Catholic Fire

1.  May is Mary's month and here are just a few flowers that I love to cultivate to celebrate her special feast days in May. Dianthus  Peony  Rose -- This one is climbing. 2.  This past week we celebrated one of my favorite feasts -- that of Our Lady of Fatima, which you can read about in my piece,  The Feast of Our Lady of Fatima and the Three Prophetic Secrets. 3.  This week we also celebrated the feast of a humble and charitable Franciscan Capuchin friar, who had a deep devotion to Mother Mary, St. Ignatius of Laconi. 4. It has been "monsoon" season here, but earlier this week we had a break in the rain and were able to pick the first "fruits" of our labor -- radishes. Praise God! There is nothing as tasty as fresh veggies from the garden. 5. Even our cat was happy to get out of the house and enjoy a sunshiny day on her private balcony. Doesn't she look content?  6.  If you ...

May 13th is the anniversary of the apparition of Our Lady to three shepherd children in the small village of Fatima in Portugal in 1917.  She appeared six times to Lucia, 9, and her cousins Francisco, 8, and his sister Jacinta, 6, between May 13, 1917 and October 13, 1917. The story of Fatima begins in 1916, when, against the milieu of the First World War, which had introduced Europe to the most horrific and powerful forms of combat ever seen, and a year before the Communist revolution would plunge Russia and later Eastern Europe into six decades of oppression under militant atheistic governments, a resplendent figure appeared to the three children who were in the field tending the family sheep. “I am the Angel of Peace,” said the dazzling figure, who appeared to them two more times that year urging them to accept the sufferings that the Lord allowed them to undergo as an act of reparation for sins and to pray constantly for the conversion of sinners. Then, on the 13th day ...