
--Monsignor Massimo Camisasca

Solemnity of the Assumption of Mary

We believe that the Mother is where the Son is, for the Son of God. The ties between Mother and Son, how close are they, how tender, how holy, even in the order of nature! What must these ties have been when grace joined hands with nature to weave them! And would this Son who loved his Mother as never son loved mother before or since suffer her virginal body to moulder in the tomb? It were almost impiety to think so. Others he raised from the grave, some to a mortal life, some to immortality; much more would he deliver his own Mother from the bonds of death.
--Fr. Charles Callahan, OP & Fr. John McHugh, OP

Feast of the Transfiguration

When He tells us that Jesus is His beloved Son, the Father reveals to us His life; and when we believe in this revelation, we participate in the knowledge of God himself. The Father knows the Son in endless glory; as for us, we know him in the shadows of faith whilst awaiting the light of eternity. The Father declares the Babe of Bethlehem, the Youth of Nazareth, the Preacher of Judea, the Victim of Calvary is his Son, his well-beloved Son; our faith is to believe this. It is an excellent thing in the spiritual life to have this testimony of the Father ever present, as it were, before the eyes of the heart. Nothing upholds our faith so powerfully.
--Blessed Columba Marmion