Jesus Caritas

It's the same thing every day, poor people, sick people, one after the other. I reproach myself interiorly for not spending enough time in prayer and purely spiritual things. By day people never stop knocking at my door, and at night when it would be a good time for it I fall asleep like a wretch.

I do not make any request for myself alone. I do not say ‘my Father’ but ‘our Father. I do not say ‘my bread but ‘our bread’. I ask for nothing for myself alone, rather I am careful to ask for all people, for us all, children of Our Lord, loved by him, all of us, whom he has redeemed by his blood.

Forgive us our debts. One cannot ask for forgiveness if one has not forgiven. Forgiveness like grace is something one does not ask for oneself alone, but for all people.

Prayer is just conversation with God: listening to him; speaking with him; gazing upon him in silence. The best prayer is the one in which there is the most love. Adoration, wordless admiration, that is the most eloquent form of prayer: that wordless admiration which contains the most passionate declaration of love.

Islam shook me deeply. Seeing such faith, seeing people living in the continual presence of God, I came to glimpse something greater and more real than worldly occupations. I set about studying Islam and then the Bible.

Every Christian must be an apostle, this is not a counsel, it is a commandment. My apostolate must be an apostolate of goodness. On seeing me people should say to themselves, since this man is so good, his religion must be good. And if I am asked why I am so gentle and good I must reply, because I am the servant of the One whose goodness is still greater. If only you knew how good my Master Jesus is!

If I were able, but I am not, to do otherwise than to loose myself totally in union with God’s divine will, I would want to choose for myself complete lack of success and perpetual solitude and failure in everything. This is the path of union with the lowliness and the cross of our Beloved God, which has always seemed to me desirable above all other ways.

To become a martyr means to become like Jesus, it means to become his brother, his little brother, to the very end, following him hand in hand, even to Calvary, and giving him the greatest proof of love: 'A person can have no greater love than to lay down their life for their friends'.

Real faith causes every impossibility to disappear. It makes a nonsense of those words, anxiety, danger and fear. It makes us walk through life with calm peace and deep joy, like a child holding its mother’s hand.

My Lord Jesus, how quickly someone will become poor who, loving you with all their heart, cannot accept to be richer than their Beloved. How quickly they will become poor who accepts with faith your words: If you wish to be perfect, go and sell all you own and give the money to the poor. Blessed are the poor.