Love of the Cross makes us undertake voluntary afflictions, such as fasting, and makes us renounce pleasures, honors, and riches. The love found in such exercises is completely agreeable to the beloved. It is still more so when we patiently, gently, and contentedly accept pains, torments, and tribulations in consideration of God’s will, which sends them to us. Love reaches its most exalted state when we accept afflictions not only easily and patiently, but even cherish, like, and embrace them because of that divine good pleasure from which they come.
—St. Francis de Sales

"Ahead! Courage! In the spiritual life he who does not advance goes backward. It happens as with a boat which always must go ahead. If it stands still the wind will blow it back."
--St, Padre Pio

The Sorrow of Christ

In the Agony in the Garden and in the three hours upon the Cross He voluntarily withdrew, as it were, the light and the sweetness which He always had by right as God, and by merit as Man. He allowed a veil, a cloud — as the darkness covered the sun at that hour — to spread over His soul. He allowed a darkness to be drawn between the sweetness and the light of His Godhead and His human soul; and why was this? It was for our sakes. It was as voluntary as His Incarnation, as His Temptation, as His Agony, as His Death; He was offered up, because He willed it; He was troubled in the Garden, because He willed it; He was desolate upon the Cross, because He willed it. It was His own voluntary act, and that for our sakes.

It was not only voluntary; it was also vicarious — it was suffered in our stead. And why? Because the penalty of our sin is separation from God; because separation from God is eternal death. Because the loss of God is Hell; because the penalty of sin is the loss of God. Because, even after death, those who are saved, unless their sins be perfectly expiated, will be detained from the vision of God; because in this life every sin we commit is followed by a shadow; and that shadow is darkness, and that darkness is a part of desolation. And because we are under this law, holy, just, and good, by which every sin is followed by the penalty of desolation, He who, to expiate all our sins and pains, voluntarily and vicariously suffered all that His sinless and Divine Soul could suffer, permitted Himself, in that moment of His agony, to be deprived of the sweetness and consolation and light even of His own Godhead. The inferior part of His Humanity, which suffered like as ours, was in the dust of death, in the sorrows of this world, and in the desolation of the hiding of His Father's face.
--Cardinal Henry Manning

Vocation Holy Hour

Come join us for a Holy Hour before the Blessed Sacrament to pray for vocations!

All are welcome!

Date: Friday, March 30

Time: 8:00-9:00 pm

Where: Cathedral Basilica--map

Blessed Sacrament Chapel

Questions? Email: sttheresesociety@gmail.com

Conquering Temptations

“As long as we live in this world, we cannot be without temptations and tribulations…Many seek to flee temptations and fall worse into them. We cannot conquer by flight alone, but by patience and true humility we become stronger than all our enemies. He who only declines them outwardly and does not pluck out their root will profit little; nay, temptations will sooner return and he will find himself in a worse condition. By degrees and by patience you will, by God’s grace better overcome them than by harshness and your own importunity.”
—Thomas a Kempis

Solemnity of the Annunciation

As the great St. Irenaeus and so many of the holy fathers remark, the obedience of the second Eve repaired the disobedience of the first: for no sooner does the Virgin of Nazareth speak her fiat, 'be it done,' than the eternal Son of God (who, according to the divine decree, awaited this word) is present, by the operation of the Holy Ghost, in the chaste womb of Mary, and there He begins His human life...

Never was there a more entire or humiliating defeat than that which this day befell satan. The frail creature, over whom he had so easily triumphed at the beginning of the world, now rises and crushes his proud head. Eve conquers in Mary. God would not choose man for the instrument of His vengeance; the humiliation of satan would not have been great enough; and therefore she who was the first prey of hell, the first victim of the tempter, is selected to give battle to the enemy. The result of so glorious a triumph is that Mary is to be superior not only to the rebel angels, but to the whole human race, yea, to all the angels of heaven. Seated on her exalted throne, she, the Mother of God, is to be the Queen of all creation. Satan, in the depths of the abyss, will eternally bewail his having dared to direct his first attack against the woman, for God has now so gloriously avenged her; and in heaven, the very Cherubim and Seraphim reverently look up to Mary, and deem themselves honored when she smiles upon them, or employs them in the execution of any of her wishes, for she is the Mother of their God.
--Abbot Gueranger, O.S.B.

True Freedom

Holiness of life does not remove us from ordinary concerns. It makes us more authentically ourselves, more "human," because we have less reason to pretend to be someone we are not. To be secure in God's love means that all of our attempts to impress others with our goodness, to hide our weaknesses and evil inclinations disappear. We are finally free to be ourselves and able to become, day by day, more like God, more like Christ.
True spiritual freedom rests on the secure knowledge that we are loved by God just as we are. It is in our broken, imperfect state that God's love comes to rescue us from sin and lead us into a life of goodness and virtue.
--Fr. Gabriel O’Donnell, OP

On Sin

Sin, the mystery of iniquity, revealed both as mortal sin and venial sin, demands our reaction and our rejection. This in turn requires vigilance and prayer, the prayer that helps us in temptation, the prayer of reparation of God, of expiation in union with Christ who was made sin by his Father. We also have the testimony of the saints to the effectiveness of prayer to our Blessed Mother to avoid sin: O Mary, conceived without sin, pray for us who have recourse to you!
--Justin Cardinal Rigali

Prayer of St. Ephrem of Syria, Deacon, Poet, and Doctor

Lord Jesus Christ, King of kings,
you have power over life and death.
You know even things

that are uncertain and obscure,
and our very thoughts and feelings

are not hidden from you.
Cleanse me from my secret faults,
and I have done wrong and you saw it.
You know how weak I am,

both in soul and in body.
Give me strength, O Lord, in my frailty
and sustain me in my sufferings.
Grant me a prudent judgment, dear Lord,
and let me always be mindful

of your blessings.
Let me retain until the end

your grace that has protected me till now.

God's Mercy

"The mercy of God is so great that it cannot be explained in any words, understood by any created intelligence, or conceived by any mind. It is above human reason."
—St. John Chrysostom

Solemnity of Saint Joseph

Saint Joseph stands before you as a man of faith and prayer. The Liturgy applies to him the word of God in Psalm 89: "He shall say of me, 'You are my father, my God, the rock, my Savior'. O yes: how many times in the course of long days of work would Joseph have raised his mind to God to invoke him, to offer him his toil, to implore light, help, comfort. How many times! Well then, this man, who with his whole life seemed to cry out to God: "You are my father", receives this most special grace: the Son of God on earth treats him as his father.
Joseph invokes God with all the ardor of his soul as a believer: "my Father," and Jesus, who worked at his side with the tools of a carpenter, addressed him calling him "father."
A profound mystery: Christ, who as God directly experienced the divine fatherhood in the bosom of the Most Blessed Trinity, had this experience as a man through the person of Joseph, his foster father. And Joseph in his turn, in the home in Nazareth, offered the child who was growing beside him the support of his well-balanced virility, his far-sightedness, his courage, his gifts which every good father has, deriving them from that supreme source "from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name."
--Pope John Paul II, March 1983

"The life of a Christian is nothing

but a perpetual struggle against self;

there is no flowering of the soul

to the beauty of its perfection

except at the price of pain."
--St. Padre Pio

Progress in the Spiritual Life

The spiritual life consists in cooperating with the Holy Spirit so that the graces and charisms offered by the Holy Spirit will pervade one's human acts. What this means is that virtues are established from within the situation one is in as long as one is seeking the glory of God in one's particular vocation. Yet another way of putting it conceptually is that spirituality means to seek and live by the grace of holiness offered to a person in any condition or state of life. As circumstances change, one must seek to please or glorify God in both the simplest and most sublime responsibilities of one's state in life. Moreover, what is absolutely essential for progress in the spiritual life is that one attempts to infuse into all intrinsically good and even indifferent acts (like barbecuing ribs) the spirit of charity in a conscious way as well as doing what is possible to eliminate grave or even deliberate venial sins.
--Fr. Basil Cole, OP

On Confession

When we go to Confession, we must understand what we are about to do. We might say that we are going to take our Lord down from the Cross. When you make a good confession you enchain the devil. Our sins are but a grain of sand compared with the massive mountain of God's mercies.
--St. John Vianney

Remembering God's Mercy

Mercy is, in effect, God’s love in the face of our sinfulness. Love plus misery equals mercy…Mercy was God’s gift in the Old Testament; the fullness of mercy is God’s gift to us in the New Testament. Mercy passes through the humanity of Christ and is made available to us in the heart of Jesus, which is the tabernacle of mediation between God and man.
—Justin Cardinal Rigali

April Meeting

Date: Thursday, April 12

Time: 7:30 pm

Location: Archdiocese Vocations Office (map)

Topic: Virtue in Community Life

We will be joined by a couple Sisters of St. Francis of the Martyr St. George who will share with us their reflections on living out virtue in community life. They will also share some information about their community. There will also time for Q & A with the sisters. Please join us!!
Questions? Email us at: sttheresesociety@gmail.com!

Examen on God's Love

The faithful should therefore enter into themselves and make a true judgment on their attitudes of mind & heart. If they find some store of love’s fruit in their hearts, they must not doubt God’s presence within them. If they would increase their capacity to receive so great a guest, they should practice greater generosity in doing good, with persevering charity. If God is love, charity should know no limit, for God cannot be confined.
—St. Leo the Great

Why Go to Confession?

No matter how much we wish to do good, the frailty that characterizes us all, exposes us continually to the risk of falling into temptation. The Apostle Paul described this experience with precision: "I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do."
It is the interior conflict from which is born the invocation: "Who will deliver me from this body of death?" To it responds in a special way the sacrament of forgiveness, which comes to rescue us always again in our condition of sin, reaching us with the healing power of divine grace and transforming our heart and our behavior.
Because of this, the Church does not tire of proposing the grace of this sacrament to us during the whole journey of our lives: Through it Jesus, true heavenly physician, takes charge of our sins and accompanies us, continuing his work of healing and salvation. As happens in every love story, also the Covenant with the Lord must be tirelessly renewed: Faithfulness is the ever-new desire of the heart that gives itself and receives the love offered it, until the day that God will be all in all.
--Bruno Forte

Vocation Promotion Week at Saint Louis University

Monday, March 19: Jesuit Night

Talk on the Jesuits and their spirituality
7 pm in Room 001 of McDonnell-Douglass Hall

Tuesday, March 20: Lenten Reconciliation Service

8 pm in St. Francis Xavier (College Church)
More info here

Wednesday, March 21: Discernment, A Personal Invitation

Talk by Sr. Joseph Andrew, OP (Ann Arbor Dominicans)
7 pm in Room 001 of McDonnell-Douglass Hall

Thursday, March 22: Vocation to the Priesthood & Religious Life

Q & A Panels on religious life for women and priesthood & religious life for men
Women's Panel at 7 pm in Room 220 of Xavier Hall
Men's Panel at 7 pm in Room 202 of Xavier Hall

Friday, March 23: Vocation to the Married Life

Two married couples discuss their experiences and answers questions about the vocation to marriage
7 pm in Room 001 in McDonnell-Douglass Hall

Sponsored by the Saint Louis University's Knights of Columbus, Daughters of Isabella, and Campus Ministry

Commemoration of St. John of God

The archbishop called John of God to him in response to a complaint that he was keeping tramps and immoral women in his hospital. In submission John fell on his knees and said: “The Son of Man came for sinners, and we are bound to seek their conversion. I am unfaithful to my vocation because I neglect this, but I confess that I know of no bad person in my hospital except myself alone, who am indeed unworthy to eat the bread of the poor.” The archbishop could only trust in John’s sincerity and humility, and dismissed him with deep respect.
--From Saint of the Day

Commemoration of Ss. Felicity & Perpetua

The bonds of friendship involve no “legal” obligation. To the bureaucrat, this is the only type of obligation that he acknowledges. The beauty of friendship is that—even though no such legal bond exists—the friend knows deep in his heart that friendship involves a moral obligation that is no less valid.
The question is: How deep, how profound, how total is one’s love for one’s friend? How far does the “moral” obligation go? Tell me how much you are willing to sacrifice for your friend, and I will tell you how deep your love is.
--Alice von Hildebrand

Avoiding Complacency

A Christian must be seeking what is better, and not merely trying to avoid what is bad. This is the only way to live a life of continual conversion, to which we are committed by baptism. The Christian must face decisions with the question: "What is the better thing for me to do?" He must not, when he has a decision to make, approach what he is inclined to do with the justification: "Well, there is nothing wrong with doing it." If that is his approach, then he is not genuinely seeking improvement in his life. Spiritual progress becomes impossible.
Ongoing conversion, to which, again, the Christian must be dedicated, involves going from good to better. This conversion is unreachable for him who in his life refuses to give up the lesser goods in order to attain greater goods. Due to fallen human nature, every person is prone to be complacent. Each of us is reluctant to change his ways. But clearly, if a person has not yet reached perfection, there are certainly greater goods for him to realize. Fasting, in many ways, is simply the choice to give up lesser goods for greater ones, to abstain from the joys of food and drink in order to attain greater joys from God. It seeks for more. If a person ever stops seeking for more, then he has stopped seeking God.
--Austin G. Murphy

Prayer, Mercy, and Fasting

There are three things, my brethren, by which faith stands firm, devotion remains constant, and virtue endures. They are prayer, fasting and mercy. Prayer knocks at the door, fasting obtains, mercy receives. Prayer, mercy, and fasting: these three are one, and they give life to each other. Fasting is the soul of prayer, mercy is the lifeblood of fasting. Let no one try to separate them; they cannot be separated. If you have only one of them or not all together, you have nothing. So if you pray, fast; if you fast, show mercy; if you want your petition to be heard, hear the petition of others. If you do not close your ear to others you open God’s ear to yourself.

–St. Peter Chrysologus

First Friday of March

The mystery of the divine redemption is primarily and by its very nature a mystery of love, that is, of the perfect love of Christ for His heavenly Father to Whom the sacrifice of the Cross, offered in a spirit of love and obedience, presents the most abundant and infinite satisfaction due for the sins of the human race; "By suffering out of love and obedience, Christ gave more to God than was required to compensate for the offense of the whole human race." It is also a mystery of the love of the Most Holy Trinity and of the divine Redeemer towards all men. Because they were entirely unable to make adequate satisfaction for their sins, Christ, through the infinite treasure of His merits acquired for us by the shedding of His precious Blood, was able to restore completely that pact of friendship between God and man which had been broken, first by the grievous fall of Adam in the earthly paradise and then by the countless sins of the chosen people.
--Haurietis Aquas (On Devotion to the Sacred Heart)

We should not want to practice many exercises at the same time and all of a sudden. The enemy often tries to make us attempt and start many projects so that we will be overwhelmed with too many tasks, and therefore achieve nothing and leave everything unfinished. Sometimes he even suggests the wish to undertake some excellent work that he foresees we will never accomplish. This is to distract us from the prosecution of some less excellent work that we would have easily completed. He does not care how many plans and beginnings we make, provided nothing is finished.

--St. Francis de Sales