Tuesday, October 6, 1998
Tuesday October 6:
Twenty-Seventh Tuesday in Ordinary Time and
Feast of Saint Bruno, Priest, Hermit and Religious Founder andFeast of Blessed Marie Rose Durocher, Virgin and Religious Founder Green or White vestments
First Reading: Job 38: 1, 12-21; 40: 3-5
Psalms: Psalm 139: 1-3, 13-15, 24
Gospel Reading: Matthew 18: 1-5, 10
Feast of Saint Bruno, Priest, Hermit and Religious Founder
Born in 1035 in Cologne, Germany, Saint Bruno Hartenfaust became a priest and canon of the famous cathedral there, gaining great renown as an eloquent preacher. He strongly supported Pope Saint Gregory VII in his great reform, encouraging his fellow clergy members to strengthen their own morality and fight simony. Though he was appointed Bishop of Rheims, he politely declined and retired to a Cistercian monastery in 1082 where he lived practically as a hermit. He left there a few years later and traveled to Grenoble where he was given a place of solitude at Chartreuse and helped begin the Carthusian Order with its founder Robert of Molesmes. His counsel was so valuable that Blessed Pope Urban II who had studied under Bruno in Germany, called him to Rome to be the personal advisor to the supreme pontiff. However in 1092 the notorious antipope Clement III forced Bruno from Rome. He journed to Calabria in south Italy, founding a charterhouse for the Carthusian Order. Shortly before his death, in an effort to suppress the Berengarius heresy, he publicly made a profession of faith declaring the True Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity. He died in Calabria in shortly after the turn of the century in 1101.
Feast of Blessed Marie Rose Durocher, Virgin and Religious Founder
This Canadian-born holy woman Blessed Marie Rose Durocher, whose canonization is imminent, was born in Quebec City, Canada in 1811 as the tenth of eleven children into a good Catholic family. One of her brothers, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate priest, asked Marie, when she turned 18, to help at his parish where she served as a lay apostle for thirteen years. With the assistance of the Oblates, she established the first parish sodality in all of Canada. In 1843 she so impressed her Bishop that he asked her to found the Sisters of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary, patterning it on the same religious congregation in Marseilles, France where the Oblates founder Saint Eugene de Mazenod was Bishop. In keeping with the Oblate mission of ministering to the poorest and most abandoned children, Marie Rose recruited many women to join. She died a happy death in 1849 and ten years later the Sisters expanded into the United States with a mission in Oregon. Pope John Paul II beatified Marie on May 23, 1982.
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