I
believe I was named after my father’s brother, Frank Rega.
Unfortunately, my birth certificate says Frank, instead of my uncle’s
real name, Francesco. That was 1942. I would love to have been
Francesco, especially now that I am a Secular Franciscan.
I
was just a Sunday Catholic who went to public schools. But around
the time I received the sacrament of Confirmation, I was thinking of
becoming a priest, due to our inspiring parish priest. I used to
collect baseball cards and articles about players, and I thought that
I could put them in a little suitcase and keep them even if I became
a priest. I would give everything up but not that collection!
Unfortunately
during my High School years I lost the faith to the point of becoming
an agnostic – maybe there is a God but we can’t know it. I was
reading a lot of Bertrand Russell, who was a non-violent pacifist
(good), but he did not consider himself a Christian (bad). Looking
back, I wish I had been reading Thomas Aquinas instead.
I
went to college and graduated from Rutgers University in 1965 in New
Brunswick, New Jersey. Rutgers was, and probably still is, a liberal
left-wing hotbed, and I fit right in. As a Psychology major, some of
my classes treated the false theory of evolution as a scientific
fact, and I did not disagree. I don’t recall ever going to Mass
during this time.
I
was seeking after Truth, but did not connect Truth with God. I tried
graduate school at the Yale Institute of Human Relations, but dropped
out after one year because I did not think I could really learn what
life was all about by sitting in a classroom.
So
I found myself living and working in New York City. After a lot of
adventures and various jobs, I ended up back in New Jersey, beginning
a career as a computer programmer. Somewhere around the early
1970’s, in my search for Truth, I walked into a Catholic bookstore
and purchased a book called The
Little Flowers of St. Francis of Assisi.
This book put my life back on track. After reading it, I truly
believed in the Lord.
From
an agnostic I returned to the Catholic faith, and to Mass. However
it was not the Mass I knew when I was confirmed. After the Vatican
II Council, there were a lot of changes and even confusion in the
Church. I visited
the parish of the priest who had inspired my youthful desire to
become one, and at his Mass, for Holy
Communion they
gave out pieces of cake!
Throughout
those post-Conciliar years, I did a lot of reading from Catholic
authors, and finally got to St. Thomas Aquinas. Better late than
never. But my main attraction was St. Francis, and how he lived
close to nature, and to Jesus. I also developed a devotion to the
Blessed Virgin, to St. Joseph, and to Padre Pio.
My
computer work took me to Philadelphia, where I lived in an apartment
within walking distance to the Cathedral of Sts. Peter and Paul,
which became my parish. Providentially, the cathedral hosted a large
secular Franciscan fraternity, known appropriately as the Cathedral
Fraternity. Fortunately their monthly meeting was on a Saturday, so
although I was working full-time I could join with them. Many of the
members participated in a very fruitful apostolate of feeding the
hungry and helping the poor at the St. Francis Inn, a facility with a
large dining area founded by three Franciscan friars
(https://stfrancisinn.org/),
located in Kensington.
I
was received into the Third Order on March 13, 1982 (my Reception
Day), but I was not yet professed. However, I was invested with the
Brown Scapular and the cord, sacramentals which have since been
replaced for Franciscan seculars by the TAU cross. Unfortunately,
the Cathedral Fraternity no longer exists.
Next
stop in my computer career was Washington, D.C., and I took an
apartment near the campus of Catholic University. The Franciscan
Monastery of the Holy Land in America (https://myfranciscan.org/)
was only about two miles away, and I joined their Secular group,
named Mt. St. Sepulchre Fraternity. Since they met on the third
Sunday of the month, I was able to participate although working
full-time.
It
was there that I became a professed Secular Franciscan, on June 19,
1983, at the age of 41. I don’t recall that the fraternity had a
special apostolate, other than helping in some way at the monastery
with the many visitors who tour the famous rose gardens and replicas
of Catholic shrines.
After
my retirement from the computer world, I moved to coastal Sussex
County in Southern Delaware. Around 2004 I saw an announcement in my
church bulletin about an effort to form a new Secular Franciscan
fraternity to be named after St. Clare. I began going to their
gatherings, and after a few years the fraternity was granted official
canonical status. Based in Rehoboth Beach, the St. Clare Fraternity
meets on Thursdays once a month, which is not a problem for retirees
since so many live in the county, although the demographics are
changing with new construction everywhere.
Their
apostolates revolve around providing food, clothing and other assets
for many charitable causes. Since I now had more time as a retiree,
I began to write Catholic books, including one on St. Francis titled
St.
Francis of Assisi and the Conversion of the Muslims.
Then a few years ago, mainly due to health issues, I formally became
an inactive member of the St. Clare Fraternity.
Everything
is possible for God. But as far as you are concerned, know that God
requires only faith from you
in order to act. We
accuse Him so
often of not listening to us
and of not satisfying us.
On
December 31, 1943, Our Lord said to the mystic Maria Valtorta that
“...under the devil's lash, your hearts are led to waver in doubt, the
first step towards despair. That is what Satan wants. He is not so
interested in the material ruins he produces as in the spiritual
effects they have on you. It is thus appropriate for Me, the Master,
to repeat to you once more the lesson concerning the way to behave so
as to obtain.” The Lord then reflects on two points.
[First
point:] “Mark, in the sixth chapter of his Gospel, verse 5, says,
‘And he could not do any
miracles there, only that he cured a few that were sick, laying his
hands upon them.’ Only someone considering the perfection of the
God-Man […] can comprehend how lovingly I had gone to my homeland.
God does not deny and forbid your sentiments when they are honest and
holy. He condemns only the ones which you erroneously call
sentiments, but which are in reality perversions.
“I
loved my homeland, then, and, within it, my home town, with a special
love. My heart returned every day with loving thoughts to Nazareth,
from which I had set out to evangelize, and I returned as well, for I
would have wished to benefit and sanctify it, even though I knew it
was closed and hostile to Me. If I lavished the power of the miracle
everywhere, in Nazareth I would have wanted this power not to leave
any case of physical illness, moral illness, or spiritual illness
unresolved; I would have wanted to provide consolation for every form
of misery, give light to every heart. But against Me was the
incredulity of my fellow townsmen.
“Therefore,
only those few who came to Me with faith and without pride in
judgment were granted a miracle [of cures if sickness]. You accuse Me
so often of not listening to you and of not satisfying you. But
examine yourselves, O children. How do you come to Me? In you where
is that constant, absolute faith like that of an innocent child who
knows that his older brother, his loving father, and his patient
grandfather can help him and make him content in his needs as a child
because they love him so much? In you where is such faith towards Me?
“Am
I not perhaps a foreigner among you, as I was in Nazareth, because
incredulity and criticism expelled Me from it as a citizen? You
pray. There are still some who pray. But as you ask Me for a grace,
you think, without saying so even to yourselves, but thinking in the
depths of your spirit, “God does not listen to me. God cannot grant
me this grace.”
“He
cannot?! What is God unable to do? Consider that He made the Universe
from nothing consider that for millennia He has been launching the
planets into space and governing their course; consider that He holds
back the waters on the shores, and without barriers; consider that
from the mud He made that organism which you are; consider that in
this organism a seed and a few drops of blood mixed together create a
new man,
who
in being shaped is
in relation to the phases of the stars thousands of kilometers away,
but also present
in the work of forming a being, [In what way are
the stars present in the work of forming a being? A mystery that
Jesus hints at, but certainly not in the astrological sense that
one’s destiny is fated in some way by the position of the stars at
one’s birth.] just as, with their ethers and their rising and
setting in your skies, they regulate the sprouting of crops and the
blossoming of trees; consider that in his wise power He has created
flowers endowed with organs capable of fecundating other flowers for
which winds and insects act as pollinators. Consider that there is
nothing which has not been created by God, so perfectly created, from
the sun to the protozoon, that you can add nothing to such
perfection.
“Consider
that, from the sun to the protozoon, his wisdom has ordered all the
laws for life, and be convinced that nothing is impossible for God,
who at his ease can have all the forces of the cosmos at his
disposal, increase them, halt them, and speed them up, provided his
Thought so considers. How often, in the course of millennia, have the
Earth's inhabitants remained astonished at stellar phenomena of
inconceivable grandeur: meteors with strange lights, nighttime sun,
comets and stars arising like flowers in a garden, in God's garden,
and being launched into space as if by child's play, to amaze you?!
“Your
scientists give ponderous explanations of the […] stellar bodies to
make the incomprehensible development of the skies human. No. Be
silent. Say a single word: God. Here is the shaper of those shining,
rotating, burning lives! God is the one who, as a warning to you that
are forgetful, tells you that He exists by way of the northern
lights, the darting meteors tingeing the ether furrowed by them with
sapphire, emerald, ruby, or topaz, the comets with a flaming tail
like the mantle of a heavenly queen flying across the firmaments, the
opening of the eye of another star in the vault of heaven, and the
whirling of the sun perceptible at Fatima
to convince you of God's will. Your other inductions are the
smoke of human science and envelope error in the smoke.
“Everything
is possible for God. But as far as you are concerned, know that God requires only faith from you in order to act. You act as a barrier to God's power with your distrust. And your
prayers are contaminated with distrust. And I am not counting those
who do not pray, but curse.
[Second
point:] “Another point in Mark's Gospel is verse 13 in the same
sixth chapter: ‘...And they anointed the sick with oil and healed
them.’ In empirical medicine at that time oil played a leading
role. Nor can it be said that it was more harmful or less effective
than your complicated medicines at present. Indeed, it was certainly
more innocuous.
“But
it was not in the oil that the power of healing lay for the sick upon
whom my apostles carried out the anointings. As always, a visible
sign was needed for human dullness. Who could have thought that a
touch of the hand of those poor men who were my apostles, known to be
fishermen and common people, could heal? If they had thought so, they
would have said, ‘You heal by the power of the prince of the
demons,’ as they said to Me. And they would have accused them of
being possessed by devils. That was not to be. I thus gave them the
human means to be believed by the empirical, if nothing else. But the
power was God, who infused it into them to make proselytes for his
doctrine.
“I
said, ‘Those who believe in Me will be able to walk upon serpents
and scorpions and do the works I do.’ I never lie, and into the
hand of a child believing and living in Me I can infuse divine power.
Isn't the history of Christianity filled with such miracles? The
early centuries are strewn with them, and the flowering of them has
gradually diminished, not because God's power has diminished, but
because you are not equal to the task of being ministers of God.
“Have
faith. Have faith. Have faith. It will save you."
Maria
Valtorta, The
Notebooks 1943,
December 31. Available from the “Maria Valtorta’s Readers’
Group,” https://www.valtorta.org.au/
View
my Catholic books Here.
In
December of 1943 Our Lord spoke a few short but concise words to
Maria Valtorta, while WWII was raging in Italy.
He
told her that another sign of His coming to be born on earth was
peace. “The world was entirely at peace when I was born. I was
God, and God is Love. War is hatred.” Jesus, our Redeemer was the
true Prince of Peace, and He could not come to us unless there was
peace on earth at his birth.
Jesus
is the New Adam, who established a new generation among men,
annulling by His martyrdom the perverse generation of the earlier
one. As the first of the new generation, He was “born to life
[...] when there was no fighting in the world.” Even though because
of the influence of Satan, “the massacre of the animals carried out
by man and among the animals themselves still continued […] men
were at peace among themselves. At least among themselves, they were
at peace.”
But
before the fall of Adam, “not even those two forms of slaughter
existed,” − men did not kill animals, and animals did not kill
each other!
Bombed
out railroad station in Maria Valtorta’s hometown of Viareggio,
Italy. WWII photo.
“War
is hatred, and God is not present where there is hatred. To merit
God, one must be without hatred. Towards anyone. Any means is useless
if God is lacking. […] The first condition in order to emerge from
this hell is for you first to emerge from the hatred which robes you
and for you to extirpate from yourselves the hatred which is like
marrow of your bones.
“Now
I say to you, ‘Pray.’ Among you there is still a minority
capable of heeding Me, of praying and suffering for the world. To
these I say, ‘Pray.’ It is time to divert the severity of the
torment which has begun with prayer and immolation...
“While
the world blasphemes and kills, sing hosannas to the Lord and love.
Love is more powerful than strength and defeats even hell. Love
overcomes everything, O my beloved ones. [...] And not only this, but
the good you do will attract Heavenly Good in an ever-increasing
measure, for God asks for nothing except to pour Himself out upon you
in love, and you would experience the era of peace promised to good
men at My birth.”
Maria
Valtorta, The
Notebooks
1943, December 21 and 22. Her works are available from the Maria
Valtorta Readers’ Group, https://www.valtorta.org.au/
