How many deviations, how many miseries! How the Catholic Church would have fewer problems if those who have entered to serve her as clerics and religious would remember that they are… religious!
Newsroom (August 26, 2021, 11:20 AM Gaudium Press) It is very useful to use the means that St. Bernard used. He always had in his heart, and often on his lips, this question he asked himself: “Bernard, Bernard, what have you come to do in religion?
So every religious should continually say: I left the world and all the advantages it offers me to come to the convent to sanctify myself, and now, what am I doing? Oh, how this thought of having left the world to sanctify himself is proper to awaken the religious and inspire him with the courage he needs to progress and overcome the obstacles that lie in his state!
Let the religious then say to himself: What good will it do me to have left the world, to have enclosed myself within four walls and deprived of freedom, if, far from sanctifying myself, I expose myself, by a timid and relaxed life, to the danger of condemning myself?
By Cicero Leite
From the book “The Sanctified Religious” by Saint Alphonsus Liguori
Compiled by Zephania Gangl