In yesterday’s blog, I said I thought it would be fun and maybe even
necessary to ask a new set of Fourteen Holy Helpers to intercede for us so that
we may grow closer to God through Jesus Christ and the Holy Spirit. My first priority in choosing this particular
group of intercessors was to identify some of the most pressing needs of our
modern age. The original Fourteen Holy
Helpers were “assembled” to help in easing the burdens of the Black Plague in
the 14th century. I’ve been meditating on the plagues of the
current world that we could certainly use the saints’ help with, and I think we’re
going to need a lot of intercessory prayers.
So I’m not sure I want to limit the number of “Heavenly Heroes” to just
14, but we’ll see what we come up with.
In no particular order (except the first, which in my mind is the
greatest plague on society today), these are the problems of the world as I see
them: Abortion, euthanasia, atheism,
cancer, AIDS, the attack on sacramental marriage, the idolatry attached to
technology, wars over religion or ideology, the attack on the priesthood, a
lack of respect for one another, poverty, injustice to immigrants, the apparent
assault on religious freedom and beliefs, and addictions to drugs, alcohol and
pornography. This is not by any means an
exhaustive list, but I do think these are the battles most affecting us today.
So we’ll start with Saints who in my mind would be the “go-to”
people in our battle against abortion:
Saint Joseph will be my #1 choice for a lot of the problems in today’s
world; after all, he is the step-father of Jesus. He could have chosen to quietly divorce Mary
when he was told of her pregnancy, but instead he opted to love both Mary and
her Child and raise Him as his own. He is a great saint to pray to in our fight
against abortion. This makes him a
shoe-in for patron of the sacramental marriage, too.
Tradition tells us that his was a happy natural
death in the presence of Mary and Jesus after a full life. So we can go to him to pray for an end to
euthanasia, and the pains and sufferings of the diseases of the world.
He can also be called upon to pray for the
fair and equitable treatment of immigrants, since he and his family knew what
it felt like to be immigrants exiled in Egypt just after the birth of Christ.
There are a lot of saints we could go to for an end to the scourge
of abortion, but one of the most logical choices is the fairly recently canonized
St. Gianna Beretta Molla.
You can read
about her here.
I thank God for giving us these two heroic saints who can bring our
prayers to God in a much more eloquent way than we can and who we can try to
model our own lives after.
Up tomorrow: two more saints
on our quest for a “Legion of Heavenly Heroes”….and a “battle cry” for our new
friends in high places.
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