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The Feast of St. Andrew: November 30, 2013

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Today is the feast day of the first called Apostle, brother of St. Peter and founder of the church of Constantinople St. Andrew.  Andrew was a disciple of John the Baptist who went along with the beloved disciple St. John to follow our Lord at the direction of John the Forerunner.  He later introduced his younger brother Simon to the Lord who made of him Peter the Rock on which He built his Church.

Tradition records that St. Andrew went north after Pentecost to found the church of Byzantium on the Bosporus, the future site of Constantinople and later preached in what is now Russia and in what we now call the Ukraine but what was then broadly called Scythia.  He was martyred in the Peloponnese in southern Greece, crucified by the Roman governor.  St. Andrew is the great patron of the East, the older brother of Simon Peter the founder of the See of Rome.  Peter was ordained Prince of the Apostles not by his own choice or merit, but by the will of God.  The East and the West are brothers, the East older while the West is younger but with the Apostolic See of Rome given primacy by its founder, its history, and the inscrutable divine Will.  Pray for the unity of the Church, the unity between East and West, and to paraphrase Bl. John Paul II that the Church may breathe with both lungs once again.

Pray the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary on Monday for the See of Constantinople, for its liberty and its salvation, and the restoration of its ancient position as a pillar of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome and for the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

Message of Pope Francis to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I on the Feast of St. Andrew

 

The Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary

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Some random musings of mine on praying the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary.  If these thoughts of mine can help anyone to meditate on the Mysteries then I am grateful, if you find them a hindrance then ignore this posting because it is strictly my way of thinking about these Mysteries.  Again these are my thoughts, but if any have been expressed by others elsewhere without me giving proper credit I beg their forgiveness.

The Joyful Mysteries are the beginning.  They are the beginning of the world recreated and the world reborn.  In many ways each Hail Mary we pray is the Incarnation all over again.  We start with the words of the Angel who announced to the Blessed Virgin Mother of God the turn of the age and the role she was to play in it, and then the words of her cousin Elizabeth who was the first human being besides the Virgin herself to acknowledge the Incarnation.  So this theme of the Incarnation then weaves itself throughout all of the Mysteries of the Rosary, both in the praying of the Hail Mary itself and the meditating on the Mysteries of the Incarnation and the Redemption of mankind by the Word made flesh.

The Joyful Mysteries make this theme of the Incarnation paramount.  Think of the world as it appeared from that small village in the Galilee five minutes before the Annunciation.  It was a dark place indeed.  The people Israel had been without a prophet for the better part of half a millennium, the return from the Babylonian exile had not restore to them any form of their ancient glory.  They were now a subject people, their one brief period of independence won by the Maccabees having been snuffed out now by the might of the seemingly all conquering might of Imperial Rome.  Nor were they at peace among themselves.  Some dove wholesale into the pagan, hedonistic culture that prevailed in the Mediterranean in those days, while others climbed back into the shelter of the old Law having long lost the sense of what that Law was really about or intended for, and others turned to politics thinking that the restoration of the political might of David and Solomon would bring about paradise.  It must have seemed that God had forgotten them and that his promise had withered and failed.  Then an Angel visited a young woman who lived in a region that would have seemed at the end of the world to anyone with power and influence in those days and announced these words: Ave Maria, gratia plena, Dominus tecum.  Benedicta tu in mulieribus.

From that moment to this the world has never been the same.  A Light came to be in the womb of Mary that day that will never go out through all the travails of humankind.  She then carried that Light in her womb to visit her cousin Elizabeth a woman, who despite her old age and previous barrenness, now carried in her womb the greatest of all prophets: John the Forerunner who was to announce the coming of the Lord to his people Israel.  This woman pronounced the words “benedictus fructus ventris tui.”  Elizabeth then becomes the first faithful witness to the Gospel.  The communion of faith between these two women in that house in the hill country of Judea is in many ways the start of the prehistory of the Church.

A decree then comes forth from Caesar Augustus.  Joseph takes his wife Mary from Nazareth down to Bethlehem to be enrolled in the census.  After a difficult journey they arrive, only to be shut out from the inns, a woman on the verge of giving birth to a new world but there is no place to put her.  Finally someone finds room for them in a nice out of the way place: a cave where animals are housed.  The child is born and the world is changed.  The angels of the celestial choir announce the birth of the Prince of Peace to the humble of the earth and they come to adore Him.  There is a message here I think for all of us: God will not force his way into our lives.  He will come in where we let Him, if we let Him, and from there He will begin his saving work.  And once you let Him start to work within you there is nothing that will stop Him.

The child Jesus is then presented to the world in his own holy place, the Temple of Jerusalem.  The priest Simeon pronounces his famous canticle and the glory of God that is in this child is first announced publicly, by the power of the Holy Spirit, to the world.  Simeon then speaks his famous prophecy of trouble ahead for this child and his Mother and for the Israel that he had known.  Not long after Joseph takes Mary and Jesus and flees from Bethlehem to Egypt and Herod’s thugs raid the town, massacring its newborns, looking to exterminate this new Prince before He can begin his work.  Another message here: the work of God in this world comes with pain and suffering.  Jesus Christ was barely allowed to be born before the world sought to annihilate Him and it will always be so.  But in the end the Triumph is his, and this we must not forget.

When the child Jesus was twelve years old his parents were travelling back north to the Galilee from Jerusalem and discovered that He was missing.  They searched high and low among their relatives for Him, but did not find Him.  Then they turned back to Jerusalem, to God’s Temple, and found Him.  They asked Him why he had done this and his response to them was, essentially, that if they knew Who He was (which both of them did) then they should know where to find Him.  Again a message: God does not abandon us.  We sometimes lose sight of Him if we are looking in the wrong places but that He will always be there for us.

I hope this helps, the thoughts are strictly my own and I am no theologian but these do tend to help me ponder these Mysteries.  Pray the Joyful Mysteries each Monday for the See of Constantinople, for its liberty and its salvation, and for the restoration of its ancient position as a pillar of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome.  And for the conversion of the Muslim peoples.

The See of St. Andrew

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St. Andrew was the older brother of St. Peter and the first called.  St. John’s Gospel records that both he and another unnamed disciple of John the Baptist (presumably the beloved disciple St. John himself) followed Christ on the word of John the Baptist and went to stay with him that day.  Tradition going back through Eusebius to Origen says that Andrew went north after Our Lord’s Ascension to preach the Gospel.  He is remembered as the first bishop of the Greek settlement of Byzantium on the Bosporus, which 300 years later when the emperor Constantine decided to make it his capital became the great urban metropolis of Constantinople: the mother of the Christian world.  Tradition also records that St. Andrew went beyond the Bosporus, into the regions that were then called Scythia but now form the Ukraine and European Russia.  Thus St. Andrew is also the patron of Russia and the Ukraine as well as Georgia.  He ended his life in martyrdom; crucified in the city of Patras, in the Peloponnese in modern Greece.  His feast day is celebrated November 30 in both the Eastern and Western Church.

St. Andrew is thus the first bishop of Constantinople and Greek Orthodox ecumenical patriarchs claim their apostolic authority from him, the first called and the older brother of the Prince of the Apostles.  The See of Constantinople is, to paraphrase Blessed John Paul II, the other lung with which the Church breathes.  It was a city great and powerful in its day, the master of the East though embroiled to a much further extent than Rome in the Christological disputes that erupted following the Edict of Milan.  After the rise of Islam in the seventh century the See of Constantinople lost much of its previous grandeur but persevered through the centuries and endured several political and military disasters, including the schism with Rome dating from 1054 and the occupation of the city by the Crusaders in the 13th century from which it never really recovered, before the Christian emperors finally succumbed to their Turkish conquerors in 1453.  Ever since that day the Patriarchate of Constantinople, the See of St. Andrew, has been politically and materially subject to foreign masters.  Offer the Joyful Mysteries of the Rosary each Monday for this great See, for its liberty and its salvation, and the restoration of its ancient position as a pillar of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church in communion with the See of Peter in Rome, and for the conversion of the Muslim peoples.