Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar

Remember this saying : “God resists the proud but will always favor the humble” (Jas 4,6). Keep before you the Lord’s words: “Those who humble themselves will be exalted and those who exalt themselves will be humbled” (Mt 23,12)… If it seems to you that you have some good quality, set it to your account but without forgetting your faults; don’t boast about what you have done well today; don’t set aside recent and past evil. If the present gives you reason to glory, remember the past! That is how you will pierce the stupid abcess! And if you see your neighbour sinning, beware that you don’t just consider him in the light of this lapse but think, too, about what he is doing, or has done, that is good. Very often you will discover him to be better than you if you examine your life as a whole and don’t add up the fragmentary bits. For God doesn’t examine us in a fragmentary fashion… Let us often remember all this so as to preserve ourselves from pride, humbling ourselves so as to be raised up. Let us imitate the Lord, who came down from heaven to the lowest depths… Yet after such a humbling he caused his glory to shine forth, glorifying with himself those who had been despised together with him. These were indeed, in fact, his first blessed disciples who, poor and naked, went out through all the world, without words of wisdom, without sumptuous escort, but alone and in anguish, vagabonds by land and by sea, beaten with rods, stoned, pursued and, in the end, put to death. Such as these are for us the divine teachings of our Father. Let us imitate them that we may also come to eternal glory, Christ’s perfect and authentic gift.

Roman Catholic Ordinary Calendar – rosary,team

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