Saints + Scripture

Simplex Edition | Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea máxima culpa!

'Tis the Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time (Tempus per annum, "time through the year"): Wikipedia-link.Wikipedia-link.

'Tis the First Saturday o' the month: Wikipedia-link First Saturdays.

Saints of the Day
'Tis the festival of Saint Pier Giorgio Frassati, T.O.P. (1901-1925, the "Man of the Eight Beatitudes;" A.K.A. Girolamo).

Commentary: Wayback Machine. St. Pier Giorgio was canonized on 7 September 2025, but I have not looked for an updated graphic.

Scripture of the Day
Mass Readings—Saturday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time
The Book of Amos, chapter nine, verses eleven thru fifteen;
Psalm Eighty-five (R/. cf. nine[b]), verses nine & ten, eleven & twelve, thirteen & fourteen;
The Gospel according to Matthew, chapter nine, verses fourteen thru seventeen.

Commentary: Daily Readings.

Gospel reflection by Bishop Robert Barron (Word on Fire):

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the parable of new wine and old and new wineskins.

The new wine is the Good News, the Incarnation, the reconciliation of the divine and the human. But this powerful elixir cannot be contained in the receptacles of the old consciousness. As long as the ego reigns in the soul, the new wine will prove too strange, too foreign, too threatening—and it will be accordingly rejected.

Before the heady wine of the Gospel can be assimilated, there must be a scouring out of the spirit, a transformation of awareness and attitude, a metanoia. We should examine the stories of Jesus’s confrontations with the demons from this perspective. The demon within us realizes that he is the old wineskin that will be shredded by the inpouring of the new wine, and he consequently reacts in horror.

It is a helpful spiritual exercise to isolate those passages from the New Testament, those sayings and actions of Jesus, that make us most uncomfortable, since they will most effectively indicate how our souls have to be transfigured. They, much more than the passages we instinctively love, will show the path that metanoia must follow.

Saint Quote o' the Day

"Jesus comes to me every morning in Communion, & I return the visit by going to serve the poor."
—Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassatti, T.O.P. (1901-1925, feast: 4 July)

Papal Quote o' the Day

"Every generation of Americans needs to know that freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having ghe right to do what we ought."
—Pope Saint John Paul II the Great (1920-2005, r. 1978-2005; feast: 22 October)