ALL SAINTS CELEBRATED IN SEPTEMBER
Saints celebrated on the 26th of September
Prayer to the Angels and the Saints
Heavenly Father, in praising Your Angels and Saints we praise Your glory, for by honouring them we honour You, their Creator. Their splendour shows us Your greatness, which infinitely surpasses that of all creation.
In Your loving providence, You saw fit to send Your Angels to watch over us. Grant that we may always be under their protection and one day enjoy their company in heaven.
Heavenly Father, You are glorified in Your Saints, for their glory is the crowning of Your gifts. You provide an example for us by their lives on earth, You give us their friendship by our communion with them, You grant us strength and protection through their prayer for the Church, and You spur us on to victory over evil and the prize of eternal glory by this great company of witnesses.
Grant that we who aspire to take part in their joy may be filled with the Spirit that blessed their lives, so that, after sharing their faith on earth, we may also experience their peace in heaven. Amen.
ST THERESE COUDERC, VIRGIN
[On] September 26, one of the saints remembered by the Church is St Therese Couderc. She was born in 1805 in France, the fourth of twelve children to farmers Claude and Anne Couderc.
As a child, St Therese attended Mass twice a week and she made her First Holy Communion in 1815. In 1822 her parents sent her to a boarding school at Vans until 1825 when she returned to attend school in their local area.
After attending a mission given by a young priest, Fr Stephen Terme, St Therese was encouraged to enter the novitiate of a new religious order dedicated to education, the Sisters of St Regis.
Instead of teaching, St Therese and another sister were sent to the mountain village of La Louvesc to help oversee the Shrine of John Francis Regis.
Under her leadership the Shrine developed into a successful retreat house for women. Later the religious order split into two sections; the teaching ministry continued but a new section for retreat work was created known as the Sisters of Our Lady of the Cenacle.
At the age of twenty-three, St Therese became the superior general of this retreat work. Financial hardships led to the demotion of St Therese and a series of wealthy women were put in place to oversee the retreat work, each one more disastrous than the last. St Therese continued to play an important, though unacknowledged, role behind the scenes and the work survived.
During the last twenty years of her life, St Therese was granted many mystical graces and a revelation on the complete self-surrender to God. This became the heart of her spirituality and she wrote: 'The surrendered soul has found Paradise on earth.'
St Therese died this day, 26th September, 1885.
She was canonised by Pope Paul VI in 1970. The Sisters of the Cenacle still continue to lead retreats all over the world.
St Therese wrote: 'To surrender oneself is more than to devote oneself, more than to give yourself, it is even something more than to abandon oneself to God. In a word, to surrender oneself is to die to everything and to self, to be no longer concerned with self except to keep it continually turned toward God.'
St Therese Couderc, pray for us.
(From: Spiritual Thought From Fr Chris)
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