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Today’s ✠Challoner Meditation
Carissimi: Today’s Mass; St Martha of Bethany
One day, when Alphonsus was conversing with a bishop with whom he was very intimate, he remarked that one of the greatest graces he had ever received was that of having escaped the peril of being a bishop: “a peril,” he added, “that I should have had some difficulty in avoiding, had I remained with my family.”
He who resolves to suffer for God, suffers no more pain. St. Gertrude used to say that so great was her enjoyment in suffering that no time was more painful to her than that in which she was free from pain. Ah yes, souls who understand the language of love, know well how to find all their happiness in suffering.
Therefore, we ought continually with tears of tenderness, to thank the Eternal Father for having given His innocent Son to death, to deliver us from eternal death: He spared not his own Son, but delivered him up for us all; and how hath he not also with him given us all things? (Rom. viii. 32). Thus wrote St. Paul; and thus Jesus Himself spoke in the Gospel of St. John: God so loved the world as to give his only-begotten Son (Jo. iii. 16).
Today’s ✠Challoner Meditation
Carissimi: Today’s Mass; Sunday X Post Pentecost
When once his Congregation was approved, Alphonsus gave himself up with greater ardour than ever to the impulses of his burning zeal. From this time we see him extending so widely the sphere of his labours, that his boundless activity has won for him the admiration of all successive ages. In addition to the cares, which now weighed upon him more heavily than ever owing to the increase and extension of his Institute; in addition to the anxieties and fatigues occasioned by his persevering assiduity in the work of the missions, Alphonsus now began to publish that long series of works, both theological and ascetical, by which he merited the glorious title of Doctor of the Church.
How is it possible for him who looks at the Crucifix, and beholds a God dying in a sea of sorrows and insults –how is it possible for him, if he loves that God, not to suffer with cheerfulness? Yea, how is it even possible not to desire to suffer every pain for Jesus’ sake? Love makes all things easy.
When the Divine Word offered Himself to redeem mankind, there were before Him two ways of redeeming the world, the one of joy and glory, the other of pains and insults. But as it was His will, not only by His coming to deliver man from eternal death, but also to call forth the love of all the hearts of men, He rejected the way of joy and glory, and chose that of pains and insults: Having joy set before him, he endured the cross (Heb. xii. 2).