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Bree Solstad

@BreeSolstad

Oct 8

Today is one of the most obscure Marian feasts in the Church calendar:

Our Lady of Good Remedy.

It goes back more than 800 years, to an order of priests who risked their lives to free Christian slaves.

A thread 🧵👇

In the 1100s, the Order of the Holy Trinity was founded by St. John of Matha.

Their mission? To redeem Christians captured and enslaved by Muslims during the Crusades.
But there was one problem: this mission was incredibly expensive.
🧵 👇

St. John had no money. No powerful connections. No way to buy back thousands of captives.

So what did he do?
He turned to Our Lady.

He begged the Blessed Virgin for help, and Our Lady provided.

🧵 👇

Read 8 tweets

Bree Solstad

@BreeSolstad

Oct 7

🔥 October 7, 1571: The day Europe should have fallen.

The day Christendom should have drowned in the Mediterranean.

But instead, it was the day Our Lady showed the power of the Rosary and saved a continent.

The Battle of Lepanto. 🧵

For decades, the Ottoman Empire had been advancing, city after city, kingdom after kingdom.

Constantinople had fallen. The crescent moon of heretics and barbarians flew over lands that had been Christian for over a thousand years.

Europe was next.

By 1571, the unity of Christendom in Europe had been severely weakened by the Protestant revolt, and the Muslim Turks from the Ottoman Empire were on a mission to conquer it.

They had stated publicly their intention to convert St. Peter’s Basilica into a mosque.

Read 14 tweets

Bree Solstad

@BreeSolstad

Oct 5

In 1219, during the Crusades, a barefoot friar walked straight into a Muslim war camp to preach the Gospel to the Sultan of Egypt.

That friar was St. Francis of Assisi. ✝️🔥

A short thread on one of the boldest acts of evangelization in history:

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The Christian armies were stuck outside Damietta. Thousands were dying.

No knight dared approach the enemy camp.

But Francis, with no armor, no weapon, and no fear, demanded to be taken to Sultan al-Kamil himself. 👇

The Sultan could have executed him instantly.

Instead, Francis was brought before him, and began to preach Jesus Christ with fire and conviction:

✨ Christ alone is Lord.
✨ Outside of Him, there is no salvation.

👇

Read 6 tweets

Bree Solstad

@BreeSolstad

Oct 1

🌹 The Nun in the Trenches

The thread below is one of many documented stories of St. Thérèse performing miracles & saving lives on the battlefields of World War I….about 20 years after her death.

At this point in history, she had not even been declared a “Blessed” yet!

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It was the middle of the night on the Western Front. Shells were screaming overhead, the earth shaking with constant bombardment. A young French soldier crouched low in his trench, clutching his rosary and trying not to give in to terror. 🧵 👇

Suddenly, through the smoke and fire, he saw a figure moving along the trench line. It was a Carmelite nun in a brown habit, her face serene, her presence strangely radiant amidst the carnage.
She looked at him, smiled gently, & said, “Do not be afraid. You will not die here.”👇

Read 6 tweets

Bree Solstad

@BreeSolstad

Sep 23

If you love St. Thérèse of Lisieux as much as me, maybe you’ll join me for these 9 nights of reading, reflection, and prayer.
Each night starting with this thread, I’ll post a portion of her writing, a reflection on it & a prayer.
We conclude on her glorious Feast Day! 🙏🧵👇 👇

“In the evening of this life, I shall appear before You with empty hands, for I do not ask You, Lord, to count my works. All our justice is stained in Your eyes. I wish, then, to be clothed in Your own Justice and to receive from Your Lovethe eternal possession of Yourself. I want no other Throne, no other Crownbut You, my Beloved!

Time is nothing in Your eyes, and a single day is like a thousand years. You can, then, in one instant prepare me to appear before You.

In order to live in one single act of perfect Love, I offer myself as a victim of holocaust to your merciful love, asking You to consume me incessantly, allowing the waves of infinite tenderness shut up within You to overflow into my soul, and that thus I may become a martyr of Your Love, O my God!

May this martyrdom, after having prepared me to appear before You, finally cause me to die and may my soul take its flight without any delay into the eternal embrace of Your Merciful Love.

I want, O my Beloved, at each beat of my heart to renew this offering to You an infinite number of times, until the shadows having disappeared I may be able to tell You of my Love in an Eternal Face to Face!” -Saint Thérèse

👇 👇 👇

Reflection: Thérèse was a difficult little girl. Motherless at the age of four, she grew up without really maturing into an unsatisfied teenager, lamenting her misfortunes and fears. The desire for God, and with it the yearning for holiness, certainly pulsated within her from early childhood. She loved Jesus and wanted to be a saint. But her fragile affections and daily frustrations made her unable to control her emotions, unable to forget herself. Then came the miracle of Christmas night 1886: she was almost fourteen years old and, in refraining from anger over yet another whim, in swallowing her tears, she understood that conversion is a grace from God, but that it is also necessary to accept it, to grasp it. And that means preferring God’s will—love—to one’s own. “I felt charity enter into my soul, and the need to forget myself and to please others; since then I’ve been happy!” This was made possible by the discovery that she had always been loved, and undeservedly so. In this way, little Thérèse was able to enter the battle of love.

Her Act of Offering to Merciful Love, written in Carmel almost ten years later, is in a sense the summary of her entire life: “I desire, in a word, to be a saint, but I feel my helplessness and I beg You, O my God! to be Yourself my Sanctity!” In this paradoxical text, almost revolutionary in the spirituality of the late 19th century, as Thérèse offers herself as a “victim of holocaust” not to a judging God who feasts on the suffering of his creatures, but to “Merciful Love,” she reveals that God’s love precedes us eternally. The Lord is waiting for us to open ourselves to the “waves of infinite tenderness” that he possesses, so that he can give them to us here below, despite our suffering, as the first fruits of the eternal face-to-face encounter for which he made us.

By Jean de Saint-Cheron

👇 👇 👇

Read 4 tweets

Bree Solstad

@BreeSolstad

Sep 14

Join me as we pray night 8 of the traditional Novena to Our Lady of Sorrows.

This 9-night devotional exercise will conclude tomorrow night on the eve of the Feast of Our Lady of Sorrows, so that we can fully enter into it.

This is powerful and life changing.

Thread 🧵 👇👇

The Vigil of The Feast of the Exultation of the Holy Cross:

Sweet Mother of Sorrows, Providence wished that Saint Helena, like you the mother of a king, find the cross of your Son and lavish honors on this relic of relics.

Grant me, Sorrowful Queen and Mother, that, like Saint Helena, I always honor the symbol of our salvation, the Cross. And like the Church, may I hold it high, display and wear it with gratitude and pride.

Above all, may I unite my sufferings to that of Jesus on the cross, and carry my crosses not in shame but in faith, love and patience as He did. 👇

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art’ thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinner, now and at the hour of our death. Amen. 👇

Read 6 tweets

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