The Little Society of St. Rita

The Little Society of St. Rita THE LITTLE SOCIETY OF ST. RITA promotes and facilitates a period of formation for young Catholic wom

04/19/2026

Observe what was the nature of [Jesus’] presence in the Church after his Resurrection. It was this, that he came and went as he pleased; that material substances, such as the fastened doors, were no impediments to his coming; and that when he was present his disciples did not, as a matter of course, know him. Saint Mark says he appeared to the two disciples who were going into the country, to Emmaus, in another form. Saint Luke, who gives the account more at length, says that while he talked with them their heart burned within them. And it is worth remarking that the two disciples do not seem to have been conscious of this at the time, but on looking back, they recollected that as having been, which did not strike them while it was….
For so it was ordained, that Christ should not be both seen and known at once; first he was seen, then he was known. Only by faith is he known to be present; he is not recognized by sight. When he opened his disciples’ eyes, he at once vanished. He removed his visible presence, and left but a memorial of himself. He vanished from sight that he might be present in a sacrament; and in order to connect his visible presence with his presence invisible, he for one instant manifested himself to their open eyes; manifested himself, if I may so speak, while he passed from his hiding place of sight without knowledge to that of knowledge without sight.
Christ has promised he will be with us to the end…. How he effects it we know not; in what precisely it consists we know not. We see him not; but we are to believe that we possess him—that we have been brought under the virtue of his healing hand, of his life-giving breath, of the manna flowing from his lips, and of the blood issuing from his side. And hereafter, on looking back, we shall be conscious that we have been thus favored…. Christians, on looking back on years past, will feel, at least in a degree, that Christ has been with them, though they knew it not, only believed it, at the time. They will even recollect then the burning of their hearts. Nay, though they seemed not even to believe anything at the time, yet afterwards, if they have come to him in sincerity, they will experience a sort of heavenly fragrance and savor of immortality, when they least expect it, rising upon their minds, as if in token that God has been with them, and investing all that has taken place, which before seemed to them but earthly, with beams of glory.
—Saint John Henry Newman

04/18/2026

We must contain ourselves in patience, remembering each morning that our main job is to love God and to serve him and if we don’t get things done due to interruptions, well, it cannot be helped, and God will take care of what we leave undone. But a tranquil spirit is important. Saint Teresa says that God cannot rest in an unquiet heart. I have to remember that many times during the day.
What if everything goes to rack and ruin? We can only do what we can to make order, but in the long run it’s ourselves we have to look after. So daily Mass, and meditation, and spiritual reading. What about an extra fifteen minutes after Mass? It will help and the house will not fall apart. You may be distracted, you may be in a frenzy about the work to do, you may want to get to the post office, but the very effort of will holding you there is a prayer.
—Servant of God Dorothy Day

04/17/2026

[Of] the objects presented to our various senses, each one gives pleasure to a distinct sense. Sounds don’t give pleasure to the sense of sight, nor colors to the sense of hearing. But for our hearts the Lord is light and voice and fragrance and food. And the reason he is all these things is that he is none of them. And the reason he is none of them is that he is the creator of them all. He is light, sound, and fragrance for our hearts.
Now if you are seeking food…Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice. But it is said of the Lord Jesus Christ himself that he has become for us justice and wisdom. There you have the banquet that has been provided. Christ is justice, nowhere is he in short supply; he is not provided for us by cooks, nor is he imported by merchants from overseas, like exotic fruits. He is a food that appeals to everyone whose inner man has a healthy appetite. He is the food which recommends itself to us by saying, I am the living bread, who came down from heaven. He is the food which nourishes without perishing, which doesn’t disappear when it is taken, which fills the hungry and remains whole.
—Saint Augustine

04/15/2026

After Adam and Eve ate the fruit, God did not walk away. He came to them, knowing he would never leave them. Yet what would remedy the rift between them, rescuing them from the consequence of death they now carried?
For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life. He gave his Son. This is the heavenly Father we trust. God wants us to believe in his goodness, knowing the conviction of his goodness opens our hearts to truly live our dependence on him with freedom, joy, and peace.
Through the gift of the Son, Jesus, we see the privilege of what it means to live as a child of the Father. The Father is continually pouring his life into Jesus, his Son. In various ways, Jesus would proclaim, I and the Father are one. For Jesus, the daily dependency on the Father in which he chose to live his earthly life was not a burden to be surmounted but a love he was inviting us into.
As the Father gave his Son, the Son leads us to the Father. Even the best of earthly friends do not share their father with you to be your own. Jesus gives us this unspeakable privilege so that we could truly say with him, “Our Father.” Jesus wants to give us that which is most valuable to him, that we would each come to know his Father truly as my Father.
Let the children come to me, and do not hinder them; for to such belongs the kingdom of God. Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it. It is as though Jesus says to each one of us, no matter where we are, “The path I have for you is simple enough for a child to follow.” When we know we are loved as his very own, the Lord’s way is wholly uncomplicated.
—Sister Faustina Maria Pia, s.v.

From: I Trust in You: A 30-Day Personal Retreat with the Litany of Trust.

04/14/2026

Must we ask for the cross? No. Must we look for it? No again. Live the doctrine of abandonment…. Accept with thanksgiving everything that happens to you. Say continually, “O Jesus, I thank you for everything.” That is enough. Do not ask for crosses, but know how to accept with joy those which Jesus has chosen for you. Besides, crosses will not be lacking. Sanctify yourself with the duties of your state in life, your daily life with all its thorns. Accept all the duties, all the responsibility, with a smile on your lips, a willing smile—a smile that is willed. The most beautiful smiles are those which shine through tears, that we give in spite of ourselves. Accept the unexpected crosses—they are the most painful: the sickness which immobilizes you, the feeling of being useless and a burden to others, of knowing that while you are needed you are being prevented from doing what you ought to do; the humiliations, contradictions, slanders, calumnies, ingratitude, bad will, criticisms, good intentions misunderstood, family quarrels, very sorrowful bereavements, separations, and reverses of fortune. Put up with yourself, with your thousand physical, intellectual, and moral miseries…. How many sufferings there are throughout our lives!
Then there is the cross of having carried the cross badly. There is a very practical point here. How many times someone has told me, “I had made a resolution to be generous in suffering. Then a trial came. I balked, even rebelled. How many merits I lost!” Thus we add to our original cross that of having carried it badly. It is here that we return to the words of little Thérèse: “We would like to suffer generously. We would like never to fall—what an illusion!” See what a lack of logic this is: to moan about having moaned and then to go on moaning! No! Say to Jesus, “Now I accept the cross you have sent me, which I at first rejected, and I accept not having accepted it right away.” That is the great resource of humble confidence pushed to its extreme. You can always, in the present moment, throw yourself into the arms of Jesus, which are always open to receive you. It is the present moment which is so important. In that moment you can take leave of all the past by giving it to him, in order to bury yourself at the bottom of his heart.
—Father Jean du Cœur de Jésus d’Elbée

04/13/2026

In prayer we experience, more so than in other dimensions of life, our weakness, our poverty, our being created, because we stand before the omnipotence and the transcendence of God. And the more we progress in listening to and dialoguing with God, for prayer becomes the daily breath of our soul, the more we perceive the meaning of our limits, not just before the concrete situations of every day but in our relationship with the Lord too. Growing within us is the need to trust, to trust ever more in him; we understand that we do not know how to pray as we ought. And it is the Holy Spirit who helps us in our incapacity, who illuminates our minds and warms our hearts, guiding us to turn to God….
With prayer animated by the Spirit we are enabled to abandon and overcome every form of fear and slavery, living the authentic freedom of the children of God. Without prayer which every day nourishes our being in Christ, in an intimacy which progressively grows, we find ourselves in the state described by Saint Paul in his Letter to the Romans: We do not do the good we want, but the evil we do not want…. The apostle wants to make us understand that it is not primarily our will that frees us from these conditions, nor even the law, but the Holy Spirit. And since where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom, in prayer we experience the freedom given by the Spirit: an authentic freedom, which is freedom from evil and sin for the good and for life, for God. The freedom of the Spirit…is never identified…with the possibility to choose evil, but rather with…love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. This is true freedom: actually to be able to follow our desire for good, for true joy, for communion with God, and to be free from the oppression of circumstances that pull us in other directions.
—Pope Benedict XVI

04/10/2026

What do the scars of Christ teach us? They teach us that life is a struggle: that our condition of a final resurrection is exactly the same as his; that unless there is a cross in our lives, there will never be an empty tomb; unless there is a Good Friday, there will never be an Easter Sunday; unless there is a crown of thorns, there will never be the halo of light; and unless we suffer with him, we shall not rise with him….
The scars are not only reminders that life is warfare, but they are also pledges of victory in that war. Our Blessed Lord said, I have overcome the world. By this he means that he has overcome evil in principle. The victory is assured, only the good news has not yet leaked out. Evil will never be able to be stronger than it was on that particular day, for the worst thing that evil can do is not to ruin cities and to wage wars and to drop atomic bombs against the good and the living. The worst thing that evil can do is to kill God. Having been defeated in that, in its strongest moment, when evil wore its greatest armor, it can never be victorious again.
Think not, then, that the Jesus of the Scars and his victory over evil give us immunity from evil and woe, pain and sorrow, crucifixion and death. What he offers is not immunity from evil in the physical world, but a chance for forgiveness for sin in our souls. The final conquest of physical evil will come in the resurrection of the just. But he does teach a noble army of the world’s sufferers to bear the worst this life has to offer with courage and serenity, to regard all of its trials as “the shade of his hand outstretched caressingly,” and to transfigure some of life’s greatest pains into the richest gains of the spiritual life.
—Venerable Fulton J. Sheen

04/08/2026

“Come to me, taste of me; stay with me, listen and learn from me.” Jesus in the Eucharist summons us to himself in definite terms…. Our Lord wants us close to him; he wants our desire near him. He wants us never to lose the allure of his presence in the Eucharist….
There is often a mysterious drawing attraction felt in the soul after a conversion, a sursum corda [“lift up your hearts”], an unmistakable longing of the heart when we place ourselves over time in physical proximity to the Blessed Sacrament. The person of Christ is a real presence when we are praying before a tabernacle. After a conversion, we may realize this truth as though for the first time…. A veil lifts, and the personality of Our Lord becomes a real presence and is felt more deeply in a mysterious manner. His summons to “come to me” is sensed in a very personal manner. We can listen to him without hearing him speak. We can be aware of his unseen gaze…. This drawing power of love in the presence of the Eucharist can be keenly felt at times, or it may not be felt at all, and still something draws us to him in a tabernacle. In a deep conviction of what is unseen with our visible eye, we can know that we are inexplicably loved when we are in the physical presence of his invisible reality….
Our attraction for the tabernacle is a gift for which we cannot be sufficiently grateful…. The mystery of that attraction is never an easy comprehension. We simply know it and treasure it in an utterly personal manner. Our eyes gravitate in the direction of the tabernacle when all is quiet because someone is there in that location even as he is silent…. We sense in an utterly Catholic manner that this blessed location of the tabernacle is the secret hiding place for the sacred presence that it encloses. He summons us to himself there, and we find in a lifetime of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament his ever-penetrating gaze.
—Father Donald Haggerty

04/07/2026

What is there to fear in death? It means no more and no less than the end of our testing period here on earth; it is a return, a going home, to the God and Father who first created us. It is not the end of life; the fact of the Resurrection proves that beyond a doubt. There is sorrow in our separation from family and friends, no doubt, the human sorrow of which no one need feel ashamed. And yet, as Saint Paul says, we Christians do not grieve as ones who have no hope; we believe in the Resurrection, as we say in our profession of faith, the Creed, and in the life of the world to come. Death is not a tragedy in our belief, but only an ordained passage from this life to the next.
Death may be feared by those who do not believe, who have no hope. It may be feared by those whose faith in Christ and the Resurrection is weak, or those who fear to meet God face to face because of what they have done or how they have lived in this period of testing we call life on earth. Men may legitimately worry, too, about those they leave behind; Christians have always prayed to be delivered from “a sudden and unprovided death.” But death itself is not a thing we fear. It is a homecoming, the return of the prodigal son, perhaps, to the welcoming arms of a loving father. We expect it, as all men must, but we expect it in confidence and even joy, buoyed up by our faith in Christ and his victory over death…. We think and speak about it not as an end to everything but as the end of our probation. We can anticipate it daily, and even eagerly, because of our faith. We can learn to yearn for it, prepare ourselves for it, and embrace it gladly, in joy and in peace, when at last we are called home to our heavenly inheritance. This we believe; this essentially is what it means to be a Christian—one who believes in Christ, the promised Redeemer and victor over sin and death.
—Servant of God Walter J. Ciszek, s.j.

03/31/2026

[Peter said to Jesus,] I will lay down my life for you. [The Lord] saw the urge was in his mind; he didn’t see any strength. The sick man was vaunting his willingness, but the physician perceived his infirmity. The one was making a promise; the other was foreseeing the future. He who was ignorant was daring; he who foreknew was teaching. How much had Peter assumed for himself by seeing what he wanted and by ignoring what he was capable of! He had assumed so much for himself that, although the Lord had come to lay down his life for his friends, and thus for [Peter] as well, he boldly offered this to the Lord, and, when Christ hadn’t yet laid down his life for him, he was promising to lay down his life for Christ!
Jesus therefore replied, Will you lay down your life for me? Will you do for me what I haven’t yet done for you? Will you lay down your life for me? You who are unable to follow—can you precede? Why do you presume so much? What do you think of yourself? What do you believe of yourself? Listen to what you are: Amen, amen, I say to you, the c**k shall not crow until you deny me three times. See how quickly you will appear to yourself, you who talk big and know yourself so little. You who promise me your death will deny your life three times…for as much as life consists in confessing Christ, so does death consist in denying Christ….
It gives us no pleasure, when we say these things, to accuse the first of the apostles, but it behooves us to take a warning from our reflecting on him: let no one trust in his human strength. For what concerned our teacher and Savior other than to show us by the example of the first of the apostles himself that no one should ever presume on himself? What Peter was offering in his body, then, happened in his soul. Yet he didn’t precede the Lord [in death] on his behalf, as he rashly presumed, but [he did so] in another way than he thought. For before the Lord’s death and resurrection he both died by his denial and came to life again by his lamentation. But he died because he was proudly presumptuous, and he came to life again because [the Lord] looked kindly at him.
—Saint Augustine

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