MARY, OUR MOTHER

Today, October 16, is the Feast Day of St. Hedwig & St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. There is another great Saint celebrated today and his name is:

SAINT GERARD MAJELLA, who is the patron of the unborn!

Memorial

16 October

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Son of a tailor who died when the boy was 12, leaving the family in poverty. Gerard tried to join the Capuchins, but his health prevented it He was accepted as a Redemptorist lay brother serving his congregation as sacristan, gardener, porter, infirmarian, and tailor. Wonder worker.

When falsely accused by a pregnant woman of being the father of her child, he retreated to silence; she later recanted and cleared him, and thus began his association as patron of all aspects of pregnancy. Reputed to bilocate and read consciences. His last will consisted of the following small note on the door of his cell: "Here the will of God is done, as God wills, and as long as God wills."

A life frail and brief

Born April 6, 1726, in Muro Lucano, Italy, St. Gerard's special intercession for mothers and unborn children is perhaps explained by his own frail health at birth, which was cause for him to be baptized immediately.

His feeble condition persisted throughout his 29 years, until his death on Oct. 16, 1755 of tuberculosis.

Despite his condition, it fell to him to support his family after his father died while Gerard was very young. He apprenticed as a tailor, but had a foreman who belittled his devotion to the Eucharist and his constant works of charity.

Gerard withstood the criticism, however, dividing his earnings equally between his family, the poor and Mass stipends for the release of souls in purgatory.

Gerard's mother, Benedetta, said her son "was born for heaven," and told how he spent hours before the Blessed Sacrament "until he forgot it was dinnertime."

He tried to join two religious orders but was rejected as too weak. He was finally admitted as a lay brother in the Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer after the superior saw "he could do the work of three men."

The Redemptorists, as they are commonly known, had been founded by St. Alphonsus Liguori only a few years earlier. To their usual vows Gerard added one: "To always do that which would seem most pleasing to God."

So trusted was he that, after joining the monastery, he was made the spiritual director for several communities of nuns.

In 1753, however, a young woman who had quit the convent wrote to St. Alphonsus and accused Gerard of having an affair with a local townswoman.

Gerard refused to offer a self-defense, and St. Alphonsus saw no recourse but to consider him guilty of adultery and violating his vows He disciplined Gerard by ordering him confined to the monastery and forbidding him to receive Holy Communion—a punishment that for Gerard was like being denied food.

Gerard's only comment was, "There is a God in heaven. He will prevail."

Months later, as his accuser lay on her deathbed, she was stricken with remorse and confessed to fabricating her story. When St. Alphonsus asked Gerard why he had not defended himself, Gerard replied: "But, Father, our holy rule says that we are to bear in silence mortifications imposed on us by our superiors."

St. Gerard spent many hours each day on his knees before the Blessed Sacrament to praise God and give thanks for His blessings.

Many of the gifts attributed to the frail saint were attributed to this time spent in prayer before the Eucharist. It was because of those gifts that his fellow monks frequently brought him with them when they would visit the homes of the sick.

Gerard had the ability to "read" souls and bring sinners back to God by quietly revealing to them their secret misdeeds, or sins they had been too embarrassed to confess.

Only one instance is recorded of his curing an expectant mother of her illness while he was alive, but there were many women who claimed that they and their children were granted graces through the prayers of Gerard.

The famous "handkerchief story" goes like this: While he was leaving the house of a family he had gone to visit, he dropped his handkerchief. A young woman retrieved it, but as she handed it to him, Gerard told her mysteriously, "Keep it. One day it will be of service to you."

Although puzzled, the woman did keep it. And a few years later, she faced life threatening complications as she was about to give birth to her first child. She remembered the mysterious hanky and the promise, and asked that it be brought to her in her travail. She held it to her womb and immediately the pain ceased and she delivered a normal, healthy child.

The miraculous handkerchief was passed from mother to mother as they were about to give birth in the town of Olive to Citra. The first mother passed the precious relic on to her niece and on it went through the generations.

Some families took small pieces of it and only a small shred remained when Gerard was canonized on Dec. 11, 1904. It was enough, though, to pass its special graces on to other cloths touched to it.

Now new handkerchiefs with St. Gerard's likeness, also touched to his relics, are given to visitors to the International Shrine of St. Gerard Majella in Materdomini, Italy, as well as at the national shrine in Newark.

Each year, thousands of expectant mothers, mothers with children and couples wanting to have children, visit the shrine in Newark, where Italian immigrants from Caposele, Teora and other towns around Materdomini settled in the 1900s, bringing their devotion to the saint with them.

A prayer for life;

Almighty and Eternal Father, in your all-wise providence you have raised up St. Gerard Majella to be the glorious protector of the mother and her unborn child Humbly we ask you that, through the powerful intercession of this, your faithful servant, we might have the courage to oppose the forces of anti-life in this world and to stand firm in our support of life in all stages of its development Grant that the ideal of the Christian family may flourish to the praise and glory of your Holy Name We ask this through Christ, our Lord Amen