St. Pius V (Latin: Pius PP. V, Italian: Pio V; 17 January 1504 – 1 May 1572), born Antonio Ghislieri (from 1518 called Michele Ghislieri, O.P.), was Pope from 1566 to 1572 and is a saint of the Catholic Church.[1] He is chiefly notable for his role in the Council of Trent, the Counter-Reformation, and the standardization of theRoman rite within the Latin Church. Pius V declared Thomas Aquinas a Doctor of the Church and patronized prominent sacred music composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.
As a cardinal, Ghislieri gained a reputation for putting orthodoxy before personalities, prosecuting eight French bishops for heresy. He also stood firm against nepotism, rebuking his predecessor Pope Pius IV to his face when he wanted to make a 13-year old member of his family a cardinal and subsidise a nephew from the Papal treasury.
In affairs of state, Pius V excommunicated Elizabeth I of England for schism and persecutions of English Catholics during her reign. He also arranged the formation of the Holy League, an alliance of Catholic states. Although outnumbered, the Holy League famously defeated the Ottoman Empire, which had threatened to overrun Europe, at the Battle of Lepanto. This victory Pius V attributed to the intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary and instituted the feast of Our Lady of Victory.
"Open the eye of your
intellect, and gaze into Me, and you shall see the beauty of My rational creature. And
look at those creatures who, among the beauties which I have given to the soul,
creating her in My image and similitude, are clothed with the nuptial garment (that
is, the garment of love), adorned with many virtues, by which they are united with
Me through love. And yet I tell you, if you should ask Me, who these are, I should
reply" (said the sweet and amorous Word of God) "they are another Myself,
inasmuch as they have lost and denied their own will, and are clothed with Mine,
are united to Mine, are conformed to Mine."
INTROIT HAIL HOLY Mother, who in childbirth didst bring forth the King Who ruleth heaven and earth world without end. Alleluia, alleluia. My heart hath uttered a good word; I speak my works to the King. V. Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen. COLLECT GRANT US, Thy servants, O Lord God, we beseech Thee, to enjoy continual health of mind and body, and, by the glorious intercession of blessed Mary, ever a virgin, to be delivered from present sorrow and partake of the fullness of eternal joy. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen. EPISTLE FROM THE BEGINNIN, and before the world, was I created, and unto the world to come I shall not cease to be; and in the holy dwelling-place I have ministered before Him. And so was I established in Sion, and in the holy city likewise I rested, and my power was in Jerusalem. And I took root in an honourable people, and in the portion of my God His inheritance, and my abode is in the full assembly of the saints. GRADUAL BLESSED and venerable art thou, O Virgin Mary, who, without spot, wast found the Mother of the Saviour. V.Virgin Mother of God, He Whom the whole world containeth not, being made man, shut Himself in thy womb. TRACT REJOICE, O Virgin Mary, for alone thou hast put an end to all heresies. V. Thou that didst believe the words of the archangel Gabriel. V. Still a virgin, thou didst bring forth God and man, and after childbirth thou didst remain an inviolate virgin. V. Mother of God, intercede for us. GOSPEL (PASCHALTIDE)
AT THAT time, there stood by the cross of Jesus, His mother, and His mother's sister Mary of Cleophas, and Mary Magdalen. When Jesus therefore had seen His mother and the disciple standing, whom He had loved, He said to His mother, Woman, behold thy son.After that He saith to the disciple, Behold thy mother. And from that hour the disciple took her to his own.
OFFERTORY
HAIL, MARY, full of grace; the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb. Alleluia.
SECRET BY THY CLEMENCY, O Lord, and the intercession of blessed Mary, ever a virgin, may this oblation profit us unto eternal and also present well being and peace. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen. PREFACE IT IS TRULY meet and just, right and availing unto salvation, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks to thee, O holy Lord, Father almighty, everlasting God: and in veneration of the blessed Mary, ever a virgin, should praise and bless and proclaim Thee. For she conceived Thine only-begotten Son by the overshadowing of the Holy Ghost; and losing not the glory of her virginity, gave to the world the everlasting light, Jesus Christ our Lord.Through whom the angels praise thy majesty, the dominions worship it, and the powers are in awe. The heavens and the heavenly hosts, and the blessed seraphim join together in celebrating their joy. With these we pray Thee join our own voices also, while we say with lowly praise: Holy, Holy, Holy... COMMUNION BLESSED is the womb of the Virgin Mary, which bore the Son of the eternal Father. POST COMMUNION HAVING RECEIVED the aids of our everlasting salvation, O Lord, we beseech Thee, grant us to be everywhere protected by the patronage of blessed Mary, ever a virgin, in veneration of whom we have made these offerings to Thy majesty. Through Our Lord Jesus Christ, Thy Son, Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, God, world without end. Amen.
Listen to my homily for the second Mass in preparation for the Feast of Our Lady of Good Counsel in our parish, at Hythe, Kent, UK on the Feast day of St Mark, 2013:
Don't judge me. How many times have you heard this?
It is a fascinating phenomenon that the more a person or a culture strays from right conscience, from the law that is written on every human heart and is perceptible to anyone of good will, the more guilty they feel, and the more quickly they will cry out, "Don't judge me!"
When I walk down the street dressed in my religious garb it is quite common for me to get this exact look, as if by representing Jesus Christ on the street I was already manifesting a judgment on this generation. It is not uncommon for some to scurry away as if at the sight of a religious priest the moral cops had just come for a bust.
Because we live in a faithless generation it is generation hypersensitive to judgment, kind of like someone whose eyes are really sensitive to light who has to cover their eyes when it shines out.
In the Gospel for today, Jesus explains why faithlessness brings about a guilty conscience. "Whoever rejects me and does not accept my words has something to judge him: the word that I spoke."
Yet, Jesus "did not come to condemn the world but to save the world." Faith is a decision. It is a moral decision. If you choose to reject what you know is right, to believe in Jesus Christ, you sin. If you chose to believe him, you do a good and holy thing.
The Second Vatican Council teaches this in the beautiful document on conscience, Dignitatis Humanae, the Declaration on Religious Freedom.
"All men are bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. They are also bound to adhere to the truth, once it is known, and to order their whole lives in accord with the demands of truth." (Dignitatis Humanae 2)
Let me repeat, Vatican II says that it is a sin to not believe in Christ if he reveals himself to you. It does not say, you can believe what ever you damn well please. Here I would like to point out that the word "damn" is a descriptive adjective, for by believing something to be false that you know very well to be true you commit a sin and therefore incur damnation.
Vatican II teaching on conscience basically rephrases Jesus' teaching from today's Gospel:
1. Jesus came to save us, but if we reject him we reject the salvation he offers.
2. We are free to accept or reject him
3. We are bound in conscience to accept him once he reveals himself to us.
4. He has not been revealed to us if the witness - the person or culture or congregation - who is proclaiming Christ is not living a Christian life and therefore we are still not responsible for accepting him.
5. If we respect people's consciences, we will live our faith that Christ may be revealed to them and that they might be saved.
6. Catholics have a special moral obligation therefore to preach the truth both in word and in deed.
7. "In order to be faithful to the divine command, 'teach all nations' (Matt. 28:19-20), the Catholic Church must work with all urgency and concern 'that the word of God be spread abroad and glorified' (2 Thess. 3:1)." (Dignitatis Humanae 14)
The first reading for today, where St Paul and St Barnabas were set apart for the preaching of the Gospel has not at all been outdated. In this faithless generation, there is a terrible urgency for missionaries to go out, not just to people who have never heard of Christ, but to to people who have never seen real witnesses of Him.
May Our Lady, star of the New Evangelization, pray that new saints of our times may go forth to proclaim the saving truth of the Gospel.
I am the gate. Whoever enters through me will be saved, and will come in and go out and find pasture. A thief comes only to steal and slaughter and destroy; I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.
Listen to my homily for Monday, the 4th Week of Easter:
I am the flower of the field, and the lily of the valleys. As the lily among thorns, so is my love among the daughters. As the apple tree among the trees of the woods, so is my beloved among the sons. I sat down under his shadow, whom I desired: and his fruit was sweet to my palate. He brought me into the cellar of wine, he set in order charity in me. Stay me up with flowers, compass me about with apples: because I languish with love.
His left hand is under my head, and his right hand shall embrace me. I adjure you, O ye daughters of Jerusalem, by the roes, and the harts of the, fields, that you stir not up, nor make the beloved to awake, till she please. The voice of my beloved, behold he cometh leaping upon the mountains, skipping over the hills. My beloved is like a roe, or a young hart. Behold he standeth behind our wall, looking through the windows, looking through the lattices. Behold my beloved speaketh to me: Arise, make haste, my love, my dove, my beautiful one, and come.
For winter is now past, the rain is over and gone. The flowers have appeared in our land, the time of pruning is come: the voice of the turtle is heard in our land: The fig tree hath put forth her green figs: the vines in flower yield their sweet smell. Arise, my love, my beautiful one, and come: My dove in the clefts of the rock, in the hollow places of the wall, shew me thy face, let thy voice sound in my ears: for thy voice is sweet, and thy face comely. Catch us the little foxes that destroy the vines: for our vineyard hath flourished.
My beloved to me, and I to him who feedeth among the lilies, Till the day break, and the shadows retire. Return: be like, my beloved, to a roe, or to a young hart upon the mountains of Bether.
Gospel Luke 1:26-38
And in the sixth month, the angel Gabriel was sent from God into a city of Galilee, called Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin' s name was Mary. And the angel being come in, said unto her: Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with thee: blessed art thou among women. Who having heard, was troubled at his saying, and thought with herself what manner of salutation this should be. And the angel said to her: Fear not, Mary, for thou hast found grace with God.
Behold thou shalt conceive in thy womb, and shalt bring forth a son; and thou shalt call his name Jesus. He shall be great, and shall be called the Son of the most High; and the Lord God shall give unto him the throne of David his father; and he shall reign in the house of Jacob for ever. And of his kingdom there shall be no end. And Mary said to the angel: How shall this be done, because I know not man? And the angel answering, said to her: The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the most High shall overshadow thee. And therefore also the Holy which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God.
And behold thy cousin Elizabeth, she also hath conceived a son in her old age; and this is the sixth month with her that is called barren: Because no word shall be impossible with God. And Mary said: Behold the handmaid of the Lord; be it done to me according to thy word. And the angel departed from her.
Concerning the Feast of Mercy Jesus said to St Faustina:
Whoever approaches the Fountain of Life on this day will be granted complete forgiveness of sins and punishment. (Diary300)
I want the image solemnly blessed on the first Sunday after Easter, and I want it to be venerated publicly so that every soul may know about it. (Diary341)
This Feast emerged from the very depths of My mercy, and it is confirmed in the vast depths of my tender mercies. (Diary420
On one occasion, I heard these words: My daughter, tell the whole world about My Inconceivable mercy. I desire that the Feast of Mercy be a refuge and shelter for all souls, and especially for poor sinners. On that day the very depths of My tender mercy are open. I pour out a whole ocean of graces upon those souls who approach the fount of My mercy.The soul that will go to Confession and receive Holy Communion shall obtain complete forgiveness of sins and punishment.*[our emphasis] On that day all the divine floodgates through which grace flow are opened. Let no soul fear to draw near to Me, even though its sins be as scarlet. My mercy is so great that no mind, be it of man or of angel, will be able to fathom it throughout all eternity. Everything that exists has come forth from the very depths of My most tender mercy. Every soul in its relation to Me will I contemplate My love and mercy throughout eternity. The Feast of Mercy emerged from My very depths of tenderness. It is My desire that it be solemnly celebrated on the first Sunday after Easter. Mankind will not have peace until it turns to the Fount of My Mercy. (Diary699)
Yes, the first Sunday after Easter is the Feast of Mercy, but there must also be deeds of mercy, which are to arise out of love for Me. You are to show mercy to our neighbors always and everywhere. You must not shrink from this or try to absolve yourself from it. (Diary742)
I want to grant complete pardon to the souls that will go to Confession and receive Holy Communion on the Feast of My mercy. (Diary1109)
The following is an excerpt from Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI's book, Jesus of Nazareth:
The Parable of the Two Brothers (the Prodigal Son and the Son Who Remained at Home) and the Good Father (Luke 15:11–32)
Perhaps the most beautiful of Jesus’ parables, this story is also known as the parable of the prodigal son. It is true that the figure of the prodigal son is so vividly drawn and his destiny, both in good and in evil, is so heart-rending that he inevitably appears to be the real center of the story. In reality, though, the parable has three protagonists. Jeremias and others have suggested that it would actually be better to call it the parable of the good father—that he is the true center of the text.
Pierre Grelot, on the other hand, has pointed out that the figure of the second brother is quite crucial, and he is therefore of the opinion—rightly, in my judgment—that the most accurate designation would be the parable of the two brothers. This relates directly to the situation which prompted the parable, which Luke 15:1f. presents as follows: “Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and the scribes murmured, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’” Here we meet two groups, two “brothers”: tax collectors and sinners on one hand, Pharisees and scribes on the other. Jesus responds with three parables: the parable of the lost sheep and the ninety-nine who remained at home; the parable of the lost drachma; and finally he begins anew, saying: “A man had two sons” (15:11). The story is about both sons.
In recounting this parable, the Lord is invoking a tradition that reaches way back into the past, for the motif of the two brothers runs through the entire Old Testament. Beginning with Cain and Abel, it continues down through Ishmael and Isaac to Esau and Jacob, only to be reflected once more in a modified form in the behavior of the eleven sons of Jacob toward Joseph. The history of those chosen by God is governed by a remarkable dialectic between pairs of brothers, and it remains as an unresolved question in the Old Testament. In a new hour of God’s dealings in history, Jesus took up this motif again and gave it a new twist. In Matthew there is a text about two brothers that is related to our parable: one brother says he wants to do the father’s will, but does not actually carry it out; the second says no to the father’s will, but afterward he repents
Pharisees that is at issue; here too the text is ultimately an appeal to say Yes once more to the God who calls us.
Let us now attempt to follow the parable step by step. The first figure we meet is that of the prodigal son, but right at the beginning we also see the magnanimity of the father. He complies with the younger son’s wish for his share of the property and divides up the inheritance. He gives freedom. He can imagine what the younger son is going to do, but he lets him go his way.
The son journeys “into a far country.” The Church Fathers read this above all as interior estrangement from the world of the father—the world of God—as interior rupture of relation, as the great abandonment of all that is authentically one’s own. The son squanders his inheritance. He just wants to enjoy himself. He wants to scoop life out till there is nothing left. He wants to have “life in abundance” as he understands it. He no longer wants to be subject to any commandment, any authority. He seeks radical freedom. He wants to live only for himself, free of any other claim. He enjoys life; he feels that he is completely autonomous.
Is it difficult for us to see clearly reflected here the spirit of the modern rebellion against God and God’s law? The leaving behind of everything we once depended on and the will to a freedom without limits? The Greek word used in the parable for the property that the son dissipates means “essence” in the vocabulary of Greek philosophy. The prodigal dissipates “his essence,” himself.
At the end it is all gone. He who was once completely free is now truly a slave—a swineherd, who would be happy to be given pig feed to eat. Those who understand freedom as the radically arbitrary license to do just what they want and to have their own way are living in a lie, for by his very nature man is part of a shared existence and his freedom is shared freedom. His very nature contains direction and norm, and becoming inwardly one with this direction and norm is what freedom is all about. A false autonomy thus leads to slavery: In the meantime history has taught us this all too clearly. For Jews the pig is an unclean animal, which means that the swineherd is the expression of man’s most extreme alienation and destitution. The totally free man has become a wretched slave.
At this point the “conversion” takes place. The prodigal son realizes that he is lost—that at home he was free and that his father’s servants are freer than he now is, who had once considered himself completely free. “He went into himself,” the Gospel says (Lk 15:17). As with the passage about the “far country,” these words set the Church Fathers thinking philosophically: Living far away from home, from his origin, this man had also strayed far away from himself. He lived away from the truth of his existence.
His change of heart, his “conversion,” consists in his recognition of this, his realization that he has become alienated and wandered into truly “alien lands,” and his return to himself. What he finds in himself, though, is the compass pointing toward the father, toward the true freedom of a “son.” The speech he prepares for his homecoming reveals to us the full extent of the inner pilgrimage he is now making. His words show that his whole life is now a steady progress leading “home”—through so many deserts—to himself and to the father. He is on a pilgrimage toward the truth of his existence, and that means “homeward.” When the Church Fathers offer us this “existential” exposition of the son’s journey home, they are also explaining to us what “conversion” is, what sort of sufferings and inner purifications it involves, and we may safely say that they have understood the essence of the parable correctly and help us to realize its relevance for today.
The father “sees the son from far off” and goes out to meet him. He listens to the son’s confession and perceives in it the interior journey that he has made; he perceives that the son has found the way to true freedom. So he does not even let him finish, but embraces and kisses him and orders a great feast of joy to be prepared. The cause of this joy is that the son, who was already “dead” when he departed with his share of the property, is now alive again, has risen from the dead; “he was lost, and is found” (Lk 15:32).
The Church Fathers put all their love into their exposition of this scene. The lost son they take as an image of man as such, of “Adam,” who all of us are—of Adam whom God has gone out to meet and whom he has received anew into his house. In the parable, the father orders the servants to bring quickly “the first robe.” For the Fathers, this “first robe” is a reference to the lost robe of grace with which man had been originally clothed, but which he forfeited by sin. But now this “first robe” is given back to him—the robe of the son. The feast that is now made ready they read as an image of the feast of faith, the festive Eucharist, in which the eternal festal banquet is anticipated. To cite the Greek text literally, what the first brother hears when he comes home is “symphony and choirs”—again for the Fathers an image for the symphony of the faith, which makes being a Christian a joy and a feast.
But the kernel of the text surely does not lie in these details; the kernel is now unmistakably the figure of the father. Can we understand him? Can a father, may a father act like this? Pierre Grelot has drawn attention to the fact that Jesus is speaking here on a solidly Old Testament basis: The archetype of this vision of God the Father is found in Hosea 11:1–9. First the text speaks of Israel’s election and subsequent infidelity: “My people abides in infidelity; they call upon Baal, but he does not help them” (Hos 11:2). But God also sees that this people is broken and that the sword rages in its cities (cf. Hos 11:6). And now the very thing that is described in our parable happens to the people: “How can I give you up, O Ephraim! How can I hand you over, O Israel!…My heart turns itself against me, my compassion grows warm and tender. I will not execute my fierce anger, I will not again destroy Ephraim; for I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst” (Hos 11:8f.). Because God is God, the Holy One, he acts as no man could act. God has a heart, and this heart turns, so to speak, against God himself: Here in Hosea, as in the Gospel, we encounter once again the word compassion, which is expressed by means of the image of the maternal womb. God’s heart transforms wrath and turns punishment into forgiveness.
For the Christian, the question now arises: Where does Jesus Christ fit into all this? Only the Father figures in the parable. Is there no Christology in it? Augustine tried to work Christology in where the text says that the father embraced the son (cf. Lk 15:20). “The arm of the Father is the Son,” he writes. He could have appealed here to Irenaeus, who referred to the Son and the Spirit as the two hands of the Father. “The arm of the Father is the Son.” When he lays this arm on our shoulders as “his light yoke,” then that is precisely not a burden he is loading onto us, but rather the gesture of receiving us in love. The “yoke” of this arm is not a burden that we must carry, but a gift of love that carries us and makes us sons. This is a very evocative exposition, but it is still an “allegory” that clearly goes beyond the text.
Pierre Grelot has discovered an interpretation that accords with the text and goes even deeper. He draws attention to the fact that Jesus uses this parable, along with the two preceding ones, to justify his own goodness toward sinners; he uses the behavior of the father in the parable to justify the fact that he too welcomes sinners. By the way he acts, then, Jesus himself becomes “the revelation of the one he called his Father.”
Attention to the historical context of the parable thus yields by itself an “implicit Christology.” “His Passion and his Resurrection reinforce this point still further: How did God show his merciful love for sinners? In that ‘while we were yet sinners Christ died for us’ (Rom 5:8).” “Jesus cannot enter into the narrative framework of the parable because he lives in identification with the heavenly Father and bases his conduct on the Father’s. The risen Christ remains today, in this point, in the same situation as Jesus of Nazareth during the time of his earthly ministry” (pp. 228f.). Indeed: In this parable, Jesus justifies his own conduct by relating it to, and identifying it with, the Father’s. It is in the figure of the father, then, that Christ—the concrete realization of the father’s action—is placed right at the heart of the parable.
The older brother now makes his appearance. He comes home from working in the fields, hears feasting at home, finds out why, and becomes angry. He finds it simply unfair that this good-for-nothing, who has squandered his entire fortune—the father’s property—with prostitutes, should now be given a splendid feast straightaway without any period of probation, without any time of penance. That contradicts his sense of justice: The life he has spent working is made to look of no account in comparison to the dissolute past of the other. Bitterness arises in him: “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed one of your commands,” he says to his father, “yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends” (Lk 15:29). The father goes out to meet the older brother, too, and now he speaks kindly to his son. The older brother knows nothing of the inner transformations and wanderings experienced by the younger brother, of his journey into distant parts, of his fall and his new self-discovery. He sees only injustice. And this betrays the fact that he too had secretly dreamed of a freedom without limits, that his obedience has made him inwardly bitter, and that he has no awareness of the grace of being at home, of the true freedom that he enjoys as a son. “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours” (Lk 15:31). The father explains to him the great value of sonship with these words—the same words that Jesus uses in his high-priestly prayer to describe his relationship to the Father: “All that is mine is thine, and all that is thine is mine” (Jn 17:10).
The parable breaks off here; it tells us nothing about the older brother’s reaction. Nor can it, because at this point the parable immediately passes over into reality. Jesus is using these words of the father to speak to the heart of the murmuring Pharisees and scribes who have grown indignant at his goodness to sinners (cf. Lk 15:2). It now becomes fully clear that Jesus identifies his goodness to sinners with the goodness of the father in the parable and that all the words attributed to the father are the words that he himself addresses to the righteous. The parable does not tell the story of some distant affair, but is about what is happening here and now through him. He is wooing the heart of his adversaries. He begs them to come in and to share his joy at this hour of homecoming and reconciliation. These words remain in the Gospel as a pleading invitation. Paul takes up this pleading invitation when he writes: “We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:20).
On one hand, then, the parable is located quite realistically at the moment in history when Christ recounted it. At the same time, however, it points beyond the historical moment, for God’s wooing and pleading continues. But to whom is the parable now addressed? The Church Fathers generally applied the two-brothers motif to the relation between Jews and Gentiles. It was not hard for them to recognize in the dissolute son who had strayed far from God and from himself an image of the pagan world, to which Jesus had now opened the door for communion with God in grace and for which he now celebrates the feast of his love. By the same token, neither was it hard for them to recognize in the brother who remained at home an image of the people of Israel, who could legitimately say: “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed one of your commands.” Israel’s fidelity and image of God are clearly revealed in such fidelity to the Torah.
This application to the Jews is not illegitimate so long as we respect the form in which we have found it in the text: as God’s delicate attempt to talk Israel around, which remains entirely God’s initiative. We should note that the father in the parable not only does not dispute the older brother’s fidelity, but explicitly confirms his sonship: “Son, you are always with me, and all that is mine is yours.” It would be a false interpretation to read this as a condemnation of the Jews, for which there is no support in the text.
While we may regard this application of the parable of the two brothers to Israel and the Gentiles as one dimension of the text, there are other dimensions as well. After all, what Jesus says about the older brother is aimed not simply at Israel (the sinners who came to him were Jews, too), but at the specific temptation of the righteous, of those who are “en règle,” at rights with God, as Grelot puts it (p. 229). In this connection, Grelot places emphasis on the sentence “I never disobeyed one of your commandments.” For them, more than anything else God is Law; they see themselves in a juridical relationship with God and in that relationship they are at rights with him. But God is greater: They need to convert from the Law-God to the greater God, the God of love. This will not mean giving up their obedience, but rather that this obedience will flow from deeper wellsprings and will therefore be bigger, more open, and purer, but above all more humble.
Let us add a further aspect that has already been touched upon: Their bitterness toward God’s goodness reveals an inward bitterness regarding their own obedience, a bitterness that indicates the limitations of this obedience. In their heart of hearts, they would have gladly journeyed out into that great “freedom” as well. There is an unspoken envy of what others have been able to get away with. They have not gone through the pilgrimage that purified the younger brother and made him realize what it means to be free and what it means to be a son. They actually carry their freedom as if it were slavery and they have not matured to real sonship. They, too, are still in need of
a path; they can find it if they simply admit that God is right and accept his feast as their own. In this parable, then, the Father through Christ is addressing us, the ones who never left home, encouraging us too to convert truly and to find joy in our faith.
St Joan of Arc's response to her persecutors asking if she was in a state of grace: "If I am, may it please God to keep me in it, and if I am not may it please God to bring me there."
Did I deny or doubt God’s existence? Did I refuse
to believe God’s revelation?
Have I gone to a fortune teller, used good luck
charms or practices any other form of the Occult?
Did I deny that I was a Catholic? Did I leave the
Catholic faith?
Did I despair of or presume on God’s mercy?
Did I neglect prayer for a long time?
Did I blaspheme God or take God’s name in vain,
curse or break an oath or vow?
Did I miss Mass on Sunday or a holy day of
obligation through my own fault?
Am I always reverent in the presence of Jesus in
the most Blessed Sacrament?
Was I inattentive at Mass? Did I come to Mass
late? How late? Did I leave Mass early?
Did I do unnecessary physical work on Sunday?
Did I disobey or disrespect my parents or legiti-
mate superior?
Did I neglect my duties to my husband, wife, chil-
dren or parents?
Did I fail to actively take an interest in the reli-
gious education and formation of my children?
Have I failed to educate myself on the true teach-
ings of the Church?
Did I give a full day’s work in return for my full
day’s pay?
Did I give a fair wage to my employee?
Did I give scandal by what I said or did, especial-
ly to the young? Was I the cause of anyone leav-
ing the Faith?
Was I impatient, angry, envious, unkind, proud,
jealous, revengeful, hateful toward others, lazy?
Did I give bad example, abuse drugs, drink alcohol to excess, fight or quarrel?
Did I physically injure or kill anyone? Have or
advise for an abortion? Procuring an abortion some-
times incurs the penalty of excommunication. This should
be addressed with your priest during confession. (Canon 1398)
Did I participate in or approve of the grave evil
known as “mercy killing?” Did I attempt suicide?
NOTE: Sexual sins are always grave and are mor-
tal if combined with full knowledge and deliber-
ate consent of the will.
Did I willfully entertain impure thoughts and
desires? Did I dress immodestly?
Did I use impure or suggestive words? Tell impure
stories? Or listen to them?
Did I deliberately look at impure things, TV,
videos, plays, pictures or movies? Or deliberately
read impure material?
Did I commit an impure act by myself or with
another? Which acts?
Did I marry or advise another to marry outside the
Church?
Did I abuse my marriage rights? Was I unfaithful to
my marriage vows?
Have I kept company with someone else’s spouse?
Did I practice artificial birth control or was I or my
spouse sterilized?
Did I practice in vitro fertilization?
Did I steal, cheat, help or encourage others to steal,
or keep stolen goods? Have I made restitution for
stolen goods?
Did I fulfill my contracts, give or accept bribes, pay
my bills, rashly gamble or speculate, deprive my
family of necessities of life?
Did I tell lies? Deliberately to deceive? Or injure
others by lies? Did I commit perjury? Was I unchar-
itable in word or deed, gossip or reveal others’ faults
and sins? Fail to keep secrets I should have?
Did I eat meat on Fridays of Lent or Ash Wednesday?
Did I fast as required on Ash Wednesday and Good
Friday?
Did I fail to receive Holy Communion during
Easter time? Fail to confess at least once a year?
Did I go to Holy Communion in the state of mortal
sin? Without fasting (water and medicine permit-
ted) for one hour from food and drink?
Did I make a bad confession?
Did I fail to contribute to the support of the Church?
