Prayer to Spiritually Adopt an Unborn Child

Here we are and already it is 2014, Happy New Year!  Archbishop Sheen said, “Each new year is actually a testing and proving ground for eternity, a kind of novitiate in which we say "aye" or "nay" to our eternal destiny, a season of plenty from which we shall later on reap either wheat or weeds.”  What wonderful words to reflect upon as we enter into the New Year.  I write you today however because January is “Pro-Life month”. 

Venerable Archbishop Fulton Sheen, encouraged people to spiritually adopt an unborn child, and thereby combat the abortion mentality and general anti-life sentiment in our world today.  It is said that although the identity of the child you pray for will be unknown to you during your earthly life, there is every hope that you will be untied with that child forever in Heaven.  Archbishop Fulton Sheen wrote the following daily prayer to spiritually adopt an unborn child and we ask that you join us in prayer throughout January. 

Jesus, Mary, Joseph, I love you very much.  I beg you to spare the life of the unborn child that I have spiritually adopted who is in danger of abortion. Amen.

Sincerely Yours in Christ,

Msgr. Stanley Deptula

Executive Director

Habsburg Wedding

Archduke Rudolf Habsburg of Austria was married by Archbishop Fulton Sheen to Countess Xenia Czernichev-Besobrasov at Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church in Tuxedo Park New York on June 22, 1953.  She was killed in a car wreck 15 years later.  Over 100 guests at the wedding including Dowager Empress Zita.  This was the 2^nd imperial marriage ever in the U.S.  (1^st was Napoleon Bonaparte brother Jerome and American heiress Elizabeth Patterson)

Empress Zita and the Habsburg family both met then Msgr. Fulton Sheen on November 5, 1946 at the ordination of the first-ever Coadjutor Bishop of the Greek Catholic Exarchate of Pittsburgh (Bishop Daniel Ivancho) and Sheen gave the homily at the ordination.

Christmas - Our Lady and Sheen

The date is December twenty-fifth, but to the humble man, it is Christmas; the manger is a throne; the straw is royal plumage; the stable is a castle; and the Babe is God.  He found Wisdom because he was foolish, Power because he was weakness, and the Infinite, Immense and Eternal God, because he was little – for it is only by being little that we ever discover anything big.

He lies upon straw on earth and yet sustains the universe and reigns in Heaven; He is born in time, and yet He existed before all time; Maker of the stars under the stars; Ruler of the earth an outcast of earth; filling the world, lying in a manger.  And yet the proud man sees only a Babe.  The humble, simple souls, who are little enough to see the bigness of God in the littleness of a Babe, are therefore the only ones who will ever understand the reason of His visitation.  He came to the poor earth of ours to carry on an exchange; to say to us, as only the Good God could say: You give me your humanity, and I will give you my Divinity; you give me your time, and I will give you my eternity, you give me your weary body, and I will give you Redemption; you give me your broken heart, and I will give you Love; you give me your nothingness, and I will give you My all.

The world misses the lesson because it confuses littleness with weakness, child-likeness with childishness, and humility with an inferiority complex.  It forgets that great moral strength may be hidden in physical weakness, as Omnipotence was wrapped in swaddling bands; and that great Wisdom may be found in simple faith as the Eternal Mind was found in the form of a Babe.  There is strength – strength before which the angels trembled, strength before which the stars prostrated, and strength before which the very throne of Herod shook in fear.

Thus the birthday of the God-Man is the children’s day, in which the proud become children, and the big become little, and all find God.

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen, The Eternal Galilean

 

(ABOVE PICTURES) In 1913 sculptor and designer Joseph G. Cowell sculpted this marble statue for a side altar in the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Immaculate Conception in Peoria, IL.  Fulton Sheen was ordained, September 20, 1919 and on that day in the presence of this very same statue, Sheen promised to offer Mass to the Blessed Mother every Saturday.  The statue is currently in the ladies chapel of the Peoria Cathedral. 

“When I was baptized as an infant, my mother laid me on the altar of the Blessed Mother and consecrated me to her.  As an infant may be unconscious of a birthmark, so I was unconscious of the dedication-but the mark was always there.  When I received my first Holy Communion at the age of twelve, I made the conscious dedication of myself to Mary.  Though I cannot recall the exact words of my prayer, it was certainly to the motto which I chose for my coat of arms as bishop: Da per matrem me venire (Grant that I may come to Thee through Mary).  When I was ordained, I took a resolution to offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist every Saturday to the Blessed Mother, renewing my feeble love of her and invoking her intercession.  All this makes me very certain that when I go before the Judgment Seat of Christ, He will say to me in His Mercy: “I heard My Mother speak of you.”

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Treasure in Clay

Fulton Sheen Novena December 1-9th

Monotony of Life

“St. John tells us that if he recorded all the miracles Our Blessed Lord had worked, the world would not be large enough to contain the books thereof.  There was only one time in His life that He ever cursed a thing, and that was the day He saw the barren fig-tree which was not producing its fruit in due season, and therefore was not enjoying the thrill of monotony.  There is necessarily bound to be a thrill in working toward any goal or fixed purpose, and therein is the final reason for the romance of repetition.  There, too, is the line of division between genuine Christianity and modern paganism.  The Christian finds a thrill in repetition because he has a fixed goal; the modern pagan finds repetition monotonous because he never decided for himself the purpose of living.  Instead of passing the test, the modern mind changes the test;  instead of working toward an ideal, it changes the ideal;  it is not marvel that existence is drab, if one has never discussed the reason for existence.    How dull, for example, golf would be if there were never a green; how monotonous would be a sea voyage, if there were never a port; or a journey if there were never a destination.  Since the modern mind has never decided the goal of life, nor the purpose of living, nor the reason of existing, but like a weathercock has changed with every wind of doctrine and suggestion, it is necessarily bound to find life dull, drab, and monotonous.” 

Archbishop Fulton Sheen - Moods and Truths

The Rosary

“You have sometimes heard a radio program in which a voice spoke, while at the same time music was playing in the background.  When we say the Rosary, something like that occurs.  Our lips say the Our Father, Hail Mary, and Glory Be to the Father, but our mind, thinking about the life of our Lord, creates a soundless background symphony of thoughts.

The Rosary is psychologically one of the greatest prayers, because it draws all our scattered human energies, mind, lips, and fingertips, into a single, unifying purpose.  To those who find prayer difficult, the rhythmic movement of the fingers induces spiritual thoughts.  To those who are used to mental prayer, the spiritual gains a new dimension when it spills over into the body and comes out on the tips of the fingers.

Ours is not an age in which the heavenly therapy of prayer-by-beads is generally used.  One of the reasons why people today are so frequently worried and fearful is that they keep their minds too busy and their fingers too idle, or else tap a jerking syncopations to the noises of a nervous world.  The Rosary, by contrast, gathers together our dispersed forces and fixes our minds on holy, simple thoughts, while the fingers, too are drawn into the magnetic field of worship.  Because it focuses the whole man towards a single, uplifting purpose, the Rosary can be the greatest of all therapies for troubled modern men.  A faint suspicion of this fact has begun to penetrate into some hospitals.  Nervous and combat-fatigued patients are taught to knit or weave, to relax their nervous tension.  The disadvantage of this treatment is that it is only partial; the patient’s mind is not involved.  But in the Rosary, all faculties, mind, will, imagination, memory, desires, hopes and muscles, are directed to the Divine.”  Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (The Fifteen Mysteries)

Happy Anniversary Venerable Fulton Sheen

“On Saturday, September 20, 1919, I was ordained a priest, by the grace of God, in the cathedral at Peoria.  The stirrings which the Holy Spirit put in my soul in the early days were now fulfilled-or were they?  I was now a priest.  Yes. But is not that just half the story?  I never asked myself that question the day I was ordained.  In due time, and not in an easy way, I was to learn that a priest is also a victim.”  Venerable Servant of God Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (Treasure in Clay)

Fr. Fulton Sheen newly ordained

Today Masses were celebrated in Peoria, New York and Rome for all of the Bishops, Priests, Deacons and Seminarians enrolled in the Masses of the Sheen Foundation.  This is the homily September 20, 2013 delivered at the Cathedral Convent of the Missionaries of Charity in Peoria, IL by Msgr. Stanley Deptula, Executive Director of the Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation:

On this day in 1919 -- here in our beautiful Cathedral -- the young Fulton Sheen was ordained a priest.  I am very grateful that Julie brought from the museum Fulton Sheen’s Chalice.  It is a very great honor to use his chalice at Mass today.  It’s also I think, a very nice connection as the universal Church today celebrates the martyrdom of Fr. Andrew Kim and the seminarian Paul along with over 100 other Korean’s who gave their life in witness to Jesus Christ.  For, although Fulton Sheen was not a martyr in blood, he certainly was a man who gave his life through his priesthood as a witness to Jesus Christ, and it was a witness and ministry he exercised throughout the world. 

Fulton Sheen loved being a priest.  He often reflected there was never a time in his life he did not want to be a priest.  He loved priests. Especially in those last few years of his life when he was so physically ill he really gave himself to the ministry of preaching to priests, preaching to seminarians.  He believed that one of the keys for the renewal of the modern church was first the spiritual renewal of the Church's priests.

I think here at the Cathedral parish, maybe especially with the work you sisters do with our Cathedral families, the focus upon meditation today could be really that first seedbed -- that first seminary -- for Fulton Sheen which was his family.  His family moved here when he was a very young boy, it was here in our Cathedral parish that as a young man this community, his family,  fostered his vocation,  taught him how to pray, and helped him to fall in love with our Lord in the Eucharist and with our Lord’s Blessed Mother.  Here at the Cathedral parish on this special anniversary let us pray for our families. Let us pray for our young men, that God may raise up in our own generation another faithful, holy, heroic priest that will give his life as a witness to the Gospel.  

Msgr. Deptula holds up Archbishop Fulton Sheen's Chalice at Mass

Archbishop Fulton Sheen's holy card in remembrance of his first Solemn High Mass offered on September 21, 1919 at St. Mary's Cathedral in Peoria, Illinois.