{"ok":true,"date":"2026-12-22","dateKey":"12-22","liturgicalDay":"Feria of Advent","rank":"Feria","color":"violet","quoteOfTheDay":{"text":"My throat shall meditate truth, and my lips shall detest the impious. All my words are just, there is no wicked, nor perverse thing in them.","author":"Holy Scripture","source":"Proverbs 8:7–8, Original Douay-Rheims","treasuryHref":"/wisdom#truth-hates-wickedness","category":"Truth: Christ and His Church"},"season":"Advent","novenas":[{"title":"Christmas Novena","feast":"Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ","day":7,"totalDays":9,"startIsoDate":"2026-12-16","feastIsoDate":"2026-12-25","dayTitle":null,"meditation":null,"intention":"Prepare the soul and household to receive the King in humility, adoration, and Catholic faith.","preparatoryPrayer":null,"prayerOfTheChurch":null,"prayer":null,"practice":"Keep silence and simplicity wherever they prepare the soul and household for the Christ Child.","conclusion":null,"prayerLink":null,"sources":[]}],"octaveContexts":[],"subject":"City of God in Exile: Feria of Advent - 2026-12-22","previewText":"Feria of Advent. Valid Sacraments Are a Grave Priority. Resist home-alone despair when it becomes settled indifference to seeking valid sacraments.","plainText":"CITY OF GOD IN EXILE\nTHE DAILY PILGRIMAGE\n\"Now therefore, ye children, hear me: Blessed are they that keep my ways.\" - Proverbs 8:32\n\"Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom. [...] For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.\" - Luke 12:32-34\nFeria of Advent\n2026-12-22 - Advent - Feria - violet\nPLAIN-LANGUAGE GUIDE FOR TODAY\nMystical Body of Christ: the Church understood as a living body whose head is Christ and whose baptized members are united to Him and to one another by grace.\nFeria: a weekday without a higher feast of its own; its prayers usually follow the current liturgical season.\nCreed: a concise, authoritative statement of the truths Christians must believe, especially the Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed.\nTODAY IN THE ROMAN YEAR\nThe nations long for unity while resisting the King in whom alone true unity is possible. Christ does not join men by treating truth and error as equal; He makes one people by one Faith, one Baptism, and life in His Mystical Body. Pray for conversions and refuse every counterfeit peace purchased by silence about His rights. Receive from Jesus through Mary only so that you may belong and return more completely to Jesus. Ask Jesus for mercy through His Mother and offer yourself as an instrument by which His charity may reach the persons entrusted to you.\n\n\"She is His mysterious canal; she is His aqueduct, through which He makes His mercies flow gently and abundantly.\"\nSt. Louis-Marie de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, no. 24\n\nChrist is the source; Mary is the canal. The distinction is essential. She neither originates grace nor replaces Our Lord's sacrifice, Church, or sacraments. Everything she gives is His, and her whole maternal action carries souls toward union with Him.\n\nAn aqueduct receives in order to convey. Imitate that self-forgetful service. Whatever truth, time, strength, material good, consolation, or spiritual help God sends should not stagnate in self-possession. Let it pass through your duties into prayer, charity, reparation, and service of souls.\n\nPRACTICE\nPray the Creed for the conversion of those outside the Church and speak of their souls with truth and charity.\n\nQUOTE OF THE DAY\n\"My throat shall meditate truth, and my lips shall detest the impious. All my words are just, there is no wicked, nor perverse thing in them.\"\nHoly Scripture, Proverbs 8:7–8, Original Douay-Rheims\n\nNOVENA IN PROGRESS\nChristmas Novena - Day 7 of 9\n\nPreparing for Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ on 2026-12-25.\n\nPETITION\nPrepare the soul and household to receive the King in humility, adoration, and Catholic faith.\n\nA FAITHFUL ACT\nKeep silence and simplicity wherever they prepare the soul and household for the Christ Child.\nROMAN MARTYROLOGY - December 22\nAt Rome, between the two bay -trees on the Lavican road, the birthday of thirty holy martyrs, who were ajl on one day crownd with martyrdom, in the persecution of Diocletian. — In the same city, St. Flavian, ex-prefect, who, under Julian the Apostate, was condemned to be branded for Christ, and banished to Aquae Taurinae, where he gave up his soul to God in prayer. — At Ostia, the holy martyrs Demetrius, Honoratus and Florus. — At Alexandria, the holy martyr Ischyrion. Because he dispised all the cruelties they made him suffer to force him to sacrifice to idols, they transpierced his bowels with a sharp-pointed stake, and thus put him to death. — In Egypt, the Saint Chseremon, bishop of Nilopolis, and many other martyrs. Some of them fled whilst the persecution of Decius was raging, and wandering in different directions through deserts, were killed by wild beasts; others perished by famine, cold and sickness; others again were murdered by barbarians and robbers, and thus all were crowned with a glorious martyrdom. — At Nicomedia, St. Zeno, soldier, who derided Diocletian for sacrificing to Ceres, wherefore he had his jawbones fractured, his teeth plucked out and his head struck off.\n\nTODAY'S SAINT OR FEAST\nThe Advent Feria\nThe Church waiting for the coming of Our Lord.\nThe Advent feria is a school of sober expectation, teaching the faithful to wait for the coming of Christ with repentance, desire, vigilance, and hope.\nThese weekdays keep the soul from treating Advent as mere atmosphere. The Church asks for preparation: crooked ways made straight, hearts awakened, and the Saviour truly desired.\nLet Advent weekdays make room in the soul. The City waits with lamps lit, not with noise.\nBREVIARY WITNESS\nWaiting with the Church.\nMatins - Feria of Advent\n- The Advent ferias school the faithful in expectation, repentance, vigilance, and desire for the coming Saviour.\n- Their witness is sober hope: the Church waits not as the world waits, but with prayer, preparation, and longing for Christ.\nLet the waiting become clean and watchful. Advent is not delay; it is preparation.\nInstruction from the Breviary\nThe Breviary witness for Feria of Advent is part of the Church's daily teaching. It should not be read as a list of isolated facts. In the Divine Office, Scripture, the lives of the saints, doctrine, and the Church's prayer are placed together so that the mind learns what the Church remembers and the heart learns how a Catholic ought to judge and live.\nToday's witness is gathered under Waiting with the Church.. Its first point is this: The Advent ferias school the faithful in expectation, repentance, vigilance, and desire for the coming Saviour. Its next point develops the lesson: Their witness is sober hope: the Church waits not as the world waits, but with prayer, preparation, and longing for Christ.\nThe practical instruction is: Let the waiting become clean and watchful. Advent is not delay; it is preparation. Ask what truth is being guarded, what virtue is being praised, and what danger or forgetfulness is being corrected. In this way the Breviary becomes instruction for the present day rather than information that is quickly passed over.\n- What truth does this Breviary witness teach or defend?\n- What virtue does the Church place before me through it?\n- What judgment or action should change because I have received this lesson?\n\nTHE PILGRIM'S SPIRITUAL CONFERENCE\nValid Sacraments Are a Grave Priority\nThe Church places this truth before you today: The faithful must seek valid sacraments with prudence, sacrifice, and holy seriousness, without inventing sacraments or despising them. Do not hurry past it as though doctrine belonged only to books and controversies. A revealed truth is also a light by which the soul must judge its loyalties, its fears, its habits, and the duties immediately before it. Families often move for work, schools, or safety. The sacraments are a higher good, and should weigh heavily in practical decisions when God makes such a move possible.\nThe grace to be practiced is Watchful expectation, drawn from today's saintly witness. Ask God for more than the natural appearance of this virtue. Temperament may make an action seem easy for a time, but supernatural virtue remains faithful because God is worthy of obedience, even when feeling offers no assistance and no one notices the cost. Practice generosity by receiving God's gifts gratefully and placing them at the service of His glory and your neighbor's salvation.\nThere is also an enemy to recognize: Resist home-alone despair when it becomes settled indifference to seeking valid sacraments. Do not study this danger only in other people. Look quietly for the door by which it seeks entrance into your own soul - perhaps through delay, curiosity, resentment, human respect, attachment to comfort, or the desire to control the outcome. Dying to self today means choosing watchful expectation when pride, comfort, fear, resentment, or human respect asks for control.\nDo the faithful act and entrust its fruit to divine Providence, God's wise and loving governance of all things. Place effort and outcome into Our Lady's hands so that the whole offering may be presented to her Divine Son. Confidence in God is not passivity: obey, pray, work, and accept that visible success, consolation, or immediate relief may not be given. God remains faithful when the duty is hidden and the outcome uncertain. Therefore, perform the duty that belongs to you, use the lawful means God has provided, and then surrender the fruit. Renounce possessiveness over gifts, time, spiritual consolations, and the fruit of good works. Use all your duties, prayers, resources, and opportunities as channels of truth and charity without seeking ownership of the good accomplished.\nThe Church's witness: this truth manifests the Church's mark of holy; the witness placed beside it is St. Charles Borromeo.\nYour resolution before God: Pray the Creed for the conversion of those outside the Church and speak of their souls with truth and charity.\nCarry this word: The unity of mankind is found under Christ the King, never above or apart from Him.\nTHE PILGRIM'S MIRROR\n\"The most noble and the most perfect victory is for a man to have the victory of himself.\"\nThomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book III, chapter 53, p. 159\nVictory over others can feed pride; victory over self-will makes room for Christ. Ask for the grace to conquer the fault that most often conquers you.\n\nChoose the fault by its frequency, not by how dramatic it appears. The repeated impatient tone, indulgent thought, delayed prayer, or unnecessary complaint may govern more of life than a rare great trial. Meet it today at its first small demand, while grace makes refusal possible.\nToday's Practice: Choose the harder faithful act once, quietly and at once.\nDAILY EXAMEN\nAsk whether grace ended in self-satisfaction or flowed onward into obedience, reparation, intercession, and works of mercy.\n- For what grace or mercy should I thank God today?\n- What sin, fault, neglected duty, or resistance to grace must I confess?\n- What definite amendment will I carry into tomorrow?\nPRAYER\nO King of the nations and desire of all, come and save man whom Thou hast formed from the earth; bring wandering souls into Thy one fold.\nDAILY RULE FOR THE PILGRIM\nA brief rule to keep every day:\nBegin with morning prayer\nAdore the Blessed Trinity and offer the whole day to Jesus through Mary before other duties claim the mind.\nKeep the Angelus\nPause morning, noon, and evening to remember the Incarnation.\nSeek Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament\nAttend Holy Mass when duty permits; otherwise make a Spiritual Communion and renew desire for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.\nReturn to Jesus and Mary\nUse frequent holy aspirations during work, waiting, suffering, and temptation.\nPray the Rosary\nKeep the mysteries of Christ before the mind with Our Lady and learn to imitate what they contain.\nEnd with night prayer and examen\nGive thanks, confess faults, forgive injuries, make a practical amendment, and entrust the night to Our Lady.\nCONTINUE STUDY\nHow to Judge a Traditionalist Chapel: https://cityofgodinexile.com/the-counterfeit/how-to-judge-a-traditionalist-chapel?entered=1\nOpen this day in the Sacred Calendar: https://cityofgodinexile.com/sacred-calendar?date=2026-12-22&entered=1\nOpen this day's Daily Pilgrimage: https://cityofgodinexile.com/daily-dispatch?date=2026-12-22&entered=1\nBrowse the Formation Index: https://cityofgodinexile.com/daily-dispatch/formation?entered=1","html":"\n\n \n \n \n City of God in Exile: Feria of Advent - 2026-12-22\n \n \n
\n Feria of Advent. Valid Sacraments Are a Grave Priority. Resist home-alone despair when it becomes settled indifference to seeking valid sacraments.\n
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\n \"City\n
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City of God in Exile

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“Now therefore, ye children, hear me: Blessed are they that keep my ways.”

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Proverbs 8:32

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Feria of Advent

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2026-12-22 - Advent - Feria - violet

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\n
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“Fear not, little flock, for it hath pleased your Father to give you a kingdom. […] For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.”
Luke 12:32–34
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Plain-Language Guide for Today

\n
\n
Mystical Body of Christ
\n
the Church understood as a living body whose head is Christ and whose baptized members are united to Him and to one another by grace.
\n
Feria
\n
a weekday without a higher feast of its own; its prayers usually follow the current liturgical season.
\n
Creed
\n
a concise, authoritative statement of the truths Christians must believe, especially the Apostles' Creed and Nicene Creed.
\n
\n \n
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Today in the Roman Year

\n

The nations long for unity while resisting the King in whom alone true unity is possible. Christ does not join men by treating truth and error as equal; He makes one people by one Faith, one Baptism, and life in His Mystical Body. Pray for conversions and refuse every counterfeit peace purchased by silence about His rights.

Receive from Jesus through Mary only so that you may belong and return more completely to Jesus.

Ask Jesus for mercy through His Mother and offer yourself as an instrument by which His charity may reach the persons entrusted to you.

“She is His mysterious canal; she is His aqueduct, through which He makes His mercies flow gently and abundantly.”

St. Louis-Marie de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, no. 24

Christ is the source; Mary is the canal. The distinction is essential. She neither originates grace nor replaces Our Lord's sacrifice, Church, or sacraments. Everything she gives is His, and her whole maternal action carries souls toward union with Him.

An aqueduct receives in order to convey. Imitate that self-forgetful service. Whatever truth, time, strength, material good, consolation, or spiritual help God sends should not stagnate in self-possession. Let it pass through your duties into prayer, charity, reparation, and service of souls.

Pray the Creed for the conversion of those outside the Church and speak of their souls with truth and charity.

\n
\n \n \n
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Quote of the Day

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“My throat shall meditate truth, and my lips shall detest the impious. All my words are just, there is no wicked, nor perverse thing in them.”
\n

Holy Scripture, Proverbs 8:7–8, Original Douay-Rheims

\n
\n \n
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Novena in Progress

\n
\n

Day 7 of 9

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Christmas Novena

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Preparing for Nativity of Our Lord Jesus Christ on 2026-12-25.

\n \n \n \n

Petition

Prepare the soul and household to receive the King in humility, adoration, and Catholic faith.

\n \n \n

A Faithful Act

Keep silence and simplicity wherever they prepare the soul and household for the Christ Child.

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Roman Martyrology - December 22

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At Rome, between the two bay -trees on the Lavican road, the birthday of thirty holy martyrs, who were ajl on one day crownd with martyrdom, in the persecution of Diocletian. — In the same city, St. Flavian, ex-prefect, who, under Julian the Apostate, was condemned to be branded for Christ, and banished to Aquae Taurinae, where he gave up his soul to God in prayer. — At Ostia, the holy martyrs Demetrius, Honoratus and Florus. — At Alexandria, the holy martyr Ischyrion. Because he dispised all the cruelties they made him suffer to force him to sacrifice to idols, they transpierced his bowels with a sharp-pointed stake, and thus put him to death. — In Egypt, the Saint Chseremon, bishop of Nilopolis, and many other martyrs. Some of them fled whilst the persecution of Decius was raging, and wandering in different directions through deserts, were killed by wild beasts; others perished by famine, cold and sickness; others again were murdered by barbarians and robbers, and thus all were crowned with a glorious martyrdom. — At Nicomedia, St. Zeno, soldier, who derided Diocletian for sacrificing to Ceres, wherefore he had his jawbones fractured, his teeth plucked out and his head struck off.

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Today's Saint or Feast

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The Advent Feria

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The Church waiting for the coming of Our Lord.

\n

The Advent feria is a school of sober expectation, teaching the faithful to wait for the coming of Christ with repentance, desire, vigilance, and hope.

These weekdays keep the soul from treating Advent as mere atmosphere. The Church asks for preparation: crooked ways made straight, hearts awakened, and the Saviour truly desired.

\n

Let Advent weekdays make room in the soul. The City waits with lamps lit, not with noise.

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Breviary Witness

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Waiting with the Church.

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Matins - Feria of Advent

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    \n
  • The Advent ferias school the faithful in expectation, repentance, vigilance, and desire for the coming Saviour.
  • Their witness is sober hope: the Church waits not as the world waits, but with prayer, preparation, and longing for Christ.
    • \n
\n

Let the waiting become clean and watchful. Advent is not delay; it is preparation.

\n

Instruction from the Breviary

The Breviary witness for Feria of Advent is part of the Church's daily teaching. It should not be read as a list of isolated facts. In the Divine Office, Scripture, the lives of the saints, doctrine, and the Church's prayer are placed together so that the mind learns what the Church remembers and the heart learns how a Catholic ought to judge and live.

Today's witness is gathered under Waiting with the Church.. Its first point is this: The Advent ferias school the faithful in expectation, repentance, vigilance, and desire for the coming Saviour. Its next point develops the lesson: Their witness is sober hope: the Church waits not as the world waits, but with prayer, preparation, and longing for Christ.

The practical instruction is: Let the waiting become clean and watchful. Advent is not delay; it is preparation. Ask what truth is being guarded, what virtue is being praised, and what danger or forgetfulness is being corrected. In this way the Breviary becomes instruction for the present day rather than information that is quickly passed over.

\n
    \n
  • What truth does this Breviary witness teach or defend?
  • What virtue does the Church place before me through it?
  • What judgment or action should change because I have received this lesson?
    • \n
\n
\n \n \n
\n

The Pilgrim's Spiritual Conference

\n

Valid Sacraments Are a Grave Priority

\n

The Church places this truth before you today: The faithful must seek valid sacraments with prudence, sacrifice, and holy seriousness, without inventing sacraments or despising them. Do not hurry past it as though doctrine belonged only to books and controversies. A revealed truth is also a light by which the soul must judge its loyalties, its fears, its habits, and the duties immediately before it. Families often move for work, schools, or safety. The sacraments are a higher good, and should weigh heavily in practical decisions when God makes such a move possible.

The grace to be practiced is Watchful expectation, drawn from today's saintly witness. Ask God for more than the natural appearance of this virtue. Temperament may make an action seem easy for a time, but supernatural virtue remains faithful because God is worthy of obedience, even when feeling offers no assistance and no one notices the cost. Practice generosity by receiving God's gifts gratefully and placing them at the service of His glory and your neighbor's salvation.

There is also an enemy to recognize: Resist home-alone despair when it becomes settled indifference to seeking valid sacraments. Do not study this danger only in other people. Look quietly for the door by which it seeks entrance into your own soul - perhaps through delay, curiosity, resentment, human respect, attachment to comfort, or the desire to control the outcome. Dying to self today means choosing watchful expectation when pride, comfort, fear, resentment, or human respect asks for control.

Do the faithful act and entrust its fruit to divine Providence, God's wise and loving governance of all things. Place effort and outcome into Our Lady's hands so that the whole offering may be presented to her Divine Son. Confidence in God is not passivity: obey, pray, work, and accept that visible success, consolation, or immediate relief may not be given. God remains faithful when the duty is hidden and the outcome uncertain. Therefore, perform the duty that belongs to you, use the lawful means God has provided, and then surrender the fruit. Renounce possessiveness over gifts, time, spiritual consolations, and the fruit of good works. Use all your duties, prayers, resources, and opportunities as channels of truth and charity without seeking ownership of the good accomplished.

\n

The Church's witness: this truth manifests the Church's mark of holy; the witness placed beside it is St. Charles Borromeo.

\n

Your Resolution Before God

\n

Pray the Creed for the conversion of those outside the Church and speak of their souls with truth and charity.

\n
The unity of mankind is found under Christ the King, never above or apart from Him.
\n
\n \n
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The Pilgrim's Mirror

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How shall I imitate Christ today?

\n
“The most noble and the most perfect victory is for a man to have the victory of himself.”
\n

Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book III, chapter 53, p. 159

\n \n

Victory over others can feed pride; victory over self-will makes room for Christ. Ask for the grace to conquer the fault that most often conquers you.

Choose the fault by its frequency, not by how dramatic it appears. The repeated impatient tone, indulgent thought, delayed prayer, or unnecessary complaint may govern more of life than a rare great trial. Meet it today at its first small demand, while grace makes refusal possible.

\n

Today's Practice

\n

Choose the harder faithful act once, quietly and at once.

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\n \n
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Daily Examen

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Three questions before night prayer

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Ask whether grace ended in self-satisfaction or flowed onward into obedience, reparation, intercession, and works of mercy.

\n \n
    \n
  • For what grace or mercy should I thank God today?
  • What sin, fault, neglected duty, or resistance to grace must I confess?
  • What definite amendment will I carry into tomorrow?
    • \n
\n
\n \n
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Prayer

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O King of the nations and desire of all, come and save man whom Thou hast formed from the earth; bring wandering souls into Thy one fold.

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Daily Rule for the Pilgrim

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A brief rule to keep every day:

\n

Begin with morning prayer

Adore the Blessed Trinity and offer the whole day to Jesus through Mary before other duties claim the mind.

Keep the Angelus

Pause morning, noon, and evening to remember the Incarnation.

Seek Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament

Attend Holy Mass when duty permits; otherwise make a Spiritual Communion and renew desire for Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.

Return to Jesus and Mary

Use frequent holy aspirations during work, waiting, suffering, and temptation.

Pray the Rosary

Keep the mysteries of Christ before the mind with Our Lady and learn to imitate what they contain.

End with night prayer and examen

Give thanks, confess faults, forgive injuries, make a practical amendment, and entrust the night to Our Lady.

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Continue Study

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Carry today's lesson into a focused chapter from the library.

\n How to Judge a Traditionalist Chapel\n
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Persevere, pilgrim.

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The gates remain open to the faithful.

\n
\n \"The\n
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