Pentecost Vigil

  The Mass Readings for the Pentecost Vigil: 

On the last and greatest day of the feast,
Jesus stood up and exclaimed,
“Let anyone who thirsts come to me and drink.
As Scripture says:
    Rivers of living water will flow from within him who believes in me.”

He said this in reference to the Spirit
that those who came to believe in him were to receive.
There was, of course, no Spirit yet,
because Jesus had not yet been glorified.

Books by Michael Dubruiel:

Pentecost Novena

 Novenas were such a popular farm of Catholic devotion because the liturgy remained largely locked up in silent Latin and was simply an obligation to those people who were not inclined to use missals. Most people, in fact, did not use or even own a missal. Many who sat passively at the liturgy enthusiastically sang and prayed at the novena. In the early 1940s, when I first served as an altar boy at the novenas to Our Lady, one of my crusty Irish neighbors asked me if I was on my way to that Protestant service. He saw it as Protestant because it was in the vernacular and it was popular. He was probably a bit suspicious, too, because unlike Mass, you could enjoy a novena.  

From Michael Dubruiel's The Church's Most Powerful Novenas. 

A novena is a term used to describe a continuous praying of a formula nine consecutive times, usually nine consecutive days or once a week for nine weeks. The number nine derives from the time Mary and the Apostles waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit between Ascension and Pentecost. (from the Catholic Encyclopedia) This purse-sized prayer guide contains many of the Church's treasured petitions to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saints, including Saint Anthony, Saint Peregrine and Saint Therese of Lisieux. A section devoted to American Saints includes a prayer to the North American Jesuit Martyrs. A new ?quick novena? from Blessed Teresa of Calcutta appears here for the first time in print. Illustrated throughout with art and religious images, each prayer in The Church's Most Powerful Novenas includes the history of that particular novena. A listing of shrines connected with novenas in the book is included. Although the practice of praying novenas has only been around since the 1600s, believers have embraced this commitment of devotion as a unique aspect of our Catholic identity.

Pentecost Novena

 If your memory goes back before Vatican II, you will recall that every respectable parish had its perpetual or ongoing novena. These were in honor of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ under some title, or they were devotions to Mary as Our Lady of Perpetual Help (originally a devotion of the Eastern churches), Our Lady of the Miraculous Medal, or even Our Lady of Sorrows. Various saints had their own novenas, usually preceding their feast days; but St. Anthony was so popular that he might find himself bombarded by prayer on a weekly basis throughout the year. Parish novenas had several things in common: popular hymns and prayers in the vernacular, a devotional sermon, and Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament. These expressions of popular piety were rather rigidly controlled. The hymns and the prayers represented the best examples of the folk religion and piety that most of our ancestors had packed Into their shabby baggage as they came to this country as immigrants through the "golden door." In Ellis Island's beautiful and moving museum is a remarkable display of several religious articles of the immigrants — Jewish prayer stoles. Lutheran Bibles, and, of course, rosaries and novena books. 

From Michael Dubruiel's The Church's Most Powerful Novenas. 

A novena is a term used to describe a continuous praying of a formula nine consecutive times, usually nine consecutive days or once a week for nine weeks. The number nine derives from the time Mary and the Apostles waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit between Ascension and Pentecost. (from the Catholic Encyclopedia) This purse-sized prayer guide contains many of the Church's treasured petitions to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saints, including Saint Anthony, Saint Peregrine and Saint Therese of Lisieux. A section devoted to American Saints includes a prayer to the North American Jesuit Martyrs. A new ?quick novena? from Blessed Teresa of Calcutta appears here for the first time in print. Illustrated throughout with art and religious images, each prayer in The Church's Most Powerful Novenas includes the history of that particular novena. A listing of shrines connected with novenas in the book is included. Although the practice of praying novenas has only been around since the 1600s, believers have embraced this commitment of devotion as a unique aspect of our Catholic identity.

Pentecost Novena

 Indeed, without knowing it as such, the Apostles made a novena of prayer while waiting for the Holy Spirit. Since Our Lord himself counseled persistent and repetitive prayer in the parables of the Importunate Neighbor (Lk. 11:5-9) and the Unjust Judge (Lk. 18:1.7), it became obvious that the novena could be used for intercession, asking the Lord for what one needs. Novenas could also be an act of penance and sometimes imposed, one assumes, for fairly serious sins on the occasion of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. 

From Michael Dubruiel's The Church's Most Powerful Novenas. 

A novena is a term used to describe a continuous praying of a formula nine consecutive times, usually nine consecutive days or once a week for nine weeks. The number nine derives from the time Mary and the Apostles waited for the coming of the Holy Spirit between Ascension and Pentecost. (from the Catholic Encyclopedia) This purse-sized prayer guide contains many of the Church's treasured petitions to Jesus, the Holy Spirit, the Blessed Virgin Mary and Saints, including Saint Anthony, Saint Peregrine and Saint Therese of Lisieux. A section devoted to American Saints includes a prayer to the North American Jesuit Martyrs. A new ?quick novena? from Blessed Teresa of Calcutta appears here for the first time in print. Illustrated throughout with art and religious images, each prayer in The Church's Most Powerful Novenas includes the history of that particular novena. A listing of shrines connected with novenas in the book is included. Although the practice of praying novenas has only been around since the 1600s, believers have embraced this commitment of devotion as a unique aspect of our Catholic identity.

Pentecost Novena

  Novenas are prayers of devotion that are offered for nine days (or some other period of time with a factor of nine).They had their origin in ancient Rome as times of prayer for the dead over a nine-day period and were, essentially, prayers of mourning and commendation of the soul to the mercy of God. I have participated in this kind of novena many times, held by the Puerto Rican people after the death of a dear one. In the early Middle Ages, novenas became ways of preparing for great liturgical events, especially Christmas. One novena became linked to the antiphons of Vespers, which begin with the vocative "0" nine days before the celebration of Christ's birth. We recognize this custom from the Advent hymn "0 Come, 0 Come, Emmanuel," which in fact is the first antiphon of this novena. This novena may have been related in people's minds to the nine months that the infant Savior remained in his mother's womb. For this reason, novenas began to be associated with Our Lady, particularly in France and Spain. A bit later, the novena became associated with the nine days from Ascension to Pentecost. 

From Michael Dubruiel's The Church's Most Powerful Novenas. 

St. Rita of Cascia - May 22

   

 

From The Church's Most Powerful Novenas by Michael Dubruiel:


Rita Lotti was born near Cascia in Italy in the fourteenth century, the only child of her parents, Antonio and Amata. Her parents were official peacemakers in a turbulent environment of feuding families.
At an early age Rita felt called to religious life; however, her parents arranged for her to be married to Paolo Mancini. Rita accepted this as God’s will for her, and the newlyweds were soon blessed with two sons.
One day while on his way home, Paolo was killed. Rita’s grief was compounded with the fear that her two sons would seek to avenge their father’s death, as was the custom of the time. She began praying and fasting that God would not allow this to happen. Both sons soon fell ill and died, which Rita saw as an answer to her prayers.
Now alone in the world, Rita sought to enter religious life, feeling that God had cleared the path for her to fulfill the vocation that she had felt was hers from childhood. Yet she found that the convent she so desired to enter was reluctant to accept her due to fears that the political rivals that had killed her husband would bring violence on them.
She finally brought peace between the rivals and was able to enter the Convent of St. Mary Magdalene of the Augustinian Nuns. In religious life, Rita was noted for her holiness. She spent her days not only in prayer and contemplation but also in service to the sick and the poor.
One day while kneeling in prayer and contemplating the passion of Jesus, she received the wound of one thorn from the crown of thorns that she bore until her death some fifteen years later.
Devotion to St. Rita was almost nonexistent for five hundred years, but with her canonization in 1900, all of that has changed. She is truly a saint for every state in life, having spent her life as a married woman, a mother, a widow, and a religious.

Michael Dubruiel: Pocket Guide to the Mass

  Michael Dubruiel's Pocket Guide to the Mass - a sample page. 

Walks you through the Mass, explaining the biblical basis of prayers, the meaning behind gestures, and a brief overview of the spirituality that brings Catholics together for Eucharist each week.

Published in 2007, still in print. 

More books by Michael Dubruiel