“UNDER this symbol of love, Christ our High Priest, having suffered both cruelly and mystically, offered the twofold Sacrifice.
“Who would not love the Saviour who loves him? Who would not love him, by whom he has been redeemed? Who would not wish to take up his abode, for ever in this his Jesus’ Heart.”
— Hymn for Lauds, Feast of the Sacred Heart
I say to you, that even so there shall be joy in heaven upon one sinner that doth penance, more than upon ninety-nine just who need not penance.
— St. Luke 15:7
“ONE day I saw the Son of God, holding in His Hand His own Heart, which appeared more brilliant than the sun and which was casting rays of light on every side; then, this amiable Saviour gave me to understand that all the graces which God unceasingly pours forth on men, according to the capacity of each, come from the plenitude of the Divine Heart.”
— St. Mechtilde, 1241-1298
“THE sanctity of the Sacred Heart is the sanctity of One who is God as well as man. The Sacred Heart of Jesus hates sin as God hates it, loathes it with inexpressible loathing. How, then, can I, who am so full of sin, venture to appeal to the Heart to which sin is thus foul with a foulness that knows no bound or limit? At least I can pray that I may share in a greater degree this hatred of sin, and so learn to avoid it.
“Happily for us, the Sacred Heart of Jesus, by reason of the Divine nature of our Lord, has also unbounded love tor sinners. His infinite sanctity makes Him long after them with an inexhaustible love, and an unceasing desire to see them rid of the sin that denies them. If sins still cling to me, it is not His fault, but my own. It is owing to my want of correspondence to His constant invitations to come to Him to be healed of all sin.”
— Rev. R.F. Clarke, S.J., “The Sanctity of the Sacred Heart“
“HE desires us to avoid the slightest faults, but He does not wish us to worry too much even about the great ones. He decrees that joy, liberty and peace of heart shall be the eternal inheritance of all those who love Him truly.”
— The Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, Fr. John Croiset, S.J. (1959)
“THE Sacred Heart of Jesus was the instrument of a human soul, which contained in it all the perfections, natural and supernatural, of which the human soul is capable. It was the ideal of which the soul, even of the greatest of the saints, was but an utterly inadequate realization. Its sweetness, its gentleness, its power to attract, its Divine beauty were unbounded and almost infinite. Let us contemplate that Sacred Heart, radiant with glory and splendor, and adore it with grateful love.
— Rev. R.F. Clarke, S.J., Meditations on the Sacred Heart
“AT THE period of Jesus’ coming upon this earth, man had forgotten how to love, for he had forgotten what true beauty was. His heart of flesh seemed to him as a sort of excuse for his false love of false goods: his heart was but an outlet, whereby his soul could stray from heavenly things to the husks of earth, there to waste his power and his substance. To this material world, which the soul of man was intended to make subserve its Maker’s glory,— to this world, which, by a sad perversion, kept man’s soul a slave to his senses and passions, — the Holy Ghost sent a marvelous power, which, like a resistless lever, would replace the world in its right position: —it was the sacred Heart of Jesus; a Heart of flesh, like that of other human beings, from whose created throbbings there would ascend to the eternal Father an expression of love, which would be an homage infinitely pleasing to the infinite Majesty, because there was in that love of that human Heart the dignity of its union with the Word.
— — Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Feast of the Sacred Heart,” The Liturgical Year
FROM The Life and Letters of Saint Francis Xavier, (Letter LXXIX, 1549-1552):
“We shall write to you about Japan, just as far as we get acquainted with it, and what we ourselves have learnt. In the first place, the nation with which we have had to do here surpasses in goodness any of the nations lately discovered. I really think that among barbarous nations there can be none that has more natural goodness than the Japanese. They are of a kindly disposition, not at all given to cheating, wonderfully desirous of honour and rank. Honour with them is placed above every thing else. There are a great many poor among them, but poverty is not a disgrace to any one. There is one thing among them of which I hardly know whether it is practised anywhere among Christians. The nobles, however poor they may be, receive the same honour from the rest as if they were rich; nor can any noble, however poor and needy, be induced to contract marriage with even the richest plebeian. They think that by coming down to ally themselves with plebeians they lose a great deal of dignity and estimation, and thus it is that they despise riches in comparison with dignity. They have a great many observances of courtesy among themselves. They are very fond of arms and weapons, and rely upon them very much. The highest and lowest alike always wear their swords and daggers—even boys of fourteen years of age. They never bear an insult either in word or deed. (more…)
From St. Francis Xavier’s “Letter on the Missions,” written from India, to St. Ignatius de Loyola, 1549:
May the grace and charity of our Lord Christ always be with us! Amen.
My own and only Father in the Heart of Christ, I think that the many letters from this place which have lately been sent to Rome will inform you how prosperously the affairs of religion go on in these parts, through your prayers and the good bounty of God. But there seem to be certain things which I ought myself to speak about to you; so I will just touch on a few points relating to these parts of the world which are so distant from Rome. In the first place, the whole race of the Indians, as far as I have been able to see, is very barbarous; and it does not like to listen to anything that is not agreeable to its own manners and customs, which, as I say, are barbarous. It troubles itself very little to learn anything about divine things and things which concern salvation. Most of the Indians are of vicious disposition, and are adverse to virtue. Their instability, levity, and inconstancy of mind are incredible; they have hardly any honesty, so inveterate are their habits of sin and cheating. We have hard work here, both in keeping the Christians up to the mark and in converting the heathen. And, as we are your children, it is fair that on this account you should take great care of us and help us continually by your prayers to God. You know very well what a hard business it is to teach people who neither have any knowledge of God nor follow reason, but think it a strange and intolerable thing to be told to give up their habits of sin, which have now gained all the force of nature by long possession. (more…)
FROM The Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, Book III, Letter LV, (c. 1545-1548):
I have very good reason to thank God for the fruits which came of this work. The converts took up the practice of singing hymns of the praises of God with so much ardour, that the native boys in the street, the young girls and the women in the houses, the labourers in the fields, the fishermen on the sea, instead of singing licentious and blasphemous songs, were always singing the elements of the Christian doctrine. And as all the songs had been put in the language of the country, they were understood equally well by the newly made Christians and the heathen. And, by the favour of God, the Portuguese in the country and the rest of the inhabitants, both Christian and heathen, took such an affection for me that I found favour in their eyes. I passed from thence into the islands that are called ‘of the Moor,’ about sixty leagues from Molucco. There were here many Christian villages unattended to for a length of time, both on account of their great distance from India, and because the natives had put to death the only priest who was among them. In these islands I baptized a great number of children, and in the space of three months, for I remained that length of time, I visited all the Christian villages, and made them devoted to Christ and to myself. All these isles are full of dangers, on account of the feuds which rage among the inhabitants and their civil wars; the race is barbarous, totally ignorant of letters, devoid of any written monuments of the past, and without any notions of reading or writing. It is their practice to take away the lives of any whom they hate by poison, and in this way a great many are killed. The soil is rugged and destitute of productions which support life. There is no corn nor wine; the natives scarcely know what flesh meat is; they have no herds nor flocks, nothing but a few swine, which are rather objects of curiosity than food. Wild boars abound; good water is very rare; rice is plentiful; there are trees in great numbers from which they get a kind of bread and of wine, and others out of the woven bark of which the clothing which they all use is made. I have written all this to you, my dearest brothers, that you may know how much these islands overflow with heavenly joys. (more…)
ALAN writes:
These are the exact words that were posted at the St. Louis Police Department’s website:
“….officers are investigation a shooting that injured two 18-year-old males injured on April 9, 2026 in the Mount Pleasant neighborhood…..”
When I lived in that neighborhood sixty years ago, I could walk the streets any time of day or night and not get injured by “a shooting”. It was so long ago that there were even things like common sense and proofreading. We had two daily newspapers, but they never reported that “officers are investigation” anything or that people who were injured were injured. (more…)
“THE more thou grudgest by impatience, either against God for any tribulation or sickness, or other bodily disease sent by Him, or against thy neighbour, for aught that he doth against thee, the less is the image of Jesus reformed in thee. I say not that such grudgings or fleshly angriness are deadly sins; but I say that they hinder the cleanness of heart and peace of conscience, that thou canst not have perfect charity, by the which thou shouldst come to life Contemplative. Cleanse thy heart also from venial sins as much as thou canst; and that the ground of sin might by grace of Jesus Christ be somewhat shaken in thee. For though it be so that thou feelest no evil against thy neighbour for a time, yet art thou not secure that the ground of anger is quenched in thee; neither yet art thou lord and master of the virtue of charity. (more…)
“DO you hope to escape what no mortal man has ever yet escaped? What saint in this world has been without his cross and without some trouble? Truly, our Lord Jesus was not one hour without some sorrow and pain as long as He lived here. It behoooved Him to suffer death and to rise again and so to enter into His glory. How is it, then, that you seek any other way to heaven than this plain, high way of the Cross. All the life of Christ was Cross and martyrdom; do you seek pleasure and joy? You err greatly if you seek any other thing than to suffer, for all this mortal life is full of misery and is all surrounded and marked with crosses. And the more highly a man profits in spirit, the more painful crosses will he find, for, by the firm certainty of Christ’s love, in which he daily increases, the pain of this exile daily appears to him more and more.”
—- Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, Book Two, Chapter 12
WELCOME to Frisco, Texas — an apparent convergence of materialism, American-style and Hindu-style.
‘OF SHILLS AND GRIFTERS’ looks at the ‘social-psychology’ of Russia, where a “prison culture” has created a macho and sadistic personality type, and explains its relevance to geopolitical events. [Use closed captions to avoid profanity.]
“Westerners don’t understand key elements in Russian social psychology. … The prison culture is everywhere in Russia today because it is, well, it is a prison state.”
See also “The Chabadian Puppet that is Donald Trump” and “The Demoralization of the Dissident Right is Absolute.”
“GOD has a right to His creature’s homage. If earthly kings and lords may claim from their vassals this recognition of their sovereignty,—the sovereign dominion of the great and first Being, the first Cause and last End of all things, demands it, on an infinitely just title, from beings called forth from nothing by His almighty goodness. And just as by the rent or service which accompanies it, the homage of vassals implies, together with the avowal of their submission, the real, the effective declaration that it is from their liege-lord that they hold their property and rights; so the act, whereby the creature, as such, subjects himself to his Creator, should adequately manifest, by and of itself, that he acknowledges Him as the Lord of all things and the Author of life. Moreover, if, by the infringement of His commands, he has deserved death, and only lives because of the infinite mercy of this his sovereign Lord,—then his act of homage or fealty will not be complete unless it also express an avowal of his guilt and the justice of the punishment. Such is the true notion of Sacrifice, so called because it sets apart from the rest of similar beings, and makes sacred the offering whereby it is expressed: for spirits purely immaterial, the offering or oblation will be interior and exclusively spiritual; but as regards man, this oblation must be spiritual, and at the same time, material, for, being composed of a soul and a body, he owes homage to his God for both.”
— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “Sunday within the Octave of Corpus Christi,” The Liturgical Year
“HE [the Holy Ghost] is the Love who, with its divine weight and influence of love, sways the blessed Trinity to the external act of creation; infinite Being leans, as it were, towards the deep abyss of nothingness, and out of the abyss creates. The holy Spirit opened the divine council, and said, ‘Let us make man to Our image and likeness!’ then God created man to His own image; He created him to the image of God, taking his own Word as the model to which he worked; for that Word is the sovereign archetype, according to which is formed the more or less perfect essence of each created being. Like him, then, to whose image he was made, man was endowed with understanding and free-will. As such, he would govern the whole inferior creation, and make it serve the purpose of its Creator, that is, he would turn it into a homage of praise and glory to its God; and though that homage would be finite, yet would it be the best of which it was capable. This is what is called the natural order; it is an immense world of perfect harmonies; and, had it ever existed without any further perfection than its own natural one, it would have been a master-piece of God’s goodness; and yet, it would have been far from realizing the designs of the Spirit of Love.”
— Dom Prosper Guéranger, “The Feast of Corpus Christi,” The Liturgical Year
“AT great expense and long journeys, men seek for themselves distinguished teachers, and consider it the highest honor and greatest joy to become their disciples and learn human sciences from their lips. At less cost and with less effort, we can find in the Sacred Heart of Jesus the surest teacher.
“This Divine Teacher gives us two kinds of lessons: some external, through the voice of the Church; others internal, through His secret inspiration. And what does He teach? Great truths, maxims of eternal life, counsels of salvation, and all-heavenly prudence. Instructed by this Divine Master, men and women of the Church of God, both unlettered and learned, have been seen to amaze and confound the wise, and to leave for future generations monuments of profound inner wisdom, acquired not in schools, but in communion and familiarity with this Sacred Heart.
“O Master of truth! O book ever open to those who wish to penetrate its secrets! O holy chair, where neither Moses nor the prophets, nor the philosophers, but God Himself, dictates lessons of truth to the disciples of His Heart!
“Open, O Lord, my heart, that I may docilely receive such divine teachings, and follow and practice them with all fidelity.
“Meditate for a few minutes.
“Who have you listened to until today, my soul? To teachers of seductive words who have led you down paths of perdition. (more…)