Letters 401-600

These letters of St. Gaspar are now online. Click on the documents tab.

These were done quickly. No time to read or browse.

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 10:07 PM link

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Letters 301-400

These letters of St. Gaspar are now online. Click on the documents tab.

He has a couple of letters address to Pius VII in this group.

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 1:57 PM link

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Home

Have I ever let you see where I live? This is where I call home. Here is where you get to meet Steve who has been involved in much dialogue with me recently over several issues of pastoral life. Ah, the joys of formation ministry!

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 11:40 PM link

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Letters 201-300

These letters of St. Gaspar are now online. Click on the documents tab.

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 6:08 PM link

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Letters 101-200

These letters of St. Gaspar are now online. Click on the documents tab.

Letter 125

For some reason, letter 125 is still in Italian, AND it isn't even a letter of St. Gaspar. Since it is still in Italian I am having some difficulty figuring it out why it is there or what it says. Anybody out there read Italian?

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 3:19 PM link

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Blood, Sacred Blood

This is my latest article for Precious Blood Family Magazine. It is basically my homage to St. Gaspar's letter 57

Blood is not pleasant to think about sometimes. Some become squeamish. At the same time, blood has a central place in some of our violent movies and other entertainment. There we do not pay attention to it. It is not real in the movies. Still, spend a few moments thinking about blood, your blood. Stop. Take your pulse. Blood is central. It is powerful. Its action, its force, what it carries, gives us life. It moves faster, we move faster. It fails, we fail. It is the silent, ever present essence of the power of life.

Our ancestors had a vastly simpler, maybe primitive approach to blood. It was simply where life met death and death met life. Fresh, warm, crimson blood was an offering, a sacrifice, a gift back to God, taking the substance of the life God had given and, giving it back, offering it all. We flinch when the priest passes among us on Easter morning scattering the water of the newly blessed font over the people. Can you imagine what it was like in the desert when inaugurating the covenant Moses took half of the blood of the bulls and splashed it on the people? This was before dry cleaning was even imagined. You were stained. It didn’t come out. It was an enduring mark of life. Life branded you, stained you, claimed you as belonging to a covenant with life itself. It was remarkably more than the privileges of membership, and you can’t leave home without it. This primitive approach developed through time to an elaborate ritual in the holy of holies where the blood of sacrifice was placed in the temple’s inner heart on the mercy seat. Blood was a way to communicate with God, to approach the very limits of life and death and receive in return his life and forgiveness.

St. Gaspar would invite us to this same reflection, but then would ask us to spend a few more moments reflecting on God’s blood, divine blood. His letters indicate it is too little to call this blood significant. Somehow our words do not convey its grandeur. This blood was the flaming outburst, the burning expression, the extravagant generosity, of a God of unreasonable and unimaginable kindness. (1) The human body of the Son of God becomes the holy of holies, and now the blood on the mercy seat is the blood rushing through his precious heart. His death on the cross and the tearing of the veil in the temple indicate that the presence of the divine has been snatched from a temple of stone and placed in the temple of a human heart where it is most defeated, overwhelmed or broken. We may think that God has abandoned us in our struggles; yet, in fact, he is closest to the broken and forsaken. You who once were far off have been made near through the Blood of Christ. (2)

This blood has a voice, a piercing cry. For Gaspar the sound of this blood extinguishes any noise of sin. (3) This voice cries out clearly on behalf of sinners and any who are broken. This voice cries to the heavens when life is lost or blood is shed. This is precisely where a devotion to or spirituality of the Precious Blood identifies us. Reciting a devotion is untruthful if it does not correspond to devoted living, and a spirituality is empty if it is not a way of life. A Spirituality of the Precious Blood drives us to follow that voice, to take it up as our own. St. Gaspar would plunge us into these mysteries, (4)bending to its gentle crushing force that urges us on to a courageous love, first for the ineffable love of God, and in the same beat of the heart, to a love for all people, especially those who are far off. Yes, blood can be messy, but it is sacred too.

NOTES
1. Letter 57
2. Eph. 2:13
3. Letter 52
4. Letter 57

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 11:39 PM link

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More Letters

Letters 51-100 have arrived on-line. It may be useful to note that in these letters St. Gaspar writes from prison. He has several correspondents for whom he writes letters of spiritual direction. My favorite is letter 62. Check out letter 52 as well.

Here they are:Look for the Documents Tab

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 11:58 AM link

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The Sister's Stoles

I was delighted to see that Catholic News Service has some quality Photograph duplications available in honor of the Holy Father's 25th anniversary. The third option shows him during his trip to St. Louis a few years ago wearing the stole made for him by the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood, O'Fallon,MO.



Long term readers may remember that the same group of sisters designed and made a stole for me, with the image of the Lamb, Cup and Cross, and the embroidered images of the founders of our men's and women's communities. I ordered the one picture from CNS. I may get the two of these pictures framed together.



The Holy' Father's stole sits in a museum case in the Cathedral in St. Louis. Mine travels with me on missions and retreats.

The link is below if you want to see the other pictures available from CNS.

CNS - Catholic News Service: Pope Photo Sales

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 11:41 AM link

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Another New Voice

In the kitchen this afternoon, Steve and I enjoyed a rather heated but respectful exchange on the topic of Inclusive language. Steve is a Candidate for the CPPS Community in his Third year of Theology.

The question remains, "To whom are we accountable?" and "Does someone who changes the text on their own initiative in a corporate setting damage unity?" It was an interesting discussion and dialogue, one being about ideas and opinions and judgments, the other about feelings and personal experiences. There was much to share and agree on, and still some things that we do not see eye to eye on.

At Morning Mass I will still be forced to listen to three differing responses to "Let us give thanks to the Lord Our God" from a small community of men from about four different cultures.

In the meantime it might be helpful to consult another voice. Paul Mankowski, SJ tried to link to this in the comments but apparently the address is too long for Haloscan to understand. His article is from Touchstone Magazine and should be available here.

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 12:12 AM link

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On-line Documents

Gaspar's Letters will slowly but surely be on-line. The Strokes of the Pen, all five volumes, are there, as are the Circular Letters of St. Gaspar. These documents have been on-line on our international site. Having all 3000+ letters available will be something new. The first 50 have been uploaded. The process entails importing the original WordPerfect Document into Word which is easy. Then I have to clean up the document, removing section breaks and correcting formatting errors. Then I turn it into a Acrobat PDF file. Then record it on the Document page, add a hyperlink, and then upload the new document page along with the new document. I will try to do one or two files a day. Each file has 50 letters.

The Files will be on the Province of the Pacific Website. Click on the Documents tab.

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 11:09 PM link

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Regnum Eius

Okay, some of this explanation is for most of the readers who are not in the Gregorian Chant choir. There are no rehearsals during the last weeks of the quarter, especially since it is crunch time for exams and papers. We warm-up an hour early on Sunday mornings. I try to find mpg recordings of chant on the web to send to them to help them practice at their convenience. Some refrains from the Graduale Simplex are simply not available on the web. So the question is how to find them simple recordings for some of the more complicated of the chants. Well, on Fr. Gee's Blog I found the recording of his voice from the airport and wondered how he did that. That is how I discovered AudBlog. Well, let's see if it helps. Maybe I will bring my cell phone this Sunday and see if I can record the whole choir.

This is the antiphon from the Graduale Simplex for the Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the King. We shall sing the refrain in Latin, and the verses of Psalm 72 in English, Grail translation.

Regnum eius regnum sempiternum est, et omnes reges servient ei et oboedient.

Literally, not a strict translation: His Kingdom is everlasting, and all kings will serve him and be obedient.

audio post powered by audblog

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 7:14 PM link

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Strokes of the Pen

With the permission of our Moderator General in Rome, Very Rev. Barry J. Fischer, C.PP.S., the Letters of St. Gaspar are now available on-line. The best way to access these letters is through the five volumes of Pinceladas. These five volumes were originally published in Spanish and were a work of love by Fr. Barry which he began long before he was elected to the General Council and then as Moderator. Slowly but surely they became available in English through The Precious Blood Resource series under the title of Strokes of the Pen.

Of course homage must be paid to Fr. Ray Cera, C.PP.S. who translated St. Gaspar's more than 3000 letters into English, and to Fr. Milton Ballor C.PP.S who created and edited the English editions from Fr. Barry's Spanish versions.

Soon, the complete letters will be available on-line.

All this is available on the Province of the Pacific Website on their new Documents page.

posted by Fr. Jeffrey Keyes, C.PP.S. on 12:08 PM link

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