Sunday, May 19, 2024

This Spirit breathed from the Father and the Son (Fr. Patrick Michaels / St. Francis de Sales)

Compassion is the hallmark of community.
 Jesus comes from the community of Father, Son and Spirit,
the perfect community,
where the compassion is full, complete and shared.
Jesus brings that compassion to bear upon the world;
that is the substance of what he has come to preach.
 

--Fr. Patrick Michaels, Homily, February 4, 2024 

    The Father breathes this love and so does the Son; this spiration of love is but one spiration, or one only spirit breathed out by two breathers. 

    This Spirit breathed from the Father and the Son is true God: and since there neither is, nor can be, more than one only God, He is one only true God with the Father and the Son. Since this love is an act which proceeds mutually from the Father and the Son, it can neither be the Father, nor the Son, from whom it proceeds, though it has the same goodness and substance of the Father and the Son, but must necessarily be a third person, Who with the Father and the Son is one only God. And because this love is produced by manner of breathings or spirations, it is called the Holy Spirit. 

--St. Francis de Sales,
Treatise on the Love of God,
Book III, chapter 13
 

Image: Holy Spirit Rose Window, St. John Neumann Catholic Church, Sunbury, Ohio, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Saint_John_Neumann_Catholic_Church_%28Sunbury,_Ohio%29_-_stained_glass,_Holy_Spirit_rose_window.jpg

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