God Makes No Mistakes
I read this in Magnificat this weekend and thought it was so beautiful & inspiring I had to share it. The countess lies in her bed, weeping freely. In her arms she cradles a newborn lump of humanity covered with blood, a boy child. His face seems jolted out of shape, and his body — it is a body, somehow. "You are so pitiful," she cries, "my poor little boy."The count looks on. "Fetch the priest," he says to one of his servants. And the thought passes through his mind that it might be a mercy if the child died after he had been baptized. He fights the thought with prayer. "My dear," he says, "we will give this child to God. He will do what is best." The priest comes, and they christen the boy Hermann, "fighting man" in the old German tongue. He will be one of fifteen children, and Werner, one of his brothers, will indeed be a fighter at the side of Hildebrand, the great reforming Pope Gregory VII. Carried to school...