A Time of Blessings
Photos by Paula Cole
Writing from Connecticut
I’m writing from my parents’ dining room table in Connecticut! Today is the first full day of my annual eight day home visit. Connecticut is greener and cooler than Oklahoma: a welcome relief. And my mother and father are flourishing, thank God.
Monsignor Arthur Calkins
Last week was extraordinarily busy and blessed at the Monastery of Our Lady of the Cenacle. Among our illustrious visitors were the Right Reverend Monsignor Arthur B. Calkins, a well-known Mariologist, who has laboured in the service of the Holy See at the Ecclesia Dei Commission in Rome for over twenty years. Monsignor Calkins celebrated Holy Mass and preached on the feast of Our Lady’s Assumption and, on the same day, addressed our Oblates, at their monthly meeting, on Marian Co-redemption and Consecration to Our Lady in the teachings of Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI. Monsignor shared fully in our life, joining his voice to ours at Holy Mass and the Hours, and enlivening our recreations.
Deacon Sean Davidson
On Thursday last, we welcomed the Reverend Deacon Sean Davidson (see photos), a fine Irishman from County Sligo, and a member of the recently founded community of the MIssionnaires du Très-Saint-Sacrement (known in English as Missionaries of the Most Holy Eucharist) of the diocese of Fréjus-Toulon in France. The Missionaries are dedicated to the promotion of perpetual Eucharistic adoration in parishes. They draw their inspiration from the Eucharistic charism of Saint Peter Julian Eymard.
A Eucharistic Evening
Deacon Sean addressed some of the Oblates and friends of our monastery last Thursday evening on Eucharistic adoration according to the teachings of Saint Peter Julian Eymard. Sean shared his own spiritual journey, his “Eucharistic” conversion, the challenges of seminary life in Ireland and Rome and, finally, his decision to join the Missionaries of the Most Holy Eucharist in southern France. He communicated to all of us something of his own ardent love for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. We began the evening with Eucharistic adoration and Vespers, and ended it with veneration of the relic of Saint Peter Julian Eymard.
Irish Connections
Together with Vultus Christi reader Ailish Melia (Keshcarrigan, Cty. Leitrim), Deacon Sean had occasion to visit, for the first time, one of Ireland’s Eucharistic holy places, the Franciscan Convent of Perpetual Adoration in Drumshanbo, County Leitrim, shortly before coming to the United States. Drumshanbo is well known to some of the Irish readers of Vultus Christi. For over 140 years, the convent bell has rung out every hour on the hour as adorers succeed one another at the prie-dieu before the Eucharistic Face of Jesus. Drumshanbo continues to be a hearth of Eucharistic adoration, spreading abroad the light and warmth of Our Divine Lord’s presence in the Sacrament of His Love.
Our Lady of Knock
We completed our novena to Our Lady of Knock for her liturgical feast on 22 August, the vigil of the Octave Day of the Assumption. The entire octave, during which we called on Our Lady of Knock every evening after Compline, was a time of abundant blessings. Thank you, Monsignor Calkins, and Deacon Sean, for allowing yourselves to be numbered among those blessings.
