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St Mark's Basilica, Venice [ Wikipedia ;  photo ] The Church celebrates the Feast of St Mark the Evangelist on 25 April. The Second Reading in the Office of Readings in the Breviary is from the treatise Against Heresies by St Irenaues. Here it is, with  highlights  added. [ Source ] The Church, which has spread everywhere, even to the ends of the earth, received the faith from the apostles and their disciples .  By faith, we believe in one God, the almighty Father   who made heaven and earth and the sea and all that is in them .  We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God, who became man for our salvation . And  we believe in the Holy Spirit who through the prophets foretold God’s plan : the coming of our beloved Lord Jesus Christ, his birth from the Virgin, his passion, his resurrection from the dead, his ascension into heaven, and his final coming from heaven in the glory of his Father, to  recapitulate all things  and to raise all...

The Adoration of the Name of Jesus , El Greco  [ Web Gallery of Art ] Readings   (New American Bible: Philippines, USA) Readings   (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, England & Wales, India [optional], Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa) Gospel   Mark 13:24-32 ( New Revised Standard Version, Anglicised Catholic Edition)      Jesus said to his disciples:   ‘But in those days, after that suffering, the sun will be darkened,      and the moon will not give its light, and the stars will be falling from heaven,      and the powers in the heavens will be shaken. Then they will see “the Son of Man coming in clouds” with great power and glory.   Then he will send out the angels, and gather his elect from the four winds, from the ends of the earth to the ends of heaven. ‘From the fig tree learn its lesson: as soon as its branch becomes tender and puts forth its le...

Apostle St Peter , El Greco, 1610-14 Museo de El Greco, Toledo, Spain [ Web Gallery of Art ] Readings   (New American Bible: Philippines, USA) Readings   (Jerusalem Bible: Australia, England & Wales, India [optional], Ireland, New Zealand, Pakistan, Scotland, South Africa)  Gospel   Mark 1:29-39  ( New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition , Canada)   As soon as they   left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John.   Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told Jesus about her at once.   He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. That evening, at sunset, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons.   And the whole city was gathered around the door.     And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit th...

Christ Raises the Daughter of Jairus Friedrich Overbeck, 1825 [ Web Gallery of Art ] Today's gospel, Mark 5:21-43, weaves two different healing stories into one, that of the woman who had been bleeding for twelve years and that of the daughter of Jairus, aged twelve, who had just died. In the scene below, taken from Franco Zeffirelli's  Jesus of Nazareth , the director focuses only on the story of the little girl. I don't know if the servant of Jairus, whom the latter addresses as 'Thomas' is meant in Zeffirelli's mind to be the future Apostle already showing the honest directness of the saint often referred to as 'Doubting Thomas', the saint who was to make the most explicit act of faith in the whole Bible,  My Lord and my God . In this scene Jesus immediately leaves what he was doing in order to respond to an emergency. Much of our life is like that. Zeffirelli retains words of Jesus that we find in the version of St Mark of this incident a...