• Around 175 years ago, a small village in France with a population of only 200 people was receiving 100,000 visitors each year. People would sleep in the fields and wait in lines for days in order to achieve the end of their visit.
• What was so important that they would make so much of an effort and go through so much hardship? What were they all there to accomplish? They were there to make their confession to a saint. They wanted to tell their sins to a saint, hear what he would say in return to them, and receive his absolution.
• St. John-Marie Vianney would read the souls of his penitents. He would weep over the sins confessed to him. He would fix the innumerable problems that sins cause and restore peace to troubled souls. Many people would leave the village of Ars changed for life.
• We do not have any priest here at St. Isidore’s who have the ability to read souls or who weep when sins are confessed to them. You do not have saints for priests.
• But your priests have the exact same power that the Cure d’Ars had, the power to cleanse your souls from sin. In that confessional box, the main thing that was happening in Ars is also happening here: the washing of souls with the Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ.
• Despite the fact that you do not have saints for your priests, it is yet extremely important for you have a love for the sacrament of confession, that you have a devotion to confession.
• Our Lord came on this earth and gave His life for our sins. But His Blood only reaches us through certain channels. The main way for you to access the Blood that He shed for you is through the sacraments of Confession and Holy Communion.
• How many are there among us who like to go to Holy Communion but do not like to go to Confession? How many like the Blood of Our Lord when it comes through the Holy Eucharist but not when it comes through the absolution of the priest?

• This life is a contest of love between us and God.
• When we were in the seminary, we priests learned in moral theology that God has total dominion over all things, while we have partial dominion over some things. What this means is that everything that we have and that we are belongs to God, while we are only stewards of those things.
• You car belongs to God. Your house belongs to God. Your children belong to God. You belong to God. God has given you these things, but He has only made you a steward over them, an administrator of them. He has not given you the authority to do with them whatever you want.
• Why has God done this? Because He is your Father, because He loves you, because He cares about you. Because He wants this life to be a contest of love.
• It is sad that in the Enlightenment and Protestant world that we live in today, most people do not want such a God. They do not like a God Who only gives them a partial control over the things they give them, use and administration but not total ownership.
• And so they invent a God more to their liking. They invent the Freemasonic God, the Deist God. The Freemasonic God is a manufacturer; He is not a Father. He makes us but then He does not expect anything of us.
• Think about how it works with a car manufacturer. The cars roll off the manufacturing line. You go to buy one, you like it, you pay the price for it, and you drive it off. Does the manufacturer care what you do with the car after that point? No, not at all! You can use it for transportation; you can use it for target practice; you can use it for off-road racing, whatever.
• Modern people tend to want God to be like the manufacturer, where He gives us our life, we are born into this world, and then He does not care at all what we do with our life from that point. We can become an Catholic or an atheist, a Buddhist or a Baptist. We can be faithful or unfaithful, we can be loving or hating, we can be selfish or unselfish. God doesn’t care.
• The thing is, however, this God does not exist. He is a false god, an idol created by modern man so that he can worship himself and his own free will.
• The real God is a father. A father does not just beget children and then leave them to do whatever they want. No, a father instructs his children, looks after his children, sets expectations for his children, makes demands of them. He wants to be united with them.
• Whenever a father gives something to his child, he does not give it unconditionally, he does not give it to be used however the child wants. The father gives the child life, gives the child his own name, gives the child food and clothing, gives the child the Catholic faith and a Catholic education. And he expects the child to use all of these things wisely and well.
• Notice that with the manufacturer, there is no union in selling the car. The good father and child, however, are on the same page, think the same way, want the same thing. They have love.
• What this means is that this life is a contest of love. God has set up our life such that He showers us with love through His gifts and then tests us to see if we are going to take those gifts and use them to love Him in return, or if we are going to take the gifts and use them for our own purposes.

#SSPX #prayer

• When God created man, at the same time He wanted to create the human family. He created one man and one woman, Adam and Eve, and then He married them. He made them two in one flesh.
• When God Himself chose to come down upon this earth in the fullness of time, He chose to do so in a family. The family had existed for the entire history of man up to that point, but now mankind would have a perfect example of what a family should be in this holy family, where you have God, the Mother of God, and the foster father of God.
• Families today are reminded not only that they belong to an institution that God has created but an institution that He has modeled for us.
• There are many aspects of the life of the Holy Family that we could speak about but today I particularly want to focus upon their example of prayer.