Third Sunday of Easter…Mary, Mother of God

Prayer to Immaculate Heart of Mary

Extraordinary Confessor of Luisa Piccarreta for over 17 years. Ecclesiastical Censor of her Writings,
Founder of the Rogationist Fathers, the Daughters of Divine Zeal, and the Anthonian Orphanages

Saint Annibal Maria Di Francia; 1851-1927; Beatified 7 Oct. 1990; Canonized 16 May 2004

www.divinewill.org

Give me the grace to annihilate my will before the Will of Your Divine Son so that the Will of Your Divine Son be mine. Kindle my heart with Divine Love! See to it that the purest flame of God’s Love penetrate deeply in my spirit and rout out my selfishness. Give me a tender devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and Your holy Love in order that I love You as You deserve. Help me detach perfectly from everything, creatures, and myself; renouncing myself and everything to live only in God.
My tender Mother, obtain for me a deep humility from God, internal and external humility, a deep knowledge of myself, and a spirit of mortification so that I humble myself before God and creatures. Help me to have contempt and humiliations loved, but myself despised. Mirror of humility, grant me the virtue of humility and obedience. Grant me the virtue of meekness and sweetness so that I treat people with kindness, especially when I meet the ones against whom I feel repugnance. Give me a simple, merry, sweet, gentle, kind, benign, compassionate, humble and meek heart. Impetrate for me a profound contrition and a intimate sorrow to make my heart bleed for my offenses against Your Divine Son.
Grant me a spirit of holy prayer, the grace of meditating upon the sublime truths of faith, especially the Passion of Jesus and Your sorrows. Give me the grace of praying in the occasions of sin. Grant me a holy recollection, the grace of being aware of Your holy presence, and the virtue of silence. Grant me from God the holy virtue of spiritual and bodily purity; as well as purity of conscience through humble, frequent, and sincere confession, for the greater glory of God. Obtain for me a heroic faith along with a loving, filial confidence in the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus and in Your Motherly affection.
Grant me fervent zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls, letting me perform the duties of my priestly ministry perfectly.
See to it that I celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and recite the Holy Canonical Hours with deep recollection and intimate devotion. My tender Mother, give me the virtue of fortitude to prevail over myself through internal and external mortification. O valiant Lady, you have conquered hell. Give me strength to triumph over the devil, the world, and the flesh. You are our life and hope, please grant me holy, final perseverance in the grace of Your Divine Son. See to it that I live and die saintly, and love you in Paradise forever.

Saint Father Annibale Di Francia from: www.divinewill.org

One of Luisa’s Volumes bearing the original handwritten NIHIL OBSTAT
of Saint Hannibal Mary Di Francia.

St. Hannibal was the Ecclesiastical Censor of Luisa’s writings until his death in 1927. Volumes 1-19 bear his Nihil Obstat. Additionally, he was responsible for publishing Luisa’s work, The Hours of the Passion, in 1915.

Adela Maria: The following articles are presented because…as I read on and on; I realized that God was giving me a message…What are you doing in the name of Christ? WHAT ARE YOU DOING TO EACH OTHER IN MY NAME? I wonder if you will recognize the hypocrisy as I did? I happened onto this website by pure accident…or was it? I couldn’t believe some of the articles that I read…all documented in the Library of Congress.
We came to America to be free from tyranny. What do we do today to the world in the name of freedom? Where are the ten commandments of God?
What do our Churches teach us and our children. Listen to the vagueness of the sermons. Is anyone addressing the evil’s of today?
Are parents teaching their children the love of God…first and foremost?
Why are young people condoning alternate lifestyles…? Churches allowing gay ministers and bishops? What has happened to Bible Reading and Scripture?
Why are the devil’s attacking our most innocent children by molestation and murder? Where are the virtuous of this nation?
What do we as a nation stand for today…God and Country???? WHO IS OUR GOD…WHO IS LIKE GOD?
Why have we allowed the bastardization of the Constitution and of our freedoms? amf

The follow1ng pages will have to do with American Religious Beliefs and the Constitution….

EXHIBITION OVERVIEW

Encompassing over 200 objects including early American books, manuscripts, letters, prints, paintings, artifacts, and music from the Library’s collections and complemented by loans from other institutions, Religion and the Founding of the American Republic explores the role religion played in the founding of the American colonies, in the shaping of early American life and politics, and in forming the American Republic.

The seven sections of the exhibition are on such provocative issues as:
• American as Refuge: The Seventeenth Century looks at the religious persecution in Europe that drove so many to the shores of British North America where these new settlers established colonies often centered on passionate religious convictions;
• Religion in Eighteenth-Century America challenges the notion that religion was in decline during this period concentrating on the nation’s first major religious revival, the Great Awakening, 1740-45;
• Religion and the American Revolution illustrates the contribution of religious leaders and religious ideas to the coming of the War of independence;
• Religion and the Congress of the Confederation examines the policies of America’s first national government toward religion;
• Religion and the State Governments illuminates the policies of the revolutionary state governments toward religion, ranging from disestablishment in Virginia to multiple establishments in New England states;
• Religion and the Federal Government focuses on the status of religion in the new federal government;
• Republican Religion traces the fortunes of religion up to the 1830s, covering in the process what has been called America’s “Golden Age” of Evangelicalism.

EXHIBITION READING

Religion and the Founding of the American Republic

The catalog contains seven chapters each corresponding to an exhibition section, by James H. Hutson and a forward by Jarlslav Pelikan. 144 pp. 75 illus. (20 color). Bibliography and Object list. 8 3/4 x 11″ $21.95 plus $5.00 shipping Religion and the New Republic: Faith in the Founding of America.
Edited by James H. Hutson.
The essays presented in this volume are revisions of most of the papers prepared by the authors for delivery at a Library of Congress symposium, “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic,” June 18 - 19, 1998.
To order either of these books, please write or telephone the Library of Congress Sales Shop:
Library of Congress Sales Shop
Washington DC 20540-4985
Telephone: (202) 707-0204
Visa or Mastercard accepted
Please make your check payable to the Library of Congress.

I. America as a Religious Refuge:
The Seventeenth Century
[ PART 1 ] [ PART 2 ]
Many of the British North American colonies that eventually formed the United States of America were settled in the seventeenth century by men and women, who, in the face of European persecution, refused to compromise passionately held religious convictions and fled Europe.
The New England colonies, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Maryland were conceived and established “as plantations of religion.” Some settlers who arrived in these areas came for secular motives–”to catch fish” as one New Englander put it–but the great majority left Europe to worship God in the way they believed to be correct. They enthusiastically supported the efforts of their leaders to create “a city on a hill” or a “holy experiment,” whose success would prove that God’s plan for his churches could be successfully realized in the American wilderness. Even colonies like Virginia, which were planned as commercial ventures; were led by entrepreneurs who considered themselves “militant Protestants” and who worked diligently to promote the prosperity of the church.

---

Execution of Mennonites

This engraving depicts the execution of David van der Leyen and Levina Ghyselins, described variously as Dutch Anabaptists or Mennonites, by Catholic authorities in Ghent in 1554. Strangled and burned, van der Leyen was finally dispatched with an iron fork. Bracht’s Martyr’s Mirror is considered by modern Mennonites as second only in importance to the Bible in perpetuating their faith.

Murder of David van der Leyen and Levina Ghyselins, Ghent, 1554
Engraving by J. Luyken, from T. J. V. Bracht (or Thieleman van Braght), Het Bloedig Tooneel De Martelaers Spiegel. . . . Amsterdam: J. van der Deyster, et al., 1685
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (1)

The religious persecution that drove settlers from Europe to the British North American colonies sprang from the conviction, held by Protestants and Catholics alike, that uniformity of religion must exist in any given society. This conviction rested on the belief that there was one true religion and that it was the duty of the civil authorities to impose it, forcibly if necessary, in the interest of saving the souls of all citizens.
Nonconformists could expect no mercy and might be executed as heretics. The dominance of the concept, denounced by Roger Williams as “inforced uniformity of religion,” meant majority religious groups who controlled political power punished dissenters in their midst. In some areas Catholics persecuted Protestants, in others Protestants persecuted Catholics, and in still others Catholics and Protestants persecuted wayward coreligionists. Although England renounced religious persecution in 1689, it persisted on the European continent. Religious persecution, as observers in every century have commented, is often bloody and implacable and is remembered and resented for generations

A Jesuit Disemboweled

Jesuits like John Ogilvie (Ogilby) (1580-1615) were under constant surveillance and threat from the Protestant governments of England and Scotland. Ogilvie was sentenced to death by a Glasgow court and hanged and mutilated on March 10, 1615.
John Ogilvie (Ogilby), Societas Jesu, 1615
Engraving from Mathias Tanner, Societas Jesu usque ad sanguinis et vitae profusionem Militans. . . .
Prague: Typis Universitatis Carolo-Ferdinandeae, 1675
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (4)

The Expulsion of the Salzburgers

On October 31, 1731, the Catholic ruler of Salzburg, Austria, Archbishop Leopold von Firmian, issued an edict expelling as many as 20,000 Lutherans from his principality. Many propertyless Lutherans, given only eight days to leave their homes, froze to death as they drifted through the winter seeking sanctuary. The wealthier ones who were allowed three months to dispose of their property fared better. Some of these Salzburgers reached London, from whence they sailed to Georgia. Others found new homes in the Netherlands and East Prussia.

Lutherans leaving Salzburg, 1731

Engraving by David Böecklin from Die Freundliche Bewillkommung Leipzig: 1732
Rare Books Division. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (7)

Persecution of Huguenots by Catholics

The slaughter of Huguenots (French Protestants) by Catholics at Sens, Burgundy in 1562 occurred at the beginning of more than thirty years of religious strife between French Protestants and Catholics. These wars produced numerous atrocities. The worst was the notorious St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in Paris, August 24, 1572. Thousands of Huguenots were butchered by Roman Catholic mobs. Although an accommodation between the two sides was sealed in 1598 by the Edict of Nantes, religious privileges of Huguenots eroded during the seventeenth century and were extinguished in 1685 by the revocation of the Edict. Perhaps as many as 400,000 French Protestants emigrated to various parts of the world, including the British North American colonies.

Massacre Fait a Sens en Bourgogne par la Populace au Mois d’Avril 1562 . . .
Lithograph in A. Challe, Histoire des Guerres du Calvinisme et de la Ligue dans l’Auxerrois,
le Sénonais et les autres contrées qui forment aujourd’hui le département de l’Yonne
Auxerre: Perriquet et Rouille, 1863
General Collections, Library of Congress (2)

Persecution of Catholics by Huguenots

In the areas of France they controlled, Huguenots at least matched the harshness of the persecutions of their Catholic opponents. Atrocities A, B, and C, depictions that are possibly exaggerated for use as propaganda, are located by the author in St. Macaire, Gascony. In scene A, a priest is disemboweled, his entrails wound up on a stick until they are torn out. In illustration B a priest is buried alive, and in C Catholic children are hacked to pieces. Scene D, alleged to have occurred in the village of Mans, was “too loathsome” for one nineteenth-century commentator to translate from the French. It shows a priest whose genitalia were cut off and grilled. Forced to eat his roasted private parts, the priest was then dissected by his torturers so they can observe him digesting his meal.

Frightful Outrages perpetrated by the Huguenots in France

Engraving from Richard Verstegen, Théâtre des Cruautez des Hérétiques de notre temps
Antwerp: Adrien Hubert, 1607
Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, D.C. (3)

Drowning of Protestants

Shown here is a depiction of the murder by Irish Catholics of approximately one hundred Protestants from Loughgall Parish, County Armagh, at the bridge over the River Bann near Portadown, Ulster. This atrocity occurred at the beginning of the Irish Rebellion of 1641. Having held the Protestants as prisoners and tortured them, the Catholics drove them “like hogs” to the bridge, where they were stripped naked and forced into the water below at swordspoint. Survivors of the plunge were shot.
Massacre of the Protestant Martyrs at the Bridge over the River Bann in Ireland, 1641

Engraving from Matthew Taylor, England’s Bloody Tribunal: Or, Popish Cruelty Displayed . . . .
London: J. Cooke, 1772
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (5)

Persecution of Jesuits in England

In the image on the top is Brian Cansfield (1581-1643), a Jesuit priest seized while at prayer by English Protestant authorities in Yorkshire. Cansfield was beaten and imprisoned under harsh conditions. He died on August 3, 1643 from the effects of his ordeal. Below is another Jesuit priest, Ralph Corbington (Corby) (ca. 1599-1644), who was hanged by the English government in London, September 17, 1644, for professing his faith.

Die Societas Jesu in Europa, 1643-1644 [left page] [right page]
from Mathias Tanner, Die Gesellshafft Jesu biss zur vergiessung ihres Blutes
wider den Gotzendienst Unglauben und Laster . . .
Prague: Carlo Ferdinandeischen Universitat Buchdruckeren, 1683
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (6)
________________________________________

Martyrdom of John Rogers

The execution in 1555 of John Rogers (1500-1555) is portrayed here in the 9th edition of the famous Protestant martyrology, Fox’s Book of Martyrs. Rogers was a Catholic priest who converted to Protestantism in the 1530s under the influence of William Tyndale and assisted in the publication of Tyndale’s English translations of the Bible. Burned alive at Smithfield on February 4, 1555, Rogers became the “first Protestant martyr” executed by England’s Catholic Queen Mary. He was charged with heresy, including denial of the real presence of Christ in the sacrament of communion.

The Burning of Master John Rogers
Engraving from John Fox, The Third Volume of the Ecclesiastical History containing the Acts and Monuments of Martyrs. . . . London: Company of Stationers, 9th edition, 1684
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (9)

John Rogers Portrayed in New England

Two centuries after John Rogers’s execution, his ordeal, with depictions of his wife and ten children added to increase the pathos, became a staple of The New England Primer. The Primer supplemented the picture of Rogers’ immolation with a long, versified speech, said to be the dying martyr’s advice to his children, which urged them to “Keep always God before your Eyes” and to “Abhor the arrant Whore of Rome, and all her Blasphemies.” This recommendation, read by generations of young New Englanders, doubtless helped to fuel the anti-Catholic prejudice that flourished in that region well into the nineteenth century. (To this day, some TV pastors are still calling the Catholic Church of Rome…Whore of Rome)

---

CROSSING THE OCEAN TO KEEP THE FAITH: THE PURITANS

Puritans were English Protestants who wished to reform and purify the Church of England of what they considered to be unacceptable residues of Roman Catholicism. In the 1620s leaders of the English state and church grew increasingly unsympathetic to Puritan demands. They insisted that the Puritans conform to religious practices that they abhorred, removing their ministers from office and threatening them with “extirpation from the earth” if they did not fall in line. Zealous Puritan laymen received savage punishments. For example, in 1630 a man was sentenced to life imprisonment, had his property confiscated, his nose slit, an ear cut off, and his forehead branded “S.S.” (sower of sedition).
Beginning in 1630 as many as 20,000 Puritans emigrated to America from England to gain the liberty to worship God as they chose. Most settled in New England, but some went as far as the West Indies. Theologically, the Puritans were “non-separating Congregationalists.” Unlike the Pilgrims, who came to Massachusetts in 1620, the Puritans believed that the Church of England though in need of major reforms. Every New England Congregational church was considered an independent entity, beholden to no hierarchy. The membership was composed, at least initially, of men and women who had undergone a conversion experience and could prove it to other members. Puritan leaders hoped (futilely, as it turned out) that, once their experiment was successful, England would imitate it by instituting a church order modeled after the New England Way.

Richard Mather
Richard Mather (1596-1669), minister at Dorchester, Massachusetts, 1636-1669, was a principal spokesman for and defender of the Congregational form of church government in New England. In 1648, he drafted the Cambridge Platform, the definitive description of the Congregational system. Mather’s son, Increase (1639-1723), and grandson, Cotton (1663-1728), were leaders of New England Congregationalism in their generations.
Richard Mather

Relief cut by John Foster. Copyprint
c. 1670
Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Massachusetts (11)
________________________________________

Cotton Mather

Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the best-known New England Puritan divine of his generation, was a controversial figure in his own time and remains so among scholars today. A formidable intellect and a prodigious writer, Mather published some 450 books and pamphlets. He was at the center of all of the major political, theological, and scientific controversies of his era. Mather has been accused, unfairly, of instigating the Salem witchcraft trials.
Cottonus Matherus S. theologieae doctor regia societas Londonensis. . . .

Mezzotint by Peter Pelham
Boston: 1728, restrike 1860
Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress (12)
________________________________________

Sermon by Cotton Mather

Holograph manuscript on paper
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress (13)

---

THE BIBLE COMMONWEALTHS

The Geneva Bible

The Geneva Bible was published in English in Geneva in 1560 by English reformers who fled to the continent to escape persecutions by Queen Mary. Their leader was William Whittingham, who married a sister of John Calvin. The Geneva Bible was used by the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England until it was gradually replaced by the King James Bible. According to one twentieth-century scholar, “between 1560 . . . and 1630 no fewer than about two hundred editions of the Geneva Bible, either as a whole or of the New Testament separately, appeared. It was the Bible of Shakespeare and of John Bunyan and of Cromwell’s Army and of the Pilgrim Fathers.”
The Bible and Holy Scriptures Conteyned in the Olde and Newe Testament.

Geneva: 1560
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (14)

The New England colonies have often been called “Bible Commonwealths” because they sought the guidance of the scriptures in regulating all aspects of the lives of their citizens. Scripture was cited as authority for many criminal statutes. Shown here are the two Bibles used in seventeenth-century New England and a seventeenth-century law code from Massachusetts that cites scripture.

The King James Bible

The first edition of the King James Bible, also called the “Authorized Version,” was composed by a committee of English scholars between 1607 and 1611. The first copy of the King James Bible known to have been brought into the colonies was carried by John Winthrop to Massachusetts in 1630. Gradually the King James Bible supplanted the Geneva Bible and achieved such a monopoly of the affections of the English-speaking peoples that a scholar in 1936 complained that many “seemed to think that the King James Version is the original Bible which God handed down out of heaven, all done up in English by the Lord himself.”

The Holy Bible, conteyning the Old Testament and the New

London: Robert Baker, 1611 Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (15)
________________________________________

Seventeenth-Century Laws of Massachusetts

Criminal laws in the early New England colonies were based on the scriptures, especially the Old Testament. Many civil laws and procedures were modelled after the English common law.

The General Laws and Liberties of the Massachusets Colony:

Revised and Reprinted [right page] [left page]
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Samuel Green, 1672
Law Library, Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress (16)
________________________________________

The Bay Psalm Book

The first book published in British North America, what has become known as the Bay Psalm Book, was the work of Richard Mather and two other ministers who transformed the Psalms into verse so they could be sung in the Massachusetts churches. Shown here is one of the eleven surviving copies.

The Whole Booke of Psalmes Faithfully Translated into English Metre.
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Stephen Daye, 1640
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (17)
________________________________________

Eliot’s Algonquin Language Bible

Obedient to the New Testament command to preach the Gospel to all nations, ministers in all of the first British North American colonies strove to convert the local native populations to Christianity, often with only modest results. One of the most successful proselytizers was John Eliot (1604-1690), Congregational minister at Roxbury, Massachusetts. His translation of the Bible into the Algonquin Indian language is seen here. At one time Eliot ministered to eleven hundred “Praying Indians,” organized into fourteen New England style towns.

The Holy Bible: Containing the Old Testament and the New,

Translated into the Indian Language. . . . [left page] [right page]
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Samuel Green and Marmaduke Johnson, 1663
Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress (18)

End of Part One
Part Two The Seventeenth Century to be continued at a future time…….