Month: June 2022

There is no prayer more agreeable to God, or more profitable to the soul, than that which is made during the Thanksgiving after Communion. It is the opinion of many grave writers (Suarez, Cajetan, Valentia, De Lugo, and others), that the Holy Communion, as long as the Sacramental species last, constantly produces greater and greater graces in the soul, provided the soul is then constant in disposing itself by new acts of virtue.

The Eternal Father was not content with giving us His Son, Jesus Christ, to save us by His death, He has given us also the Holy Ghost to dwell always in our souls and keep them inflamed with His holy love. Hence, when the Holy Spirit descended upon the Apostles, He appeared in the form of tongues of fire. This is the holy fire that inflamed the Saints with the desire to do great things for God, that enabled them to love their most cruel enemies, to seek after contempt, to renounce all the riches and honours of the world, and even to embrace torments and death.

It results from the practice of prayer that a person constantly thinks of God. “The true lover,” says St. Teresa, “is ever mindful of the beloved One. And hence it follows that persons of prayer are always speak¬of God, knowing, as they do, how pleasing it is to God that His lovers should delight in conversing about Him, and on the love He bears them, and that thus they should endeavour to enkindle it in others.” The same Saint wrote: “Jesus Christ is always present at the conversations of the servants of God, and He is very much gratified to be the subject of their delight.”

St. Francis de Sales says, that our Saviour can never be seen more amiable and more tender, in all that He has done for us, than in Holy Communion, in which He, so to say, annihilates Himself and becomes Food, that He may unite Himself to the hearts and bodies of His faithful. Therefore, the learned Gerson used also to say, that there was no means more efficacious than the Holy Communion whereby to enkindle devotion and the holy love of God in our souls.

Divine Love is that Treasure, to purchase which, the Gospel says, we should leave all things; for this love makes us partakers of the friendship of God. An infinite treasure which they that use become the friends of God.

He that leaves off prayer, will leave off loving Jesus Christ. Prayer is the blessed furnace where the fire of holy love is enkindled and kept alive: And in my meditation a fire shall flame out-(Ps. xxxviii. 4). It was said by St. Catherine of Bologna: “The person that foregoes the practice of prayer breaks the chain which binds the soul to God.”