Patience
Thoughts on the Patient Endurance of Sorrows and Sufferings
VICTIMS WITH CHRIST [1]
There is an apostleship of suffering as well as an apostleship of word and prayer.
Our blessed Saviour seeks victims, especially among souls still radiant with their baptismal innocence, or who having lost that pearl of rare price have recovered it in the deep waters of penance and tears.
He finds them sometimes on the highways of the world, but more frequently in the enclosed gardens of religious communities. And finding souls thus generous to enter into His life of sacrifice, He pours out upon them an abundance of griefs and sorrows. He communicates to them the spirit of prayer, the love of humiliations, of sufferings and deprivations. He roots out of their hearts pride and its succulent branches, the love of approval and esteem, jealousy, self-sufficiency, ambition, and human respect, and plants instead a profound humility and a veneration for authority.
Some of them our blessed Saviour ordains to suffer on behalf of Catholic Missions, for the propagation of the faith, for infidels, others for heretics and schismatics, others again for sinners in general, or for souls in purgatory, for the conversion of a certain country, for this or that parish, family or individual.
Finally, our Lord ordains some to suffer for the sanctification of priests and the multiplication of earnest workmen in His vineyard, which vocation next to that of the ministry is the noblest that can be entrusted to souls.
Such special victims we know to have been Saints Catherine of Sienna, Mary Magdalen of Pazzi, Aloysius Gonzaga, Rose of Lima, Margaret Mary, Teresa of Avila, Teresa of the Child Jesus (the Little Flower) and many others who, innocent themselves, suffered for the guilty.... [continued tomorrow]
[1] Adapted from Father Brinkmeyer's "Short Conferences on the Sacred Heart of Jesus."
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Compiled and Edited by Rev. F. X. Lasance
Author of "My Prayerbook," etc.
1937, Benziger Brothers
Printers to the Holy Apostolic See
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