Harvesting The Fruits of Contemplation

((Source: Wikimedia Commons ) Pondering Tidbits of Truth is my simple and inadequate way of providing nuggets of spiritual wisdom for you to chew on from time to time. Blessed John Paul II "...the numbing of conscience, their indifference to good and evil, their deviations, are a great threat for man. Indirectly, they are also a great threat for society, because in the the last analysis the level of morality of society depends on the human conscience." ( Angelus , March 15, 1981)

It should be no surprise, after decades of being told it is unlikely that any of us have committed a mortal sin and that we are "good people" whom a loving and merciful God would never send to hell, that we have lost the sense of sin, a healthy fear of hell, a concern for the salvation of souls, and a recognition of our need to seek Sacramental forgiveness. How refreshing then that our Holy Father is beckoning the members of Christ's Church to discard these untruths, to humble themselves and to be reconciled and transformed by the healing graces of that great and undeserved Sacrament. In doing so, Pope Francis is extending the same invitation offered by many of his predecessors.  No doubt his invitation echoes the wisdom of Pope Paul VI: Let's us pray that all who profess to be Catholic will heed the invitation of Christ's Vicar on earth and will go to confession, not only during the "Day of Reconciliation" he has annou...

In today's Gospel, we find the hated tax collector Zacchaeus doing everything he could in order to see this Jesus of whom he had heard, including climbing up onto a tree. He did not care what people thought of him. He wanted to see Jesus and nothing and no one were going to stop him.  

In a previous post , we reviewed the definition of a “worthily and holily celebrated Mass” that Father Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P. offered in his book ThePriest In Union with Christ - a book I again highly recommend . As painful an exercise as the following may be, it would be worthwhile to take a look at two other types of Masses the good Friar describes – “the hurriedly said Mass” and the one that is “outwardly correct but lacks the spirit of faith” - neither of which has resurrected or can resurrect the sense of awe and amazement in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the Eucharist to which Catholics are entitled and that Blessed John Paul II advocated and so longed for each of us to experience.   This is, in part, what Father Reginald has to say about a “hurriedly said Mass”: