The novena in honor of the Holy Ghost is the oldest of all novenas, since it was first made at the direction of Our Lord Himself when He sent His apostles back to Jerusalem to await the coming of the Holy Ghost on the first Pentecost. It is still the only novena officially prescribed by the Church. Addressed to the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, it is a powerful plea for the light and strength and love so sorely needed by every Christian.

Manner of Praying the Novena

Each day the meditation and prayer for the particular day is said, followed by one (1) Our Father, one (1) Hail Mary, and seven (7) Glory be to the Fathers, the Act of Consecration, and the Prayer for the Seven Gifts.

May 18, Ninth Day of the Novena to the Holy Ghost for the Seven Gifts

Thou, on those who evermore
Thee confess and Thee Adore,
In Thy sevenfold gift, descend.

Give Them comfort when they die;
Give them life with Thee on high;
Give them joys which never end. Amen.

The Fruits of the Holy Ghost

The gifts of the Holy Ghost perfect the supernatural virtues by enabling us to practice them with greater docility to divine inspiration. As we grow in the knowledge and love of God under the direction of the Holy Ghost, our service becomes more sincere and generous, the practice of virtue more perfect. Such acts of virtue leave the heart filled with joy and consolation and are known as Fruits of the Holy Ghost. These Fruits in turn render the practice of virtue more attractive and become a powerful incentive for still greater efforts in the service of God, to serve Whom is to reign.

Prayer

Come, O Divine Spirit, fill my heart with Thy heavenly fruits, Thy charity, joy, peace, patience, benignity, goodness, faith, mildness, and temperance, that I may never weary in the service of God, but by continued faithful submission to Thy inspiration may merit to be united eternally with Thee in the love of the Father and the Son. Amen.

Our Father…

Hail, Mary…

Glory be…  (7x)

Act of Consecration to the Holy Ghost

On my knees before the great multitude of heavenly witnesses, I offer myself soul and body to You, Eternal Spirit of God. I adore the brightness of Your purity, the unerring keenness of Your justice, and the might of Your love. You are the Strength and Light of my soul. In You I live and move and am. I desire never to grieve You by unfaithfulness to grace and I pray with all my heart to be kept from the smallest sin against You. Mercifully guard my every thought, and grant that I may always watch for Your light, listen to Your voice, and follow Your gracious inspirations. I cling to You and give myself to You, and ask You by Your compassion to watch over me in my weakness. Holding the pierced Feet of Jesus, and looking at His Five Wounds and trusting in His Precious Blood and adoring His opened Side and stricken Heart, I implore You, Adorable Spirit, Helper of my infirmity, so to keep me in Your grace that I may never sin against You. Give me grace, O Holy Ghost, Spirit of the Father and the Son, to say to You always and everywhere, “Speak, Lord, for Your servant heareth.” Amen.

Prayer for the Seven Gifts of the Holy Ghost

O Lord Jesus Christ, Who before ascending into Heaven did promise to send the Holy Ghost to finish Your work in the souls of Your Apostles and Disciples, deign to grant the same Holy Spirit to me, that He may perfect in my soul the work of Your grace and Your love. Grant me the Spirit of Wisdom, that I may despise the perishable things of this world and aspire only after the things that are eternal; the Spirit of Understanding, to enlighten my mind with the light of Your divine truth; the Spirit of Counsel, that I may ever choose the surest way of pleasing God and gaining Heaven; the Spirit of Fortitude, that I may bear my cross with You and that I may overcome with courage all the obstacles that oppose my salvation; the Spirit of Knowledge, that I may know God, know myself, and grow perfect in the science of the Saints; the Spirit of Piety, that I may find the service of God sweet and amiable; the Spirit of Fear, that I may be filled with a loving reverence towards God and may dread in any way to displease Him. Mark me, dear Lord, with the sign of Your true disciples and animate me in all things with Your Spirit. Amen.

 May God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit bless you on Pentecost.

We are in urgent need of your support right now. With five issues completed, we can only continue with some immediate financial help and more subscribers. With your donations, we WILL stay in print. Please recommend the magazine to others who might be able to subscribe or to support us.

In a very encouraging sign of support, Keep the Faith, Inc., publisher of The Latin Mass magazine, has offered to send a free CD of Fulton Sheen’s “Daily Holy Hour” for a DONATION OF ANY AMOUNT. For any donation over $100, they will send you the magnificent audio retreat by Venerable Fulton Sheen titled “Vintage Sheen.”

Please, in your charity, donate what you can and pray for the success of this publication. If you prefer to mail in a donation, you may make a check or money order out to “Laudamus Press” and mail it to:

Laudamus Press
P.O. Box 251
Hamlin, PA 18427

God willing, we will be back in print in June. During this break, we are getting ahead with editing and trying to raise money. We need to raise a significant amount in order to stay in print. If you think you can help, please visit our website to make a donation.

Thanks to all of our subscribers for sticking with us as we get this sorted out. And special thanks to those who have purchased gift subscriptions. As I said in a previous email, if each subscriber were to attract just 2 more subscribers, we’d be all right. We need 300 new subscribers this month and 300 more next month.

Please keep us in your prayers. There is nothing like this magazine out there and we’d like to keep working on it!
God bless
Margot

http://catholicism.about.com/od/Readers-Choice-Awards/ss/2013-About-Catholicism-Readers-Choice-Awards-Winners_6.htm

We continue to search for donors and/or partners. Please let us know if you know of anyone who might be able to help us.

Here is the text of the email:

Dear Subscriber,

Grace and peace to you as we enter Lent. Thank you for all the helpful and positive comments about Laudamus Te. We are reading with interest every letter and e-mail and implementing suggestions as we can. Your kind words despite our blunders are a consolation to us.

We write to let you know that the Lent issue will be a few days late. We apologize for the delay. Most are being mailed tomorrow (February 11). Please click on the link below to download a pdf of the Lent issue in case you would like to use it before your hard copy arrives. Many thanks to the good people at St. Martin de Porres Lay Dominican Community in New Hope, Kentucky for helping us with the printing and mailing of the PreLent and Lent issues. They have worked night and day to try to expedite this issue when we got it to them so late. We are so grateful!

Why are we late . . . again? Our ongoing struggle to purge error from the Mass propers has made it difficult to meet production deadlines. Nearly all of the available English material contains mistakes from re-copying over the years; sadly we are finding that this is true to some extent of the Latin as well. A reliable source has informed us that even recently printed missals have these types of errors. It all takes a great deal of time, and with each issue, we get further and further behind.

For this reason we will be taking a break in production. You will receive a Holy Week/Easter Week issue and then not another issue until this summer. We must catch up with propers editing or Laudamus Te magazine will fail. Your subscription will stay intact and resume when we resume. You will still receive the same number of issues that you subscribed to receive. We are very sorry to have to take this measure, but feel we have no choice until we get a little ahead. We hope you will stick with us as we work to catch up!

We are struggling to attract subscriptions as well. So far we have about 750 subscribers, but we need several thousand. With every penny going toward production, printing, and mailing costs, we have no budget for advertising. A very kind individual stepped in temporarily to purchase ads for Laudamus Te, but we cannot rely upon this kind of generosity alone.

So, we are launching a subscription campaign. If everyone now receiving Laudamus Te were to attract just two new subscribers, our production costs per copy would drop dramatically and the extra money would provide a much-needed funding cushion. We love this magazine as much as you do and are committed to its success. Will you help? Please tell your friends about the magazine and let us know if you would be willing to pass out flyers at your parish. Many of you have paid for gift subscriptions and made donations, and we very much appreciate your help. Please also keep us in your prayers.

May the season of Lent draw you closer to Our Lord in His Passion.

In Christ,
Margot Davidson
Therese Warmus
Ted Schluenderfritz

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

How fitting for today!

However, before Mass I picked up a copy of Caryll Houselander’s Reed of God and turned casually to a chapter called “Homo factus est”–there I read of Mary’s gift, her incomparable gift. I wished I had read this passage before we put together the Christmas issue because I would have loved to share it with you. Here it is now. May you draw ever closer to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, in this Christmastide.

(The formatting didn’t come through on this; each line is a new paragraph.)

In giving life to Him, [Mary] was giving Him death.
All other children born must inevitably die; death belongs to fallen nature; the mother’s gift to the child is life.
But Christ is Life; death did not belong to Him.
In fact, unless Mary would give Him death, He could not die.
Unless she would give Him the capacity for suffering, He could not suffer.
He could only feel cold and hunger and thirst if she gave Him her vulnerability to cold and hunger and thirst. He could not know the indifference of friends or treachery or the bitterness of being betrayed unless she gave Him a human mind and a human heart.
That is what it meant to Mary to give human nature to God.
He was invulnerable; He asked her for a body to be wounded.
He was joy itself; He asked her to give Him tears.
He was God; He asked for her to make Him man.
He asked for hands and feet to be nailed.
He asked for flesh to be scourged.
He asked for blood to be shed.
He asked for a heart to be broken.
The stable at Bethlehem was the first Calvary.
The wooden manger was the first cross.
The swaddling bands were the first burial bands.
The Passion had begun.
Christ was man.
The description of His birth in the Gospel does not say that she held Him in her arms but that she “wrapped Him up in swaddling clothes and laid Him in a manger.”
As if her first act was to lay Him on the Cross.
She knew that this little son of hers was God’s son and God had not given Him to her for herself alone, but for the whole world. This is one of the greatest of all things that we must learn from our contemplation of Our Lady. (Houselander, Reed of God. New York: Sheed and Ward, 1944, pg 59-60.)

We are not a non-profit organization. We do not have 501c exemption from the IRS which would allow people to make a tax-deductible donation to us. Legal advice we received said that unless we have donors lined up at the door, it’s not worth it for us to become non-profit at this time. Another financial adviser told us that with the tax laws changing, the better tax shelter for people in the future will not be giving to 501c organizations, but investing in businesses that don’t make money—organizations like us that do good things for people, but won’t necessarily give an investor a return.

Donors who give to Laudamus Te are truly giving from the heart since we can offer no other financial incentive.

It is not our purpose to make a lot of money. We want to pay our workers a just wage (at this time everyone involved is working for free on spare time) and have enough money to keep the magazine in print. In addition, there are other services we’d like to provide, such as large print and e-pub versions, as well as other publications for the Latin Mass.

To do this, we really need donations. On the one hand we want/need to appear solid and financially stable so that people will subscribe to the magazine. On the other hand, we need to admit that we don’t have the funds to produce the magazine the way we—or our subscribers—want. People do want this magazine, and we have priced it to fit the budgets of the people we hope will subscribe. Unfortunately, without start-up capital, there is no way to meet our costs on subscriptions alone. For example, the last issue sold for less than it cost us to print it. We desperately wanted to get it into your hands, so we took a hit and lost money doing it. Printing and shipping costs are now so high, it is difficult for any start-up publication to make ends meet. Until Laudamus Te gains the subscription numbers necessary to bring down the cost per piece, we will need donations to cover the loss.

We have a great product and people who want it, but we are not taking in enough money to sustain it. Can you help?

Do you know of anyone with the means to donate to a worthy cause? Please show them the magazine (it’s beautiful!) and ask them to consider donating. If you would like to pass names along to us, we can send sample magazines and a “begging for alms” letter.

Do you know others who might like to subscribe? Please let them know about us!

And please, don’t give up on us because we may appear weak in asking for money! In our weakness we have put our trust in Our Lady, Undoer of Knots, and know that through our weakness the glory of God will shine through.

Please pray for us that we may continue to bring joy to our neighbors and be pleasing to God.

Thanks to all of you have subscribed and donated—we really appreciate it. Now, please, tell your friends! May God bless you.

Instructions for Kindle
The file will download as a zip file. Double click on it to unzip and then the PDF will appear.
Open your mail program and create an email to be sent to your unique Kindle email address. (To find your Kindle email, turn on Kindle, click on the “Docs” button, and immediately below the words “By Author, By Recent, By Title” you will find the words, “Send documents to: xxxx@kindle.com” which is your unique Kindle email.) Add the Laudamus PDF as an attachment to the email, and press send. Once the document has transferred to your Kindle, simply click to open.

Instructions for iPad
Your file will download as a PDF.
To add LaudausTe PDFs directly to your iTunes library and read them on your iPad, follow these instructions:
1. Make sure you have the iBooks app installed on your iPad. You can find iBooks in the App Store for free.
2. Download the PDF to your computer, then run iTunes.
3. Navigate to File -> Add to Library. Find the PDF(s) you wish to add and select them.
4. From the left menu in iTunes (under LIBRARY) choose Books.
5. You should see all of the PDFs you’ve added to your library. Right-click (or control-click) on a file to Get Info.
6. Click the Options tab. Make sure the Media Kind is set to Book. If necessary, title and author information can be edited using the Info tab.
7. Connect your iPad to the computer. It should appear in the left menu under DEVICES.
8. Select your iPad and navigate to the Books tab. Check the box next to Sync Books. Choose All Books or select the individual PDF and ePub files to sync.
9. Click the sync button to copy the files to your iPad.
10. Run iBooks on your iPad. The Laudamus Te PDFs will now appear in your library.

(Instructions courtesy of Gilbert Magazine)

1. Will you be making this available to international addresses? Right now, we can only ship to North America (US and Canada). We’ll see if we can figure something out for Europe and Australia. In the meantime, it’s possible we could make it available digitally.

2. What if you don’t get off the ground? What happens to the money we paid? We will gladly return the subscription cost (minus the cost of issues shipped) to anyone who wants a refund should we be unable to get this project off the ground. Given the interest we’ve seen so far, I feel confident we will be able to fulfill orders.

3. When will you ship the Advent issue? It should arrive in your mailbox in early-to mid-November.

4. What is the correct address to send payments if I don’t want to use a credit card on the Internet? It is P.O. Box 251 Hamlin, PA 18427

5. Where do the proceeds go from the sale of this magazine? Hmmm . . . no proceeds just yet. All that we are gathering now goes to the printing and mailing of the magazine (and printing, especially in color ink, is very expensive). We have no financial backing and are relying on subscriptions to make this project work. It’s a true grass roots operation!! If we get big enough to warrant the cost of it, we will reform as a non-profit organization. Right now we rely on the support of our parent company (Hillside Education) to pay the bills.

Thank you for your interest in Laudamus Te. I will continue to add questions to this post as they come up.
Margot