Saturday, September 21 : Saint John-Mary Vianney

The first way to persevere in the path that leads to heaven is to be faithful to following and to take advantage of the movements of grace that God wants to grant us. All the saints are liable for their happiness only to their fidelity to follow the movements that the Holy Spirit has given them, and the dammed can only attribute their misfortune to the contempt they have made of it. This alone can be enough to make you feel the price and the need to be faithful to it. But you will say, how, by what means can we know that we correspond to what grace wants us, or that we resist it? If you don’t know, listen to me for a moment, and you will know the most essential. I say first of all that grace is a thought that makes us feel the need to avoid evil and do good. (…) The saints were only sanctified by their great attention to following all the good inspirations that the good Lord sent them, and the damned only fell into hell because they despised them. (…) We see in the Gospel that all the conversions that Jesus Christ made during his life have been depended on persistence. How was Saint Matthew converted? We know that Jesus Christ, having seen him in his office, told him to follow him, and that he followed him, but what assures us that his conversion was true is that he did not return in this office, that he no longer committed injustice; It was that after starting to follow Jesus Christ, he never left him. Perseverance in grace, the renunciation forever of sin, were the very certain marks of his conversion.

Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team