This man, Alcide-Vital Lastaste founded one of the Church’s most fascinating religious orders: for female ex-cons

This man founded one of the Church’s most fascinating religious orders: for female ex-cons

Alcide-Vital Lastaste died at age 36, singing the Salve Regina, and having declared that he had "seen the secrets of God" ...

Larry Peterson

Alcide-Vital Lastaste was born in Gironde, France, on September 5, 1832. As a teenager, Alcide felt a call to the priesthood, but as is the way of adolescence, sometimes there can be distractions. Alcide began courting a young lady named Cecilia de Saint-Germain while attending secondary school. 

Cecilia and Alcide soon declared their love for each other and planned to get married as soon as possible. However, Alcide’s father, Vital, thought the couple was too young to be getting so serious. He voiced his great displeasure at their deep involvement, and the couple agreed to not see each other for a year. Incredibly, during that year, Cecilia suddenly passed away. The young man was heartbroken. 

Alcide turned to his young faith for comfort. He joined the St. Vincent de Paul Society, and the visits to the downtrodden and homeless opened his eyes to the plight of the poor. At the same time, the call to the priesthood once more erupted within him. In 1857 he entered the Dominican Order. Alcide was ordained a priest on February 8, 1863, and took the name Jean-Joseph. His unexpected spiritual journey was about to take flight and reach heights no one could have ever imagined.

On September 15, 1864, after being a priest all of 18 months, Father Jean-Joseph Lataste was sent by the prior of the monastery in Bordeaux to conduct a four-day retreat for the inmates of a woman’s prison in the town of Cadillac. This experience would change his life forever.

Suddenly he found himself amid 400 women prisoners, most of them abused and abandoned with nowhere to go. In most cases, these women were poor, uneducated, and without family. Living on the streets forces one to live in survival mode. That means stealing and soliciting and doing whatever one must do to breathe another day. They had been discarded and treated like criminals. This was 1864, and they fit the cliché “out of sight, out of mind.”  

The atmosphere of hopelessness and despair at the prison was overwhelming. He wondered what he could do for these women who were often called “the lost women.” Would they even sit and listen to him? He was frightened of the possibilities, but he was also filled with faith.

Father Jean-Joseph stood before the women, stretched out his arms, and began, “My dear sisters –” That was shocking in itself because no one ever truly spoke to these people. Dogs and cats were treated better. His gentle, brotherly greeting got their attention. He spent the next few days guiding them to a special place. It was a place where Hope existed. They had forgotten what that even meant, if they’d ever known at all.

He introduced them to God’s infinite mercy by telling them about the woman caught in adultery and how Jesus forgave her. He spoke about Hell and conversion and embracing freedom. He shared with them the Real Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist, and lastly, he spoke to them of Heaven. He could not believe how many women embraced the offer of forgiveness and began going to Confession. The chapel was filled each evening for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. His own heart became filled with a new purpose. He wanted to begin a ministry to serve these women.

The women asked that he come back, and one year later he did just that. This time there was only one sermon a day because the demand for Confession was so high. The last night of the retreat, most of the women attended Adoration. Some stayed the entire night, remaining until dawn. Using the words of St. Catherine of Siena, Father Lataste wrote in his closing notes about the retreat: “I have seen the secrets of God; I have seen the wonders.”

From that point on, he was determined to find a way to help these women. In 1866, he wrote a pamphlet called Rehabilitated. He sent copies to as many journalists and government officials as he could. He knew that the reason so many of those being released failed was because no one trusted them or gave them the slightest chance. He was determined to reshape public opinion. 

He announced his intentions of starting an order where women leaving prison could begin a religious life in a contemplative setting. This order was approved and is known as the Dominican Sisters of Bethany. The Order still flourishes and serves many women in different countries around the world.

Tuberculosis took the life of Alcide-Vital Lastaste (aka Father Jean-Joseph) on March 10, 1868.  He was only 36 years old. As he died, he could be heard softly singing the Hail, Holy Queen, “Salve Regina.”  

Alcide-Vital Lastaste was declared Blessed on June 3, 2012.  We ask Blessed Alcide to pray for us.

~

The story of this religious order is powerfully told in a fictional novel by Rumer Godden called Five for Sorrow, Ten for Joy, which follows the life of one of the women who joined the Bethany Nuns.

The Cure for Spiritual Cancer

Courageous Priest

---

The Cure for Spiritual Cancer Posted: 27 Jul 2017 09:22 AM PDT By Fr. Daniel Doctor: As a priest, one of my roles is to be a spiritual physician.  So, when those sick from sin and evil and its effects can come to the sacrament of confession, they can be relieved of them. The priest plays a vital role in our spiritual lives because he can diagnose the root cause of these spiritual illnesses that a soul can suffer from and can offer relief. As a priest in many different parishes throughout our diocese, but also looking at the America Catholic Church at large, my diagnosis as a spiritual physician is that our world, our culture, and in some cases even our Church, is suffering from a form of spiritual cancer.  This form of spiritual cancer is unlike anything we physicians have seen before.  This form of spiritual cancer metastasizes at a very fast rate and affects everything that it comes in contact with.  It even seems, at times, that no solution or remedy… that no matter the spiritual practice, penance, or acquired virtues we develop, seem to be able to weaken its hold on us or even slow its rate of growth once it takes hold. When we look back over the great Traditions of our Catholic Church, the great craft Our Lord has given to us priests to wield brings about our own personal holiness and our neighbor’s as well.  This craft, this art, these skills which have been passed down to us by all those great saints, great spiritual physicians of old, we come to an understanding that our spiritual lives are not based on our feelings or ruled by our emotions.  As a physician, I can’t offer cures that don’t work, or just based on how I feel today. My priestly action to help Our Lord cure or relieve the sufferings of others or the effects caused by sin is based on a rational science taught for over 2000 years.  It is called the Science of the Saints and this Science offers a cure for the evils and sinfulness we see in the world and in our own lives. According to these great Saints, the only known cure for this kind of spiritual cancer that is affecting our lives and our world is Eucharistic Adoration.  When you come before our Lord in Adoration, Our Lord’s mercy and love radiate the spiritual cancer within us (that is, the sin and evil and its harmful effects.)  And if we spend enough time in His presence, it radiates to the cellular level. As St. Paul taught “the wages of sin is death” and death is at work within those who live in sin. Our Lord, on the other hand, replaces the damage done by sin and evil at the deepest level within us, with His very presence transforming death into life. We priests offer no other cure than the Divine Physician Himself! Who wants to penetrate our very selves at the deepest level with His most gracious and incredible Love, at the very level of our cells if you will. Therefore, God begins to do His work in us:  healing us, transforming us, helping us to be Holy, to be like Him.  And as the cure works its course throughout us, we begin to be created anew, transformed into His very self.  The cure for all the spiritual cancers and evils in our world is Jesus Christ and His wonderful presence in the Blessed Sacrament.  Remember the words of our Lord, “Go and learn these words; I desire mercy not sacrifice,” and that Our Lord came to “call sinners not the righteous.” So, have we gone and learned the meaning of these words? Do we put them into practice? We all need Eucharistic Adoration in our lives if we ever hope to make it safely into the harbor of Heaven. If we admit, and rightfully so, that we have sinned and are now infected or affected by those sins, we need the cure that radiates from the Heart of our Savior in the Holy Eucharist. To overcome being sick from the effects of our former way of life, we need a nurse to bring us all the way back to health. This nurse, God also provides in the healing and loving help we receive from the Mother of God, most especially from her Rosary. You see, my brothers and sisters, the Rosary has two very important effects in those who pray it.  First, it is a formidable weapon (!!) against any further infection from sin.  It is a defense weapon against evil and its effects. Secondly, it teaches us the moral virtues, by reflecting on the mysteries.  It is an offense weapon, offering to us a sure way of attacking the sins we need to learn to overcome, so that we live in a way that we no longer commit them. The Blessed Virgin, being both a good Mother and life-giving Nurse, not only wants us to heal and get well.  She does not wish any further or future damage to come to us. The greatest way to avoid future evil is by developing the virtues, which Mary’s Rosary gives to those who pray it.  These the spiritual strengths and grace given to us by Our Lady help or fortify us against any future evil or its effects. That’s why I love Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati.  He personifies the very core of what the Science of the Saints teaches us.  At a very early age, he began sneaking out of his house very early in the morning to attend Mass. At the age of 7, he started Eucharistic Adoration giving an hour everyday and no one in his family knew. His friends remarked of him, “you never saw him anywhere without his rosary in hand.” What an awesome thing to say of any Catholic! At the age of 14, he make his first Holy Communion and continued to received Our Lord every day until his death at the age of 24.  He once said he was so blessed that Christ came to him in Holy Communion everyday that he had to return that love in acts of charity.  When asked by his friends why he was always so happy, he responded, “How can I not be? I have Christ within me.”  When a friend retorted, “How can you be so sure?” He responded, “I receive Him everyday and he has never refused me His presence.” As Giorgio grew older and had more control over his schedule, while he was at college studying mining engineering, he would love to spend all night in Adoration.  When asked what do you pray for he said, “I pray for all the youth of the world who are sinning” and for their conversion. At a very profound level Giorgio understood something we do not and it came to him in all those hours of Adoration, in all those countless rosaries, and bouquets of flowers he would bring to our Lady.  It was a love story and the love story was about how God came down to a soul, the soul of a little boy, and transformed him into a Saint. Giorgio was an athlete, a world class skier and mountain climber, a social leader and a political activist of his time even getting arrested for his religious beliefs.  More than once he got into a fist fights to defend it.  He was a college student working on his advanced degrees in Engineering.  At his funeral Mass, over a thousand people from his hometown of Turin, Italy showed up.  Why?  Because of all those hours of love that he received from Our Lord and our Lady.  He could not contain it, he had to spread it around.   And so between all his social, political, and religious activities, as well as all his studies and family responsibilities, he still fed and took care of the health and physical needs of thousands of people. He would go into the poorest areas of Turin to care for their needs. Giorgio was one of the wealthiest Bachelors in all of Italy.  Yet no one knew, not his friends, not his family, all the secret works of charity and acts of devotion to Our Lord and His Mother that he performed.  But, even in all that he gave to poor, it is believed that he caught polio meningitis from them. Giorgio gave every ounce of himself to love others, even though in the end that is what killed him. And now I think my spiritual best friend Giorgio looks at us with some pity, but with great encouragement.  As Pope Benedict said of him, “Giorgio shows us that holiness is possible for all of us.”  Why? Because what he did to become holy and a saint is something all of us can do, all of us should do:  Eucharistic Adoration most especially at night and over night and praying the Rosary. That’s it, nothing less, nothing more.  Just those two simple things, done with great love and persevering devotion directed his life and can make us saints, too.  It did it to Giorgio and it can for you, too.  Because these two devotions, more than any others, can make us holy. Blessed Pier Giorgio was “no pie in the sky” Saint.  He was quite practical and he had a vision of how we can and must help each other.  As he said, the great gift that we Christians have is the gift of persuasion but we seldom use it. We don’t persuade others to be holy.  We rarely persuade others to Eucharistic Adoration or to pray the Rosary.  We have all these wonderful opportunities to help others become holy, if we would just persuaded them to do it.  When you take the time to read over the letters that Giorgio sent to his friends and that his friends sent to him, you can see the great influence he had on their holiness and their belief that they could become holy.  Because they could see it in him and he always encouraged and persuaded them to keep going to the top, to keep climbing in their search to find and reach for God. One of his closest friends once remarked, “He could convert you by making the sign of the cross.” Wow!! Simply making the sign of the cross could convert somebody!! How often we make it so sloppily and without much thought, like we are swatting flies, and all the while we could be converting somebody by our actions, by our devotions done reverently. This is what I think, and what most people, especially the youth, find so attractive about Blessed Giorgio.  He is just like us, trying to make friends, trying to get though life, trying to get though college, and all the complexities of family and friends that go with it, and reaching – trying to get to heaven. But by some great miracle, that we all seem to miss, it was simply right in front of our face… all time. As your priest and a spiritual physician, I hope I have persuaded you to take care of your spiritual health and to visit your spiritual physician often.  Also, I hope I have given you a guide to better-improve your spiritual health. This is the power that the Communion of Saints have.  They teach us, reveal to us how to be holy, how to be friends of Christ, how to save our souls.  It is beyond words to express how important it is to read the lives of the Saints and realize what we can learn from them, beyond words to even describe the wonderful grace-filled effects that come to us from Eucharistic Adoration or praying the Rosary.  So fill your lives with them.

Have you ever heard of the “butterfly effect” of Eucharistic adoration?

Toth Tamas / Shutterstock

It can be seen in homes, in families, in marriages, and in neighborhoods ...

When a person adores Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, that person and his surroundings change. When a perpetual adoration chapel opens, it slowly transforms the neighborhood. This is what Isabel Puig calls the “butterfly effect” (from the theory that the smallest movement of a butterfly’s wings in one part of the world can have a powerful effect on wind and weather patterns thousands of miles away).

© Marcin Mazur / catholicnews.org.uk

Isabel Puig is a mother of a large family and helps to coordinate hourly turns at a Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration chapel in Badalona (near Barcelona, Spain). She is also currently working with others to open another perpetual adoration chapel in Barcelona, at the Royal Monastery of Santa Isabel, where the Regnum Christi movement houses a scholastic center.

“The Lord acts in the neighborhood, in souls, in the whole environment,” Isabel told the Spanish online publication, Religión en Libertad, as she recalled how, at the chapel in Badalona, “people find peace.”

“Adorers find greater peace and serenity to face life, and the wounds of their hearts find healing by going to see Jesus.”

“If the adorers are doing better, all of their surroundings are affected,” she noted. “You notice it at home, in families. When people have their priorities straight, this has an immediate effect on their friends, and we are better able to help those around us.”

The change happens slowly but surely, for the presence of the Lord works marvels. “We have seen people change their lives radically based on that hour of adoration,” Isabel confessed.

“People with addictions, with serious family problems who find support by leaning on the Lord for that hour. Also couples in difficulty — one spouse comes or both come together. People find healing especially for ailments of the soul. You can see how they develop and evolve as they learn acceptance. There is a lot of joy among the adorers, a deep and profound joy.”

Isabel says that many people who aren’t practicing also come to the Eucharistic Adoration chapel in Badalona, because there they find peace, silence and a welcoming space, and they end up developing a regular and assiduous prayer life.

Some adorers confess that, although they don’t go regularly to Mass, they do come regularly to be in the Lord’s presence. “Something tells them to return each week. It’s a space of total freedom.”

One example of this “butterfly effect” can be seen in Ciudad Juárez, where Eucharistic Adoration has contributed to a decrease in the number of homicides from 3,766 in 2010, to 265 in 2015, says Fr. Patricio Hileman, a priest who is dedicated to establishing adoration chapels throughout Latin America. Experience has shown Fr. Hileman that “when a parish adores God day and night the city is transformed.”

© Marcin Mazur / catholicnews.org.uk

https://aleteia.org/2017/02/08/have-you-ever-heard-of-the-butterfly-effect-of-eucharistic-adoration/

Read: Pope Francis: Eucharistic Adoration is the secret to knowing the love of Jesus Christ

FROM THE PASTOR February 12, 2017 by Fr. George W. Rutler

FROM THE PASTOR
February 12, 2017
by Fr. George W. Rutler

Europe and its contiguous lands were in a chaotic condition in 1240: the Mongols were destroying Kiev, the Novgorod army virtually wiped out the Swedes along the Neva River, and the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, was pillaging the Papal States using Islamic Saracens as his mercenaries. Pope Gregory IX’s attempt to rally a Crusade against the invaders failed, and his good friend Saint Clare was virtually bedridden as the Saracens besieged her convent at San Damiano. Her beloved Francis of Assisi had died fourteen years before. In this emergency, she left her invalid couch, went to the window and exposed the Blessed Sacrament in a silver and ivory ciborium, and the alien troops fled.

   In northern Mexico until just a few years ago, drug- and gang-related violence had made Ciudad Juarez one of the most dangerous cities in the world. Following the example of Saint Clare, missionaries turned to the Eucharistic Lord for help. A perpetual adoration chapel was opened in 2013 when the murder rate was forty people a day, with soldiers and policemen joining the gangs. Increasing numbers of devotees urged the soldiers to join them in Holy Hours. Few now dismiss as only coincidence the fact that within five years the annual murder rate dropped from 3,766 to 256.

   That rate is far lower than many cities in the United States now. With dismaying insouciance, statisticians in our nation over recent years have coldly taken for granted its moral decay. Besides graphic violence in the streets, there are over 500,000 abortions each year. In many places, births out of wedlock are the norm, teenage suicide has doubled in little more than a decade, 40% of all children live in broken homes, school diplomas and college degrees have generally become meaningless, marriage has been redefined into surreality, and freedom of religion has been intimidated by false readings of constitutional rights.

   Recent political shifts in our nation offer a faint glimmer of genuine promise for a change in all this, as more people realize that in the past they had placed their confidence in gossamer hopes and tinsel messiahs. But the ballot box is no substitute for the Tabernacle. A well-known Pentecostal preacher surprisingly admitted that most miracles happen in the Catholic Church because “Catholic people revere the Eucharist.” If more Catholics themselves understood that, there would be more miracles. Now, miracles do not contradict nature: they are God’s will at work at high speed. Christ promised to be with us “until the end of the world.” Eucharistic adoration is simply the recognition of his presence. Saint Clare prayed, “My Lord, if it is your wish, protect this city which is sustained by your love.” The Lord answered, “It will have to undergo trials, but it will be defended by my protection.”
         

---

Father Rutler’s book, The Stories of Hymns – The History Behind 100 of Christianity’s Greatest Hymns, is available through Sophia Institute Press (Paperback or eBook) and Amazon (Paperback or Kindle). 

---

Make a Donation, of any amount, to the Church of St. Michael.

Our website is www.StMichaelNYC.com