GLEANINGS FOR NEXT WEEK'S CALENDAR

New Zealand Tablet, 2 December 1909, Page 1883

GLEANINGS FOR NEXT WEEK'S CALENDAR

December 5, Sunday.— Second Sunday in Advent. „. 6, Monday.— St. Nicholas, Bishop and Confessor. „ 7, Tuesday. — St. Ambrose, Bishop, Confessor, and Doctor. „ -8, Wednesday. — Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary. "„ 9, Thursday. — St. Eutichian, Pope and Martyr. „ 10, Friday. — Octave of St. Francis Xavier. „ 11, Saturday. — St. Damasus 1., Pope and Confessor.

St. Nicholas, Bishop and Confessor. St. Nicholas, was Archbishop of Myra, in Asia Minor, in the early part of. the fourth century. 'He is called particularly the patron of children,' says Butler, ' not only because he made their instruction a principal part of his ;care, but chiefly because he always retained the virtues, the meekness, the simplicity without guile or malice, 4md the humility .of his tender age, and because, from his very infancy 1 , he devoted himself to God by an heroic piety -.' His feast was formerly kept with great solemnity in many of the schools and colleges of England. Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin - Mary. ' Her Immaculate Conception was the first of the privi-" leges by which the Blessed Virgin was prepared for the . dignity^ of Mother of God. This privilege signifies that Mary never contracted the stain of original sin; that her soul, in the first moment of its union with her body, was pure and spotless. . She was" thus excepted from the universal doom, in virtue of which every member of the human race enters the world stained by Adam's sin. This doc- . trine, so admirably in keeping' with what the holiness of Mary's son required, though expressed more or less explicitly in every age of. the Church's history, was not formally defined until the year 1854.