If it were not Monday of Holy Week, today would be Lady Day, the Feast of the Annunciation, the instant of the Incarnation.
However, 25 March is also the Feast of the Good Thief, St. Dismas!
Fulton Sheen famously quipped of this thief-saint that he “stole heaven”. A good thief indeed!
Many saints have their feast days assigned to the day when they were born into heaven (read: died). There is a tradition that that first Good Friday was on the same day as the Annunciation, 25 March.
Luke 23:39-43:
And one of those robbers who were hanged, [Gesmas] blasphemed him, saying: If thou be Christ, save thyself and us. But the other [Dismas] answering, rebuked him, saying: Neither dost thou fear God, seeing thou art condemned under the same condemnation? And we indeed justly, for we receive the due reward of our deeds; but this man hath done no evil. And he said to Jesus: Lord, remember me when thou shalt come into thy kingdom. And Jesus said to him: Amen I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with me in paradise.
It makes the heart ache, to read these words addressed to that penitent sinner. Would that they were address to each one of us.
But wait! They can be.
Holy Church has the Lord’s own authority to forgive sins, to loose and to bind! It is exercised by His bishops and priests!
GO TO CONFESSION!
There is, by the way, a legend that, during the Holy Family’s flight from Herod to Egypt, they ran into Dismas, who was exercising his trade of thievery.
Dismas was going to rob them, but seeing the Infant Jesus, he instead gave them shelter in his lair and let them go on their way without harming them. Dismas would continue to be a nefarious ne’er-do-well. His intellect still darkened by sin on Calvary kept him from recognizing Christ’s Mother.
This is another proof that sin makes you stupid.
Finally, Fathers, mark on your calendar that in the back of your traditional Missale Romanum there is a Mass formulary for the 2nd Sunday of October in honor of the Good Thief for use in prisons and in houses of reform of mores and of the discipline of amendment.
Loading ...
in your charity please pray for me that i may make a good confession. i have been in despair for over four months.
“I have sinned and my punishment is just.” I took that as my daily meditation along with a devotion to St. Dismas one lent, and on a particularly hard day, I had an inclination to stop in to pray at a Church that I’d never been in before. As I knelt in front of the tabernacle, I noticed the large golden-lettered inscription above the main altar, “This Day Thou Shalt Be With Me In Paradise.” Good St. Dismas, pray for us.
The 2 people with Jesus on the other crosses at the time of his crucifixion really show the difference between people. The ones who doubt and the ones who believe. Such a great account from the Bible.