今天教会庆祝罗马的圣方济各贞女的自由纪念瞻礼。圣人在于1384年出生于罗马的一个富裕的贵族家庭。她在著名的纳沃纳广场(Piazza Navona)的圣依搦斯蒙难堂(Chiesa di Sant’Agnese in Agone)领洗。圣人在11岁的时候想成为修女,可是,她的父母在她12岁的时候强迫她嫁给洛伦佐·庞齐亚尼(Lorenzo Ponziani),他是罗马教宗军队的指控官,家境极其富裕。尽管这场婚姻是父母安排的,可是,在她婚后四十年以来,她过得幸福美满。 罗马教宗与西方天主教会大分裂期间,洛伦佐为教宗服务。据说:他们的儿子巴蒂斯塔(Battista)被作为人质送给了那不勒斯军队的指挥官。圣人遵从其神师的命令,将儿子带到了坎皮多利奥(Campidoglio)。途中,她停在当地的阿拉科埃利教堂(Church of the Aracoeli),将儿子的生命托付给了圣母。当他们到达指定地点时,士兵们试图将她的儿子放在马上,以便将他押送至囚禁地。然而,尽管士兵们狠狠地抽打马匹,它却一动不动。士兵们认为这是天主的旨意,于是将男孩交还给了他的母亲。 1425年8月15日,圣母升天节,她创立了奥利韦坦圣母献身会(Olivetan Oblates of Mary),这是一个由虔诚女性组成的团体,隶属于罗马圣母新修道院(Abbey of Santa Maria Nova in Rome)的奥利韦坦修士管理之下,但她们既不隐修,也不受正式誓言的约束,因此她们可以遵循她的模式,将祈祷生活与满足社会需求相结合。 约1650年 1433年3月,她在坎皮多利奥附近的托尔德斯佩基创立了一座修道院,以供那些自称为“共济会”成员的人过共同生活。这座修道院至今仍是该修会唯一的院所。同年7月4日,该团体获教皇尤金四世批准,成为具有私人宗教誓言的献身者修会。该团体后来简称为“罗马圣方济各献身者”。 圣人在自己丈夫生命的最后七年里,她一直照料着他在战斗中受伤的丈夫。当丈夫于1436年去世时,她搬进了修道院,并成为了院长。她于1440年去世,并被安葬在新圣母堂。 1608年5月9日,教宗保禄五世册封她为圣人,1925年,教宗庇护十一世把她宣为汽车驾驶员的主保,因为有传言说:她在出行的时候,有天使用灯照亮她的前路,使她远离危险。在本笃会中,她也被尊为奉献者的主保。圣人也是寡妇的主保圣人。
March 9, 2026 Monday of the Third Week of Lent Or Optional Memorial of Saint Frances of Rome, religious Gospel: Luke 4:24-30 The Unaccepted Prophet
Today the Church celebrates the Optional Memorial of St. Frances of Rome, Virgin. Born in 1384 into a wealthy aristocratic family in Rome, she was baptized in the Chiesa di Sant’Agnese in Agone (Church of St. Agnes in Agone) on the famous Piazza Navona. At age 11, she desired to become a nun, but at around 12, her parents forced her to marry Lorenzo Ponziani, commander of the Papal troops of Rome and a member of an extremely wealthy family. Though the marriage was arranged, it was blessed by God, and they lived happily together for forty years. During the Western Schism of the Catholic Church, when the Pope in Rome opposed various antipopes, Lorenzo served the former. It is said that their son Battista was to be handed over as a hostage to the commander of the Neapolitan troops. Obeying her spiritual director’s command, Frances took her son to the Campidoglio. Along the way, she stopped at the Church of the Aracoeli there and entrusted her son’s life to the Blessed Mother. Upon arriving at the designated site, the soldiers tried to place her son on a horse to transport him to captivity. However, despite heavy whipping, the horse refused to move. Seeing the hand of God in this, the soldiers returned the boy to his mother. On August 15, 1425 (Feast of the Assumption of Mary), she founded the Olivetan Oblates of Mary, a confraternity of pious women under the authority of the Olivetan monks of the Abbey of Santa Maria Nova in Rome. Neither cloistered nor bound by formal vows, they could follow her model of combining a life of prayer with meeting societal needs. In March 1433, she established a monastery at Tor de’ Specchi, near the Campidoglio, for those members of the confraternity who felt called to communal life. This monastery remains the only house of the institute. On July 4 that year, they received approval from Pope Eugene IV as a religious congregation of oblates with private vows. Later known simply as the Oblates of St. Frances of Rome, the community grew in devotion. Frances herself remained in her home, nursing her husband through the final seven years of his life—he had been severely wounded in battle. After his death in 1436, she entered the monastery and became its superior. She died in 1440 and was buried in Santa Maria Nova. On May 9, 1608, Pope Paul V canonized her as a saint. In 1925, Pope Pius XI declared her patroness of motorists, as tradition holds that an angel once lit her path with a lamp while she traveled, protecting her from danger. Among Benedictines, she is also venerated as patroness of oblates, and she is patroness of widows. Today’s Gospel from St. Luke portrays an unaccepted Jesus. We often categorize people based on our own biases, treating Jesus as the crowd in the Nazareth synagogue did. Thus, Jesus tells them, “No prophet is accepted in his own hometown” (Luke 4:24). The incident began when Jesus quoted Isaiah’s prophecy of the Messiah’s mission: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor” (Isaiah 61:1-2a; Luke 4:18-19). After reading this, Jesus declared, “Today this scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (Luke 4:21). But the Nazarenes, knowing Jesus since childhood, rejected his words as blasphemy. They drove him out of the synagogue, led him to a cliff, and intended to throw him down (Luke 4:28-29). Such conflict mirrors what happens within each of us. We often think we are pure after being washed clean of original sin in the mercy flowing from Christ’s pierced side on the Cross, and thus feel no need to listen to God’s Word proclaimed through His Church. When such thoughts arise, we, like the Nazareth crowd, reject all Jesus offers. Today, let us imitate St. Frances of Rome, Virgin: courageously renounce our selfish desires, embrace God’s Word, and faithfully proclaim it to the world.
May your unfailing compassion, O Lord, cleanse and protect your Church, and, since without you she cannot stand secure, may she be always governed by your grace. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever
The Woman at the Well: A Thirst for a Love That Lasts John 4:5-42
Claretian Missionaries Jijo Kandamkulathy, CMF
There is a beautiful, aching loneliness that hangs in the midday air of Sychar. While the other women come to draw water in the cool of the morning, sharing gossip and laughter, one woman comes alone. She walks in the heat, under the weight of the sun and a far heavier burden—the weight of a shattered heart. But do not mistake her isolation for weakness. She is a woman who has dared, again and again.
St. John presents us with a woman who is an expert in failure, or so the village would say. She has had five husbands, and the man she is with now is not her own. The moralistic eye sees only scandal, a broken chain of relationships. But the eye of Jesus, and the eye of a true contemplative, sees something else: a woman of incredible courage. In a society where women were property, where divorce meant disgrace, she dared to walk away from relationships that diminished her. She dared to divorce. She dared to try again. She dared to hope.
She is a pilgrim of love, a seeker of the absolute, who has made the mistake of searching for the infinite in the finite vessels of human relationships. With each husband, she likely thought, “This time, it will be different. This time, I will be fully known, fully loved, fully cherished.” But one by one, these men failed her. They saw her, perhaps, as an object of convenience, a keeper of the house, a means to an end. They did not see the person. They did not listen to her points of view. And so, she would gather the shattered pieces of her dignity and walk on, alone, into the next relationship, still searching for the one man who would look her in the eye and see her soul.
And in this, she is the perfect symbol of her people. The Samaritans were a people who had also dared to be different. They were the remnant of the Northern Kingdom of Israel, who had intermarried with foreign colonists and developed their own traditions. The Jews considered them heretics, half-breeds, cut off from the covenant. But the Samaritans saw themselves as the true guardians of the faith. They had their own temple on Mount Gerizim, their own priesthood, their own version of the Torah. They were, in a sense, a people who had “divorced” the worship of Jerusalem and entered into a series of relationships with other religious influences. The prophets would have described their history as one of infidelity, of chasing after foreign gods. They were a people searching for a true and lasting covenant, but searching in the wrong places. And now, they lived in a kind of religious no-man’s-land, accepted by no one, worshipping in a way that was a shadow of the full truth.
So when this woman walks to the well alone, she carries not only her own history but the history of her people. She is the Samaritan nation, wounded, isolated, still searching for the God who seemed to have forgotten them.
This is why the encounter at the well is so electrically charged. She meets a man—a Jew, no less—who breaks every protocol. He speaks to her, a Samaritan and a woman. He asks her for a drink. In this simple request, he elevates her. He makes her the giver. He treats her with a dignity she has not felt in years. For the first time, a man is not taking from her for his own gratification, but is opening a dialogue. He is thirsty, yes, but his thirst runs deeper than water. He is thirsty for her faith, her trust, her heart.
And then, he does the one thing no other man has dared to do: he tells her the complete truth about herself. “You are right when you say you have no husband… What you have said is true.” He does not flatter her. He does not judge her with a cold, condemning stare. He simply states the facts of her life with a divine honesty that is also a divine embrace. He names her wounds, not to shame her, but to heal her. In that moment, she realizes she is standing before someone who knows her entirely and has not turned away. Her search is over.
On the deeper, corporate level, this is the moment the Samaritan people have been waiting for. Jesus, the Son of God, reveals himself not at the Temple in Jerusalem, but here, on the fringes, to an outcast of the outcasts. He is the true and eternal Bridegroom, not just of Israel, but of all who seek him. He has come to claim his bride—the lost, the wounded, the daring souls who have been searching for love in all the wrong places. He does not come with thunder and lightning to punish their infidelity. He comes, weary from the journey, and sits on the edge of the well, waiting to offer a love that will finally, eternally, quench their thirst.
But the psychological truth remains the most accessible for us. How many of us are like this woman? We thirst for a love that is total, a relationship that is secure. We search for it in our careers, our achievements, our possessions, our relationships. We give ourselves to these “husbands,” and one by one, they let us down. We are left alone in the heat of the day, still thirsty.
The beauty of this Gospel is that Jesus is already there, sitting by the well of our ordinary lives. He waits for us in the heat of our loneliness. He asks us for a gift—our time, our attention, our broken heart—so that he can give us the gift of himself. He offers us a “living water” that becomes in us “a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” This is not just a promise for the afterlife. It is the promise of a love that can sustain us now, a relationship that will never fail, a presence that will never leave us alone.
The woman left her water jar at the well. She forgot her earthly thirst because she had found the source of all satisfaction. She ran back to the very town that shunned her and became the first evangelist. When a soul finds its true rest in God, it cannot help but share the news: “Come, see a man who told me everything I have ever done! He cannot be the Messiah, can he?”
The question hangs in the air, as it does for each of us. Have we found him? Or are we still walking alone in the sun, carrying an empty jar, still searching for a love that will last?
John has made the encounter of Jesus with the Samaritan woman a theological text to teach the process of conversion of those who accept the gospel of the Lord.
It is noon when the woman comes to draw water, and Jesus asks her for a drink. The way in which the evangelist presents her clearly reveals his intention to transform her into a symbol. Let us try to identify her: she has no name, nothing is said where she comes from. The only element that defines her is that she is a “Samaritan,” which is equivalent to a heretic, unfaithful to God. Who can she be?
The evangelist cunningly sends the disciples away from the scene to buy bread to keep the “lovers” alone! Whom do the two “lovers” at the well represent? The woman represents the unfaithful Israel (keep in mind that Israel in Hebrew is feminine). So the lovers are Yahweh and Israel. This marriage did not have a happy outcome. The falling in love started in the desert where God and Israel had lived unforgettable experiences. At these moments, the Lord looked back nostalgically: “I remember your kindness as a youth, the love of your bridal days when you followed me in the wilderness” (Jer 2:2). Then the infidelities of the bride began: her betrayals, her infatuation with lovers, the regret for the gods of Egypt, the worship of Baal of the Canaanites, and many others.
At this point, the identification of the Samaritan woman is taken for granted; it is the bride Israel, backed by her whole story of love and adulteries. She had many “husbands,” and what she has now is not her husband. At the well, Jesus meets her and wants to bring her back to the one true love, the Lord.
The thirst of the Samaritan woman is the symbol of the most intimate needs that torment the heart of the bride-Israel: the need for peace, love, serenity, hope, happiness, sincerity, consistency, and for God. These are the needs that every person experiences.
The water of the well indicates the attempts and tricks that humans put in place to quench this thirst that no material “thing” can satisfy.
The living water that Jesus promises is the spirit of God. It is that love that fills the hearts. Those who let themselves be guided by this spirit get peace and do not need anything else.
The Samaritan woman at the beginning of the dialogue thought of material water. But gradually she began to perceive and accept the proposal of Jesus. Her progressive discovery is carefully underlined by the evangelist. At first, for her Jesus is a simple wandering Jew (v. 9), then he becomes a master (v. 11), then a prophet (v. 19), and afterward the Messiah (vv. 25-26), and finally, with all the people, she proclaims him the Savior of the world (v. 42).
The last part of the gospel (vv. 28-41) presents the conclusion of the spiritual journey of the Samaritan woman and every disciple. What does this woman do after meeting Christ? She leaves the pitcher (she has no more use of it because now she found another water) and runs to announce her discovery and happiness to others.
It is the call to become missionaries, apostles, catechists to tell everyone the joy and peace experienced by one who meets the Lord and drinks his water.
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