Glorious St. Benedict, sublime model of virtue, pure vessel of God's grace! Behold me humbly kneeling at your feet. I implore you in your loving kindness to pray for me before the throne Of God. To you I have recourse in the dangers that daily surround me. Shield me against my selfishness and my indifference to God and to my neighbor. Inspire me to imitate you in all things. May your blessing be with me always, so that I may see and serve Christ in others and work for His kingdom.
Graciously obtain for me from God those favors and graces which I need so much in the trials, miseries and afflictions of life. Your heart was always full of love, compassion and mercy toward those who were afflicted or troubled in any way. You never dismissed without consolation and assistance anyone who had recourse to you. I therefore invoke your powerful intercession, confident in the hope that you will hear my prayer and obtain for me the special grace and favor I earnestly implore (name it).
Help me, great St. Benedict. to live and die as a faithful child of God, to run in the sweetness of His loving will and to attain the eternal happiness of heaven. Amen.
There are two excellent Facebook groups, Clergy, Religious, Seminarians and Laity Who Stand With Pope Benedict XVI and Catholics Who Condemn the Media's Recent Treatment of the Pope that are communicating to like-minded Catholics about our need to pray for our pope. I recommend St. Benedict as he is the patron saint of those who are poisoned, owing to the fact that an attempt was made to kill St. Benedict by having him drink from a poisoned chalice. St. Benedict rendered the poison ineffective by blessing the drink. Perhaps, in praying to St. Benedict, we might especially pray for those UK Catholics whose positive mindset towards the pope has indeed been infected by shoddy media reports and contaminated by this nonsense from state bodies who employ such civil servants. Such ‘servants’ are paid with our taxes.There are four million ‘Romans’ or RCs here in the UK, and is it out of the question that each of us formally question why our toll to the government should not include funding such odious (libellous?) and crass ‘brainstorms’? It’s not as if the civil servants will be sacked, they’ve been moved on from their comfy government job to a new job. Smooth! I would wholeheartedly agree with Jeffrey Steel when he wrote ‘what was shocking to me was the reassignment of those involved rather than something more severe.’ http://frjeffreysteel.blogspot.com/2010/04/all-catholics-should-be-utterly.html
To put a framework to their ‘far-fetched’ ideas; there is something very New Labour and Blairite about the ‘plans’ they had concocted for the pope – with its big emphasis on the pope apologising randomly for anything and to everyone (Blair days revisited) but also the clashing ‘open an abortion ward’ with some idea about the pope changing his ideas on adoption. They surely cannot fail to understand that with over 600 abortions everyday in England and Wales, that..oh my gosh...those same babies that could have been put up for adoption…have been…um…done away with on some ‘abortion ward’?
And ‘the speech on equality’, Harriet H will be pleased, she may even give whoever dreamt it up a stake in NuLab. Bit of irony there too – if those paltry civil servants knew anything about equality they wouldn’t subject Catholic ideals and our great leader to such playground bullying. I’ll put a stop to my rant, and pencil in each day of the Novena in my diary.
PS - The Knights of Columbanus have already completed a novena for Pope Benedict, which began on April 11 and finished on April 19.
http://communio.stblogs.org/2010/04/novena-of-prayer-for-pope-bene.html
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