Beads of Joy Blog II (2025 - 2026)

  June 5 Our Lady of the Roads St. Boniface, Bishop and Martyr Today’s Gospel: Mark 12:35-37 Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. Jesus asked the crowd a question nobody expected. Everyone knew the Messiah was coming. Everyone had an opinion about who He would be. So, Jesus stood up in the Temple and asked, " Whose son is the Messiah exactly? The son of David? Then why does David himself call him Lord? The crowd went silent. Nobody had an answer. Sometimes the most important truths don't arrive the way we expect them to. They show up quietly. On a road nobody planned to take. In a form nobody recognized. St. Boniface knew that road well. He left the comfort and safety of his English monastery at an age when most men were settling down and walked straight into the heart of pagan Germany. Nobody sent for him. Nobody was waiting. He just went because God said go. At 75 years old he was still on the road, still planting the faith in new soil, when they amb...

  June 4 Our Lady of Haut St. Francis Caracciolo Today’s Gospel: Mark 12:28-34 Photo created by Google AI Image Creator.   A scribe walked up to Jesus with a real question for once. No trap. No trick. Just a man who genuinely wanted to know, of all the commandments, which one is the greatest? Jesus answered without hesitation. Love God with all your heart, all your soul, all your mind, all your strength. And love your neighbor as yourself. The scribe understood, he told Jesus that loving God and neighbor this way was worth more than every burnt offering and sacrifice ever made at the Temple. And Jesus looked at him and said something very beautiful to him. You are not far from the Kingdom of God. St. Francis Caracciolo took that step and never looked back. He spent hours every day before the Blessed Sacrament, so long and so often that people had to pull him away. He organized his entire life around one question: how do I love God with everything I have...

  June 3 Our Lady of Sasopoli Sts. Charles Lwanga and Companions, Martyrs Today’s Gospel: Mark 12:18-27 Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. They thought they had Him again. The Sadducees walked up to Jesus with a ridiculous hypothetical: seven brothers, one wife, the resurrection. Whose wife will she be at the end of all things? It was meant to make resurrection sound absurd. They didn't believe in it. They never had. Jesus didn't flinch. You are badly misled. God is not the God of the dead. He is the God of the living. One sentence. Case closed. Charles Lwanga was 21 years old when King Mwanga gave him a choice: abandon your faith or burn. He had staked everything on the same truth Jesus spoke that day. Death was not the end. It was the door. He walked into the fire singing. The youngest of his companions was still learning his catechism. He walked in singing, too. You don't sing walking into a fire unless resurrection is absolutely real to you....

  June 2 Our Lady of Edessa Sts. Marcellinus and Peter, Martyrs Today’s Gospel: Mark 12:13-17 Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. They thought they had Him. The Pharisees walked up to Jesus with a coin and a clever question, is it lawful to pay taxes to Caesar or not? It was a trap wrapped in a compliment, and everyone in the crowd knew it. Answer yes, and you betray your people. Answer no, and you're a revolutionary. Either way, they win. Jesus asked for the coin. Turned it over. Whose image is this? Caesar's. Then render to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's. They marveled at that one statement, and He walked away. What the Pharisees missed, what most people still miss, is the second half of that equation. The coin bears Caesar's image, so it belongs to Caesar. But you bear God's image. Which means you belong to God. Every minute. Every ounce of energy. Every conversation. Every decision about where your time goes....

  June 1 Our Lady of the Star St. Justin Martyr Today’s Gospel: Mark 12:1-12 A man planted a vineyard. Built a wall around it. Dug a winepress. Put up a watchtower. Then he handed it all to some tenants and left. When he sent someone to collect the fruit his vineyard had produced, they beat the messenger and sent him away empty. Jesus told this story, and everyone listening knew exactly what it meant. God gives. We receive. And then comes the question that never goes away: What did you do with it? Justin Martyr knew his answer. He took the sharpest mind of his generation, a gift if there ever was one, and spent every last bit of it defending the Faith. They beheaded him for it. He never asked for his gift back. I don't have a philosopher's mind, and I never claimed to. What I do have, I try to give away. That's the whole strategy, plain and simple. Whatever flows in flows right back out, to the Rosary Makers Ministry, to others, and basically to whoever ne...

May 31 The Queenship of Mary Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. "A great sign appeared in heaven: a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars." - Revelation 12:1 The Crown at the End of May May began with a child placing a crown of flowers on Our Lady's statue. It ends with God Himself placing a crown of twelve stars on her head. There is a beautiful completeness to this. A month that opened with the simplest gesture of human devotion closes with the grandest vision of heavenly glory. We started with wildflowers in a little girl's hands. We end with the woman clothed with the sun, enthroned in heaven, reigning with her Son. The feast of the Queenship of Mary was formally established by Pope Pius XII in 1954, on the centenary of the definition of the Immaculate Conception. It was placed on May 31 to crown Our Lady's own month. It was later moved in the liturgical calendar to August 22, but May 31 retain...

May 30 Our Lady of the Sacred Heart Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. "The love of God has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit." - Romans 5:5 The Guardian of the Heart of Jesus The devotion to Our Lady of the Sacred Heart was founded in the nineteenth century by Father Jules Chevalier, a French Missionary of the Sacred Heart, who understood Mary's unique relationship to the Heart of her Son. She is, in the most personal sense imaginable, the Guardian of the Sacred Heart, the one who knew it first, who carried it, who heard it beat for nine months from the inside. No one has ever been closer to the Heart of Jesus than His Mother. She carried it. She held it in her arms in the stable. She felt it break at the Cross. She knows its rhythms in a way that theology can describe but never fully capture. Father Chevalier understood that to go to Mary under this title is to go directly to the Heart she guards. And from that Heart flows everything: the gr...

May 29 Our Lady of Ardents Arras, France (1095) Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. "I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will not walk in darkness." - John 8:12 The Candle That Healed a City In 1095, the city of Arras in northern France was in the grip of a terrible epidemic. A disease called the Sacred Fire, ergotism, caused by a fungal infection of rye, was burning through the population. The symptoms were agonizing burning sensations in the limbs, gangrene, and convulsions. The people were terrified and helpless. According to the tradition of Arras, Our Lady appeared separately to two men, a bishop and a troubadour, and instructed them to meet. When they came together, each bearing an account of the same apparition, their stories confirmed one another. Our Lady gave them a candle and instructed that the wax, dissolved in water, be given to the sick. Those who drank the water were healed. The epidemic ceased. A shrine was built. Our Lady of Ardents, Ou...

May 28 Feast of the Relics of Our Lady Venice Photo created by Google AI Image Creator. "Blessed is she who believed." - Luke 1:45 She Was Truly Here Venice, the most improbable and magnificent city in the world, built on wood pilings in a lagoon, rising from the water by what appears to be a combination of engineering and miracle, has always been a city of relics. The great Basilica of San Marco was built around the bones of the Evangelist, carried secretly from Alexandria in the ninth century. Venice knew that sacred objects anchor sacred stories. To touch what the saints touched is to touch, however faintly, the life they lived. On this feast, Venice honored portions of Our Lady's veil and other relics associated with her earthly life, cloth said to have been worn by Mary, preserved across centuries by hands that loved her. Such relics were among the most precious objects in medieval Christendom. Not because they were magical, but because they meant something profoun...