Our Lady of Perpetual Help
Posted by Terry Nelson on Apr 25th, 2007
In gratitude for favors granted from Our Lady of Perpetual Help. If you have not devotion to Our Lady, especially under this title, I highly recommend you start now - she acts swiftly.
Thank you Mother of Perpetual Help for the grace you have granted me.
April 25th, 2007 at 12:54 pm
I have a HUGE devotion to Our Lady of Perpetual Help thanks to my mother. She has a monstrous icon of Her atop her fireplace mantle. When my parents married in 1952, mom was Catholic and dad was Church of Christ. Needless to say the families weren’t ecstatic. Mom prayed to Our Lady of Perpetual Help for my father’s conversion and 2 years later he entered the Church. Mom has been going to weekly Perpetual Help devotions ever since, for 50+ years.
April 25th, 2007 at 2:57 pm
When I was a little boy my Dad built me a beautiful tree house in the back yard. How I loved that tree house! It was my hermitage, my retreat, my place of solace. I distinctly remember having a booklet of devotions to Our Mother of Perpetual Help (with a nice reproduction of the icon on the cover) and novena prayers that touched me deeply. I took that booklet up into the tree house with me and used to pray to Our Mother of Perpetual Help there. The prayers touched my heart. I couldn’t define compunction at that age but I certainly felt it while praying to Our Lady. Now I live just a few streets away from the Roman Church of Our Mother of Perpetual Help. You set me to thinking that I ought to make a pilgrimage there tomorrow! And I wish I could find that booklet!
April 25th, 2007 at 3:01 pm
Tomorrow is Our Lady of Good Counsel as well - so say a prayer for me.
April 25th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
The church in Rome is the Church of Saint Alphonsus featured in your first link! And do you know what else happened today? I received a feastday message from Father Scott Bailey, a Redemptorist friend from years ago in which he expressed the following: May our Mother of Perpetual Help hold you always in her heart. Uh . . . . is Our Lady trying to tell me something?
April 25th, 2007 at 6:53 pm
Blessed Charles de Foucauld had a great devotion to OLPH, and drew a few of her icons for his chapels. there is a beautiful entry in his diary of a pilgrimage he made to the redemptorist church in rome where her icon is venerated. his hermitage in nazareth was decicated to OLPH.
Her icon is very rich and draws the east and west together into her motherhood. she is in the icon style of the “one who shows us the way”;
in early times the icon was called by both churches ‘Our Lady of the Passion’, and in the west this entrustment of Mary to us has been experienced as a source of ‘perpetual help’, her icon is a visual expression of the ancient “sub tuum praesidium” prayer or the memorare. they are all portals to experience in a deeply personal way her tenderness and how she will “always show herself a mother.”
a few years ago liguouri press came out with a nice and inexpensive novena booklet based on the symblos of her icon.
April 26th, 2007 at 9:02 pm
if anyone is interested here is a link that has an akathist hymn to OMPH :
http://hometown.aol.com/dtbrown/phelp.html