Say Your Grace! – Meal Prayer

-Father Arthur Tonne, The Big Book of Sacramentals

“Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, distributed them to those reclining” – St. John, 6:11.

A Catholic Army chaplain of World War Two was relating some of his experiences. Speaking of starvation in war-torn Europe, he described what he saw in an American Army camp in France. Every day a group of boys and girls of all sizes and ages, but with one common longing for food, would search among the empty food cans thrown out from the Army kitchen.

With painstaking perseverance the children would scrape every speck of food from the cans. After they had gathered whatever they could find, each child placed his precious findings on the ground, knelt down, made the sign of the cross, and said a prayer before his miserable meal. Many of the soldiers were touched to tears.

A Holy House – True Womanhood

Two wonderful articles on the atmosphere of a Catholic Home……

From Plain Talks on Marriage by Rev. Fulgence Meyer, O.F.M., 1927

The parents of the family will at once take it upon themselves to give their home the air of a house of God.

In other words, they will supply it with those emblems that ought to have a place in every Catholic home.

Of these emblems the first and foremost is the crucifix of which mention was made before.

Besides it there ought to be other representations of our Lord, his mother, and the Saints, discreetly placed about the home.

Whilst the house needs not to be turned into a holy picture gallery, yet a prudent selection of holy pictures will become a Catholic home. They are indicative of faith, and of a certain gratitude for, and pride in, the faith.

In the meantime they are a continuous reminder of God and his saints, the heroes and heroines of virtue, to the family, and thus provide it with a potent stimulant to piety and goodness.

Religious Practices in Your Home/A Little Update…

Before the post….

We wish to thank you so much to those who have given to Rosie’s Get Well Fund. We have hit our goal and we are overcome with gratitude with your monetary gifts…and especially the gift of your prayers!

Although Rosie is going through a lot, her attitude is quite refreshing! She does not complain about her sickness and accepts it as God’s will. We are so grateful for that!

We are working hard at getting her well and waiting on test results.

We have received so many kind offerings of prayers! And people have written us, sent us sacramentals, etc. Thank you, thank you! Please know how much it is appreciated and that you will be remembered each day in our prayers…especially the daily rosary!

Please continue to keep us in your prayers…

I will keep you updated!

Saying “Hi!”

Religious Practices in the Home

In order to provide an environment where your child will grow to love God and the things of God, make your home a little sanctuary–a place where he will be constantly reminded of the Lord, and where family devotions will instill habits of deep and lasting Christian piety.

Patience, Nagging, Sincerity – Catholic Family Handbook

Painting by Al Buell 1910-1996

by Father Lovasik, Catholic Family Handbook

Ask God to help you be patient

Even people who constantly strive to please God have a goodly share of hard things to bear. This is the reason patience is so necessary for happiness in marriage.

Be constantly prepared to bear disagreeable things.

When there is an abundance of the good things, there is danger of becoming too occupied with passing and material considerations.Be grateful to God for them.

When disagreeable things, reverses, sorrows, and disappointments come your way, put your confidence in God, who will strengthen you.

Ask for patience. In the mercy of God, reverses are sometimes sent to awaken your wayward conscience or to test your love of God. When God so tests you, you must never be wanting in love and confidence and patience.

Be honest and sincere

You owe your spouse truth and sincerity. Our Lord is the greatest example of these virtues. He wished everyone well and was never anything but kindness itself in word and deed. He never made use of men for selfish ends, but spoke and acted openly, sincerely, and uprightly.

Honesty and sincerity bring about confidence and a spirit of loyalty. Few things contribute more to the success of a marriage.. Such confidence bolsters a husband’s flagging courage and inspires him with the will to win and to measure up to the high opinion that his wife and children have of him and his abilities.

The enemies of honesty and sincerity are nagging, miserliness, jealousy, and in-law trouble.

Avoid nagging

Nagging is not always the fault of women, yet it seems that they often fall victims to this disagreeable habit that spoils family happiness. Do not be a nagging wife.

Do not try to remake your husband. Prize your own individuality and be willing to put up with his.

Do not expect your husband to render daily reports on where he was, why, when, and with whom. Be an eager listener, but a reluctant inquisitor.

You must assure yourself of your husband’s unwavering devotion. The result of your placing implicit confidence and trust in him will not incline him to take advantage of your refusal to snoop or pry, or to step out of line.

He will be won by decency, gratitude, loyalty, and trust, but never with fear.

A sincere and trusting wife will have a great influence in shaping her husband’s life. Stand by your husband and share with head and heart his successes and failures.

Give him due encouragement, but have the courage to drive home a sometimes unpleasant truth.

Never be afraid of responsibility, but be prepared to embark on a new course of life with your husband, should the need arise.

You will bring to your husband the love and inspiration he needs in the many problems of life, and that love and inspiration will weave threads of gold in his life’s pattern.

Wealth, fame, and power are no satisfactory substitutes for the hard-earned joys of the married life, for not one of them can satisfy the hunger of the heart for love.

When your husband knows he is married to his most trusted confidant, your influence soars. -Matthew L. Jacobson https://amzn.to/2MtbcTT (afflink)

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Finer Femininity is a small publication compiled to inspire Catholic women in their vocations. It consists of uplifting articles from authors with traditional values, with many of them from priests, written over 50 years ago. These anecdotes are timeless but, with the fast-paced “progress “of today’s world, the pearls within the articles are rarely meditated upon. This little magazine offers Catholic womankind support and inspiration as they travel that oftentimes lonely trail….the narrow road to heaven. The thoughts within the pages will enlighten us to regard the frequently monotonous path of our “daily duties” as the beautiful road to sanctity. Feminine souls need this kind of information to continue to “fight the good fight” in a world that has opposing values and seldom offers any kind of support to these courageous women. Inside the pages you will find inspiration for your roles as single women, as wives and as mothers. In between the thought-provoking articles, the pages are sprinkled with pictures, quotes and maybe even a recipe or two.

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Building a Happy Home

I remember my dear aunt (God rest her soul) say to my mom, “It’s very hard, Beulah, to be a good Catholic.”

I’ve given that a few thoughts through the years and my own thoughts are, “It’s very hard NOT being a good Catholic!”

All mothers struggle. But I can’t imagine being a mom without the Faith.

There are many of these moms who are juggling careers and motherhood and spinning their wheels.

They feel they are wasting their degrees if they are staying home and just changing diapers, and at the same time they feel inadequate as a mom, not knowing where to turn.

It’s a confusing and empty life without our Faith to guide us.

We, as Catholic mothers, struggle. But we have all the helps, all the guidelines, the Sacramental grace at our fingertips. We must count ourselves very fortunate.

That being said, it is a good thing to listen to the commonsense advice of veteran moms.

Charlotte Siems is a mother of twelve and has learned some lessons along the way! Thank you to her for this lovely post that should give you some inspiration in your own journey!

Before having children, many women worry about what kind of mother they will be. Nothing unusual about that, but a difficult childhood instilled in me a fear that I wouldn’t know how to have a normal family home life. I worried about how I would handle discipline or how I would treat possible future children. On the other hand, that same childhood experience made me determined to create a marriage and home that was stable, warm and peaceful.

Early in my mothering career I attended a parenting conference and heard Dr. Herbert Ratner make the following statement: “The 20 years between 20 and 40 (years of age) are just as long as the 20 years between 40 and 60. What you do in the first 20 years determines how happy you will be in the second 20 years.” That idea stuck with me. I determined to live life with the end in mind.

Not knowing how to have a happy home, I set out to learn how. Here are a few things I figured out:

Books don’t magically solve problems. Sometimes we deceive ourselves into thinking we’re doing something because we read about it and agree with it. Close the book and do what it says.

Surround yourself with what is true and lovely. Protect yourself from ugly input. Don’t live in a bleak, cluttered environment. Bring beauty, warmth, and neatness to all of your life. Be very careful what you allow to enter your mind and eyes. Constant exposure to beautiful ideas and noble goals will transform your thought life.

We all know that thoughts determine actions, don’t we?

Do the things you don’t want to do. Do them cheerfully and well. Edith Schaeffer wrote, “Somebody has to get up early, stay up late, do more than the others, if the human garden is to be a thing of beauty.” At first glance it doesn’t seem fair, but there are hidden and precious rewards for dying to self and serving. Stomping and self-pity cancel the reward points.

Choose your hard things. Do your laundry and put it away. That’s hard. Get ready to go somewhere and realize no one has clean clothes to wear. That’s hard. You pick.

Take the time. Yes, I know you’re busy. Throw a meal on the table and get on to the next thing. No time for a tablecloth and candles and flowers. You’ll do that when you have time. But before you know it, the weeks, the months and the years pass, and the children leave home and you never had time.

Lest you think I’ve sailed through life with clean laundry and beautiful meal tables, I assure you these lessons were hard earned. Many times I felt inadequate to the task. It was like trying to pour water from a dry bucket. Giving your children what you didn’t have as a child is not easy. Creating a happy home life from scratch will take everything you’ve got and even that won’t be enough…

That’s why I’m so glad for the strength Jesus gives me. His favor and loving-kindness supply what I don’t have. He will gladly do that for you, too, for He knows all about love and building beautiful homes…

It turns out that giving your family what you didn’t receive, gives it back to you.

This is the time of year that you should be able to get some Epiphany Water in your home! It is very powerful (and who doesn’t need some good power going on in their homes)! The blessing of Epiphany water has special exorcism prayers that no other holy water has. Use it often….teach your children the value of it and get them used to blessing themselves with it.

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Guide Your Children and Shape Their Character

From The Catholic Family Handbook by Fr. Lovasik

As the father is the head of the family, the mother is its heart. Just as Pope Pius XI speaks of the father as “strong in faith and manly in virtues,” he speaks of a mother as “pure and devoted.”

Elsewhere he says, “As the father occupies the chief place in ruling, so the mother may and ought to claim for herself the chief place in love.”

But the Holy Father speaks of supernatural love, not of the tender maternal love-instinct upon which the supernatural is built.

Natural love, which is excellent in itself, and offers the possibility of untold good, may even at times be a hindrance when you are imprudent and cannot keep your children truly obedient, cannot refuse what is harmful, and cannot punish if necessary.

It may be abused if it is made a wedge to separate the children from their father. Supernatural love exercises the strongest appeal. Of it are born piety, modesty, purity, and fear of the learned at the mother’s knee.

Every person has a supernatural destiny, to be worked out in time. He must be educated for what he must be and what he must do here below, in order to attain the sublime end for which he was created.

That education is the result of the combined efforts of both parents. But in his youngest years, the child is almost exclusively under the mother’s guidance.

Your efforts are to produce effects that will have their final reckoning in eternity. Although your educational influence is of a nature entirely different from that of the father, your vocation as mother is equal in importance to your husband’s.

Most adults attest that mothers have had far more to do with the shaping of their character than fathers have.

But so necessary are both that if either is lacking for any cause whatever, the education of the children is seriously, and sometimes fatally, handicapped.

As far as possible, be at home with your children. As you nourished your child before he was capable of eating solid food, so in the early formative years, nature has determined that you must nourish your child in virtue.“We often live with this illusion. With the impression that all would go better, we would like the things around us to change, that the circumstances would change. But this is often an error. It is not the exterior circumstances that must change; it is above all our hearts that must change.” -Fr. Jacques Philippe, Searching For and Maintaining Peace, http://amzn.to/2oqVOv8 (afflink)

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Insignificant Duties?

From Christ in the Home, Fr. Raoul Plus, S.J., 1950’s

Apostolic work, if carried on inopportunely or immoderately, can take a woman away from her home too much.

Beyond a doubt, there are immense needs: help for the sick, catechetical instructions, guild meetings for the Sisters, spiritual conferences, and in all of these, great charity can be exercised.

It is much better for a woman to spend her time in such things than in lounging, or in numerous and useless visits, in exploring for the hundredth time some enticing department store.

Nevertheless, the duties of the home remain her principal work: To plan, to arrange, to mend, to clean, to sew, to beautify, to care for the children.

 Insignificant duties?

But what would that matter if they represented the Will of God? Are we not too often tempted to want a change?

Impetuous zeal, poorly directed service, caprice under the guise of generosity seek to substitute for daily duty which perhaps has not much glamour about it but which is just the same wanted by God.

Would not the greatest charity in such a case be not to engage in works of charity but to remain faithfully at home and devote oneself to works which no one will speak of and which will win no one’s congratulations?

Later when the children have grown up and settled, there may be leisure; then a large share in the apostolate will be open according to one’s strength and time.

Until then, my nearest neighbor, without being the least bit exclusive about it but merely judging with a well instructed understanding, will be this little world that has established itself in my home….

Another danger besides excessive apostolic works that might ensnare some wives and mothers of families would be to give exaggerated place to exercises of piety.

Did not one of the characters in a novel by George Duhamel lament this tendency:

“I have heard priests say that some women have spoiled their married life by excessive attendance at religious ceremonies and they sighed, ‘Why did they get married if they had a religious vocation.'”

There are unfortunately some husbands so superficially Christian that they see exaggeration in the most elementary and normal practice of piety on the part of the wife and mother.

That is only too sadly true!

Their judgment is worth nothing.

We are referring only to an actual excess which would really be considered such by a competent judge.

There is no doubt that a married woman, if she is a good manager and is not encumbered by some job outside the home, can find time for normal religious exercises and can even provide for meditation, spiritual reading and a relatively frequent assistance at Mass and reception of Holy Communion; time, after all, is something that varies in its possibility for adaptations and compressibility and woman excels in the heart of putting many things into a small place….

If she suspects that her husband finds certain exterior acts of piety exaggerated, attendance at weekday Mass for instance, let her increase her private devotions somewhat, a little more meditation or spiritual reading when he is not around; whether he is right or not, it is better not to irritate him if grave consequences might result.

That is how Elizabeth Leseur managed; never did she betray the least annoyance when disturbed in her devotions; she always answered her husband’s call or his outbursts of irritation with a pleasant face.

Never neglect a duty but observe the order of their importance.

Be sure to treat all alike. Nothing is so disrupting to home life as favoritism for one or the other child. The same measure for all! – Christ in the Home, 1950’s, Fr. Raoul Plus, S.J

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Reflections on the Holy Family

Fr. Francis Filas, S.J., 1947

“WHEN God in His mercy decided to carry out the work of man’s redemption, so long expected through the centuries, He arranged to perform His task in such a way that in its beginnings it might show forth to the world the august spectacle of a divinely founded family.

“In this all men were to behold the perfect exemplar of domestic society as well as of all virtue and holiness.

“A benign Providence established the Holy Family in order that all Christians in whatever walk of life or situation might have a reason and an incentive to practice every virtue, provided they fix their gaze on the Holy Family.” Thus did Pope Leo XIII write in 1892.

A divinely founded family…the perfect exemplar of all virtue and holiness…for all Christians in whatever walk of life.

“Why!” you say, “my family life is to make me holy? Did Pope Leo mean that ordinary people can be and should be saints? We who live in the world, who have to spend most of our time watching the budget and earning enough to support ourselves and our children?

Our ideals are subjected to continual battering by the un-Christian teachings and practices of so many of our neighbors. We can’t spend our whole day in prayer like the saints of old.

Evidently the Pope did not realize how ordinary we are. We try to live a good Catholic life, but we don’t deserve special credit for that. Holiness is something reserved for a few select laymen, for priests and religious, for monks and nuns in austere monasteries and convents.”

But the Pope did mean you–you and your husband or wife as well as your whole family. You can be and should be saints, for saints are those common-sense people who act according to their realization that all their happiness lies in obeying God’s law perfectly as it is shown them by the Church and by their conscience.

Holiness means happiness. Holy people are happy people at peace with God, with others, and with themselves.

There is only one requirement. You must do God’s will. This embraces various obligations and gives you corresponding rights and privileges.

God’s will in your regard is not something frightening and preternatural, brought down to you by angels amid trumpet blasts, thunder, lightning, and earthquakes.

No, it consists in the observance of the commandments, the frequent reception of the sacraments, and the practice of certain virtues in your everyday life. That is all. Call it homely, call it an everyday, ordinary, humdrum rule of life if you wish; but you can’t call it difficult and beyond your strength.

God’s grace is with you at every turn, sufficient and more than sufficient to help you serve Him.

Sometimes in your efforts you perhaps will fall out of weariness or discouragement; but you rise quickly, and trusting in God’s abundant grace, you go forward again.

Your goal must ever be the perfect love of God manifested in perfect love for His creatures, your “neighbors”–your husband or your wife, your children, your friends, all with whom you come into contact.

You look for inspiration to attain such an ideal. You ask for a proof to convince yourself that everyday joys can be the means to serve God perfectly; or on the other hand you are possibly too close to the earthly conditions of daily work attended with monotony, disappointment, worry, and fatigue.

This makes it hard to believe that in so ordinary a way you can become someone so extraordinary as a saint, known to God as His special image, His temple in whom He loves to dwell.

You want proof and inspiration? You wish to see everyday life made into a steppingstone to the very heights of heaven? Then you need only look at the Holy Family.

You must contemplate Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. They not only possessed human nature like yours, but they performed workaday tasks as you do. They ate and drank and slept and cleaned house and earned a living and prayed and had their neighbors just like you. Yet who were they?

They were Jesus Christ, God, Second Person of the eternal Blessed Trinity, who took to Himself a body and soul like ours: Mary, the blessed Virgin Mother of God, all-perfect, in whom there was never the slightest sin or imperfection; and Joseph, he whom Jesus called “Father,” the virginal husband of the Mother of God.

Have you ever stopped to do a little arithmetic in studying Christ’s life? Jesus had a tremendous mission to accomplish. He was to teach mankind the new and difficult law of brotherly love; He was to redeem us by means of intense suffering and a painful and disgraceful death; He was to found a Church that would last for all time as the only certain road to salvation.

Nonetheless, with such a task before Him, the Son of God spent ten times as much of His life in obscurity as in His public apostolate.

We are told of no miracles, no preaching, no teaching of the multitudes during that period.

There was merely a hidden and ordinary family life with two lovable persons as His intimate and chosen companions, Joseph and Mary.

No human being has ever been or will ever be holier than this husband and wife. Yet these two souls did not help Jesus in His preaching and teaching, for Joseph was already dead when Jesus left Nazareth to begin His career; and as far as we know, Mary stayed quietly at home during almost all of the Public Life.

Actually, then, Joseph and Mary gained their immeasurable holiness by offering Jesus the love of a father and mother in a true family, while Jesus in His turn tendered them the homage of a son. Could any lives have been more ordinary than those at Bethlehem, Egypt, and Nazareth–yet were any lives ever more holy?

This is the lesson of the Holy Family. The will of God must count for everything in our daily lives. Prosaic deeds done for God can lead to spectacular holiness.

Jesus, Mary, and Joseph were human, intensely human in the best sense of the word. They show us how our lives, too, should be human–truly warm and Godlike.

By this means we can be sanctifying ourselves more and more. The method is simple. Perhaps we have been following it all along without realizing the fact. At any rate, the leaders are set before us. All we need do is follow.

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Do Your Part and Trust in God’s Help

It IS interesting, isn’t it, how, in the last decades, women are made to feel as if they are being “losers”, “nobodys” if they are dedicated to the home. They are not using their talents if they aren’t out working in the world.

Truly, I find that illogical. How many talents does it make to run a pleasant home, raise good children, have a healthy relationship with someone you rub shoulders with night and day? That, in itself, is a full-time job…not to mention if some are homeschooling, seeking out healthy alternatives, helping with their parish life, etc., etc.

No, it takes a brave, committed, responsible, hard-working adult to do what it takes to raise a Godly family in today’s society.

And for those women who have to work on top of all that, what a load, indeed! My own mother had to work for a period in our lives and it was very difficult!

Father Lovasik, in this excerpt, talks about happiness in marriage, and how it must be earned…

 

by Father Lovasik, The Catholic Family Handbook

Happiness in marriage must be earned. It is something you must work out for yourself, chiefly by forgetting yourself and serving others.

Marriage involves the art of human relations, the psychology of children, the economics of running a home, the maintenance of health, but, above all, the development of the moral and spiritual life of the family.

All this demands a wide range of talents and skill. No marriage is a success unless less you make it so, and that takes persistent effort and, still more, a constant and humble reliance on God.

The supreme object of your effort and striving is the family. You worked and saved in order that you might be married and have a home of your own. Once married, you worked and saved that you might successfully bring up a family.

Your purpose in Matrimony should be to bring God’s children into the world and rear them properly, to be one in body and spirit, and to make a happy home. You are to help one another and your children in every possible way, especially to get to Heaven, which is the final and eternal destiny for us all.

You and your spouse must be willing to work at marriage as the greatest job of your lives and not desert when problems arise. When you married, each of you took on a responsibility for some part of the work that goes into the making of a home.

Both assume the responsibility of encouraging and helping the other, insofar as is possible, in the specific tasks designed for each.

The training of children is the mutual responsibility of both husband and wife. Thus, marriage is very much a fifty-fifty proposition. Only when you are willing to bear your share of the burdens of married life can you hope to have real love and peace.

Marriage is normally a source of equilibrium for you, because cause it brings you legitimate and healthy pleasures. But equilibrium always consists of an effort to impose the guidance of reason upon all your activities.

Welcome without narrow-mindedness and weakness the joy marriage offers; use your reason in meeting the difficulties that marriage inevitably entails.

If your temperament is inherently unstable, if your life is weighed down with unfavorable conditions, you can recover the health of your emotional and spiritual life only if you seek above all what is right according to the sane reason that God has given you, providing, of course, that you make yourself do it.

Only this effort can bring you the joy that is worthy of you.

At any rate, she has by nature the power, the art, and the disposition to please, to soothe, to charm, and to captivate. It is a wonderful power; and we see daily women exerting it in a wonderful way. Why will not women who are truly good, or who sincerely strive to be so, not make it the chief study of their lives to find out and acquire the sovereign art of making their influence as healthful, as cheering, as blissful as the sunlight and the warmth are to their homes? – Rev Bernard O’Reilly, True Womanhood, 1894 http://amzn.to/2mPm81e (afflink)

 

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Examination of Conscience – How To Raise Good Catholic Children

Teach Your Child to Pray: Examination of Conscience

How to Raise Good Catholic Children, by Mary Reed Newland

The first thing, after “Dear Blessed Jesus,” or whatever children like to call Him best, is their examination of conscience, because it’s easier to settle down to a really good talk with God after we get our sins out of the way.

This is why the Mass starts with the penitential rite. The important thing about a child’s examination of conscience is that he be assured that his parents will not scold him if he reveals some carefully concealed guilt of the day.

His sins are sins against God, not his parents, and he will not hesitate to drag out the most jealously guarded secrets if he’s certain his parents understand that he’s confessing to God, not to them, and that they will resist the temptation to lecture.

For instance, in the summertime we have a problem called “dirt in the hair.” Every night the children turn up at bedtime with their heads gritty with topsoil. The culprit is conspicuous, if at all, only by his silence — until he examines his conscience.

“I poured dirt on everybody’s head because I felt like it.” The immediate reaction of any normally weary mother facing a lineup of shampoos is at least mild rage, but in the face of such a confession freely made, the only permissible comment is, “Are you really sorry?” to lead the self-accused to a sincere act of contrition.

“I am sorry, and please help me not to do it again.”

Here they learn to guard against presumption. The inclination is to vow solemnly that they will never do it again (O happy day!), but sanctity does not come that easily. Unless they beg for the grace to reform, they are apt to do it again and again.

Some days are quite good, and they will charge into night prayers loudly with, “I was very good today, God!”

With presumption again in mind, it is better to say something like, “I tried to be good today, but if I did anything to offend You, I am sorry. Please help me never to offend You again.”

Not all children are shouters at prayers, but we have had some who were, and their attempts to make themselves heard way off in Heaven certainly robbed their prayers, while not of sincerity, at least of privacy.

Learning that God is near, is here, is everywhere, and can hear even the whispered prayers and secret thoughts, is a wonderful discovery for shouters and non-shouters alike and, incidentally, covers one whole lesson in the catechism: Where is God? If God is everywhere, why don’t we see Him? Does God see us? Does God know all things? Can God do all things? Is God just, holy, and merciful?

The answers to all these questions can be learned in the course of the many interruptions to night prayers. “How can He hear me if I don’t even see Him? When did He come in? Did He come in the door? Can He come through the wall? Could He see a mouse in the wall? A mosquito on the ceiling? If I just think my prayers, can He hear them?”

If the question about God’s being just, holy, and merciful seems a bit difficult, it fits in when we explain that confessing the sins of the day is something entirely between them and God, and is the reason — when correction and punishment are a mother’s and father’s concern elsewhere — they do not belong at night prayers. One sins against God, who can already see the sin, and see the sorrow for it, and will reward a sincere confession with forgiveness and the grace to do better next time.

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“Religious have no need of particular friendships, but those living in the world need them as a mutual strength and aid in the many difficult passages that have to be crossed.
For those who live in the midst of the world and yet strive for true virtue, it is necessary to ally themselves to one another by a holy and sacred friendship through which they stimulate, assist and encourage each other toward good.Those who walk on level ground do not need to hold hands, but those who climb steep and slippery roads need to hold on to each other in order to progress more securely.” -St. Francis de Sales

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