Mother Guerin, pray for us!

Mother Guerin, when she was still a young woman, told a group of peers that she would marry a King. Indeed she did, a few years later when she entered the convent.

How often do we acknowledge that we serve a King? Edwin O'Brien reminds us of our baptismal vocation:

In the Gospel reading we heard a few minutes ago, our Lord speaks, as he so often did, of the “Kingdom of heaven.” It’s an image we have heard so frequently that we may have lost sight of the richness of its meaning especially for the poorest and most vulnerable. The “kingdom of heaven” is not something for the indeterminate future, a kind of Christian Oz in which we hope eventually to find ourselves. When Jesus tells his disciples and his challengers that the kingdom “is in the midst of you” [Lk. 17.21], he is telling us that, if our faith is great enough, we can live, here and now, in anticipation of that kingdom come in its fullness. Jesus, after all, is that Kingdom “in our midst.” Do we recognize him and respect him in ourselves? Do we recognize him and reverence him in every neighbor?

If our faith is great enough, we can move mountains: even the seemingly unmovable mountains we face in both our personal lives and our life as a civic community.

-inspiring words for the 40 Days for Life Movement, from the installation homily of Baltimore's new Archbishop.

Mother Guerin overcame great odds to serve in the New World. Because of her and many other pioneer Sisters, the Faith was brought to this country. The Archbishop's homily should waken American Catholics to this noble heritage in women like Mother Guerin, the Carrolls, and countless others. The full text can be found here.