You’re cordially invited to participate in a special Lenten devotion that will take place at 3pm today (Feb. 19) and each Friday during Lent on the St. Charles Borromeo Zoom channel (instructions to join are available here). 

We’ll pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet, a special devotion to Christ based on the words St. Maria Faustina Kowalska heard in 1935.  Traditionally, the Chaplet is prayed at 3:00 PM, recalling the time of Christ’s death on the cross. It uses the same amount of beads as the Holy Rosary, but the main prayer for each decade’s bead (“For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world”) is much shorter.   

To pray the Chaplet takes only about 15 minutes, but it is powerful.  It is also a  meaningful way during Lent to recall Christ’s sacrifice for us and a humble way to ask for His Mercy–for ourselves and for the whole world during these very challenging times.  All the words needed for the prayer will be shown on screen so no need to come with anything but your prayerful self.  On each of these Fridays, our Evening Prayer will still take place at its regular 5 PM time. 

Henriette Delille, (1812-1862), founder of Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary“For the love of Jesus Christ, she had become the humble and devout servant of the slaves.”
By Josephine Dongbang

Henriette Delille was born in 1812 in New Orleans, Louisiana, to a loving Catholic family. While Henriette was born a free woman, she was descended from an enslaved African woman and white slave owner. Thus, following the tradition of the females in her family, she was groomed to form a monogamous relationship with wealthy white men under the plaçage system. She was trained in French literature, music, and dance, and expected to attend balls to meet men who would enter into such civil unions. Most of these agreements often ended up with the men later marrying white women in “official” marriages and/or abandoning their promises of support for the women and their mixed-race children. As a devout Catholic, Henriette opposed such system, believing it went against the Catholic sacrament of marriage.