From: richarra@gmail.com   
      
   Perfection   
      
   Perfection consists in one thing alone, which is doing the will of   
   God. For, according to Our Lord’s words, it suffices for perfection to   
   deny self, to take up the cross and to follow Him. Now who denies   
   himself and takes up his cross and follows Christ better than he who   
   seeks not to do his own will, but always that of God? Behold, now, how   
   little is needed to become as Saint? Nothing more than to acquire the   
   habit of willing, on every occasion, what God wills.   
   --St. Vincent de Paul   
      
   ===============   
   November 7th – Bl. Antony Baldinucci   
   d. 1717   
      
   ON this day the Society of Jesus and several Italian dioceses that   
   profited by his labours keep the feast of this Bl. Antony, the fifth   
   son of Philip Baldinucci and Catherine Scolari, of Florence. His   
   father, painter and writer by profession, after recovery from an   
   illness, which he attributed to the intercession of St. Antony of   
   Padua, vowed his next child to that saint; and when a boy was born in   
   1665, appropriately within the octave of his feast, he had him   
   baptized Antony and brought up with the idea of becoming a priest. The   
   Baldinucci family lived in the same house in the via degli Angeli at   
   Florence in which St. Aloysius Gonzaga had lived for a time when a   
   child, and the intimate memory of this young saint had much influence   
   on the growing Antony. When he was 16 he offered himself to the   
   Society of Jesus and was accepted, in spite of his rather uncertain   
   health.   
      
   Antony hoped to be sent as a missionary to the Indies, but instead he   
   was set to teach young men and give instructions to confraternities,   
   first at Terni and then in Rome. A bout of seizures and bad headaches   
   caused him to be sent back to Florence, and then to several country   
   colleges, where his health improved and he began to preach, very   
   successfully. When he was thirty he was ordained priest, and after he   
   had completed his tertianship he asked if he might now go to the   
   Indies. He was refused and sent to minister in Viterbo and Frascati,   
   in whose neighbourhood he spent the remaining 20 years of his life,   
   working principally among the poorer and uninstructed people. To   
   attract them he adopted missionary methods that were, to put it   
   mildly, demonstrative and startling, modeled on those of St. Peter   
   Claver among the Negroes and Bl. Julian Maunoir among the Bretons. Bl.   
   Antony organized imposing processions from different places to the   
   centre where the mission was being held, in which penitents walked   
   wearing crowns of thorns and beating themselves with a discipline; he   
   himself often preached carrying a heavy cross or wearing chains, and   
   would strike the hearts of the people by going along the streets   
   scourging himself violently. After a due impression had been made and   
   he had got the people of a place to come and listen to him, he would   
   modify his methods to a more usual pattern. To keep order in the   
   crowds that flocked to his preaching he appointed lay marshals, often   
   men of notoriously bad lives, who were thus flattered and brought to a   
   more amenable frame of mind. Among the exterior results of his   
   missions was generally a public burning of cards, dice, obscene   
   pictures and other occasions of sin and excess. He found particularly   
   widespread the evils of reckless gambling, violence arising from   
   revenge, and lewdness of speech and action, and his zeal did not end   
   in bonfires but brought about many real conversions and the   
   establishment of organized good works.   
      
   Although he was incessantly engaged in preaching missions and the work   
   ancillary thereto, Bl. Antony wrote down numerous sermons and   
   instructions and kept up a wide correspondence. He rarely slept more   
   than 3 hours in a night, and then on a bed of planks, and fasted 3   
   days of every week; in view of his tremendous activity Pope Clement XI   
   dispensed him from the daily recitation of the Divine Office, but   
   Antony did not make use of the dispensation. In all he gave in twenty   
   years 448 missions in 13 dioceses of the Abruzzi and Romagna. In 1708   
   he was called to preach the Lent at Leghorn by order of Duke Cosimo   
   III. Antony arrived bare-footed, in a tattered cassock, with his   
   luggage on his back, and at first the gentry would not come to his   
   sermons. But he won them in the end, and every Lent after he had to   
   preach in some principal city. The year 1716 saw a terrible famine in   
   central Italy, and Bl. Antony was indefatigable in the work of relief.   
   He was still only just over fifty, but he was literally worn out with   
   work and hardly survived the strain of this additional effort. He died   
   on November 7 in the following year. During a mission at Carpineto in   
   1710 he had stayed in the house of the Pecci, a family which   
   afterwards gave a pope to the Church in the person of Leo XIII. By   
   this pope Bl. Antony Baldinucci was beatified in 1893.   
      
   The details of the history of Bl. Antony are very fully known from the   
   testimony of the witnesses in the process of beatification as well as   
   from his own letters and other contemporary documents. There is a   
   satisfactory, if summary, account of these sources in the Acta   
   Sanctorum, November, vol. iii. Within two and a half years of the   
   missioner’s death a substantial biography had been published by Father   
   F. M. Galluzzi. The best modern life is probably that by Father   
   Vannucci (1893), but there are several others, e.g. by Father Goldie   
   in English (1894). See also DHG., vol. iii, cc. 756-760. A large   
   collection of Bl. Antony’s letters was edited and published by Father   
   L. Rosa in 1899.   
      
      
   Saint Quote:   
   Love the poor tenderly, regarding them as your masters and yourselves   
   as their servants.   
   --St. John of God   
      
   Bible Quote:   
   Never repay evil with evil. As scripture says: Vengeance is mine--I   
   will pay them back, says the Lord. But there is more: If your enemy is   
   hungry, you should give him food, and if he is thirsty, let him drink.   
   Resist evil and conquer it with good.  (Romans 12:17,19-20,21 )   
      
      
   <><><><>   
   Saint Margaret Mary's Prayer of Consecration To the Sacred Heart   
      
   I, ( your name. . .), give myself and consecrate to the Sacred Heart   
   of our Lord Jesus Christ my person and my life, my actions, pains, and   
   sufferings, so that I may be unwilling to make use of any part of my   
   being save to honor, love, and glorify the Sacred Heart.   
      
   This is my unchanging purpose, namely, to be all His, and to do all   
   things for the love of Him, at the same time renouncing with all my   
   heart whatever is displeasing to Him.   
      
   I therefore take Thee, O Sacred Heart, to be the only object of my   
      
   [continued in next message]   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)