One of the recurring themes in my writing is the obligation each of us has as a Catholic to forgive others as we have been forgiven so freely and so readily by Our Blessed Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ acting through an alter Christus in the Sacred Tribunal Penance. There is nothing that anyone can do to us, say about us or cause us to suffer, whether emotionally or physically, that is the equal of what one of our least Venial Sins caused the God-Man to suffer in His Sacred Humanity during His Passion and Death as the Fourth through Seven Swords of Sorrow pierced the Immaculate Heart of His Most Blessed Mother. If He forgives us recidivist sinners, steeped in the spiritual mediocrity of lukewarmness, so readily and so frequently, who are we to hesitate for a moment to forgive others anything and everything, whether real or imagined or exaggerated, that they have have said about us or done to us?
Our Lord entered His Passion so as to redeem us and thus to make it possible for us to know His forgiveness, first in the Baptismal font and then in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance (and, for our Venial Sins, every time a priest administers Absolution following the recitation of the Confiteor in the offering of Holy Mass). We must make good use of this Passiontide to be more forgiving as we seek out the mercy of the Divine Redeemer through the ministrations of a true priest acting in persona Christi in the confesional.
As a sinner who has been forgiven much in the Sacred Tribunal of Penance, I have no energy at all (Deo gratias!) for nursing petty grudges and stewing in my juices about the judgments of others. Our sins imposed an unjust judgment on God in the very Flesh. It is good for us to suffer humiliation and rejection and calumny and scorn and derision. Very good for us. The more we suffer with love and gratitude is the more that we can unite ourselves to the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus through the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. And even if we are the victims of real injustices and calumnies, so what? So what? Everything gets revealed on the Last Day at the General Judgment of the Living and the Dead. Each of the just will be reconciled one to the other at that time. That happy reconciliation then can only take place, however, if we forgive others from our hearts in the here and now of this passing, mortal vale of tears!
Let’s make this the best Passiontide of our lives, grateful to Almighty God that He has brought us to the beginning of yet another Passiontide, uncertain though we may be as to we will live to see Easter Sunday in this passing, mortal vale of tears just thirteen days from now on Sunday, March 27, 2016.
There will be a new entry on this site tomorrow. It was simply impossible after the emergency room visit late Saturday evening that stretched into early yesterday morning to complete my next article. Suffice it for the moment to note that it is interesting to see all of the understandable anger about political and corporate elites that many of those supporting the presidential candidacy of Donald J. Trump are expressing, an anger on the natural level about problems that are the direct result of the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King. How sad it is that very few people are in the lest bit upset about the overthrow of the Social Reign of Christ the King, perhaps even fewer yet who are in the least bit upset about the heresies, apostasies, blasphemies, sacrileges, and various and sundry pastoral celebrations of paganism and still by the conciliar "popes" and their "bishops" in the past fifty-seven years, four and one-half months.
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Our Lady of Sorrows, pray for us.