Birthdays and feast days

Today is the 80th birthday of our beloved pope, Benedict XVI (the former Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger). Happy birthday to our dear Holy Father and may God continue to bless him in the years to come! I believe Pope Benedict held a mass yesterday (Sunday) at the Piazza di San Pietro to celebrate his birthday as well as Divine Mercy Sunday. (He shares this birthday with a good friend of mine who sarcastically remarked that the shared birthday is the only thing they have in common.)

Today also happens to be the feast day of two of my many favorite saints, St. Bernadette Soubirous and St. Benedict Joseph Labre. Both of them died on this very day, St. Bernadette in 1879 and St. Benedict Labre nearly a century earlier in 1783, and both at the age of thirty-five.