Faithfulness to vocation

Allow me to insist: be faithful. This is something deeply embedded in my heart. If you are faithful, our service to souls and to the Holy Church will yield abundant spiritual fruit. Don’t forget, I repeat, that we can make mistakes in life, but that doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with our way, nor with our Love. What it does mean is that we need to be more prudent in the future. No one can reason like this: “Because I can’t manage to fulfil this one obligation, I will not fulfil any.” This is a reaction of pride; it is to go over from being divinised to being diabolical. Corruptio optimi pessima, says the old Scholastic adage: the corruption of the best is the worst. Only humility helped by grace can stop this corruption, this short step from the best to the worst. When the unclean spirit has gone out of a person, it passes through waterless places seeking rest, and finding none it says, “I will return to my house from which I came.” And when it comes, it finds the house swept and put in order. Then it goes and brings seven other spirits more evil than itself, and they enter and dwell there. And the last state of that person is worse than the first (Luke 11:24-26).

Vocation and mistakes in our personal life

To abandon everything just because we have abandoned one particular thing is absurd and a dead-end. It is to act like a madman. We possess a wonderful treasure, and if for some reason we lose part of it along the way – even a large part – that is no reason to throw away spitefully what remains. The obvious thing is to learn from that experience to make sure we do not lose any more of it. In the affairs of the soul, nothing is ever hopelessly lost. Our humble and contrite effort to keep what is left will ensure that we recover even more than what was lost. “The intensity of a penitent’s repentance may sometimes be proportionate to a greater grace than that from which he fell by sinning (...). And so the penitent sometimes rises to a greater grace than that which he possessed before.”³²