Fr. David Sherry

District Superior of Canada

By Fr. David Sherry

One day a nine-year-old boy and his ten-year-old sister were reading the Bible. They were Protestants, you see, and that is what good Protestants do. Then they had an idea: they got some verses of the first chapter of the Gospel of St. Luke, and they put them together. Then they went to their mother to show her the new prayer they had found. “What is it?” she asked. “Look, we found these verses and made a new prayer. It goes like this: ‘Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee, blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb!’ What do you think, Mom?” Well, Mom forbade them to read that chapter again. But the Word of God is Life. That little boy became a priest, and his sister founded a congregation of sisters in their true home, the Catholic Church.

450 years ago, Ali Pasha led one of the greatest fleets ever seen on a mission to conquer Christendom. Don Juan of Austria led a Christian fleet to certain doom off the shores of Turkey. St. Pius V bade Christendom to pray the Rosary. To mark the victory, the Feast of the Most Holy Rosary was instituted.

What is the meaning of all this? It is that Catholics must ever keep in mind that in the battle against the forces of evil, they have a weapon which is stronger than the strongest evil. Many good Catholics forget this. They are fundamentally mistaken. They see that the powers of evil make use of weapons that are strong, and they think to themselves: “Why can’t we use the same weapons?” They see propaganda of the enemies of God: engineered street manifestations, manipulative advertising, young and beautiful spokespeople, pithy slogans and they say “Why can’t we do the same? After all, the truth is more powerful than lies!”

Are human means bad? Not necessarily, but in God’s fight, they are no good on their own. We have a weapon that is more powerful than all others put together. It is prayer. “Seek first the Kingdom of God and Its Justice” applies to prayer. If you preach, manifest, and do all sorts of good works, but you do not pray, they are almost no good. But if you live in the state of grace, and pray, and then preach and do good works, great things will happen.

Fr. David Sherry