Unfathomable. Just unfathomable
Only a handful of genuine mystics and truly gifted spiritual masters have been able to comprehend the unfathomable mysteries of grief that overwhelmed the fairest creature of our race, Our Lady, as those Seven Swords of Sorrow were plunged through and through her Immaculate Heart. We sin so casually, so thoughtlessly, so repeatedly, rarely giving a moment’s worth of a meditation to how our least Venial Sins caused Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ to suffer unspeakable horrors during His Passion and Death, horrors that penetrated the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother as she, conceived without any stain of Original or Actual Sin, suffered in a perfect communion of Hearts with Him. It cannot be that way with us from this day forward.
We are on the cusp of Holy Week, ending now the first week in Passiontide, Passion Week. We must enter deep into the mysteries of our salvation, which was wrought for us by the perfect obedience of the Word made Flesh in Our Lady’s Virginal and Immaculate Womb to the Will of His Co-Equal and Co-Eternal Father. We must quit our sins once and for all, recognizing how they caused the God-Man and His Most Blessed Mother to suffer, how they wound our own souls, which have been purchased by the shedding of every single drop of the Divine Redeemer’s Most Precious Blood, and how they have brought great sorrow into the Heart out of which was formed Our Redeemer’s Most Sacred Heart.
No more sin.
No more joking about sin.
No more dismissiveness about the gravity of sin.
We must repent and amend our lives as the consecrated slaves of Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Our Lady brought forth her Divine Son painlessly and miraculously. She brought us forth in great pain as the adopted children of the Living God as she stood so valiantly by the foot of the Cross on Good Friday. She stands by the foot of her Divine Son’s Most Holy Cross in every true offering of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass by a true bishop or a true priest. We must stand by her each day at Holy Mass as we make reparation for our sins and those of the whole world with every beat of our hearts, making sure as well to pray as many Rosaries each day as our states-in-life permit.
Also, pleased be assured that I will have a commentary about Jorge Mairo Bergoglio's latest blasphemy of Our Lady and his effort to coerce perjury out of the works of Saint Alphonsus de Ligouri by Palm Sunday at the very latest.
Finally, as the hour is late, I ask your prayers for the repose of the soul of my late father’s widow, Mrs. Joanna Simon Shipp Droleskey, who died in Sylvania, Ohio, yesterday, Thursday, March 25, 2021, the Feast of the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Commemoration of Thursday in Passion Week, at the age of ninety-four.
My father was so distraught after my mother’s death on March 18, 1982, that he couldn’t bear being without her. It was within God’s Holy Providence that a fellow veterinarian, a practicing Catholic, who was his subordinate in the Texas Department of Public Health in Harlingen, Texas, introduced him to Joanna Simon Shipp, who had been widowed from her first husband, Leonard Shipp, for three years.
Although I admitted it at the time and admit it now, it was very difficult in human terms at first to see my father with a woman other than my mother so soon after my mother’s death. However, I knew at the time that, despite my own difficulties of adjusting to the situation, that Joanna was going to be the Heaven-sent means to bring my father back to the Holy Faith that he had stopped practicing in his college days at the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Texas from 1938 to 1943. Joanna did just that, stipulating that my father go to Confession to an older priest in Harlingen as a condition for their getting married on December 17, 1982. Joanna’s stipulation was a Spiritual Work of Mercy that revivified my father’s soul as he would die as a practicing Catholic on September 5, 1992, in Sylvania, Ohio, after he had moved to Joanna’s home community in 1990.
Joanna Simon was born on December 1, 1925 and entered the convent of the School Sisters of Saint Francis when she was a teenager. She made her final vows and taught school for a number of years before the changes wrought in religious life were too difficult for her to bear, being granting a dispensation to leave her order in 1967. It was two years thereafter that she had married Leonard Shipp, an executive with the Great Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company (A&P), and moved to Harlingen, Texas, from Ohio. Joanna cared for her first husband and his father for ten years before Leonard Shipp died from heart problems in 1979 a short time after his father had died. Joanna did nothing other than care for others throughout her entire life. Indeed, she provided excellent spiritual and temporal care to my father, who was a mess after my mother’s death and would have been much more of a mess had he not met and married Joanna. She was wonderful to my father.
Despite having been married and widowed twice, Joanna Simon Shipp Droleskey never stopped living the life of a religious. She spent her entire days in widowhood sitting in a chair reading her prayers despite suffering from severe neck pain that caused her to wear a brace. She was truly a victim soul who helped to sanctify the world by her fidelity to her Rosary and other prayers, including a very long list of people for whom she prayed every day. She was kept alive for all these years to suffer for souls and to be a source of inspiration to all who knew her.
I visited Joanna whenever I passed through the Toledo, Ohio, area during my annual summer national speaking tours when associated with The Wanderer in the 1990s, and she first met Sharon and Lucy in 2003 when we drove through in our motor home on a speaking tour, and we would visit her every time we passed through Toledo thereafter. Joanna was living in an assisted living facility in Sylvania, Ohio, when we saw her for the last time on December 4, 2019, and she was in fine spirits despite being in great physical pain.
Therefore, I ask you to join us in praying for the response of the immortal soul of Joanna Simon Shipp Droleskey, who is survived by a sister, many cousins, nieces, nephews, grandnieces and grandnephews in the Toledo, Ohio, area.
Eternal rest grant unto her, O Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May her soul and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace. Amen.
Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.
