Our Lady of the Angels, ora pro nobis!

Ahh, these wonderful Franciscan feasts!

via Fr. Angelo (who also kindly asked for prayers for New Catholic's mother who recently died)

The beautiful Feast of Our Lady of the Angels, commemorates the dedication of the little chapel known as the Portiuncula (Little Portion) or Our Lady of the Angels.  It was the third Church St. Francis rebuilt after Our Lord spoke to him from the Cross and ordered him to “rebuild the Church.”  St. Bonaventure says that the three churches prefigured the three orders he later founded: First Order (the friars); Second Order (the Poor Clares); Third Order (the secular participants in the life of the Order).  Thomas of Celano, the first biographer of St. Francis, quoted above, also writes:

For there had also been built in that place a church of the Virgin Mother who merited by Her singular humility to be, after Her son, the head of al the saints. In this church the Order of Friars Minor had its beginning, there, as on a firm foundation, when their number had grown, the noble fabric of the order arose. The holy man loved this place above all others; this place he commanded his brothers to venerate with a special reverence; this place he willed to be preserved as a model of humility and highest poverty for their order, reserving the ownership of it to others, and keeping only the use of it for himself and his brothers.

The Feast is special to the Order, not only because it commemorates the dedication of this most loved church, but also because St. Francis obtained an extraordinary indulgence, the “Portiuncula Indulgnence,” attached to the pilgrimage to the chapel.  You can obtain this indulgence today, without having to go to Assisi.

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