Episode Details

It's a Feria / 1st Fri, 4th Class, with the color of Green. In this episode: the meditation: "Trust In Providence", today's news from the Church: "What "Communion"?", a preview of this week's episode of The SSPX Podcast: "The Incarnation and the Virgin Birth", and today's thought from the Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre. Have feedback or questions about the DD or our other shows? podcast@sspx.org

Sources Used Today:

• "Trust In Providence" — From the Assumption to Advent
  • https://angeluspress.org/products/from-trinity-sunday-to-the-assumption
  
  
• "What "Communion"?" (FSSPX.news)
  • https://fsspx.news/en/news/what-communion-60832
  
  
• The SSPX Podcast: "The Incarnation and the Virgin Birth" (SSPX Podcast)
  • View on YouTube
  • Listen & Subscribe on SSPXpodcast.com
  
  
• The Spiritual Life — Archbishop Marcel Lefebvre (Angelus Press)
  • https://angeluspress.org/products/spiritual-life-archbishop
  
  

Please support our new project, the Archbishop Lefebvre Biography Audiobook:

• Learn more:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-Wp4MQdK2o
• Donate:https://sspx.gifts/audiobook

Saint Ultan of Ardbraccan is one of those early Irish saints whose biography comes to us in fragments, but one particular detail makes him stand out immediately.

He cared for abandoned children.

Ultan lived in seventh-century Ireland and became bishop and abbot at Ardbraccan, in what is now County Meath. He belonged to the remarkable age of Irish monasticism when monasteries were not simply places where monks prayed. They functioned as schools, farms, libraries, hospitals, and centers of charity for the surrounding countryside.

Then Ireland was struck by a terrible epidemic.

A plague sometimes called the Buidhe Chonaill, or Yellow Plague, swept through the country during the seventh century. Among its victims were enormous numbers of adults, leaving children without parents to care for them.

Ultan saw what was happening and stepped in.

Later Irish tradition remembers him gathering orphaned children around the monastery at Ardbraccan and personally helping care for them. One particularly memorable story says that there were so many infants needing to be fed that Ultan devised ways of supplying them with milk, including keeping cows specifically for the children.

It's a wonderfully practical image of sanctity.

A bishop surrounded by crying babies, trying to figure out how to feed everybody.