M
MariaChristi
Guest
Dear Brothers and Sisters,
St. John Paul II in paragraph 47, shows us the “reasonableness” of our Faith. If we listen to God, and are open to His Love, there can be peace within persons and between persons. However, like our first parents, we can freely choose to disbelieve God. Let us not resist His Love, but open ourselves to His Holy Spirit, sent to bring us into all Truth. On this Feast of the Triumph of His Cross, let us pray for one another and all those in need of His Mercy. We’ve been bought at a great price!
Come Holy Spirit, enable in us that readiness to accept Your Mission as Counselor to us all.
St. John Paul II in paragraph 47, shows us the “reasonableness” of our Faith. If we listen to God, and are open to His Love, there can be peace within persons and between persons. However, like our first parents, we can freely choose to disbelieve God. Let us not resist His Love, but open ourselves to His Holy Spirit, sent to bring us into all Truth. On this Feast of the Triumph of His Cross, let us pray for one another and all those in need of His Mercy. We’ve been bought at a great price!
- The action of the Spirit of truth, which works toward salvific “convincing concerning sin,” encounters in a person in this condition an interior resistance, as it were an impenetrability of conscience, a state of mind which could be described as fixed by reason of a free choice. This is what Sacred Scripture usually calls "hardness of heart."184 In our own time this attitude of mind and heart is perhaps reflected in the loss of the sense of sin, to which the Apostolic Exhortation Reconciliatio et Paenitentia devotes many pages.185 Pope Pius XII had already declared that “the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin,"186 and this loss goes hand in hand with the "loss of the sense of God.” In the Exhortation just mentioned we read: "In fact, God is the origin and the supreme end of man, and man carries in himself a divine seed. Hence it is the reality of God that reveals and illustrates the mystery of man. It is therefore vain to hope that there will take root a sense of sin against man and against human values, if there is no sense of offense against God, namely the true sense of sin."187
Mary Mother of the Church pray with us, and for us: "…that the dangerous sin against the Spirit will give way to a holy readiness to accept his mission as the Counselor, when he comes to “convince the world concerning sin, and righteousness and judgment.”Hence the Church constantly implores from God the grace that integrity of human consciences will not be lost, that their healthy sensitivity with regard to good and evil will not be blunted. This integrity and sensitivity are profoundly linked to the intimate action of the Spirit of truth. In this light the exhortations of St. Paul assume particular eloquence: “Do not quench the Spirit”; "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit."188 But above all the Church constantly implores with the greatest fervor that there will be no increase in the world of the sin that the Gospel calls “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.” Rather, she prays that it will decrease in human souls-and consequently in the forms and structures of society itself-and that it will make room for that openness of conscience necessary for the saving action of the Holy Spirit. The Church prays that the dangerous sin against the Spirit will give way to a holy readiness to accept his mission as the Counselor, when he comes to “convince the world concerning sin, and righteousness and judgment.”
Come Holy Spirit, enable in us that readiness to accept Your Mission as Counselor to us all.