Bulletin of the Eucharistic Crusade for Children in Australia
Dear Crusaders and Friends,
Before anything else, let my wish you a happy New Year 2018. I hope God will grant many blessings during this year to you and to your families. Time is a gift from God and I hope you will all use it for good and therefore sanctify yourself by an ever increasing practice of charity.
Charity is what makes our actions praiseworthy and deserving the reward of Heaven. For this, Our Lord Jesus Christ is our model to follow at any time of the year. Indeed, not perfectly parallel to the civil year, but with a month’s interval, is the liturgical year starting with Advent when for 12 months we follow the life of Our Lord. This life is a unique example of the perfect practice of charity in all its different aspects. The summit of Our Lord’s Charity is obviously His death on the Cross. Calvary shows how far His love for us went. But this love was actually infinite and perfect from the very beginning. The simple fact that the Word of God became man and lived among us was a tremendous proof of His love for our souls.
The love of Our Lord is particularly represented by His Sacred Heart. It would be wrong to summarise and link the devotion to the Sacred Heart only to His Heart pierced on the Cross. The Sacred Heart is Our Lord showing His love for men from His birth to His death. This is why on this Christmastide we must listen to the call of God to love Him in return for the love He showed us by becoming incarnate. Our desire to be always united with Him and to follow Him must be our response. From this comes the importance of our prayers by which we speak to God and can tell Him how much we want to live with and for Him. From this comes as well the importance of our Holy Communions which are the opportunity to have Our Lord dwelling within our souls. It is this desire of union with God which must increase day by day till the end of our lives.
Unfortunately, too few people have this concern and this is a great source of grief for Our Lord. Indeed, on Christmas day we read from the gospel according to Saint John (chapter 1, verse 11) that “He came to His own, and His own received Him not.” This is terrible and we should not be one of those. On the contrary, we must make the resolution to receive Our Lord and follow His example in a better way than we have ever done. Let us then focus our resolutions on what we have already promised to Our Lord on the day of our baptism or on that of our engagement into the Eucharistic Crusade. See what engagement you don’t keep as faithfully as you should and then keep it more firmly with the desire to be pleasing to God and deserve many merits for Heaven where we shall be with Him for eternity.
Have a peaceful Christmastide.
Yours in Jesus & Mary,
Fr. Benjamin Campbell
