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Blessed Miriam Teresa "knew and understood, she spoke and lived, the universal call to holiness."
Here is the text of the homily given by Bishop Arthur Serratelli of Paterson, New Jersey, at Saturday's beatification of Sr. Miriam Teresa Demjanovich, SC.
The beatification was the first to be held on US soil.
Sr. Miriam Teresa’s life spanned only 26 years; from her entrance into the Sisters of Charity of Convent Station on the 11 February 1925, the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes, until her death on 8 May 1927, only 28 months.
But, God does not need much time to draw us to himself, only our will to please him in all things.
Sr. Miriam once said that: “The saints did but one thing – the will of God. But they did it with all their might.”
And this Sr. Miriam Teresa herself did.
Whether absorbed in prayer, teaching in the classroom, scrubbing floors or, in obedience to her confessor, writing the spiritual conferences now known as The Greater Perfection, she was careful never to offend God and to serve him by knowing and doing his will. Filled with the knowledge of Sacred Scripture, she anticipated Vatican II’s emphasis on the Word of God as the source of authentic spirituality.
Just one month before she died, Sr. Miriam Teresa became a professed member of the Sisters of Charity of Convent Station. She was joy-filled to be a member of a community whose members, by their zeal and dedication to God and their ardent love of neighbor, make Christ’s charity real in the lives of so many.
Through their apostolates of education, health care and social work, the gospel the Church preaches continues to become deed in the lives of the needy.
In his all-wise Providence, God chose to entrust Sr. Miriam Teresa to the Sisters of Charity and to grace her with mystical visions and deep insights; to show that, only with prayer, can we, the branches, bear much fruit; to show us that union with God is the source for all we do in Jesus’ name; and even more important, to show us, as she herself once wrote, that “Union with God…is the spiritual height God calls everyone to achieve – any one, not only religious but any one, … who says ‘yes’ constantly to God…”
By God’s grace, she knew and understood, she spoke and lived, the universal call to holiness, later to be formally taught by the Second Vatican Council.
In our secularized age that shuns solicitude and silence, God is giving us, from among those who leave the world to be with Christ, a new Blessed who was, in the words spoken at her death, a living “monstrance that silently showed forth Our Lord to all that passed by.”
At a time when humankind is still capable of the noble, the loving and the compassionate and yet still responsible for the ugly, the brutal and the barbaric.
At a time when we need to rediscover the wellsprings of all goodness, God is giving us a new Blessed who recalls us to the truth that by baptism, the Most Holy Trinity dwells within our souls; a Blessed who reminds us that, when we live in such a way that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit remain within us, we find true joy in this world and the next.
Blessed Miriam Teresa, pray for us!
Read the original news story here:
Homily at 1st Beatification Ever Held in USA
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