3 2us - Totus2us

Fr Anthony Meredith SJ: "St Athanasius wrote 3 books against the Arians, in which he dealt with the passages in Scripture which they had used in order to prove that Christ was not indeed truly God. So his great contribution to the history of the Church is his affirmation and strong defence of the full divinity of Christ, a truth which we affirm regularly in the Creed: "God from God, light from light, very God from very God, begotten not made, consubstantial with the Father." This is thoroughly Athanasiun. We owe it a good deal to Athanasius, who was present at the Council of Nicaea in 325, the first ecumenical council at which this truth was confirmed." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Mgr Keith Barltrop: "This Sunday is traditionally observed throughout the Church as Vocation Sunday. It's a day when we should all be down on our knees, begging the Holy Spirit to give us light. 'Lord, help me to see beneath the surface of my own life, help me to see what you are saying in my life, help me to see what you are calling me to.' ... The Holy Spirit is a real light who shines on us and gives us surprising insight into the meaning of our lives and what we're capable of. And that's the second great gift of the Holy Spirit: He gives us power. ... We're created with a capacity for God, to love God, to know God, to be united with God and to share God to others; but on own we will fail to bring that capacity to its fulfilment. But if, through experiencing our own weakness, we turn to the Holy Spirit every day and say to Him: 'Give me your light; show me what I should do today. Give me your power.' These 2 gifts go together, because if the Holy Spirit gives us light and says to us 'You are capable of giv

Fr Tony Nye SJ: "This Sunday is about a special call: vocation to the priesthood and the religious life, a special way of following the Good Shepherd. Of course there are other vocations too: the important one of marriage and many ways of serving in the Church as lay people. Those special vocations to the priesthood and religious life are supported and formed from the general vocation of lay people in the Church. We need each other. Pope Benedict's message for this day calls on that support: 'All vocations' he says, 'are a gift of God's love. In every age the source of the divine call is found in the initiative of the divine love of God, who reveals himself fully in Jesus Christ.' Vocation, call, does not come from us or our personal preferences but from God's love. The secret is to respond to that love, fully understanding and freely willing it." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Michael Krychiwskyj: "The essential point is not the number and kind of our sins but the presence of true contrition, the willingness to change. Confession enables us to experience for ourselves what the Church sings in the exultet 'Oh happy fault! Oh necessary sin of Adam which gained for us so great a redeemer.' Jesus knows how to make all of our faults, once they've been repented, into happy faults, no longer remembered for the guilt or the shame that they engendered but for the experience of divine mercy which they occasioned. The way to experience profoundly the joy of Easter is through the door of the confessional." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Anthony Meredith SH: "This is something very important for St Anselm: faith in search of understanding. So it's not simply enough to affirm your creedal beliefs but you must try to understand them also. He is very strong and insistent upon: the importance of seeking understanding of what you believe. So in the work, the Proslogyon, how and why God is both seen and not seen by those who seek him, So you have to raise up your mind and heart to God, which in some ways is a very good definition of prayer. In chapter 14 of the Proslogyion he says, 'O my soul, have you found what you were looking for? I was seeking God and I've found that He is above all things and that than which nothing greater can be thought, I have found Him to be life and light, wisdom and goodness, eternal blessedness and the bliss of eternity, existing everywhere and at all times." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr David Barnes: "Today we begin Passiontide, we begin our final preparation to celebrate the paschal mystery, which is the crown of Christ's saving work, saving us because it saves us from our destructiveness, sets us free from destructiveness of sin which has the consequence of death. And in the paschal mystery, the great Easter mystery, Christ overcomes that power of destructiveness, that power of sin the consequence of which is death. Yes, it's hard to understand and yet our Lord in the Gospel gives us an image to help us, it's an image of a seed of the wheat grain and he says: 'I tell you most solemnly unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies it remains a single grain but if it dies it yields a rich harvest.' That image of the seed helps us understand the paschal mystery: the passion, death and resurrection of the Lord. It's God's way of showing us His power and His love for us. It's the way in which God makes Himself known above every other way." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (Al

Fr Stephen Wang: "And finally, as Jesus falls under the weight of the cross, he catches the eye of his Blessed Mother, and Mel Gibson the director has him whisper to her, 'Behold, I make all things new.' It's a clever image. It shows us how Jesus is renewing all creation and renews the life of each one of us, through his faithfulness and love, calling us to do the same. So, yes, The Passion of the Christ is a violent film, and the Holy Week that approaches us soon is a dark time. But God loved the world so much that He sent His Son to be with us in this darkness, to carry it for our sake and to show that even there love is possible, the love of God. So the seed of eternal life that we've heard about in this Gospel today is planted in the soil of the Passion." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Pat Browne: "When Patrck was alone on those hillsides, Slemish it was in County Armagh, he had noone to turn to for help but God. Patrick found God in his loneliness there. In fact Patrick needed those 6 years to mature, because at the end of the them he had become what we might call a holy man. He eventually escaped and found his way back to Wales. He became a priest and then a bishop. He writes in his Confessions: 'After I had come to Ireland, I daily used to feed cattle, and I prayed frequently during the day. The love of God and the fear of Him increased more and more, and faith became stronger and the spirit was stirred, so that in 1 day I said about 100 prayers and in the night nearly the same. So that I used even to remain in the woods and in the mountains; before daylight I used to rise to prayer through snow, frost and rain, and I felt no harm, nor was there any slothfulness in me as I now perceive because the spirit was then fervent within me." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yo

Fr Francis Selman: "At his transfiguration, Christ's face shone like the sun and his clothes were brighter than light. In his apostolic exhortation for the Jubilee Year 2000, Blessed John Paul encouraged us to behold and contemplate the face of Christ. The transfiguration especially calls us to direct our looks to the face of Christ. St Paul tells us that God who said light will shine out of darkness has shone into our hearts to enlighten us with the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Emmanuel Mansford CFR: "He had hoped, maybe even half expected, to be healed because he'd heard about Jesus, he'd heard that he'd done this before, but not this. 'Your sins are forgiven.' My sins are forgiven? He must have thought. All of them? Gone, just like that? It was a scandal to everyone around. Never mind, they thought to themselves, if he heals him, but only God can forgive sins. But to prove that Jesus could forgive sins, he heals him and the man walks home, cleansed and healed, washed clean and set free, no longer paralysed physically or spiritually. The amazing scandal of God's mercy, so simple and straightforward, these words 'Your sins are forgiven', anticipating the power of the Cross, his blood shed for you and for me, washing our sins away when we come to him in repentance." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr John Edwards: "Two major external events in his life; one was St Margaret Mary Alacoque. Now she was the mystic, suffering, most loving and devoted apostle of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to whom Our Lord gave the major revelations of the Sacred Heart. Claude it was who was for some time her director. A second major event was that for some years he was sent to England as the chaplain to the virtuous and delightful Mary of Modena, who was the wife of the Duke of York, who subsequently became James II, and he was there in the time of the Titus Oats plot against the Catholics, and was imprisoned for a while before being banished." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Mgr Leo Maasburg: "Sickness and suffering are a big puzzle to human beings. We're all created for health - health is the normal state of man. But sickness and suffering are a reality of our life, nobody can avoid it completely, it will hit everybody at a certain moment in their life. Since we believe that for God there is no trash, everything he has permitted he can use for a good end, the secret of suffering and of sickness reveals a big mystery, a mystery of God's greatness. I believe this was the reason of Our Lady's appearing on 11th February 1858 to Bernadette Soubirous. But she didn't appear to explain suffering, she appears silently, she doesn't say anything the first three apparitions, and she just holds a rosary in her hand and Bernadette prays the rosary. The beginning of that revealing, of the understanding of the mystery of suffering is prayer. If we ask Our Lord, if we enter, if we approach Him in prayer, He can reveal to us the mystery of suffering." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus

Fr Francis Selman: "The Benedictine Order whose daily life is based on prayer has been a great civilizing influence in Europe quietly throughout the centuries. For when civilization receded with the end of the Roman Empire, as Europe was overrun by Barbarians, learning and art continued in the monasteries until the high Middle Ages. Here is a lesson for us today. Much of what we value in European civilization, which for the most part until very recent decades has been Christian, was built on prayer. May the beauty and freshness of St Scholastica's hidden life of prayer inspire us to seek God in simplicity of heart from day to day in our own time." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Marcus Holden: "We are talking about ultimate human fulfilment: we've been offered something so sublime, so majestic, so great: the eternal love of God. If this isn't worth giving our time to, what is? St Bernardine of Siena used to say: 'Time is worth what God is worth. For with each moment of time we may purchase God and buy eternal glory.' In the world around us, people forget that time is precious ... In reality, every moment, every thought, every word and every action will have infinite repercussions in eternity, for good or for ill. And what then will shine out from our lives? I assure you it will be our prayers and our Masses, our confessions and our spiritual reading, our acts of charity and our evangelisation. To say this stuff is like gold dust is to underestimate it." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Francis Selman: "St Francis de Sales was not only a bishop but he is also a Doctor of the Church, especially for his particularly consoling teaching about prayer, which again especially reflects his spirit of gentleness, as he teaches us not to be troubled by past sins but to have confidence in God and to make our misery into a throne for God's mercy." Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Ian Kelly: "There is a truth, I believe, in saying that the secret of Peter, Andrew, James and John was that they trusted the One who called them. It wasn't that they believed that they had all the answers themselves; no, because later in their following of Jesus, they would make mistakes, Peter would betray Him, and yet what carried them through to the end was that ability to trust. If we are to make commitment, if we are not to be mere historians of what might have been in our own lives, there does come a point when we hear the invitation 'Follow me' and we dare to trust the One who issues the invitation. In the words of good Pope John Paul II, 'Let us arise. Let us move forward in hope.'" Visit Totus2us.com for lots more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was the motto of Blessed John Paul II to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.

Fr Francis Selman: "St John was the youngest of the Apostles, 'the beloved disciple', the one whom Jesus loved and the only one of the 12 who remained with his Master all the way to the foot of the Cross. He was the last to write a Gospel and the last of the apostles to die as an old man, still the Bishop of Ephesus, around the year 100. With the wiritings of the last of the apostles, revelation came to a close. We keep his feast day just 2 days after the birth of our Saviour, when we think of the great mystery of the Incarnation, for St John was especially the Evangelist of the Incarnation. He wrote the phrase 'And the Word was made flesh', perhaps the most important sentence ever to have been written in history. I like to think that the reason why St John had a special insight into the mystery of the Incarnation was because he was the disciple to whom Jesus entrusted his mother at the foot of the Cross, "Behold your mother." Thus teaching us all to look to Mary as our mother and the mother of the Church." V

Fr Emmanuel Mansford CFR: "Over the years millions, literally millions, of Mexican Indians were converted because the image is such that Our Lady of Guadalupe is clothed with the stars (on her cloak are the stars), behind her is the sun and she is standing on the moon, and so the Indians, who worshipped these pagan gods of the sun, the moon and the stars, knew that she was more powerful than them because she stood on the moon, she was in front of the sun and she was clothed in the stars. But they also knew that she wasn't God because her head was bowed and her hands were joined in prayer, and they saw that round her waist was this sash that meant that she was pregnant and right over her womb was this flower in the shape of a star which was a sign to them of the one true God. So they came to believe that this true God she was in fact pregnant with. Over the years around 9 million Mexican Indians became Catholics. All this happened in 1531 and following years. So while the Reformation in Europe was happening an

Fr John Edwards SJ: "It took a long time for the Church to work out how the Immaculate Conception could have happened. (After all, Our Lady was redeemed like all of us, but how could Jesus have redeemed her before as man he existed?) Heaven took a hand in nudging the Church towards the right conclusion, especially when it was given the “Miraculous Medal” in 1831 (“Oh Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to thee.”) At last in 1854 the Church was clear enough in its mind to define the doctrine, and to say that rightly understood you could work it out from Scripture. And then heaven intervened again. At Lourdes in 1858 Our Lady said “I AM the Immaculate Conception.” Let’s honour Our Lady, and praise her beauty, and thank God that we welcome the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, and its consequence, the Redemption, and accept the fact of original sin; and are grateful that the Church which teaches us the truth with Christ’s authority clarifies what is obscure in Scripture." Visit Totus

Fr Emmanuel Mansford CFR: "This man, this bishop, this shepherd, clearly in his life was reproduced the life of Christ. I think in our times when there's increasingly greater confrontation between the Church and the secular authorities of civil society, that we need the courage of St Ambrose and we need shepherds who have his gift of prayer and humility and fortitude to stand firm. And if we look at how God chose him, it's a reminder to all of us that we never know what God has in store for us, but once we submit to His plan, simply to put ourselves into the hands of God, and to allow His grace but also the gifts that He has given us to be used for his glory. So, Saint Ambrose, pray for us." Visit Totus2us.com for more. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was Pope John Paul II's motto to Mary. Our Lady is also everything to us - Totus 2us.