By giving each of us the grace of being called with Him to suffer a small portion of His Passion, Our Lord Jesus Christ was making clear the unparalleled role of the Cross in the life of a man, in the history of the world, and in His own glorification.
Let us not think that…He wished to dispense us from pronouncing in the anguish of death our own “consumatus est.”
Bl. Jose Luis Sanchez del Rio, Cristero martyr.
Without an understanding of the Cross, without love of the Cross, without each of us having passed through our own Via Crucis, we will not have fulfilled Providence’s design for us. And, on dying, we will not be able to make our own the sublime words of Saint Paul: “I have fought the good fight. I have run the course…. As for the rest, there is reserved for me a crown of justice.”
… With love of the Holy Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ, we will obtain all, even as we are weighed down with the holy burden of purity and other heroic virtues, the unceasing attacks and mockeries of the enemies of the Faith, and the betrayals of false friends.
On October 2010 Muslim terrorists murdered 58 Iraqi Catholics while they were attending evening Mass at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Baghdad. “Enough! Enough!” shouted this three-year old toddler as he chased one of the Islamic terrorists gunning down the faithful and in response, the Mujahidin turned his gun on the valiant boy and riddled him with bullets.
The great foundation, indeed the greatest foundation, of Christian civilization is that each and every soul cultivate a generous love that embraces the Holy Cross of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
May Mary help us to exercise this love and we shall reconquer for her Divine Son the Kingdom of God, which today flickers so faintly in the hearts of men.
Plinio Correa de Oliveira – Speech for the Washington, D.C. launching of his book Nobility and Analogous Traditional Elites in the Allocutions of Pius XII.
