The Bones Of St. Peter Displayed By Vatican For The First Time

Tuesday, 3 December 2013

To mark the end of the Year of Faith, the Vatican has for the first time publicly displayed the bones of St. Peter. While no pope has ever definitively declared the fragments to belong to the apostle Peter,  Pope Paul VI in 1968 said fragments found in the necropolis under St Peter’s Basilica were “identified in a way that we can consider convincing”.
The bones were discovered in 1939 in an excavation of the Vatican Necropolis below the main altar at Saint Peter’s Basilica, which has been the consistent traditional burial place of the first Pope since antiquity. The excavation, ordered by Pope Pius XII, found the bones in a first century funerary wall creche, with a Greek inscription of ”Petros eni”, or “Peter is here”. The bones were found wrapped in purple and gold threaded cloth. Scientific study of the bones showed them to be of a “robust” man in his 60′s-70′s at the time of death.
The relics, normally kept in  the private chapel of the Pope’s  Vatican apartments, were presented to tens of thousands of pilgrims who gathered to catch a glimpse of the relics. The eight fragments of bone between two and three centimetres (around one inch) long were displayed on an ivory bed within a bronze chest on a pedestal in St. Peter’s Square.
Reflecting upon the relics of St. Peter, whose very name means “Rock”, and their location below the Main Altar of St. Peter’s Basilica on the Vatican Hill, one can not help but meditate on Peter’s confession in the Gospel of Matthew , and Our Lord’s words to him in Matthew 16:18:

“And so I say to you, you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church,
and the gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.

   

Skeleton of St. Antony

Here is the relic of St. Antony......
St. Antony, Pray for us!

Relic (Skeleton) of St Anthony goes on display to public more than 750 years after his death

Come, Let's Go to Heaven!

Gershom....
Name of the first son of Moses in his wife Zipporah.
for he said, "I have been a sojourner in a foreign land."
(cf Exodus 2:22)

We are all pilgrims .... and our homeland is heaven...

Let us walk together toward heaven.... with Jesus...Mary our mother and Joseph....
with the company of saints and choirs of heaven....

yours

S. Gershom

Saint Therese of Lisieux

Shalom Times, 07 June 2012 11:40 
Written by  Super User

 “I prefer the monotony of obscure sacrifice to all ecstasies. To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul.” These are the words of Theresa of the Child Jesus, a Carmelite nun called the “Little Flower,” who lived a cloistered life of obscurity in the convent of Lisieux, France. [In French-speaking areas, she is known as Thérèse of Lisieux.] And her preference for hidden sacrifice did indeed convert souls. Few saints of God are more popular than this young nun. Her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, is read and loved throughout the world.

Thérèse Martin entered the convent at the age of 15 and died in 1897 at the age of 24. Life in a Carmelite convent is indeed uneventful and consists mainly of prayer and hard domestic work. But Thérèse possessed that holy insight that redeems the time, however dull that time may be. She saw in quiet suffering redemptive suffering, suffering that was indeed her apostolate. Thérèse said she came to the Carmel convent “to save souls and pray for priests.” And shortly before she died, she wrote: “I want to spend my heaven doing good on earth.” On October 19, 1997, Pope John Paul II proclaimed her a Doctor of the Church, the third woman to be so recognized in light of her holiness and the influence of her teaching on spirituality in the Church. All her life St. Thérèse suffered from illness. As a young girl she underwent a three-month malady characterized by violent crises, extended delirium and prolonged fainting spells. Afterwards she was ever frail and yet she worked hard in the laundry and refectory of the convent. Psychologically, she endured prolonged periods of darkness when the light of faith seemed all but extinguished. The last year of her life she slowly wasted away from tuberculosis. And yet shortly before her death on September 30 she murmured, “I would not suffer less.”