Thursday, 26 July 2012
St. Joachim and Private Revelations
St. Joachim, whose feast day is shared with his wife, St. Ann (see below) like other married saints, has an interesting name according to the Catholic Encyclopedia online. It means "God Prepares". I highlight him today with St. Ann in order to invoke them to help me with a point I have been making regarding private revelations.
St. Peter Damian, along with other saints mentioned below in Garrigou-Lagrange's book, warns against curiosity about things which are not in the Scriptures. At this time, I cannot stress this point enough. We have many things upon which we can ponder, in the Scriptures and in the CCC, for example. We can meditate on the lives of the saints in our modern times, whose lives have been documented clearly.
We should not read the fake "gospels" for meditations, as these are not inspired by God. Here is a bit from the same article on St. Joachim where I happily found the reference to St. Peter Damian.
Tradition has it that the parents of the Blessed Virgin, who, apparently, first lived in Galilee, came later on to settle in Jerusalem; there the Blessed Virgin was born and reared; there also they died and were buried. A church, known at various epochs as St. Mary, St. Mary ubi nata est, St. Mary in Probatica, Holy Probatica, St. Anne, was built during the fourth century, possibly by St. Helena, on the site of the house of St. Joachim and St. Anne, and their tombs were there honoured until the close of the ninth century, when the church was converted into a Moslem school. The crypt which formerly contained the holy tombs was rediscovered on 18 March, 1889
We can assume the relics were destroyed, except for those few which had already made the journey into Europe.