List of points

Bring out your spirit of mortification in those nice touches of charity, eager to make the way of sanctity in the middle of the world attractive for everyone. Sometimes a smile can be the best proof of a spirit of penance.

In your personal prayer, whenever you experience the weakness of the flesh you should repeat: Lord, give the Cross to this poor body of mine, which gets tired and rebellious!

To preserve holy purity and live a clean life you have to love and practise daily mortification.

How difficult you find that mortification suggested to you by the Holy Spirit! Look at a Crucifix, steadily… and you will come to love that expiation.

“To be nailed to the Cross!” This aspiration kept coming again and again, as a new light, to the mind and heart and lips of a certain soul.

“To be nailed to the Cross?”, he asked himself. “How hard it is!” And yet he knew full well the way he had to go: agere contra — self-denial. This is why he earnestly implored, “Help me, Lord!”

We should accept mortification with those same sentiments that Jesus Christ had in his Holy Passion.

Mortification is a necessary premise for any apostolate, and for the perfect carrying out of each apostolate.

To draw closer to God, to fly all the way to God, you need the strong and generous wings of Prayer and Expiation.

To love the Cross means being able to put oneself out, gladly, for the love of Christ, though it’s hard — and because it’s hard. You have enough experience to know that this is not a contradiction.

It is not the spirit of penance to do great mortifications some days, and nothing on others.

—The spirit of penance means knowing how to overcome yourself every single day, offering up both great and small things for love, without putting on show.

You will have as much sanctity, as you have mortification done for Love.