Ah, daughter, do you think that it will be the secular who
will be the first to persecute my Church? Ah, no, it will be the religious, the
very leaders who, pretending now to be sons, shepherds, while in reality they
are poisonous snakes that poison themselves and others, will begin among
themselves to lacerate this good mother; and then the secular will follow.” Aug. 7, 1904
“My beloved daughter, who came to visit me in the grotto of
my birth? Only shepherds were my first visitors – the only ones who kept coming
and going, offering Me gifts and their little things. They were the first to
receive the knowledge of my coming into the world and, as a consequence, the
first favorites to be filled with my grace. This is why I always choose poor,
ignorant, abject people, and I make of them portents of grace – because they
are always the ones to be more disposed, the ones who more easily listen to Me
and believe Me without raising so many difficulties, so many quibbles as, on
the contrary, learned people do.
Then came the Magi, but no priest showed up, while they
should have been the first to form my cortege. In fact, more than anyone else,
according to the Scriptures which they studied, they knew the time and the
place, and it was easier for them to come to visit me. But no one – no one
moved; rather, while they indicated the place to the Magi, they did not move,
nor did they trouble to take one step to follow the traces of my coming. This
was a most bitter sorrow for Me at my birth, because in those priests the
attachment to riches, to interest, to families and to exterior things was so
great as to blind their sight like a glare, harden their hearts, and render
their intelligence dazed to the knowledge of the most sacrosanct and most
certain truths. They were so engulfed in the low things of the earth, as to
never be able to believe that a God could come upon earth in the midst of so
much poverty and so much humiliation. And this, not only at my birth, but also
during the course of my life. When I performed the most sensational miracles,
no one followed me; on the contrary, they plotted my death, and killed Me on
the cross. And after using all of my art in order to draw them to Myself, I put
them into oblivion and chose poor and ignorant people as my apostles, forming
my Church in them. I segregated them from their families, I released them from
any bond of riches, I filled them with the treasures of my graces, and I
rendered them capable of governing my Church and souls.
However, you must know that this sorrow of mine is still
lasting, because the priests of these times have banded together with the
priests of those times. They have been holding hands in their attachments to
families, to interest, to exterior things, and they care very little, or not at
all, about that which is interior. Even more, some have degraded themselves so
much as to make even secular people understand how unhappy they are with their
state, lowering their dignity down to the bottom, and below the secular
themselves. Ah! my daughter, what prestige can their word still have among the
peoples? Even more, because of them, the peoples keep deteriorating in the
faith and into abysses of worse evils, groping their way in darkness, because
they see no more light in priests. December
25, 1910
My adorable Jesus told me: “The mission I will give is high
and sublime, in a special way, for priests. Faith is almost extinguished among
the peoples, and if there is any spark left, it is as though hidden under
ashes. The life of priests, which is almost completely secularized, and maybe
worse than that, as well as their examples, which are not good, lend a hand to
extinguish this spark. And what will happen to them and to the peoples?
Tell the bishops and the leaders that if they want to save
the flock, this is the only means. It is up to them to save the shepherds, and
up to the shepherds to save the flock; and if the bishops do not place the
shepherds in safety, how can the flock ever be saved?” January 8, 1910
No comments:
Post a Comment