Today is the feast day of the Santo Nino de Cebu.
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Filipinos around the world celebrate today, the third Sunday in January as his feast day. Providentially this year the date coincides with the beginning of the monthly novena to the Infant Jesus.
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+Prayer+
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O miraculous Santo Nino prostrate before your sacred Image, we beseech you to cast a merciful look on our troubled hearts. Let Your tender love, so inclined to pity, be softened at our prayers, and grant us that grace for which we ardently implore you. Take from us all unbearable affliction and despair. For your sacred infancy's sake hear our prayers and send us consolation and aid that we may praise you, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, forever and ever. Amen.
.A dear friend sent me the following, I had either read this or something similar many years ago on what the Sta. Nino did when he first arrived...
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"In the whole Orient, only here did the Church display its old genius for using and transforming the material it found . . . And the Church could not do otherwise, because there was one ahead of it to show the way. Again, it was merely following the lead of its Lord. For the Child was here before the Church. The Child was willing to join our pagan idols, if only to defeat and demolish them. The Child was willing to live a pagan among us, and to become a rain god for us, and to bless our heathen ceremonies. But all the time it was preparing us for the Faith. When Legazpi and Urdaneta arrived, they found it so much easier to convert us because we had, unknowingly, been tempered for conversion by the Child." (Nick Joaquin)
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Happy feast day!
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Links:
History of Santo Nino
Santo Nino - Wkipedia
Novena Prayers
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Thanks to Fr. Gary for the reminder. Thanks C. for the Joaquin quote.
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