20 November 2024
The IMPERIAL CROWN OF INDIA and the DELHI DURBAR
In this video I explore the history of the Delhi Durbars, the proclamation ceremony for British emperors of India, looking particularly at the Durbar of 1911 and the Imperial Crown of India made for the occasion, for King George V.
Can You Go to Confession If You're Not Sorry?
10 Saints With Dysfunctional Families
And St Felix of Valois, whose Feast Day is today, was one of them. His parents divorced and his father was excommunicated for it. St Felix, pray for all dysfunctional families.
From Aleteia
By Meg Hunter-Kilmer
It turns out, dysfunctional families are no modern invention …We live in a broken world filled with broken hearts and broken families. Those of us who are wounded because of our experience of family life can become overwhelmed with the hopelessness of it all, looking back on the halcyon days of the past when families were all intact and holy, giving their children a leg up on sainthood, it seems. But what about us? What about our children?
It turns out, dysfunctional families are no modern invention, nor are they unusual in the lives of the saints. If your family is less than perfect, spend some time with some of the many saints who know what that’s like.
St. Felix of Valois (1127-1212) was likely the son of a count and countess who famously divorced when Felix was about 13. After his parents’ divorce and his father’s remarriage and subsequent excommunication, Felix determined to follow through on his desire to live as a hermit. He was eventually ordained a priest and helped to found the Trinitarian order in his old age.
Bl. Philip Hong Pil-ju (1774-1801) was born to a non-Catholic Korean family. His widowed father married Bl. Columba Kang Wan-suk, who soon became a Christian and brought her stepson Philip into the faith. But Philip’s father ridiculed Columba and ultimately left her for a concubine. Philip, meanwhile, stayed with his stepmother (and spiritual mother), assisting her as she led the fledgling Church in Korea and kept their only priest safe for six years. Ultimately, Philip, Columba, and Bl. James Zhou Wen-Mo (the priest) were arrested and martyred.
St. Eugene de Mazenod (1782-1861) was born to a wealthy French family, but the Revolution forced them to flee as refugees to Italy. Their marriage strained by financial difficulty, Eugene’s parents divorced, a very unusual occurrence at the time. Eugene’s mother took the divorce as an opportunity to taunt her ex-husband, taking back her dowry and writing to him, “Now you have nothing.” Though Eugene worked to reunite his family, he eventually gave up and later became a priest, founded the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and was eventually consecrated a bishop.
St. Marguerite Bays (1815-1879) was a Swiss working-class seamstress who lived at home until her death at 63. The rest of the family was in and out of the same house: Her sister, who left to get married but came home again after her marriage failed. Her younger brother, who had a violent temper and ended up in prison. Her nephew, born out of wedlock and entrusted to Marguerite to raise. Her embittered sister-in-law, who harassed Marguerite for years. Marguerite was a mystic and a stigmatist, a 3rd Order Franciscan who lived with chronic pain. But what makes her most relatable is that she had a hard family to love and she loved them anyway.
Bl. Marie-Eugénie de Jésus (1817-1898) was raised in a nominally Catholic French family. When she was 13, her father’s business went bankrupt and her parents separated, her only brother going with their father while Marie-Eugénie went with their mother. Two years later, her mother died, leaving Marie-Eugénie to be passed between relatives. In adulthood, Marie-Eugénie heard God’s call through a powerful homily and founded the Religious of the Assumption.
Bl. Laura Vicuna (1891-1904) was young when her father died. Her mother soon became the mistress of a violent, drunken man, Manuel Mora. Laura was terribly hurt by her mother’s choice, even more than by Mora’s abuse, and offered her life in sacrifice for her mother’s conversion. Mora beat Laura to death when she was only 12, and her mother returned to the practice of the faith that very day.
Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati (1901-1925) lived in fear of his parents divorcing. Their marriage had always been in trouble, and it seems the two were about to divorce when their saintly son died. Seeing the thousands of people who came to his funeral, they were inspired and ultimately found some healing in their marriage. Pier Giorgio’s father, an outspoken atheist during his son’s lifetime, eventually returned to the Sacraments as well.
Read more:
Stunning photos of mountain-climbing saint, Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati
Bl. Lojze Grozde (1923-1943) was born out of wedlock, rejected by both his parents, and raised by his maternal grandparents and an aunt. When Lojze’s mother married, Lojze’s stepfather regularly chased the little boy away. While he was on his way home from college, Lojze was searched by communists, who discovered that he was carrying The Imitation of Christ and a booklet on Fatima. Lojze was tortured and martyred.
Bl. Marie-Clémentine Anuarite Nengapeta (1939-1964) was born to non-Christian parents in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. She was the fourth of six daughters; after the last, Anuarite’s father left her mother for another woman, hoping to have a son. Anuarite forgave her father, even as she worked to help her mother provide for the family. She later entered religious life and was killed fighting back against a would-be rapist.
Saints and Blesseds of Ukraine
From The Pillar
After a shocking wave of Russian military strikes across Ukraine on Thursday — attacks beginning a full-scale military assault on the country — Ukranians officials say they are prepared to fight back against Russian invasion, and say they will win. \Catholic Ukrainians, and those around the world praying for their country, may well turn to the intercession of Ukrainian saints and blesseds.
Here are a few - of many - worth getting to know.
Blessed Michaelina Josaphata Hordashevska (Whose Feast Day is today)
Born in Lviv in 1869, Michaelina was known for her unusual piety in childhood. At 18, she felt herself called to be consecrated entirely to God, and made a private vow of chastity.
Michaelina planned to enter a contemplative and cloistered order of nuns, until her spiritual director urged her to consider instead a new apostolic community of sisters, which would serve the poor as nurses, teachers, catechists, and caretakers for children.
The Sister Servants of Mary Immaculate were founded in 1892. Michaelina, taking the name Sister Josaphata, was the community’s first superior at age 23; the group began with just seven young sisters. Within 10 years, there were 128 sisters in Ukraine, and sisters soon went to Canada to serve Ukrainian immigrants living there.
Under Sister Josaphata’s leadership, the community’s active life was attractive and evangelically effective, and it became eventually the largest community of women religious in the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church.
Sister Josaphata faced difficulty in the community: because of internal division, she was not permitted until 1909 to make final profession of vows in the community she had cofounded. She also faced heath problems: in her 40s she was diagnosed with tuberculosis, and after a long and painful illness, she died at 49 in April 1919.
She was beatified in 2001, during Pope St. John Paul II’s pastoral visit to Ukraine.
Blessed Volodymyr Pryjma
Born in July 1906 in the western Ukrainian village of Stradch, Volodymyr Pryjma trained as a liturgical cantor, and became the cantor and choir director in his own village parish.
Married and the father of two young children, he and Fr. Mykola Konrad were captured by Soviet agents on June 26, 1941, as they walked on a forest road outside of Stradch. They had been returning from the home of a sick woman who had requested that the priest hear her confession. It was a Thursday.
When they didn’t come home from that confession, villagers began searching for Volodymyr and Fr. Mykola. One week after they were accosted, their bodies were found in the forest. Volodymyr had been tortured, and then stabbed repeatedly in the chest with a bayonet.
Pope St. John Paul II declared him a martyr, and beatified Volodymyr Prjma, along with Fr. Mykola Konrad, in June 2001.
St. Vladimir I of Kyiv
Born to a family of rulers in 958, he was eventually king of the Kievan Rus, but only after building an army and waging a combative power struggle against his brother, following the death of their father. By 980, at 22, Vladimir had built a realm that extended from Ukraine to the Baltic Sea.
A pagan, Vladimir took seven wives, and participated in religious rituals that some scholars believe involved human sacrifices. But under the guidance of the Byzantine emperor Basil II, Vladimir became a Christian in 987, reportedly after he sent emissaries to study the religious practices of neighboring countries and people. Vladimir is said to have found Eastern Christianity to be the most beautiful of any religion his advisors studied — though politics were likely also a factor in his conversion
However it happened, once he was a Christian, Vladimir ordered that pagan idols be thrown into the river, that churches be built, and that his countrymen be catechized in the Christian religion. He also built schools and developed programs of aid for the poor, at the same time developing habits of extraordinary personal charity. His rule — and especially the Christianity he brought to Ukraine — saw him remembered as St. Vladimir the Great.
Blessed Klymentiy Sheptytsky
Klymentiy Sheptytsky was an accomplished legal scholar and a politician, who was educated in Poland and became a member of the Austrian parliament.
While he had practiced Latin Catholicism for much of his life, he eventually returned to the practices of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, and then entered a Ukrainian monastery at 43, renouncing his secular profession.
In 1915, when he was 46, he was ordained a priest, and served for decades as the monastery’s hegumen, or prior, until 1944, when he took up its head position — the monastery archimandrite. Archimandrite Sheptytsky opened his monastery to persecuted Jewish boys during World War II, saving as many lives as he could.
Sheptytsky’s brother, Venerable Andrey Sheptytsky, was the Metropolitan Archbishop of Lviv, head of the Ukrainian Catholic Church, and himself a holy man. The post-war Soviet effort to persecute Ukrainian intellectuals and religious leaders included an effort to intimidate the archbishop — his brother Leon was murdered along with his wife.
Archimandrite Sheptytsky himself was arrested in 1947, pressured to renounce his union with Rome and serve as a Russian Orthodox priest. When he would not do so, he was sentenced to eight years in prison, and died a martyr, in a Russian prison in 1951.
He was beatified in 2001.
Priest CANCELED For Declaring Francis An Antipope
Today in Church History
The Life of St Edmund, King & Martyr
THE DANISH KINGS INVADE
In his time it happed that two wicked tyrants, that one named Hingvar, and that other Hubba, came out of Denmark and arrived in the country of Northumberland, and robbed and destroyed the country and slew the people without mercy in every place where they came. Then the one of them named Hingvar came into the country where this most christian S. Edmund reigned, and understood that he was in his flowering age, strong and mighty in battle, and demanded of the people where their king was resident and dwelled, which that was most abiding in a town named then Eglesdon, and now is called Bury.Now the Danes had always custom that they would never fight battle set ne appointed, but ever lie in wait how they might by sleight and deceit prevented, fall on good christian men, and so slay and destroy them, like as thieves lie in await to rob and slay good true men. Wherefore, when he knew where this holy king was, he addressed one of his knights to him for to espy what strength he had, and what people about him. And Hingvar himself followed with all his host to the end that suddenly he should fall upon this king unadvised, and that he might subdue him unto his laws and commandments. Then this said knight came to this holy king S. Edmund, and made his legation and message in this wise:
Our most dread lord by land and by sea, Hingvar, which hath subdued divers countries and lands in this province unto his seigniory by strength of arms, and purposeth with all his ships and army to winter him in these marches, sendeth to thee his commandment that thou incontinent come and make alliance and friendship with him. And that thou depart to him thy paternal treasures and riches in such wise that thou mayst reign under him, or certainly thou shalt die by cruel death.And when the blessed king, S. Edmund, had heard this message, anon he sighed and called to him one of his bishops and demanded counsel of him, what and how he should answer upon this demand that was asked of him. Which bishop, sore dreading for the king's life, exhorted him by many examples for to consent and agree to this tyrant Hingvar, and the king a while said nothing but remembered him well, and after many devout words at the last, he answered to the messenger in this wise and said: "This shalt thou say to thy lord: know thou for truth, that for the love of temporal life, the christian king Edmund shall no subdue him to a paynim duke."
Then unnethe was the messenger gone out, but Hingvar met him and bade him use short words and tell him his answer, which message told unto Hingvar, anon the cruel tyrant commanded to slay all the people that were with S. Edmund and destroy them, but they should hold and keep only the king, whom he knew rebel unto his wicked laws.
THE DEATH OF KING EDMUND
Then this holy king was taken and bounden, his hands behind him, and is brought tofore the duke, and after many opprobrious words, at the last they led him forth unto a tree which was thereby. To which tree his adversaries bound him, and then shot arrows at him, so thick and many that he was through wounded, and that one arrow smote out another, and always this blessed king ceased not, for all his wounds, to give laud and praising unto Almighty God. Then this wicked tyrant commanded that they should smite off his head, which they so did, he always praying, and saying his orisons to our Lord God. Then the Danes left the body there Iying, and took the head and bare it into the thick of the wood, and hid it in the thickest place among thorns and briars, to the end that it should not be found of the christian men.HIS BODY IS RESTORED
But by the purveyance of Almighty God there came a wolf which diligently kept the holy head from devouring of beasts and fowls. And after, when the Danes were departed, the christian men found the body, but they could not find the head, wherefore they sought it in the wood. And as one of them spake to another: Where art thou? Which were in the thick of the wood, and cried: Where art thou? the head answered and said: Here! here! here! and anon then all they came thither and saw it and also a great wolf sitting and embracing the head between his forelegs, keeping it from all other beasts. And then anon they took the head and brought it unto the body and set it to the place where it was smitten off, and anon they joined together, and then they bare this holy body unto the place where it is now buried. And the wolf followed humbly the body till it was buried, and then he, hurting no body, returned again to the wood.And the blessed body and head be so joined together that there appeareth nothing that it had been smitten off, save as it were a red shining thread in the place of the departing where the head was smitten off. And in that place where he now lieth so buried is a noble monastery made, and therein monks of the order of S. Benet, which be richly endowed. In which place Almighty God hath showed many miracles for the holy king and martyr.
From Doomsday 1959 to Dire Straits 2024
"Pope John XXIII’s decision to ignore the message of the third Fatima secret and instead call an ecumenical council has had dire consequences."
From Crisis
By David Torkington
Pope John XXIII’s decision to ignore the message of the third Fatima secret and instead call an ecumenical council has had dire consequences.
When most Catholics hear of revelations, they are understandably skeptical. After all, they say, do we not already have the teaching of Christ, the inspired word of God in the Scriptures, and the dogmatic teaching of the Church? What need do we have of revelations? They are, of course, right. But what happens when the teaching of Christ that may still be alive in the mind goes dead in the heart, as did the love of God when Jansenism was rife in the Church? Christ Himself appeared to St. Margaret Mary—not to give us a new teaching but to set us afire once more with the teaching of the Sacred Heart that restated the love of Christ poured out on the first Pentecost Day.
The same happened in the last century, when hearts that once practiced loving God became hardened and turned to self-love instead. It was then that Our Lady of Fatima appeared to call people to practice loving God again, by repenting, praying, and making sacrifices. This was not a new teaching, for it was the teaching that her Beloved Son had taught; but her children had forgotten it—at least forgotten to practice it.
However, when, in 1959, Pope John called a meeting of cardinals to discuss the third Fatima secret, which he had prematurely opened, he decided to shelve the contents and call a council instead. Although we do not know the actual date of Doomsday, we know that it took place in 1959, thanks to Cardinal Bea who told his friend and colleague Fr. Malachi Martin about it immediately after he left the meeting. The meeting had been called to decide whether or not to do what Our Lady had told the pope to do. According to Fr. Malachi, Cardinal Bea said, “Those fools have just condemned millions of people to death.” In hindsight, he would realize that far greater damage was done.
Our Lord, the head of the Church, did not ask His mother, the Mother of the Church, to deliver His message to the pope for him to decide whether or not to proclaim it to the world in 1960 but to do it.
Let us be clear about this: the Church herself has declared that Our Lady’s appearances at Fatima were authentic and that her message was authentic too. The message came from the head of the Church, through His Mother to His Vicar on earth, and His Vicar decided to disobey Him, with the diabolical consequences that we can now see for ourselves. These consequences could have been avoided because the most important part of the message of Our Lady was that the whole Church should have been called to repentance, prayer, and sacrifice in 1960.
If he had called an ecumenical council to decide how best this could be implemented in every diocese and every parish in the world, then we would not be in the dire spiritual straits in which we find ourselves today, nor would we be in fear of the consequences that Our Lady promised would afflict those who would not heed her message. In 1959, it would seem that these consequences were only conditional; now it would seem they are inevitable. Indeed, they have long since begun—and in the highest places in the Church.
Let me review the historical events that led up to the terrible moral malaise that, without realizing it, the Church found herself in on the eve of the Second Vatican Council, although they became more pronounced after the Council.
The Modernism that was born at the Renaissance—whose creed began with the words, “I believe in Man”—did not of course exclude God at first but paid homage to the masterwork of God’s creation, who would shortly come of age at the Enlightenment and finally rise above himself to rule where God ruled before. But the decline of the God-centered spirituality that prevailed before the Renaissance and the rise of the man-centered spirituality that began to prevail after the Renaissance received a decisive “shot in the arm” after the condemnation of Quietism, as I have shown in previous articles. It was then that the deep prayer—called contemplation—that leads to union with God was extracted from Catholic Spirituality for all but a remnant.
Long before a person can tangibly experience God’s love, something has to happen within prayer that is the key to everything. That something is that we must be weaned from the cupboard love that has infected us from the very beginning of the spiritual life. Far from experiencing spiritual delights at the outset of prayer, a beginner has to experience darkness, dryness, and aridity, not to mention battalions of distractions and temptations that make the believer think they are on the wrong path. It has been the teaching of Catholic Spirituality from the beginning that it is in continually turning away from distractions and temptations that a person is making acts of love that eventually lead to a habit of selfless loving.
The mystic St. Angela of Foligno calls this loving “divine loving” because it is the same sort of selfless, unconditional loving with which Christ loves us—and it is the only form of loving that, when learned in years rather than months, can unite us with Christ. Then—in, with, and through Him—we can contemplate God the Father and receive in return what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the fruits of contemplation—namely, the infused theological, cardinal, and moral virtues and the gifts of the Holy Spirit—to share with others.
After the Second Vatican Council, the self-centered, man-centered spirituality that had preceded the Council went viral. This was the result of an entirely new and diabolical movement that began among a small but ever-expanding group of Catholic intellectuals. In the 1930s, many Catholic intellectuals, like their non-Catholic peers, flirted with left-wing ideologies as the only bulwark against the fascism that was rising in Europe. In the secular world, many left-wing intellectuals not only repudiated the secular culture in which they had grown up but they became traitors and defected to an alien culture. A similar thing happened in the Church, where many left-wing intellectuals not only repudiated the spiritual culture in which they had grown up but became traitors and defected to an alien culture too.
In the seventy years that followed the Council, the ideas contained in liberation theology gradually began to develop into something little short of Satanic, as they have progressively become porous to evil. Like a pernicious and poisonous fungus that grows underground, these ideas and the corrupt idealists who spawned them finally surfaced under the papacy of Pope Francis, who has surrounded himself with a sycophantic oligarchy who have now enthroned their new god—an unpurified, unstable, unruly, and unredeemed Moloch called Man.
Just as previous theocentric religions gave to God what they thought He wanted—like the physical offerings made in the Temple in the Old Testament, or the offering of oneself in the New Testament, in what Christ called the New Worship in Spirit and in Truth—the new, postmodern, self-ridden Moloch is offered all they think that he wants. If their “Old God” has any part in this new religion, then it is only as little more than an outward sign of unity. He has become rather like the British Monarchy, a sign of national unity, surrounded by all the pomp and circumstance that can be mustered, to keep the plebs together and on side. But the Monarch has no power whatsoever over the people, nor do the people have any real relationship with him other than that of a sort of imaginative emotional obeisance.
The power that comes from the new postmodern religion that now rules from Rome is held by a new Moloch, which is man himself. His high priests not only determine what he wants and needs but interpret for us mere underlings what he considers to be right or wrong in a new man-made morality. This new morality is always relative to what man’s unredeemed, self-centered selfishness wants. That is why this new moralism is called relativism. It is what man decrees not what the God of so-called rigidity once decreed; and it is sought by what is called discernment.
A group of Catholic boys in the youth club were using a Ouija board as a means of enabling the Holy Spirit to answer their questions. They were astounded at the answers they received, until I blindfolded them and those answers turned to gibberish. A similar self-deception takes place in the discernment process, which always seems to deify decisions that were decided by at least one “big brother” or “big sister” before the process began. A perfunctory prayer to the Holy Spirit before the process proceeds and a feeling of peace at the end of the process is used to deceive the unwary and the naïve into believing that the resulting decisions have been sanctioned, if not positively inspired, by God.
So God help those who think otherwise! For the truth is not a dainty dish to set before the most dangerous animals on earth, particularly if they have religious or political pretentions. They prefer ambrosia to eat and nectar to drink and have little stomach for humble pie. If you feed it to them often enough and in large enough portions, they can become very cross; and when they become very cross, they can crucify.
In the Catholic Church, major decisions at any level were traditionally made not after a perfunctory prayer just before the process begins but after serious debate and discussion informed by the infused virtue of wisdom received after years of the deep personal prayer of those seeking the divine truth; that has no place in the “pseudo religiosity” of the new order. St. Thomas Aquinas insists that true wisdom that comes from the Holy Spirit is one of the infused virtues, which are the fruits of the mystical contemplation that has long since been outlawed by those who see discernment as the guaranteed way that Synodalitists seek and find God’s will.
For years now, hardly noticed by the faithful, the present regime has been closing down contemplative religious houses and pouring scorn on all forms of contemplative prayer apart from what they call “contemplation in action”—that, in fact, means action without contemplation. It is this sort of purely human action that is closed to the Holy Spirit which has been responsible for flooding the Church with an unprecedented tsunami of sexual depravity, to which the highest authorities turn a blind eye. Marx, their mentor, once said that if you want to destroy an institution, first saturate it with sex.
The only hope for the Church is to return immediately to imitate the Christ who was the inspiration of my youth, who still inspires me and all who turn to Him—to receive the only Love that can change us and the world that He has chosen to redeem through us.
St Felix of Valois, Confessor
St Felix of Valois, Confessor
From Dom Prosper Guéranger's Liturgical Year:
Felix was called in his youth to dwell in the desert; and he thought to die there, forgotten by the world he had despised. But our Lord had decreed that his old age should yield fruit before men.
It was one of those epochs which may be called turning points in history. The first of the great active Orders was about to be raised up in the Church by St. John of Matha; others were soon to follow, called forth by the new requirements of the times. Eternal Wisdom, who remaining herself the same reneweth all things (Wisdom 7:27), would prove that sanctity also never changes, and that charity, though assuming different forms, is ever the same, having but one principle and one aim—God, loved for his own sake. Hence John of Matha was led by the Holy Spirit to Felix of Valois, as a disciple to the master; and then, upon pure contemplation personified by the anchorite living out his declining years in the depths of the forest, was grated the intensely active life of the redeemer of captives. The desert of Cerfroid became the cradle, and remained the chief center, of the Trinitarian Order.
Let us read the Church’s history of the servant of God, remembering that it requires to be completed by that of his son and disciple.
Felix, formerly called Hugh, was born in France, of the royal family of the Valois, and from his cradle gave promise of future sanctity and especially of charity towards the poor. While still an infant, he would distribute money to the needy with his own hand, as if he were grown up and had full use of reason. When somewhat older, he used to send them meat from the table, and would choose what was daintiest for poor little children. When a youth, he more than once stripped himself of his own garments to clothe the poor. He obtained the life of a condemned criminal from his uncle Theobald, Count of Champagne and Blois; forestalling that the man, hitherto an infamous murderer, would shortly become a saint; the truth of which prophecy was proved by the event.
Having spent his youth in the practice of virtue, he was induced by his love of heavenly contemplation to think of retiring into solitude. He was determined, however, first to take Holy Orders, and thus cut off all possibility of succeeding to the crown, of which he had some expectations on account of the Salic Law. After being ordained priest, and celebrating his first Mass with the greatest devotion, he retired into the desert, where he lived in the severest abstinence, but enjoying an abundance of heavenly gifts and graces. There he was joined by John of Matha, a Parisian doctor, who had been inspired by God to seek him; and they lived together in a most holy manner for some years. God then sent an Angel, who bade them go to Rome and obtain a special rule of life form the Sovereign Pontiff. Pope Innocent III received, during solemn Mass, a revelation concerning the religious Order to be instituted for the ransom of captives; and he himself clothed Felix and John in a white habit with a red and blue cross, such as was worn by the Angel who had appeared. Moreover the Pontiff determined that on account of the three colors of the habit, the new Order should bear the name of the most Holy Trinity.
Upon receiving the confirmation of their rule from Pope Innocent, Felix returned to Cerfroid, in the diocese of Meaux, and enlarged the first convent of the Order, which he and his companion had built there shortly before. There he caused religious observance and the work of ransom to flourish; and he diligently propagated the Order by sending disciples into other provinces. In this place he was favored with a remarkable grace by the Blessed Virgin Mary. On the vigil of the Nativity of the Mother of God, while the brethren, God so disposing, remained asleep instead of rising at midnight for Matins, Felix who was watching according to his custom before the appointed hour, entered the church, and found the blessed Virgin in the middle of the choir, clad in the habit and cross of the Order, and surrounded by Angels in the same attire. Felix joined them, and the Mother of God having intoned the Office, he sang the divine praises with them even to the end. Then, as if calling him from the choir of earth to that of heaven, an Angel informed him that his death was at hand. He exhorted his sons to love of the poor and of captives; and gave up his soul to God, full of days and of merits, in the year of our Lord 1212, in the pontificate of the said Innocent III.
Felix, happy lover of charity, teach us the worth, and also the nature, of this queen of virtues. It was she that attracted thee into solitude in pursuit of her divine Object; and when thou hadst learned to find God in himself, she showed him to thee and taught thee to love him in thy brethren. Is not this the secret which makes love become strong as death, and daring enough, as in the case of thy sons, to defy hell itself? May this love inspire us with every sort of devotedness; may it ever remain the excellent portion of thy holy Order, leading it to adapt itself to every new requirement, in a society where the worst kind of slavery, under a thousand forms, reigns supreme.