St John Paul II Parish - NB

This may be hard to understand, but not so if we remember the risk we take in loving. Spouses and parents know this well. We have to love first and remain faithful, not surrounding our love with a million conditions. There is a place in every loving relationship for this freedom. The father must let his son grow up, and so this implies that he must let himself be exposed to hurt or disappointment, but this is because his love for his son was never about himself, but was a free gift. The same goes for daughters, spouses, friends.

One hundred years ago, the Virgin Mary appeared to three shepherd children in six visitations near Fatima, Portugal. She sealed those visitations with a miracle of the sun, which danced and emitted colored rays of light before tens of thousands of eyewitnesses, a fitting maternal signature upon what the Vatican has recognized as “the most prophetic of modern apparitions”

Pasteur kept his counsel in religious matters, but there is no question that he believed in God and walked in the ways of the faith he learned from his country parents. Here is what he had to say about Émile Littré, an elder scientist and, it is true, a positivist (though one who died in the Church after a later-in-life baptism): "Often have I fancied him seated by his wife, as in a picture of early Christian times; he, looking down upon earth, filled with compassion for human suffering; […] she, by every divine grandeur, uniting in one impulse and in one heart the twofold holiness which forms the aureole of the Man-God, the one proceeding from devotion to humanity, the other emanating from ardent love for the divinity: she a saint in the canonic sense of the word; he a lay saint." The ideal that Pasteur drew of Littré's home was but a mirror of his own.