The

Mary Michael Machabee

Institute

Newsletter

January 12th, 2024

Happy Epiphany to everyone! We hope you all have had a wonderful start to the New Year. Don't forget to do your Epiphany blessings on your homes with blessed chalk to bring down the grace of Our Newborn Lord for 2024.

As we continue celebrating the great feast visit of the Magi to our Lord, we offer now a reminder of its once privileged status before changes came in the middle of the 20th century. Besides the prestige that Epiphany held (second only to Easter and Pentecost), of note are the eminent lessons that are pulled from Genesis.

Enjoy these beautiful and edifying paragraphs taken from the second and third days within the octave of Epiphany from the renowned Benedictine Monk of France. Imagine the ruin to Christian piety and historical study, when Adam, Noah, the Ark, etc. are not taken literally.

From the Second Day within the Octave of the Epiphany, pp. 152-153

"A solemnity of such importance as the Epiphany could not be without an Octave. The only Octaves, during the year, that are superior to this of the Epiphany, are those of Easter and Pentecost. It has a privilege which the Octave of Christmas has not; for no Feast can be kept during the Octave of the Epiphany, unless it be that of a Patron of first class; whereas, Feasts of a double and semi-double rite are admitted during the Christmas Octave. It would even seem, judging from the ancient Sacramentaries, that, anciently, the two days immediately following the Epiphany were Days of Obligation, as were the Monday and Tuesday of Easter and Whitsuntide. […]

"In order that we may the more fully enter into the spirit of the Church, during this glorious Octave, we will contemplate, each day, the Mystery of the Vocation of the Magi, and we will enter, together with them, into the holy Cave of Bethlehem, there to offer our gifts to the Divine Infant, to whom the Star has led the Wise Men.

"These Magi are the harbingers of the conversion of all nations to the Lord their God; they are the Fathers of the Gentiles in the faith of the Redeemer that is come; they are the Patriarchs of the human race regenerated. They arrive at Bethlehem, according to the tradition of the Church, three in number; and this tradition is handed down by St Leo, by St Maximus of Turin, by St Cesarius of Arles, and by the Christian paintings in the Catacombs of Rome, which paintings belong to the period of the Persecutions.

"Thus is continued in the Magi the Mystery prefigured by the three just men at the very commencement of the world: Abel, who, by his death, was the figure of Christ; Seth, who was the father of the children of God, as distinct from the family of Cain; and Enos, who had the honour of regulating the ceremonies and solemnity to be observed in man's worship of his Creator.

"The Magi also continued, in their own person, that other Mystery of the three new parents of the human family, after the Deluge, and from whom all races have sprung: Sem, Cham, and Japheth, the Sons of Noe."

From the Third Day within the Octave of the Epiphany, pp. 162-163

"The great Mystery of the Alliance of the Son of God with the universal Church, and which is represented in the Epiphany by the Magi, was looked forward to by the world in every age previous to the coming of our Emmanuel. The Patriarchs and Prophets had propagated the tradition; and the Gentile world gave frequent proofs that the tradition prevailed even with them.

"When Adam in Eden first beheld her whom God had formed from one of his ribs, and whom he called Eve, because she was the Mother of all the living, he exclaimed: 'This is the bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh. Man shall leave father and mother, and shall cleave to his wife; and they shall be two in one flesh.' In uttering these words, the soul of our first Parent was enlightened by the Holy Spirit, and, as we are told by the most profound interpreters of the Sacred Scriptures, (such as Tertullian, St. Augustine, St Jerome, etc.), he foretold the alliance of the Son of God with his Church, which issued from his Side, when opened by the spear, on the Cross; for the love of which Spouse he left the right hand of his Father, and the heavenly Jerusalem, his mother, that he might dwell with us in this our earthly abode.

"The second father of the human race, Noe, after he had seen the Rainbow in the heavens, announcing that now God's anger was appeased, prophesied to his three Sons their own respective future, and, in theirs, that of the world. Cham had drawn upon himself his father's curse; Sem seemed to be the favoured son, for from his race, there should come the Saviour of the world; but, the Patriarch immediately adds: ‘May God enlarge Japheth, and may he dwell in the tents of Sem.’ In the course of time, the ancient alliance that had been made between God and the people of Israel was broken; the Semitic race fluctuated in its religion, and finally fell into infidelity; and at length, God adopts the family of Japheth, that is, the Gentiles of the West, as his own people; for ages, they had been without God, and now the very Seat of religion is established in their midst, and they are put at the head of the whole human race."