The second coming of Jesus Christ

FATHER JÚLIO MARIA, C.SS.R.

The second coming of Jesus Christ

NIHIL OBSTAT
PC Semadini, SJ

IMPRIMATUR

Rio, April 13, 1913.
On His Excellency's commission
SEBASTIÂO, Auxiliary Bishop.

TWO WORDS

The work, which will be read, came from the lips and heart of the great Brazilian Redemptorist who was Father Julio Maria, inaugurates the Cristo Redentor Collection, within which it is our thought to place all the works of the late sacred speaker. With this, we are moved by the desire, not only to pay homage to the memory of one of the greatest figures who in the last forty years passed through the Brazilian pulpit, but also the duty to spread the Church's doctrine as widely as possible in words and expressions that are accessible to all. intelligence of the most humble layers.
We are at a time of national life and universal history when it is necessary to clarify spirits and soften hearts by means of timely and intrusive preaching. Father Julio Maria was, in the contemporary history of Brazil, the most powerful and sonorous tuba in favor of the Christianization of our homeland.
May "The Second Coming of Jesus Christ" meditate on the horror of responsibilities that weigh on us in the sense that the Cross of Jesus Christ will be replaced in Brazilian lands, from here and there pulled out by the "material unification" and the "moral dissolution" of the world, in an infernal effort for Antichrist to proclaim his triumph.

Soares D'Azevedo

I

HOW WAS THE VIRGIN WHO ACHIEVED AND SATISFIED THE UNIVERSAL HOPE OF THE FIRST COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST

 “I saw and heard the voice of an eagle that flew through the sky, crying out: Ah! there! there! of the earth's inhabitants!…
“Et vidi, et audivi you uni aquila volantis per medium cali, dicentis voce magna: Va, va, va habitantibus in terra.”
(Apoc. VIII, 13)

The sky that, in the magnificent vision of the Apocalypse, the disciple that Jesus loved so much, saw unfold before his eyes, full of stars, one of which is a beacon destined to clarify the view of the world. This starry sky is the Church. The eagle, which John saw flying through the illuminated sky, is the priest, the Catholic preacher, whose cries in the last human age are both warnings of Mercy and curses of Justice.
There! of the inhabitants of the land, because today the ambition of jouissance dominates them, led to the most regrettable excesses!
There! of the inhabitants of the land, because the ambition of wealth impels them, in an ever greater greed and never satisfied!
There! of the inhabitants of the land, because in all parts of the world they are fascinated and stunned by the ambition of their positions, the itchiness of command, the boasting of dignities!
There! there! there! of the inhabitants of the earth, in none of the other periods of humanity more subjugated, more enslaved than today by the three lusts: the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.
From the lust of the flesh, - the lust, the immodesty of the senses, the disruption of customs, the imperfect virginity of so many bodies, to no virginity of so many souls, sensualism with all its procession of evils, the lust of the eyes, - the love of worldly frivolities, excessive attachment to earthly goods, excesses of human activity, dissipation, curiosity, lack of discernment in the very acts of charity, lack of discretion in Christian zeal itself. From the pride of life, - selfishness, self-exaggerated self-esteem, the false cult of honor, susceptibility, haughtiness, ambition, contempt for others, resistance to Church laws, violation of all divine duties .
It is useless to deny; as society has lost sight of the Catholic ideal, everything has become corrupted, everything has become prostituted; man's aspiration became enjoyment, wealth, pleasure and well-being, Littre makes this a noble confession, recognizing and proclaiming that neither the principle of legitimacy, nor that of popular sovereignty, nor that of international balance, nor the solidarity of industry and commerce, successively proposed since the Renaissance to the government of modern society, have succeeded in establishing justice, peace and order. The principle of legitimacy produced the despotism of kings; that of popular sovereignty, the anarchy of nations; that of international balance, the most audacious and criminal territorial conquests; that of the solidarity of industry and commerce, that excess of material life, that enormous imbalance in modern life between the physical and moral of man, that hideous industrialism, which the most unsuspecting thinkers condemn and condemn, or in historical criticism like Taine; or in political economy, as Leroy Beaulieu; or in eloquence, like Castelar; or in poetry, like Vitor Hugo; lamenting all that the love of wealth, the hunger for pleasures, the cult of money, the idolatry of material progress, the barbarism of civilization have identified in spirit modern man the spirit with matter and completely replaced by the wonders of industry the much more precious wonders of the human soul.
See, they say, the material greatness of the modern age in its varied progress!
No; nobody disputes them. But of what use are so many industries, so many colossal factories, so many huge ships, if in the very center of so much material civilization we see the man dejected, weakened, vilified by a false science that denies his divine origin; for an art that prostitutes him, dignifying lust; by an industry that absorbs it, reducing it to a simple machine, without a soul, without a heart, without duties to God; for a policy that degrades it, animalizing nations, slaughtering freedom and repudiating all ties between the State and Religion ?!
What is the use of man, to be double and mixed, who has a body, but also has a soul; who has sensitive and earthly needs, but also has a thirst for justice, love and happiness; of what use, in virtue, is such a civilization?
And how can she make you happy?
Happy the modern man ?! Travel the world; knock on all doors, from the hut to the palace; ask the modern man if he is happy; and modern man, even in the fever of business, in the enjoyment of riches, in the tumult of pleasures, will answer you: "No, I am not happy! ..."
Modern society, wrote the most rationalist and anti-Christian of German writers, modern society is a huge hospital, whose patients fill the atmosphere with painful groans.
Everywhere, sinister rumors, disorder, fighting, brutal oppression. Socialism, political parties, the barbarism of Russia, the moral corruption of public administrations, dynamite, nihilism, the inertia of statesmen, the workers' question, the decadence of parliamentary regime, the brutalization of the masses, the oppression of the governments, anarchy, discontent of nations, pessimism, skepticism literaturain literature and art, in philosophy and science, realism, moral imbecility, the dying man and the dying society!
Who thinks so? Max Nordau!
A Catholic priest, in this matter, would not better proclaim the truth about our age; and, from the point of view of moral decay, which historical period surpasses ours?
Humanity, it is true, has already suffered a crisis of this kind; and it was just when Jesus Christ was about to make his first coming. It would be said that for the Creator there was then no place in creation. The greatest excesses, and the most monstrous errors, filled the world, where they prevailed against Divine truth, on the eve of their greatest and most stupendous revelation, the politics of Rome, the philosophy of Greece, the aberrations of Judaism and the barbarism of these peoples themselves. Asians, destined to be the cradle of modern society. Whether we turn our eyes to the city that dominates and encompasses the world with its colonies, its armies, its colossal material empire; whether we apply the spirit to the philosophical systems of the former queen of intelligence and thought; whether we contemplate the sterile struggles of Judea, or the warlike movement of Asian nations, everywhere ignorance, indifference to divine things, just a shadow of disfigured truth.
However, either we will deny the history of humanity prior to Jesus Christ, that is, forty centuries; or we must affirm messianism, that is, the hope that humanity had of its liberator. This supernatural hope in the ocean of so many misdeeds, so many mistakes, so many sins.
All historians testify that, even in this age of such decay, God was desired and expected!
It is not just David's magnificent psalmodia; it is not only the inspired prophecy of the tribunes of Israel; it is also philosophy; it is also poetry; it is also Plato's elevations and Virgil's verses that preserve the messianic hope in the world and salute the liberating Messiah from afar.
Moral decay, therefore, in paganism, from a certain point of view, did not reach the level of our times, to the extreme of mockery and scorn, with which souls who desire and expect a new appearance of God in the world are received. .
But let us leave the analysis, criticism, psychology of this mockery and scorn, for which many Catholics and Indians are not exempt, and ask where the great hope came from.
The fall, that is, original sin is the first historical mystery of the human race, to whom the Church teaches that, as a result of this sin, man is born with a nature that is addicted and inclined to evil. Original sin, a truth whose obliteration in modern society, a great sociologist, Le Play, proved to be the root cause of all his failures, swimming not only in education and in the family, but also in politics, administration and government; original sin is not just dogma; it is a fact, verified by the intimate feeling of man and by the external manifestation of human nature in the theater of history, where, among all others, summing them up in a pair of magnificent synthesis, two typical and original characters stand out: - Adam and Jesus Christ .
Since Adam, after the fall, the messianic promise was made to mankind, to whom God showed in a future offspring the defeated enemy.
To deposit this great promise, whose tradition runs through all generations, God forms a people charged with guarding and preserving it. Myths, of course, disfigure it; the messianic tradition is corrupted; but the Jewish people always show it to all peoples, with its double character of remembrance and hope; remembrance of a great catastrophe, - original sin; hope arising from a great promise, - the redemption, which would be effected, becoming the God of the Jews the God of the entire universe, and the great revolution taking place through a man who would be a Jew, from the house of David , and that it was nothing but the Messiah, the desired, the expected, the universal expectation: expecta unio omnium gentium.
God, who had promised it, so that humanity, through a sad experience, would recognize the need it had for a liberator, allowed the deviations of philosophy in Greece, the madness of politics in Rome, the errors and humiliations of the chosen people themselves , reached the point of proving that only divine mercy could be a remedy for the world's supreme misery, a misery in which, however, this divine historical trilogy never completely wrecked: - the fall, the promise, the hope.
How was this hope fulfilled and fulfilled?
In the Virgin Mary and the Virgin Mary.
She is not only the type-woman, in which all the conditions, all the states of the woman regenerated by the Word are summed up. It is also the center of the entire divine plan; it is the link that holds, coordinates, harmonizes and makes explainable to our intelligence and above all to our heart the great mercies of God, already in creation, already in redemption, already in the sanctification of men.
But, why does the plan of redemption happen to the Virgin, who is the woman-type, so many and so extraordinary prerogatives?
Because in the order of creation as well as that of redemption, women play an essential role; and, created as our nature was, not looking at it in the lower senses, but in its higher tendencies and more delicate needs, it cannot be understood without this duality, in which God divided mankind: man and woman. The man of nature claimed in the order of creation a similar adjunct, which God gave him; the man of grace also needed, in the order of redemption, an equal adjunct, which God did not deny him. In fact, Providencia Divina had many other and varied reasons for bringing together, consorting, identifying men and women in the order of redemption: theological reason, providential reason, historical reason, moral reason.
Theological reason, because created for partner, friend, companion of man, the harmony of the divine plan asked that, in the order of redemption, God should not "separate what He had united, Reason" providential, because, having man and woman being "both actors in the tragedy of the fall, it was convenient that man and woman were both actors in the repair work; the enemy being defeated by the woman, that is, by the same weapon with which he had defeated "the first man.
Historical reason, because in all "the countries the woman was enslaved by the man debased in the codes, in the laws, in the uses and customs; so degraded as wife, as mother, as daughter, that she could truly say through Medea's mouth in the tragedy of Euripides: "of all living beings I am the most unhappy; I have nothing left but to die."
Moral reason, because if to demean women is to demean family and society, to dignify and rehabilitate them is, by the influence that they exert, to ennoble humanity at home and in the motherland.
These are great and beautiful reasons! but to which another can be added. It is true that, in the end, the Incarnation honors man and woman, having both sexes, from this point of view, equal honor, being able to exclaim with the apostle: “There is no more Jew or barbarian, neither quotes nor Roman ; there is no more free, nor slave; neither man nor woman; they are all one in Jesus Christ ”
Basically it is so, but in the way of its realization the Incarnation honored the male sex in a special way, because it was from this sex that the Word clothed himself with flesh: an honor so great that God wanted it to be balanced, making such an honor the man owed it. to the woman herself, represented in the Virgin Mary, a voluntary instrument of the Incarnation, whose plan God made dependent on the Virgin's prior consent. *
Divine motherhood is peculiar to the Virgin Mary; but the honor and brilliance of this stupendous privilege dignifies and ennobles the entire female sex, because it resulted in the universal rehabilitation of women.
Where and how did this rehabilitation start?
It began in this sublime episode in the history of humanity, which three times a day the bells of Christendom remind the universe. It began with the initial mystery of the Incarnation, which the Angelus remembers daily, as if inviting us to meditate on the greatness, beauty and lesson of the mystery.
The Angelus! A simple dialogue, but a dialogue in which the destinies of man and peoples are decided; a dialogue, in which God through the mouth of an Angel proposes and humanity through the mouth of a Virgin accepts the contract of salvation! But it is not only the dazzling representation of the entire human race that we see in the personality of the Virgin. In her face, so to speak, are the groans, the tears, the universal aspirations of forty centuries. In the face of it, the messianic hope, which began in Paradise and went to be placed in the small house of Nazareth, as if asking, begs, pleads for its fulfillment, that it should be consummated when the Virgin, flower of humanity, honor of our race, glory of all centuries, accept and answer: Ecce ancilla Domini! ... Fiat! ...
It being true that God became man, but with the consent of the Virgin; that he became our Redeemer, but by requesting and receiving from the Virgin the flesh and blood with which he had to appear among us; it is certain for this very reason that it was the Virgin who realized and fulfilled the universal hope of the first coming of Jesus Christ.
You all who so often, in the streets and squares, as in your homes and even within your families, hear, but without any emotion and without any sign of reverence, touching the Angelus, I reflected that the facts that the Angelus celebrates are not fantasies of piety; they are the most beautiful and ineffable truths in history: the rescue of man by the Word, the conquest of his salvation by the Messiah, the glorification of mankind by the Virgin Mary!

II

AS JESUS ​​CHRIST APPEARING HIS REVEALED, IT WAS NOT JUST THE MESSIAH EXPECTED AND WHICH CAME TO RESCUE THE SOULS, BUT ALSO THE JUDGE, WHO MUST RETURN TO JUDGE THE WORLD.

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because the pride of the intelligents now dominates everywhere.
Everyone thinks they are competent and qualified for all things; all claim to be able to judge and decide the most difficult problems of the soul and human societies. There is no one, either in books or in the newspaper, or in the chair, who does not intend to say the last word about men and things.
In such pride of intelligence there is only the cult of the Self and the apotheosis of man by man, the idolatry that, refusing the worship of God, adores, however, with burlesque liturgies called sociological religions, humanity itself with its vices , his passions, his tendencies towards what is vile and abject.
No; there is no denying; the pride of intelligence, the dreadful evil of our time, is the greatest aberration of intelligence itself, the whole force of intelligence is in common sense; and common sense prescribes humility to man, which is not, as one thinks, a virtue without shine and without glory, but is truly the highest and most beautiful of the perceptions of reason.
The man is a creature, who is born and dies without being consulted, paying while living, to the dust of the earth, the real tribute of an apparent domination. This domination does not exempt him nor the existence of raw material; nor the need for animals, minerals and vegetables to live; nor to the indisputable condition of simply enjoying the globe, which he did not make and whose owner is evidently the Creator. This word, however, Creator is presently, for a multitude of spirits, an abstract name, to mean only that we are not eternal; it is the masculine form of the expression creation. In books on morals, science, philosophy, politics, we sometimes talk about the Creator, but this is in a vague way, without recognizing the Creator as a personal and living being.
God as a person is a matter of which the proud of intelligence are not concerned; being that even in the natural sciences the origin of matter, its molecular elements, the revolutions of the celestial bodies, all this is studied and explained in a multitude of books with a singular atheism and never seen in other times of humanity.
The greatest punishment for this pride of intelligence is divorce from universal common sense, not only with regard to the physical world, but mainly with regard to the religious world, where such intellectual pride, which is, after money, the greatest despot of this generation, does not tolerate dogmas, that is, the fundamental truths of the human spirit, not even those that in all centuries have been the sacred heritage of humanity.
To give an example of the disgust for dogmas, let this be - that of the eternity of penalties.
Truly universal belief, it has in itself, not only the teachings of the Church, but history, philosophy of history, historical criticism, psychology, metaphysics, morals, criminal law, natural law, the attributes of God and the entire economy of redemption. History shows it: the eternity of punishment, that is, the eternal punishment for the sinner who dies unrepentant and without having reconciled himself to God  is not only a belief of the Christian peoples, but of all the ancient and modern peoples, Jews or Gentiles , barbarians or civilized. The philosophy of history says a universal belief requires a universal cause, and this is necessarily Revelation. Historical criticism ponders: a penalty that strikes man in his passions could not be invented by man himself. Metaphysics teaches, there is necessarily for all things, except for God, a principle and a conclusion, and this, for the happiness or for the final disgrace of man, cannot fail to be eternal. Morality prescribes: just as two parallels cannot be found, so neither is it possible for good and evil, for virtue and sin to reach the same end. In fact, Natural Law teaches that we are free, and God will not force the eternal happiness of the man who does not want to obtain it.
Criminal law never measures the penalty for the time spent perpetrating the crime, but, as much as possible, for the criminal's intent; therefore, there is no reason to claim a lack of proportion between sin, an act of some moments on earth, and hell, eternal punishment, which the sinner only receives, after God has verified the malice of his intention and the infinity of that malice.
Nor could God reward eternally, if He could not also punish eternally; nor would Jesus Christ be our redeemer, because having not redeemed us from any of the evils of life - sickness, pain, poverty, death - it was precisely from hell that he came to exempt us, offering all of us the remedy for his rescue which, being, as it is, a medicine of infinite price, supposes an infinite evil.
Behold! .. the magnificent dogma of the eternity of penalties is not without its colossal reasons, unanswerable arguments; but, in our time, the pride of the intelligences does not accept it and, when it cannot completely destroy with logic, it resorts, in a false sensitivity to the mercy of God that he does not recognize; as if God's mercy excludes his justice; as if, for God - "to be good and compassionate, it would be mixed to be weak and imbecile, having nothing but the means to punish, and rewarding after all with the same eternal bliss what humbles himself, confessing his sin, is what he is increasingly exalted in his intellectual pride.
This intellectual pride, however, is fair to recognize, it comes not only from will but also from ignorance.
The intellectuals we are dealing with have absolutely neither the notion of historical Christianity nor the idea of ​​the role that Jesus Christ plays in history.
They ignore that Christianity is an essentially historical religion and not, as they suppose, a philosophical system, a humanitarian theory, or a theological abstraction. They are unaware that Christianity is all historical, both in substance and in form; that the ineffable character of this religion is to be historical; that their dogmas are facts; his Credo, a complex of facts; his apostles witnesses to the facts, his long and beautiful martyrology is nothing but blood spilled to prove facts.
They also ignore that Jesus Christ is the greatest, greatest figure in history, so that history is incomprehensible without Him; because He has always existed as God in history; and how God survives in history.
Forty centuries awaited him; twenty centuries adored him, One of two: whether or not the divinity of Jesus Christ is accepted, an enormous absurdity, because He was born, lived, spoke, died, rose again, being a Divine Person; or if you accept, and then you cannot refuse, as false modern sensibility does, eternal punishment, eternity of penalties, hell.
No! it cannot be refused, because the same Christ, who promised man eternal happiness, threatened man with the deprivation of that happiness, which is eternal disgrace. The Christ of history is another very different one from that which is fashionable in idylls, serials, in frivolous newspaper articles in the holy week, Describing him tender and tender, without showing knowledge of his value, his strength, the divine virility of his character without revealing the awareness that He is the God-Man, offering the sinner mercy, but, to exempt him from his justice, - it is not having the exact notion of the Messiah.
Well then; be it John the Baptist, the Precursor, who gives the exact notion of the Messiah.
John the Baptist appears at the most critical moment in Israel's life. His country is disturbed by the parties, bent under the pagan yoke, disoriented by passions and prejudices. The state of Judea was very sad, its political, civil and religious decay was profound, and its sufferings were so obliterated that, supposing to aspire to freedom from which Roman despotism had stripped it, in fact it wanted nothing but slavery.
Like all corrupted peoples who do not recognize the Just punishment for their sins in their calamities and miseries, the Jewish people, turn to all sides, the search for salvation; however, it does not agree with the true path to be followed.
Repudiate your national vocation! the public spirit has weakened, social classes have demoralized, the home is prostituted; the priesthood has defiled the desecrated Temple, the deliverer he desires is no longer the Messiah; he is a strong and powerful general who, with his sword drawn, subdues Rome and restores lost freedom to Judea, Sad; no doubt, but this is the fate of all peoples who apostatize from the faith and repudiate God. This was the fate of the Jewish people, a resource of which, in the meantime, in his divine compassion, God sends him, to prepare the ways of the Messiah, a singular prophet, predestined to reveal to his homeland the divine thoughts and designs.
João Batista is austere; it is straight; it is noble; it is eloquent. He has the passion for justice and the boldness of his vocation. It is the race of the prophets, and the greatest of all. Evil saddens you and fills you with indignation. It does not work miracles, but your whole life is a miracle. It speaks the great and does not flatter the strong. He preaches, and his preaching is eloquent and sublime, since he says to his homeland the word that is appropriate to corrupt nations: "Do penance! ..."
There is, in the life of John the Baptist, in relation to the Messiah, a threefold and magnificent testimony, expressed as if in three divine cries of his ardent and overwhelming word. In the first cry, he announces "Someone more powerful than me". In the second cry, he says to the crowd, referring to the Messiah: "He is among us." In the third cry, surrounded by disciples, he says, pointing to Jesus Christ. "Here is the lamb of God: this is the one who takes away the sin of the world. ”.
But what insight did John the Baptist give us about the Messiah? Read the Gospels; and you will find that John the Baptist, the Angel sent to prepare the way for Jesus Christ, did not preach this one only as Savior.
He preached his divinity, loudly proclaiming that Jesus Christ was above him, as God descending from heaven; preached his mercy, claiming that He was the Lamb of God, destined to take away the sin of the world; he preached his righteousness, warning everyone, regarding Jesus Christ, that - "the shovel in his hand is found, that He will clean the threshing floor, collect the frigo in the barn, but will also burn the straws in a fire that will not be extinguished. .. "
There you have, according to an authentic testimony, who is Jesus Christ - He is the Messiah-God; it is the Messiah-Redeemer; is the Messiah-Judge.
Can John the Baptist's testimony be challenged? No; because it is confirmed by Jesus Christ himself, who did not praise the Baptist in vain, except that our devotion to his Precursor would be just, and our gratitude to such an excellent Prophet, sincere and complete.
Christ confirmed the teachings of the Baptist. He worked as Messiah, already in the physical order, freeing man from the miseries that so afflict his body; Already in the moral order, freeing him from the slavery of sin. In the Messiah-God, omnipotence is revealed in all the magnificence of the most amazing miracles. In the Messiah-Redeemer, goodness defies omnipotence and reveals itself to humanity in the infinite tenderness of crucified love. However, there is not, in all the public life of Jesus Christ, a speech, a parable, a lesson, in which He either explicitly or indirectly and implicitly does not allow himself to be seen or foreseen as a judge of men and of the world. Promises like God; but it threatens like God. Intermediate in a new covenant, he is happy between man and the divine justice that he has offended, not merely describing the groans, tears and pains that will be, in eternal punishment, the sharing of those who refuse that covenant; He identifies his Mercy, with this infinite justice; he declares that he has all the powers and prerogatives of her; He proclaims that he will be the judge, on the last day of the world, and that even with human flesh, he absolves or condemns souls.
It is useless to quote texts, one cannot read the Gospel without worshiping in the Messiah the God compassionate of our miseries, and who, in the most ineffable of divine works, - the Incarnation, - descended, in stupendous condescension, to level off with man. ; but neither can you be lelo, without fearing the God who, in a memorable dialogue with his disciples, tearing the veils of the future, and pointing out those who on the day of judgment will stay on the right or on the left, some because they wanted to identify with Him in the love of God and neighbor, others, because they did not want this identification, declares that He Himself will say to some: "Come, Blessed ... enjoy the happiness that has been reserved for you"; and say to others, "Go, damn you, to eternal disgrace!"
Stripping the Messiah of justice, because he is merciful! - accumulation of irrision?- which can only be explained by the decadence in which, in contemporary society, the idea, the feeling, the cult of Justice are found.
So noble is this virtue; that when you say - of a man - you are a righteous person - you have been given the crown of perfection; Justice being a summary of all other virtues. Undoubtedly, it was in this sense that the Divine Master promised those who, while still on earth, are hungry and thirsty for justice, a special beatitude.
Being justice a perfection in man is not wanting God to be just! ...
God is not God, but because he is infinite in all his attributes and while all these attributes are harmonized. A God who was not merciful, but only just, would be a cruel God for us. A God who was not just, but only merciful, would be an imbecile God for us.
In either case, as the illustrious theologian says, he would be an imperfect God; and an imperfect God would not be God. God's justice is as infinite as his mercy; and that is why the Scripture, not separating Justice from mercy, tells us: "The Lord is merciful, compassionate and Just ..."
Well then; He has already come in mercy ... and no language, not even that of angels, could describe the primors of his compassion, translated into the greatest and most sublime loves: the love of his Mother, the Virgin, which He exempted from the original stain; the love of the Church, divine wife that He conquered and left behind, perpetuating his redemptive work; the love of men, magnificently loved by Him in the Prodigal, in the Samaritan. in Madalena, Cananeia, in all moral ways and even in all physical miseries, instituting for those, as channels of grace, the sacraments, and inspiring for them, as reliefs of humanity, the lazarets, hospitals, sisters of charity , the charities, all the prodigies of the evangelical alms ... Yes; He has already come in mercy, offering to all men the rescue of his passion and his death.
He has already come in mercy, for the poor, because he is the God of the poor, for the rich, because he is the God of the rich; for the happy, because it is true joy; for the sad and disconsolate, because it is the God who relieves and consoles all pains; for the simple, because it is the God of the parables that so enchanted the people; for the wise, because he is the God of true science, He has already come in mercy; now it will come to court.
Do not despise the warnings of heaven given at the first coming, just for a precursor; now, however, for thousands of precursors. who, consciously or incidentally, voluntarily or involuntarily, from one another to the extreme of the world, announce to you, in the miracles of the priesthood, the second coming of Jesus.
As after the Eucharist, Christ multiplied throughout the world in thousands of Christians, who are the priests; in the same priests, the Forerunner of Christ multiplies as well.
In fact, greater than that of the Precursor is the mission of the priest. He elevates the work of the prophets and the apostles. There is a distance between the Catholic priest and the prophet of old, in the opinion of St. Paul, between the two testaments. The dignity of the priest prevails as much over that of the prophet, as the New Testament prevails over the old.
The Catholic priest, visible continuant in the land of Christ's work, now invisible, but who works for him, using his voice, his gaze, his hands, his feet, his will; the Catholic priest has even greater prerogatives for announcing the second coming than those which John the Baptist had for announcing the first; John the Baptist did not work miracles; the Catholic priest works the same miracles that Christ worked, and which are currently being performed, not in the physical order, not on bodies, but in a higher order, that is, on souls.
When John the Baptist's disciples went to Christ to make sure of his mission, Christ said to them: “Go and tell John what you have seen and what you have heard the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the poor are evangelized ”. The Catholic priest can say the same; and to whoever asked me with what authority I announce the second coming, I would answer: “with the authority of the One who said to me: go and preach! ... heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, expel the demons; with the authority of the miracles that I do, resurrecting, in the confessional or in the pulpit, the souls dead in their sins, cleaning the souls covered with blemishes, giving the strength of grace to timid souls, curing moral illnesses in them,miracles far greater than all that have been accomplished in the physical order; because it is an incomparably greater miracle to resuscitate a soul, absolving it in the confessional, than to take it out of the grave and make it revive to a corpse that has already rotted ... ”I would still answer anyone who questioned my mission: and see what I do on the altar, which is the greatest and most wonderful of all miracles, - the consecration of the body of Christ; come and hear the word that I speak in this pulpit; that word is not mine; it is the same as that of Jesus Christ, who, appearing to the world, revealed himself, not only the expected Messiah who came to rescue souls, but also the judge who must return to judge the world!than to take it out of the grave and make it revive to a corpse that has already rotted ... ”I would still answer anyone who asked me about my mission:“ come and see what I do on the altar, which is the biggest and most stupendous of all miracles, - the consecration of the body of Christ; come and hear the word that I speak in this pulpit; that word is not mine; it is the same as that of Jesus Christ, who, appearing to the world, revealed himself, not only the expected Messiah who came to rescue souls, but also the judge who must return to judge the world!than to take it out of the grave and make it revive to a corpse that has already rotted ... ”I would still answer anyone who asked me about my mission:“ come and see what I do on the altar, which is the biggest and most stupendous of all miracles, - the consecration of the body of Christ; come and hear the word that I speak in this pulpit; that word is not mine; it is the same as that of Jesus Christ, who, appearing to the world, revealed himself, not only the expected Messiah who came to rescue souls, but also the judge who must return to judge the world!appearing to the world, it was revealed, not only the expected Messiah who came to rescue souls, but also the judge who must return to judge the world!appearing to the world, it was revealed, not only the expected Messiah who came to rescue souls, but also the judge who must return to judge the world!

III

THE FORMAL PROMISE THAT JESUS ​​CHRIST MADE TO COME TO THE WORLD, SECOND TIME

Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because today, everywhere, this is contemplated: dreadful phenomena, the torpor of consciences.
Let no one be deceived, even as regards morality and religion, with a certain mildness, a certain moderation and politeness that, in general, characterize modern intellectualism.
There is no doubt that there is a noble and vast form of tolerance covering all ideas, all sectarianisms, all schools. This, however, does not perfectly reflect the situation of the intelligences, nor does it give the exact statistics of souls in our time.
What the scholarly researcher apprehends at this time, in an enormous amount of spirits, is the torpor of conscience, perfectly characterized in the vague of ideas in the inanity of thoughts, in the softness of sensitivity, in the utopias and chimeras of the imagination, in melancholy, in boredom , in repudiation of all sacrifice, which tends to discipline the body and lift the spirit to the broad horizons of the supernatural.
In science, as in philosophy, in literature, as in industry, life has lost its real meaning, also atrophying in all political or diplomatic combinations, in which what is well characterized is the predominance of material well-being for man, or for the nations.
Modern tolerance, which, I do not dispute, adorns the contemporary generation, but does not honor the human spirit; it does not honor it, because the truth no longer exists in the absolute state, and an extraordinary number of intelligences does not accept it, however clear it may be.
The truth is no longer a basis that can support duties or justify sacrifices. The religion for a great number of delicate souls is a very beautiful flower, but it is a flower: and, for an extraordinary number of imaginations, it is a brilliant chimera, but it is a chimera. Souls no longer have the enthusiasm of life, the boldness of truth, the courage of conviction, the virility of intelligence. Tolerant, yes, contemporary civilization! however, it is like a colossal Panteon housing all the gods, all superstitions, all religions, all truths, like all errors.
Hence the phenomenon, whose formula was given in the expression - torpor of consciences; - exact and very significant expression for those who analyze souls in our time.
There is no more sarcasm or mockery against Christianity, as in certain times; no more insults and invetives against religious beliefs, as in other ages; there is no longer, in general, bloody and declared hatred against Jesus Christ and the Church ...

What, then?
A life without God, without any concern for Him, or the great human problems that concern him ... a life without attraction to the supernatural ... without fear of hell, and even without desire for heaven ...
Without desire from heaven?! ... Yes!
The soul, where the conscience, as stupefied, has no concern for the future life, is a disgrace not only for man but for society. For man, because if his destiny is limited by the grave, he is more unhappy than the brute; and all that philosophy and religion promise to the soul, formed in the image and likeness of the Infinite, is but irony. For society, because, if life is only a terrestrial and transitory phenomenon, man has the right to demand happiness in this world, where unequal conditions remain an injustice, and a right to claim, even by weapons, equal share of fortunes for all.
You have seen that in a great number of spirits there is no fear of hell. Now you will see an even greater evil: there is not even the desire of heaven. Thousands of men in the modern age, pass by the planet and leave it, with no idea of ​​the future life ... and fascinated by the most disgusting and incomprehensible materialism.

Where does this enormous calamity come from? From the poison that the science of Nothing, the philosophy of Nothing, the literature of Nothing, the poetry of Nothing, and even the religion of Nothing have infiltrated the generations of our time.
The science of Nothing says through the mouth of a Berthelot, to name but one chief, that everything is solved in atoms and molecules; the philosophy of Nothing regrets through the mouth of a Taine that Christianity unbalanced the human race, making the brain of man imagine realities beyond those of the earth. The literature of Nothing is ominous by Renan's mouth that Christianity would make paganism lose the cult of many spirits. The religion of Nothing asks for the mouth of Augusto Tell us to worship, not a real entity: - God; but a monstrous abstraction: - humanity! The poetry of Nothing exclaims in this libertine verse by Theodoro de Banvile:

I am not a devotee
And I also do not fear God, I
cheerfully give you,
Nature, my bones.

But those, you will say, are just a few unbalanced ... No! they are legions of men, in whom there is no notion of sin, completely extinct in law, in legislation, in politics, in diplomacy, in education, in teaching and even in customs and customs. In law, the irresponsibility of criminals, supported by the most extravagant and monstrous systems of criminology; in politics, caesarism dressed in democratic skirts; diplomacy; a - pacification covered with arms and accompanied by large armies; in the various relations of public and private life, medicine never finds the diseases, where they have their real origin, - sin.
How can all this be expressed better than by the expression: the torpor of consciences ?!
The ultimate consequence, the total result of this Torpor is this: life without prayer.
Prayer, as he admirably defined: Gerbert, is the manifestation of an indigence waiting for, Man prays naturally ... The boy asks his mother, the poor asks the rich, the weak asks the strong. One can say of prayer, says a Christian philosopher, that it is the balance of the world; because without it, the weak, the small, the poor, would be crushed by the strong, the big, the rich. But if prayer is so necessary in the reciprocal relations of men, how can it not be in the relations of the creature with its Creator ?! It is an elevation of the spirit to God, paying my respects, exposing our needs to him, asking for his help. If it is so beautiful, when a simple dialogue between a son and his father, between a friend and his friend, how not to be, when a dialogue between man and God ?! If prayer is necessary and beautiful, how can it not be effective? Effective,not only when it is the prayer of the Church, the universal intercessor constituted by Christ Himself, but also when it is a national prayer, a patriotic and virile act of those who have not yet lost their Christian sense and do not ignore that all nations belong to Jesus Christ, or when it is domestic prayer, the perfume that embalms the domestic home or when, finally, it is simple individual prayer, that is, that of the human soul that on the wings of supplication goes back to the Infinite ?!that of the human soul that on the wings of supplication goes back to the Infinite ?!that of the human soul that on the wings of supplication goes back to the Infinite ?!
How ridiculous is it to oppose a defective half-science, according to which we cannot admit either the miracle or the effectiveness of prayer, because natural laws are inflexible and immutable ?!
There is no such; and for true science this, one is gross error. Not only God, but man himself can modify, suspend and in a certain way revoke, in its effects, the laws of nature.
Nature is a complex of opposing but harmonizing forces; and the general law that governs the dynamics of beings is this: - the own or direct effect of a relatively inferior force is always annulled, modified or suspended, in certain cases, by the supervening action of a relatively superior force. It is the essence of the law that, under certain circumstances, its action, or its effect, be annulled, modified or suspended by the action of a more powerful law.
Without this, if the law or force always produced its effects, the harmony of the world would disappear and be replaced by the most hideous conflict of the elements.
Suspend any of you a body in your hands! ... it does not revoke, without a doubt, but it suspends the effects of the law of gravity. Now a man can suspend the effect of laws; and God can't? What a nonsense! A man can deflect the course of rivers, pierce mountains, compel lightning to retreat, modify trees, suspend pain in the sick, chloroform him; it can in a thousand ways, what a bore it would be to enumerate, suspend the effects of laws, and God, who is the law of laws, the strength of forces, cannot!
Pray, pray, pray with sincerity! This is the only remedy for the torpor of conscience, which so many spirits do not presently allow  a rational thought about the universe, in which we find ourselves ... What is this universe? Where are you going? What's your end? Placed on this planet that takes me away, walking hundreds and hundreds of leagues an hour, passing through so many other spherical globes that count for millions and millions, where am I taken? I will die, it is certain; my bones, my ashes will be locked up in this immense, in this colossal funerary urn, called the terrestrial globe; but this globe, where does it go ?!
Pascal, an outstanding mathematician, had not believed that a man could, without having lost the sense of his own dignity, stop asking himself: - "what was I? where do i come from and where am I going? ... ”The same sentence can be applied on the part of man in relation to the destinies of the universe, stating that this formidable question is imposed on man, just because he is man: - where does the world?
I can, like any of you, read the World System, Laplace's book.
I can read the description, in which Laplace reduces the entire physical universe to a mechanical formula, which presents the world to us, like a mathematically constructed clock; but, despite so much knowledge, such a mathematical erudition by the celebrated astronomer, I am not satisfied and ask myself: until when will this clock work? For it is certain that it was built, and only began to work in time, how will it work forever, without end ?! Absurd!
Like any of you, I can read Cosmos, that beautiful book by Alexandre Humboldt, and remain as I was, in my youth, truly enchanted by the physiognomy of the globe, so magnificently and with such a magical style described by the illustrious naturalist; but with the simple conclusion of it, that is, that a knot links and harmonizes everything on our planet, I am not satisfied, and I ask myself: where does the planet go?
Modern science itself claims that it cannot last forever; he falters, however, because he does not have faith or hear the Church's teachings about the time and manner of the end of the world.
The end of the world is therefore not a small matter; it is a question that is imposed on every man, his conscience is not dulled, and for that very reason it was imposed on the Apostles. Seeing this splendid universe that was given as home, they wanted to know the end of the universe, and when that end would come. Among them, some more daring formulated the problem and questioned the Master ...
Of the Master, that is, of Jesus Christ, says São Paulo that He illuminated life: Illuminavit vitam. Yes, Jesus Christ enlightened souls; it clarified the greatest problems of the human spirit, it taught humanity its origin and its end taught it what the soul is, and what destiny awaits it in eternity.
Jesus Christ revealed everything that suited us to be revealed. It would not be possible, therefore, that he failed to reveal where this great pilgrimage of human generations is going; what the world will become; whether the world will be annihilated, or just transfigured; and if He, who deigned to clothe the Divinity of our flesh and blood, appearing once in the poor and humiliated land, will not appear a second time, in a different way, to give his kingdom the complement it must have.
The Master replied.
But how and when?
He already had, the glory of a moment, watched, Palm Sunday, his great messianic triumph. He had already delivered his last speeches, sublime attempts with which he sought to uplift the people, mobilize the homeland, make Judea the herald of the new humanity. Leaving Bethany, the earthly sanctuary, where the most sublime episodes of their friendship took place; where Lazaro had resurrected, he had been anointed on the head and feet by Magdalene, and Marta's virginity had enchanted him; leaving Bethany, and seeing the city that he had evangelized so many times, Jesus Christ wept. Burning tears, tears, divine! - they reflected the humanitarian grief of so many souls not having received it for their homeland that, He knows, will sacrifice Him.
Undoubtedly, the failure of Jesus Christ is only evident; because He will overcome the world; his cross will rise triumphantly over paganism; his disciples will proclaim his doctrine, his gospel will refound the world; all the centuries will proclaim his divinity; millions of souls will leave their mothers and fathers to love him; in the hut, as in the palace, in tattered beggars, as in princes dressed in purple, their love will work wonders, creating apostles and sisters of charity; creating the love of tears, the hunger for sacrifice, the thirst for immolation.
Its failure, I repeat, is only apparent; but the pain that the punge is real, because the Jewish people deny it. This rejection we understand it; history explains it. The acceptance of the truth does not depend only on its intrinsic value, nor also on the value of the man who utters it; it definitely depends on the circumstances of the time and the moral state of souls.
Now, you have already seen what the state of Judea was, in full political and religious decline.
Therefore, responding to the apostles, before hurting the problem that plagued them, Jesus Christ preliminarily refers to Jerusalem, which, in divine designs, will be the figure of the world.
In the destruction of Jerusalem, He gives a preview of the destruction of the world; then he speaks of the end of the world, clearly and directly, finally announcing explicitly, and as a promise that consoles the disciples, the final judgment, preceded by the splendours of his second coming.
Always identifying Jerusalem and the world, enumerating, with one another, the calamities that will precede the end of the world, whose last day is also symbolized by the last day of Jerusalem, Jesus Christ says that he will come again to the world; that this second time; not only one, but all human generations will contemplate Him, no longer as Messiah-Redeemer, but Messiah-Judge: "Tune videbunt Filium hominis venitentem in nube cum potestate magna et magestate ...", here is the Messiah's answer! Undoubtedly, we must well consider that, if the question, of the Apostles is the question of all humanity asked by the mouth of some men, the answer of Jesus: Christ is the answer of a God! If men heard it, they believed it, and if since then the idea of ​​the second coming has been a sweet concern for them, and not only sweet, but also so ardent and profound,that his expectation dominated the apostolic spirit; we who, after twenty centuries of wonders and miracles, have seen all the promises of Jesus Christ fulfilled, how and why should we not wait for the last one to be realized?

I do not want to anticipate the sermon, which will deal with the signs of the second coming. However, to excuse myself, I cannot ask you a question, inviting you to meditate on it well: What crisis is this that the world is currently experiencing?
Scientific crisis? No; because then science would have solved it before arriving, as it arrived, at bankruptcy, having failed to pacify the intelligences.
Philosophical crisis? No; because then philosophy would have solved it before being a victim of the contempt that our age has inflicted on metaphysics.
Political crisis? No; because then statesmen, parliamentarians and diplomats would have solved it, before governments came to the very sad impotence in which they find themselves to restore justice, order and peace.
Religious crisis? Not properly said; why then the Church, the great and divine physician of human souls and societies, would not have seen the remedies it has offered to contemporary humanity rejected.
Undoubtedly, science, philosophy, politics, religion, - all of this goes into crisis; but this universal crisis cannot be characterized, unless it is said that it is the human crisis, that is, the very crisis of humanity, ready, in the verified impossibility of all human solutions, to end the cycle of its existence on earth. .. Great things will happen .... heaven and hell will meet.
Miguel and Satan will fight again ... The Archangel, * (* S. Miguel - 8 May) whose image you can venerate in this temple, and whose feast the Church celebrates in today's Mass, will unfold against the banner of the proud, who do not fear hell or desire heaven, the standard of the humble who repent and confess and believe in the second coming of Jesus Christ. Great things will happen ... A seer has arrived, said for years, the beginning of these things has already arrived ... Men are agitated and angels look ... the Church waits ... and Christ has the cross suspended about the world.

IV

HOW AND WHY DOES FAITH DESIRE THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because there is no denying, among the splendours of material civilization, the most gigantic of all there has been, and the magnificence of the works of intelligence, dominates this most disastrous disease at the time: moral imbecility.
Despite the intellectual pride, of which I have already told you, modern man is weak, without energy, without virility, not understanding, it seems, the most beautiful advice that the king of Scripture gave to his son: to come ... be man!...
To be a man, in the highest sense of the word, talent or genius is not enough; science, not even scholarship, is not enough; it is necessary to have this virtue that paganism itself made the praise; this virtue, which moralists so admire in stoicism's sustine et abetine, but that only Catholicism gives the exact notion, in teaching us to consider it, not as the Stoics, "a means of winning the heart is its tenderness ”, But as the complex of all the energies needed to defend, sustain and develop the good in moral life: strength.
There is, without this manly virtue, neither personal dignity, nor fearlessness of spirit, nor courage of convictions, nor worship of law, nor love of Justice; There is neither freedom nor democracy. If it is she who makes the confessor and the martyr of the faith, it is she who makes the true citizen.
Who can contest in our time the complete absence of that virtue, without which pleasure intoxicates, glory dazzles, power vanishes, fills it with pride, and prosperity fills the heart of man with misery ?! Who will claim that it exists in the proud science, in the impudent Literature, or in the false democracies of our time, all of them married to caesarism, that starving sultan of republics, but guarded by armies ?!
No one can deny this contemporary phenomenon: moral imbecility.
But what is its main cause and its predominant consequence?
The cause is the degradation of character, which is presently neither developed in education nor in teaching; on the contrary, hampered by the preponderance that, in all private or public relations of contemporary life, the intellectual is given over morals, no longer preserving each man either in the Literature, in politics, or in friendly relations; a special stamp by which we can distinguish; because they all conform to interests, conveniences and have neither sincerity in opinions, which vary from moment to moment, nor a sense of words, which have already lost their value, either to praise, to censor, or to love, whether to hate.
The cause is this: - the degradation of character. And what is the ultimate consequence of moral imbecility? It is the absolute weakness of the will to practice the highest and noblest acts of man, among which the acts of Faith.
The rarity of the Faith, in the contemporary spirits concerned, does not stem only from the ignorance of religion, but also from weakness of the will.
Undoubtedly, ignorance largely enters modern unbelief. There is no notion of the Faith, which a multitude of men judge to be an unconscious and unimportant adherence to supernatural truths; adherence, which they judge: also not depend on them, many of whom at every moment say: - Oh, if I had faith! ... if faith were given to me!
They ignore two essential things: 1a that faith is an act of intelligence; 2a which is also an act of the will.
If there is no religion without faith, there is also no science without faith. Science, even in its boldest statements, involves faith, because the object of all science is both visible and invisible: visible, in its phenomena; invisible its substance. Now, in all science, it is through the contemplation of phenomena that the affirmation of the substance is arrived at; the phenomena being the things that are seen, and the substance the thing that is not seen. No sage sees in a bread, in a vegetable, in a mineral, the strength or the substance that constitutes them, but only the phenomena, that is, the color, the shape, the figure. Neither the physiologist sees life, nor the mathematician sees unity. It is not, therefore, absurd for the Catholic faith to affirm truths, of which they bear witness; realities, which we all verify in the heart, soul or life of man.
But modern man does not lack only this notion, in order to know what faith is; it also lacks the will to practice it.
Faith is not just an act of intelligence; it is also an act of the will, which (one can define) is the faculty of love. Now, there are two loves, that of natural things and that of supernatural things; the way in which we acquire them is identical.
We love natural things, because we want them, look for them and put ourselves in contact with them! the air, the light, the heat, the perfume, the food, the personal relationships. We cannot love supernatural things, avoiding them, not looking for them, in short, not wanting them, as we really do not want them in our time, which is therefore oppressed by the threefold calamity of the repudiation of faith: literary calamity, that is, the paganism in letters; political calamity, that is, the revolutionary spirit in constitutions, codes and laws; social calamity; that is, the cold-blooded sin, whose forms are the contempt of Sunday, the falsification of genders, the fraud of contracts, the violation of marriage laws.
I only show the description of moral imbecility in a summarized table. You cannot deny it in contemporary civilization, neither in relation to God nor in relation to man. Without faith as how to worship God? Without faith how to respect man?
God and Man! - The two greatest mysteries in the world! Nor did pagan philosophers know God; neither modern philosophers have been able to define man.
God! ... Humanity in all ages, had the belief and feeling of God; but knowledge, - no. How could I not have the idea and feeling of God ?! He reveals himself to us in the spectacle of nature, because it does not have the character of an independent being that exists on its own; in the institutions of reason, because it reads in itself absolute truths, and which it could not invent; in the axioms of conscience, because he feels the absolute law of duty engraved in him, which cannot be the product of his will; in the fact of human sociality, which is a providential and divine fact. To this quadruple statement can be added that of modern science itself, which, in the synthesis of the world, that is, in the mineral, in the vegetable, in the animal, in man, says - God!
You do not understand Him, however, philosophy, nor in the enormities of pagan philosophism, defining it extravagantly: - God is water; God is fire; God is the blood; God is the circle; God is the square; nor in the absurdities: of modern philosophism, defining it, ridiculously; God is the axiom; God is the knot; God is the unknowable; God the ideal; God is humanity!
If philosophers did not succeed in God, so did the ancients, nor the moderns, succeed in defining man.
Antiquity made him a god, idolizing him; modern philosophism made him a brute, degrading him.
To reduce man to a simple perfected animal, considered only a biped without feathers, a mammal of the order of primates and of the family of bimans; to see it as only a superior degree of animality is to attack metaphysics, philosophy and positive science itself.
Against metaphysics, because two primordial faculties - reason and freedom - essentially distinguish man from the brute. Against philosophy, because in man it is not possible to omit or confuse the phenomena, either in its multitude or in its variety; being certain, as for the crowd, that man summarizes and condenses in himself everything that is spread throughout the world: the existence of inorganic beings, the augmentative life of minerals, the vegetative life of plants, the sensitive life of the brute; and as for variety, man moves, assimilates, feels, thinks, speaks; he is a free being, he is a religious being. Against positive science itself, because it teaches that man is distinguished from the animal, even physically, that is, by the perfection of the nervous and cerebral system, by the structure and brain mass, by the position of the head at vertical altitude,over the uncovered forehead to receive the crown, and open hands to receive the scepter of creation. It can be seen, therefore, that true anthropology, without telling the whole truth, nevertheless affirms exact things in relation to this creature, which only Catholic philosophy defines, saying that it is a being composed of body and soul, formed in the image and likeness of the Infinite.
However, neither ancient nor modern philosophy, nor even the true one, reveal God and man. Who reveals them? ...
It was Jesus Christ who revealed God to man. The first coming of Jesus Christ is nothing but the revelation of God in his Omnipotence, in his Goodness, in his Love. Omnipotence, which in creation made man in the image and likeness of the Infinite, is that same Goodness that, to rescue man, takes on our flesh and, appearing in the world, to bewitch man ”enslaved by sin, expands in prodigies of Mercy, whose unprecedented extreme is the madness of crucified Love.
At the first coming, Jesus Christ revealed God to us; told us everything about God; uttered, taught everything we can and it is good for us to know about God; he gave us all the evidence to make sure that it was God himself who showed himself through his flesh; he accumulated prodigies on prodigies to prove what he was saying; did everything that only God can do; he gave his blood, his passion and his death to recognize that, being God's Mercy infinite, it is also as if infinite the malice of our sin; founded the Church; it gave future centuries the route they must follow; showed the eternal rewards or eternal punishments that await us; in such a way, promising or threatening, it proved to be the divinity itself, which of Jesus Christ says the most famous and sad of modern heresiarchs: "There is no distinction between Jesus and God ..."
Jesus Christ, therefore, at the first coming, revealed God to man, But if so, why, perhaps, will you ask, for, what is the second coming? Not only so that God, who has already come into Mercy, may come to Justice, but also to reveal to us the second of the two greatest mysteries in the world: man.
Jesus Christ revealed God to man but let man himself reveal himself to other men.
Since the first coming of Jesus Christ, God has become so well known that there are no more mysteries in God; we have said all that is, all that it wants from us, and all that we must do. Each man, however, remained a mystery to other men, at least inside him, in the depths of his heart, in the recesses of his conscience.
What man knows another man? Each man is an impenetrable abyss in the eyes of another man; and that is why, in this world, so often evil prevails and good is not a winner, as it would be if men were really known to each other! Well then; the second coming, universal and triumphant acclaim of Jesus Christ, will be the revelation of man, in his merit and in his demerit, in his glory or in his reproach, in reality that we cannot learn at present, and that only then will we learn; it is the duty of every man who accepts the revelation of Jesus Christ at the first coming to prepare for the revelation of the second, as he has taught us.
What is this way? What preparation is this?
I will now touch on one of the saddest testimonies of moral imbecility in our time, which is precisely the sacramental confession, omitted, in a great number of men, out of ignorance, and in another number also out of weakness of will.
Jesus Christ imposed on the man who wants to save himself a double preparation: the interior preparation, which every man must do, so to speak, within himself, examining himself, analyzing his thoughts, desires and passions well, seeing if they may be exposed to the great publicity of the second coming; and also rehearsing from now on, with humility, repentance and purpose of amendment, the external preparation, which is the confession to the priest.
I have already said and I repeat: many ignore the economics of confession, which can be considered in three ways: the individual or psychological point of view, the social or collective point of view, the analogue or sacramental point of view. In the first, the prejudices against confession are absurd, because they contradict the nature of man and repel an indisputable thing: the beauty of confession.
In the second, these prejudices are absurd, because they harm social interests, ignoring an indisputable fact: the sensitive utility of confession.
In the third, these prejudices are still absurd, because they ignore the economy of the sacraments, and ignore this truth: the harmony of confession.
Confession is beautiful in the order of domestic relations, civil relations, friendship relations, moral relations, literary relations; beautiful in the face of Morals, Natural Law and the psychology of the human heart; beautiful in its origin and antiquity, in the context of its court, in the delegation that Jesus Christ clothed the priest to forgive sins, in the sublime dignity of the priest who, in confession is Doctor, Doctor, Judge and Pal. It is useful to order and peace in society! It is harmony with all other sacraments.
Repelling confession, once its structure is known, can only be explained by moral imbecility, by the weakness of the will, and man does not feel with the energy to make the necessary preparation as effective as God could give him for the manifestation of the second coming. .
But isn't this second coming a chimera?
Chimera?! ... an article of the Creed, that is, an article of faith, a dogma? !!
No!An article from the Creed, which states of Jesus Christ, cannot be chimera: "Iterum venturus est cum gloria Judicare vivo et mortuos". Jesus will return glorious, to judge the living and the dead.
It's dogma! and very clear dogma the coming of Jesus Christ, as you quickly see in this threefold demonstration: the Bible in the messianic prophecies, announcing all the double coming, since the Messiah appears in all of them, not only in the form of mercy, but of Justice, preceded by fire, as seen in Isaiah, Jeremiah, Daniel and Esequiel; the Gospel, where Jesus Christ himself, questioned by the Apostles, announces his second coming, gives the signs of it and recommends them to watch and pray: the Church, not only inserting it in his Creed, but also opening and closing the liturgical year with the same Gospel as the second coming, making us as if a double warning, which we should take advantage of, not listening to jokes, mockery and mockery; on the contrary, waiting for that second coming, which Faith desires, because: - He is the end ...
- The end of the universe, which only then will give God the full glory for which he was created; it is the deliverance, the deliverance from creation, in all its parts, enslaved by sin, but waiting for the liberation that the Apostle speaks to us, when he says that all creation suffers and groans, hoping to be fully liberated; it is triumph. The triumph of Jesus Criso, whose glory will be in the second way, where, how extraordinary was his humiliation in the first; it is the aspiration of the blessed ones themselves, whose happiness will not be complete before the resurrection of the flesh; it is the ideal, so to speak, of the very body of man who, separated from the soul by death, wants to unite himself with the soul in the resurrection of bodies; it is the order disturbed by the iniquity of man, but restored by the justice of God; it is the Gospel, so often despised,shining on the ruin of all errors; it is the Church, so often oppressed, hovering victorious over the rebellion of nations and their governments; it is the universal proclamation of Justice, conculcated by all despotisms; in short, it is the complement, that is, the messianic complement, which will completely carry out the work of Jesus Christ, giving to the new humanity that He formed on the planet, in magnificent and splendid physical and moral renewal, the accomplishment of this plea, which, one to the other end of the world, millions of lips raise daily to the Infinite, in the most sublime of prayers * Father! ... Comethe messianic complement, which will completely carry out the work of Jesus Christ, giving to the new humanity that He formed on the planet, in magnificent and splendid physical and moral renewal, the accomplishment of this plea, which, from one end of the world to the other, millions of lips raise daily to the Infinite, in the most sublime of prayers * Father! ... Comethe messianic complement, which will completely carry out the work of Jesus Christ, giving to the new humanity that He formed on the planet, in magnificent and splendid physical and moral renewal, the accomplishment of this plea, which, from one end of the world to the other, millions of lips raise daily to the Infinite, in the most sublime of prayers * Father! ... Come
we your kingdom! ... "

V

HOW AND WHY DOES REASON WAIT FOR THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because everywhere today, an extraordinary crowd of men is overwhelmed by this great tyrant: - Human respect.
In the palaces, in whose meals the rich man is ashamed to make the blessing of the table, and in the huts, where the poor man is already ashamed to make the sign of the Cross; in schools, where teachers fear to speak the name of God, and in assemblies, where legislators no longer want to swear by him, but to promise for honor; in books and newspapers, in homes and in public squares; outside and even inside the temples, where Catholics are in great numbers, who express badly, very quickly, and often making ridiculous external signs of devotion; in palaces, in huts, in colleges, in assemblies, in books, in newspapers, in homes, in public squares, in temples, everywhere, the great tyrant has penetrated, and reigns, aided by his followers: the world, the devil , and meat; the world that scoffs at devotion;the devil who mystifies devotees; the meat that allows itself to be led and overcome without resistance.
It is hard to believe how, in a time so jealous of independence and freedom, most men pay such a shameful tribute to human respect, that it is but one of the most odious forms of despotism.
What is human respect? It is an attack on the dignity of the Christian and an attack on the dignity of man, simply considered to be a man. Against the dignity of the Christian, because human respect forces the Christian to actually repudiate his faith; against the dignity of man, because what makes man's greatness is sincerity in actions and freedom in will.
 Now, as long as a man practices or fails to practice the acts of godliness, dominated by human respect, that is, for fear of mockery, scorn or censure of other men, he is no longer free, but a slave; in the same way that, in other relationships, if he only for convenience and interest simulates these acts, he is not a real man, but a liar.
For in relation to human respect - very curious thing! - it is double, has two faces, two faces; in the state it is translated semi-Christianity; in the Church, it translates into semi-Catholicism. Semi-Christianity in the state is hypocrisy; semi-Catholicism in the Church is cowardice.
The politician, who in the administration, or in the Government, just so as not to create complications or arouse demands, appears to respect religion; the politician who, in certain and certain circumstances, compromises with the feelings and emotions of piety, but at the same time, allows the worship of God to be banned from national life; education, Christian teaching; private and public relations, which involve marriage, family or the state, all under the influence of Jesus Christ; this politician undoubtedly has a semi-Christianity for the uses of politics that does not reveal dignity, but cunning. This is truly hypocrisy.
The Catholic who, in the practices of his religion, conforms to the demands of the world, and, trying to harmonize them with the interests and conveniences
of his reputation among men, he merely conceals and distorts them; this Catholic has, to deceive his conscience and at the same time not to displease other men, a semi-Catholicism that, does not reveal strength, but weakness, this is truly cowardice.
Our age is so distorted, as I have already shown, by Intellectual pride, by the torpor of conscience and by moral imbecility; our age has neither the courage nor the truth; nor the courage of error. It is a calamity to see politics full of Christians, who in fact have already renounced all the graces of their baptism, but they do not dare to open a noble and loyal struggle against the church; on the contrary, what worries them a lot is the means of deceiving the Catholic spirit, exploiting it whenever necessary, but not giving it the place and the preponderance that it must have in the social regime. The politicians concerned are truly the decadents of Reason.
It is also sad to be Catholicism full of false adherents, who do nothing but disfigure religion in its principles and in its practice, noting in this respect a double tendency: that of those, dominated by the spirit of the world, weaken the notion of the Christianity until it stripped him of his most just demands; and that of those who, only concerned with outer practices, greatly despise inner perfection. The Catholics we are talking about are truly the cowards of the Faith.
In our time there is no more ridiculous prejudice, nor more absurd enormity than that of the error that separates, as antagonistic and not reconcilable, - reason and faith.
Creation is made up of three overlapping kingdoms: - the world of nature, which ecstasizes the poet, the thinker, the artist; the world of the laws of nature, which enchants the physicist, the geometra, the astronomer, the sage; the supernatural world, which makes the believer happy.
To enter the world of nature, man has an appropriate organ: - the eyes; To penetrate the world of the laws of nature, this organ is no longer enough; another is needed: - reason. To penetrate the supernatural world, an even higher organ is needed - and this is Faith, which raises reason to a higher sphere.
Faith does not undermine reason; complete it.
It is, as a man of science, Moigno, the telescope of reason, said with great happiness, that she does not endanger reason, the scientific and literary movements of the Christian genius demonstrate, the opinion of the most illustrious doctors of the church and even the unsuspected opinion of men, like Augusto Comte; who, listing the scientific, literary and aesthetic, and industrial achievements of Catholicism, says of him that he is: - the masterpiece of human wisdom.
However, politicians do not hear, when it comes to Catholicism, the harmonies of reason. What is so regrettable that certain Catholics do not see the splendors of the Faith. For this very reason, I want today, in this matter of the second coming of Jesus Christ, that the Faith, which it affirms, be acclaimed for the reason that it confirms.
Since the Faith has many and powerful reasons to affirm it, all of them supported on this unshakable foundation, the word of Jesus Christ who formally promised it.
Reason, for its part, has but very powerful reasons to confirm it; and, among these reasons, the greatest and most powerful is the iniquity of human judgments; iniquity from which, quite logically, reason deduces the need for the second coming, that is, the need for another judgment, which corrects human judgments.
Undoubtedly, the second coming is to fear, the second coming is no longer God in mercy, but God in Justice.
The first coming is the Nativity Scene; is the ordeal; is the Altar.
The crib, that is, the Incarnation! Everything that has lyrical wealth in the heart, or epic greatness in the soul of man, is gathered in the Incarnation of the Word, in this ineffable truth of a boy-God; a weak God, a God who descends from the heights of heaven and comes to place himself on the planet, sharing all of our vicissitudes! ...
Calvary, that is, Redemption! Calvary, the spot that is both dark and luminous, separates the two great civilizations of mankind: paganism and Christianity! An obscure point, because it symbolizes contingency in the Absolute, suffering in the Impassible, death in the Immortal; and luminous point, because it is the pole; around which, forty centuries in figures twenty centuries in splendid realities, the human race revolves! ...
The Altar for daily reproduction of Belém and Calvário; of incarnation and redemption!
The Altar! Repetition of the same universal sacrifice; the visible margin of eternity circling the ocean of time!
Yes; the first coming is the Nativity Scene, it is Calvary; it is the Altar; whereas the second coming will be the judge! it will be the Court! will be the Sentence!
And what judge? God! And what court? that of Eternity! And what Sentence? The definitive!
For even so the Judgment of God at the second coming, since it is very fearful, since it is an infallible Judge, a divine Court and an irrevocable sentence; yet, every man must prefer the Judgment of God to the Judgment of other men, so unjust, so cruel, so wicked, so tyrannical, it is, almost invariable rule, so monstrously inaccurate, that reason, confirming the Faith, says: it is the second coming is needed.
The final judgment, faith deduces it from the word of God by announcing that judgment; reason deduces him from the necessity of that Judgment to correct the falsity of the judgments of men on each man; so great a need that the judgment of Deis is preferable to the judgment of other men.
It is preferable, the classic Vieira egregiously says, because: “God judges us with understanding, whereas men judge us with will; in the judgment of God conscience is valid, whereas in the judgment of men conscience is not valid; God judges what he sees, but men judge what they do not see; in the Judgment of God, good works are worth, which are, however, for men what most make us victims of their envy, the Judgment of God is a judgment of one day, but that of men is a judgment of every day; God judges what he sees and knows, and men judge what he does not see or know; God will judge us in a place, men judge us everywhere, even those we are not in, and they judge us whether we are awake or asleep; God, if we change our conduct, from worse to better, our sentence changes; that was against us, in favor,as he did with Magdalene and Pharisee; whereas, as for men, who once wronged or sinned and were condemned by them, even if they regenerate and become perfect and become holy, - they are forever condemned.
There is, therefore, no doubt that for us, rather the Justice of God than the mercy of men. In God, justice will never be separated from mercy; and, pronouncing our sentence, He weighs everything, combines everything, harmonizes everything, sees everything that happened in our life, everything that influenced us, ascertains exactly our degree of guilt from the moment we were born until we died. In man, however, mercy itself, when it grants it to us, is not just, because it never gives us forgiveness with magnanimity, and always with a certain contempt for our error or sin,
The judgment of men is always: a liar, even in history, which never gives posterity the exact measure, the real value of a man, and so full of falsehoods in relation to men and things, that Agusto Thierry wrote a work: - Historical errors and lies.
This is what the judgment of men is worth! How can every man not prefer, no matter how much the theme, God's judgment at the second coming? At the second coming, each man will appear to other men as he is, and not as men judge him, many times with injustice, and never with complete mercy, which does not allow them to do jealousy, envy, intrigue, lying , all of which he was a victim, we see in the Gospel, Jesus Christ himself, even in his most admirable and praiseworthy acts; all of which he continued to be a victim in all the centuries, and precisely because of his exceptional greatness, his wonderful life, the infinite mercy that brought him to earth, from which he did not leave, did not want to leave, without saying first: Happy Those who are not scandalized by me!
To be scandalized by Him; they are scandalized by Jesus Christ! How?! Is this possible ?! Yes, it is possible, and not only for pagans, Jesus Christ was the subject of a great scandal; for Christians, too, he is the cause of another great scandal.
Not only were the Jews scandalized by their works, notwithstanding the infinite kindness, mercy and love of which they were a witness ... Later on, the politicians of Rome, the philosophers of Greece, saw nothing but madness in all that. the apostles told them that it was truly the strength of God, who had confused them, choosing to reform the world, what in the world was less powerful and less illustrious ..., which was a reason why the pagans did not understand and scandalized. Let us compare, however, the scandal of the pagans with the scandal of the Christians today.
The great scandal of the pagans was that God had appeared in human form, in a crib, small and fragile .... Petty hearts, who did not know what love is capable of ... ...
The great scandal of Christians today is that He appears on the clouds of heaven, triumphant and glorious. Narrow spirits, who do not understand what despised love is capable of! ...
For the pagans, the great scandal was the wonders that the Apostles referred to and reproduced ... For Christians, the great scandal is the prodigy that is missing, and that must be realized in order for the Messianic prophecies to be completed and the promise to be fulfilled. of the Messiah himself ... For the pagans, a great scandal was that He had come to regenerate men ... For the Christians, may He come to glorify them in body and soul ... For the pagans, a great scandal was what He promised. The triumphs of the Church, the defeat of its enemies, the renewal of law, justice, freedom for all mankind, until then divided into tyrants and slaves ... For Christians, a great scandal is, after having seen all those promises made, which did not happen to the pagans, hear that Jesus Christ will come to judge the world,to close the terrestrial cycle of humanity and to give to its elect, in a splendid physical and moral palingenesia, what what St. Peter calls - a new land and a new heaven! ... But then, if they don't want this, if they don't to see this magnificent hope realized, what do they want, Christians who are scandalized by the second coming?
What do they want? - They want the world to last forever ... always ..., they want the eternity of the world with their vices, their mistakes, their sins!

SAW

HOW AND WHY CONSCIOUSNESS CLAIMS THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because nowadays, everywhere an immense triteness oppresses the spirits.
Much is said about modern progress; why not also talk about moderate suffering? This progress exists, no doubt, and I have recognized it from this pulpit. But this progress that has produced so much wealth, used so many elements, given so many wonderful applications to the forces of nature; has this progress, I ask, also produced virtues, increased man's happiness? I ask and answer with an illustrious thinker: Yes! if you understand happiness as physical well-being, material comfort, speed of movement, on land and at sea. Not if man's happiness requires kindness, delicacy, peace and joy.
Machinism is progress; but is it not certain that it has produced the abandonment of the fields, the contempt of rural life, the greed of living in the cities? The raw iron that comes out of manufacturing is polished and shiny; but is it not true that the factories, the mills, the mines, in their excesses, materialize and stultify a multitude of men? The press is progress; but is it not true that it is also the lie, the slander, the corruption? Large industry is progress; but is it not certain that industrialism, a vast system of production without restraint or limits, is the oppression of man, the tyranny of work, the despotism of capital? The education of the soldier is progress, the manufacture of weapons, the study of military art; but it is also not certain that militarism is an evil, in the expenses it entails, in the threats with which it disturbs the nations,in retrograde tendencies to extermination and barbarism?
Oh!Let us not divinize the progress of our time, which, for this reason, which is only material, has not yet made and cannot make the happiness of man really disenchanted, even in the midst of pleasures, in the turmoil of business in the feverish agitation of contemporary life, and, as if, asking through the mouth of Johannes, the prophet of Denmark, to modern civilization: "what can you make me happy with?", and listening to this answer given by the German poet Henri Heine: "with champagne, roses and the dance of the nymphs You
understand that happiness cannot be in this, and then why deny it? Modern man is sad.
His tristera is stamped in the bustle of politics, in the feverish movement of noindustry, in the realism of art, in the skepticism of philosophy, in the vain sonority of poetry, in moral imbecility, which does not give the wings of man the flights of the Infinite, O modern man is sad, and his sadness is well translated - into the emptiness of hearts and the hunger of souls.
The vacuum of the heart can only fill you with Christian virtue; the hunger of souls only God can satisfy. Now, modern man, you have seen him in previous preaching, he does not fear hell, and he does not even desire heaven; he does not pray, he is ashamed to pray, as he is ashamed of all Christian practices, and, more than all, of sacramental confession.
The Christian has needs analogous to those of the natural man, and for that very reason, as there is a medicine to cure physical illnesses, there is a medicine to cure moral illnesses. Without the remedy that, in the order of religion, is the confession of sins, man cannot be cured. There is food for the life of the soul, as there is food for the life of the body. Without the food that, in the life of grace, is communion, the soul languishes, faints, dies; and he dies because he doesn't eat, and he dies because he doesn't eat!
The soul to eat! .... But isn't this a nonsense ?!
No; it is a truth, not only of faith, but also rational and which translates into scientific laws. What are these laws? They are as follows: 1a Every being needs food; 2a The higher the being on the scale of life, the more delicate is his food; 3a No being finds food in its own organism, and needs to look for it in external organisms. - The human soul, therefore, like the plant and the animal, cannot live without nutrition; and, like this analogy to the nature of being; nutrition is not the juice of the earth, food of the plant; material bread, food for the human body, but food adapted to its divine spiritual needs: and since the lower beings look outside themselves for food in the reservoirs of nature, the human soul must necessarily seek its food in the organisms in which it was deposited by God .
Man does not have physical life in himself; however rich and powerful it may be, it cannot take life from its own substance, and if it wants to live, it must ask the vegetable, the animal, the dust of the earth for its nutrition. Man, too, cannot take the divine life from himself; he will ask for it in saccades, for these are the supernatural organisms, in which God deposited the divine life.
Do you know what eating is, physically speaking? It is to consciously or incisively practice an act of humility. It is man to confess his contingency; confess that you don't have life in you; confess that he has a kind Creator and that he profusely filled the earth with food for man. Now; why does man not have the same humility in the order of religion? Why not confess, in relation to the soul what do you confess in relation to the body? The Creator, so lavish when he made food for the body of man, excelled in love and mercy when he made food for the soul, because this food is Himself; this food is the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ in sacramental communion. Do not commune! But this is the great vacuum, this is the great hunger of the modern soul: And why does modern man not share? Because you don't know what Communion is; because it supposes that dogma,of the Eucharist is an absurd, extravagant, ridiculous thing, and not as it happens, a sublime reality, a divine truth.
All Catholic dogmas, however transcendent they may seem, have their roots in God's mercy and their motives in man's deep needs. They all rest on this triple granite: Faith, Reason, Consciousness; there is not a single Catholic dogma, of which it cannot be said: Faith affirms, Reason confirms and Coonscience complains.
I want to give you just a few examples.
It seems absurd that the dogma of the Incarnation, that is, God became man, But examine man in the light of the psychologist, that is, in himself, and in the light of history, that is, in the outer theater in which he appears . You will find that man's greatest desire, in the normal condition of his nature, that is, when he is not maddened by atheism, is to see God, to have God, to live with God; and, spanning forty centuries, there is the yearning, the yearning, the conscious or unconscious desire of the Incarnation. The dogma of confession seems absurd; that humiliates man so much, even if it is to exalt him a lot. But study dogma; and I want you to do it now with long reasoning and plenty of examples.
The stomach of the man who drank a poison does not crave to vomit it as much as the heart that committed a sin longs to confess it; he longs so much that if the man does not confess it to the priest, he will confess it to his friends, because he wants relief, medicine. It is true that confession, the sacrifice of the lips, is nevertheless painful for the sinner, when he confesses, just as the nausea he feels is unpleasant to the poisoned man, before expelling the poison; but, just as these nausea, when poison is expelled, is replaced by great physical well-being, the sinner's humiliation, after confessing sin, becomes a great joy.
The sacramental communion of which I spoke to you seems absurd; but examine human nature before God. It is true that, on the one hand, God's greatest desire is to give himself, because God is love, and the great need for love is to identify with the loved object. Love tends to unite, and wants to be one with the loved object. If a mother could do this, she would mix her blood with her son's blood, she would put her son into her heart, she would merge with her son. However, the merger of one being with another can only take place if they are incorporated and penetrate. The mother was unable to do so; but God can and does, because if he couldn't - oh absurd! man would be more powerful to desire beautiful and sublime things than God to do them. But if it is certain that God, infinite Love, desires and fuses the human creature with its Creator,it is true that man has always desired communion, and has no greater desire than this, since his soul is hungry for justice, beauty and love; he wants the bread of intelligence, the living bread that came down from heaven.
Here are three dogmas, all three explained by the needs of human nature itself, the depths of which reveal the motives and reasons that modern man does not grasp, because he is atrophied, unable to verify what the Faith says, Rezão confirms and Consciousness complains.
Mes, I want to, yes! I want from the second coming of Jesus Christ, to give you the same peremptory and irrefutable proof.
You have seen the Faith affirm the second coming, because Jesus Christ announced and promised it; and that's enough, because Jesus Christ is God, and neither his announcement nor his promise can fail; being sure that the second coming is the Justice of God, it is the Judgment of God, it is the final Judgment, a necessary Judgment, because it will be the explanation, the justification, the glorification of Divine Providence in the government of the Universe.
But not only does Faith claim; Reason confirms the second coming, deducing it from the falsity of the judgment of men on each man; falsehood, which kills us, which must be corrected and will only be so, when each man is known to other men, just as it is and not as hatred, envy, jealousy, reckless judgment, slander do.
the second advent confirmed by reason, conscience also complains, and complains by deducting its need from the falsity of each man's judgment of himself.
No man thinks of himself as he is; it is a rule with almost no exceptions, one thing is what he is, another - something he thinks he is. There is no one in this world, says the famous classic Vieira, who describes himself with his definition; everyone is mistaken in gender and also in differences.
So much misery where does it come from? Without a doubt, pride, vanity and self-love; weakness, against which I seem impotent not only the - "Nosce te ipsum" of ancient wisdom, but the very examination of the conscience of Christian wisdom.
Nosce te ipsum! what a great sentence!
But, those who seek to know themselves in all reality that Self, more or less dominated by himself, the most deceptive of all prisms ?! The Examination of conscience! what a divine precept!
But whoever makes it whole, complete, stripped of all illusion, all subtlety, all the excuse to apologize to yourself, and never finding circumstances, reasons, motives, alleged cases of force majeure with which to justify yourself, judging that the same things in others are serious faults, and in themselves faults?

Catholics who confess, I know, do an examination of conscience; and of saints, in this matter, there are things that haunt; as for example: - a Francisco de Borja, long time, each day, absorbed in contemplating his misery and his nothingness and so unworthy if Judging himself to live, that he could not understand how God had given him the magnificent gift of life.
Exaggerations! they will say the bloated of themselves, the convicts of their own excellence, the proud, and not only those, but even many who practice the Christian life, however, who do not practice it without; in acts of devotion, pay some tribute to vanity.
Exaggerations! such people will say; but what is right. is that every man is an abyss of miseries and there is no denying the truth of what a poet said:

"In the forest of evil in our hearts
There are more tigers, reptiles and frogs, and lions
Than there are stars in the sky, in the great deep blue."

See, see each one in which company lives!
The verse is not a simple trope, it is not just a figure; passions, that is, hatreds, criminal desires, clumsy machinations, ambitions, backbiting, lies and slander, envy, all these monsters that sin generates in every man, they are tigers, they are reptiles, they are frogs , are lions: Therefore, each man is what he is, and not what he thinks of himself; since, if there is one thing that even the best men, as taught by the masters of Asceticism, are victims in the very Christian and spiritual life, it is the illusion, Proteus that takes all forms, the most varied; that with cunning and subtlety is mixed with our best acts; which, with incredible disguise, wears the mask of devotion and often makes us suppose that it is carat gold in our piety, which is nothing but a counterfeit coin.
In these conditions, everyone well understands that it is not only false the Judgment of other men on each man; every man's judgment of himself is also false; and, since the second coming will also be the corrective of the false Judgment, which each man makes of himself, it follows that, if each man's reason, as you have seen, asks that the false judgment of other men be reinforced, conscience of humanity claims the second coming, as an amendment of each man's false judgment of himself. In the manifestation of the second coming, the manifestation of consciences will be truly great and beautiful, which, however, has already started on earth for those who confess; with this previous remedy, personal vanity is exempt from all confusion in punishment, which must be given to universal vanity!
Universal vanity! How not to see, and not to hate, and not to regret in our time, when, in the material sphere, man became a giant, and only because he grew immeasurably through progress, having his feet on the seas, furrowed by colossal ships, and their heads pinned to the heavens; ravaged by huge telescopes, when you are told about the Divinity that you should adore, even disdainful of God, with extraordinary vanity, smilingly shows your idol, that is, that other divinity you adore, and which is called modern civilization!
Progress?! ... Civilization?! ... I don't believe! How to call civilization, I ask, making the thoughts and feelings of an illustrious sage mine, those immense trains of wagons, which an unforeseen or calculated derailment violently launches against each other; those jobs that “force thousands of men to stand night and day, standing on the locomotives, always restless, trembling, crushed by terrible responsibility; these endless tunnels that at every moment can become the tomb of thousands of people; these immense ships, with such a high center of gravity and such instability, that the slightest accident can cause thousands of men to sink; these colossal factories that pour torrents of lava day and night; these boulervards transformed into cities, in which day and night, ceaselessly, one eats and drinks;those hungry bags with their screams of buying and selling; this feverish movement that drags men from the countryside to the cities; this uninterrupted service from factories, done by men, women and even children; these standing armies with which nations mutually threaten each other; this mandatory military service that decimates the populations; how to call civilization all that, preferably, can be called barbarism, because, in fact, it is barbarism, the barbarism of progress ?!how to call civilization all that, preferably, can be called barbarism, because, in fact, it is barbarism, the barbarism of progress ?!how to call civilization all that, preferably, can be called barbarism, because, in fact, it is barbarism, the barbarism of progress ?!
The modern giant is very proud; but do not forget that, in the remote era of humanity, there was already another giant; and this one, because he found the daughters of the earth beautiful, that is, because he identified with matter; because crazy love has depraved your heart; because, in the drunkenness of his triumph, he no longer looked at the sky; because he allowed himself to be enslaved and stultified by the senses, the punishment came, it came in the flood, which drowned him!
Could - now, parody the poet Castro Alves, but giving his stanzas a different purpose, say of these two giants, the ancient and the modern:

”What two giants so crazy
In a world of pygmies!
- They want the majesty to
pluck from the hand of God! ”

I could, but I prefer to ask: Didn't you hear a huge noise coming out of the bowels of the world, about to become a colossal cry ?! But it is no longer simply a noise; it is a cry, that of the small, and the unfortunate, that of the proletarians, that of all the victims of this barbarism of material progress, which transformed the world into a factory, wealth into a sovereign, and pauperism into a vassal!
It is the cry of socialism, to which, however, “sympathetic as it is with contemporary disorder and anarchy, I do not lend my lips.
I use them, however, in this pulpit, and so that it reverberates very loudly, and, if it depended on me, so that it reverberated throughout the world; I lend, I say, I lend my lips to the cry that millions of Christian souls, in the face of so many and so monstrous iniquities of our time, must utter, pleading:
Come, Jesus!

VII

HISTORIC EVOLUTION, AT THE SAME DIVINE AND HUMAN TIME, OF THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because everywhere, presently, selfishness prevails; and, despite being on all lips, to be proclaimed in a thousand associations and clubs, to be one of the most pompous promises of modern democracies, to enter into all systems of philanthropy, and into all codes or constitutions of politics, the Fraternity, which Jesus Christ called a new commandment, he no longer dominates spirits, nor does he seduce hearts.
A new commandment? Yes!
When Jesus Christ appeared there was a great potion of humanity divided into tyrants and slaves; there was no homeland, no family, no rights. Four thousand years ago man had loved in man wealth, power, intelligence, genius, beauty, eloquence; but the man had not loved the man. And why hadn't the man loved the man? Because until then he had never seen perfectly, in his fellow men, as Jesus Christ later showed him, through the veils of matter, the invisible majesty that is called the soul. Jesus. Christ did not reveal only the sovereign to the world, who has since received praise and allegations; gave him a universal throne. In the world fascinated by the new beauty, only now contemplated in all its splendor, the love of souls in such a way bewitches hearts,that in the most vile and most despised man fraternity knows how to discover what makes us love him, not because he belongs to our race, not because he belongs to our family, not because in him the same blood that runs in our veins, because he is our father, our brother, our son, our friend or countryman, but because he is a man, that is, because in him there exists, united and associated with the body, a soul. world to rescue them, said: "love one another, as I have loved you".a soul, And because of the love of souls he made a precept He who, coming into the world to redeem them, said: "love one another, as I have loved you".a soul, And because of the love of souls he made a precept He who, coming into the world to redeem them, said: "love one another, as I have loved you".
It was for the love of souls that the Church organized these great and beautiful fraternal services that humanity owes to it: the service of the word, proclaiming and teaching the truths of the Gospel; the service of education, freeing spirits from error, the service of beneficence, relieving pain, wiping tears, mitigating all physical miseries; the service of the sacraments, consecrating the life and death of man.
If it is true that a complaint is now in the world, a groan denounces the cooling of hearts; if the vacuum is felt everywhere, and if even among Catholics a large number do not know how to harmonize devotion with brotherhood, it is undoubtedly the fault of the Church.
A striking injustice is to ignore their services in everything that concerns the dignification of man, whether that dignity is treated in the field where the rights of reason and the rights of the faith are debated; whether it is about the burning sphere of political problems, which show us in perpetual conflict authority and freedom; finally, let us seek this dignification of man in the most serene realms of piety and love.
The Church was not only the bulwark of civil freedom and political freedom. Three hundred years also fought for the freedom of the soul. It was at the expense of the precious blood of her apostles, her confessors and her virgins that she succeeded in establishing the rights and dignity of human conscience, oppressed and demeaned in Rome by all the violence of paganism which, in the intellectual order, was the reason emancipated from all truths; in the moral order, the emancipation of the flesh with all the lusts devouring humanity; in the political order, the concentration of all powers in the hands of a monster successively called Nero, Caligula, Tiberius, absolute lord of bodies and souls, consciences and freedom, ordering to worship stone, the dog, the crocodile and the ox.
I would like to show everything that man owes to the Church, regarding civil and political freedom; but I must restrict myself, since I deal with fraternity to the sphere of moral freedom, pointing out only that the Church has the glory of having the principle of human inviolability avenged in codes and laws, in the whole legal body; and that it was the Gospel that consecrated the soul in the family, at home, in society, in all relationships of life, in that consecration that can put on the lips of St. Paul this sublime song of the fraternity of ”There is no longer a Jew, nor gentile, neither Scythian, nor barbarian, nor Greek, nor Roman, nor free, nor slave, nor man, nor woman; they are all one in Jesus Christ ”.
Unfortunately with the fraternity of the Church they contrast not only the lie of political freedom, the imposture of modern democracies, the perfidy of anti-Catholic sects, the cunning of secret societies, but also (why not say?) - individualism in the Church!
But what is individualism in the Church? It has many and varied nuances, from the narrow and petty molds in which the Gospel is attached, to the alliances of the world. Now, it is Pharisaism, which sees only the letter that kills, without seeing the spirit that quickens; now it is false prudence, which has but the most guilty tolerances for the powerful and the great of the century; now it is the ril, beyond which it does not transcend worship, and which the Messiah poured out in vehement apostrophes; why, the absence of all gravity in the service of God. Individualism in the Church has a thousand forms; but I can only deal now with that which is related to my subject. Individualism in the Church, as I consider it today, is incomplete, imperfect, selfish devotion; it is of all forms of egoism the most disgusting, because it is egoism in religion;it is the idolatry of the self transported from the world to the Church; it is the exclusive concern of a soul fearing God, seeking the forgiveness of his sins, wanting the happiness of heaven, but doing all this only for personal interest, and not for love, because he has no mercy, and, if he fears God, he fears him as a slave to the master, as a subject to the sovereign, not as a son to his father.
Of course, individualism does not cover, it cannot cover dedication, devotion, the love of others; and for this reason it is truly, on the part of Indifferent Catholics, the fate of a multitude of men who struggle with error, vice and sin, save whoever can from the great shipwrecks, transported to the Church's boat.
Individualism does not have the passion for truth, it does not have the hunger for proselytism, nor the zeal for souls. They pray and beat their breasts, but their prayer is a multiple infraction: infraction of the sign that Jesus Christ gave of true piety; violation of the magnificent dogma of the communion of saints; breach of the fundamental law, which is twofold, of devotion.
As for the sign, it was with solemnity that Jesus Christ said to all his worshipers of all centuries these words, addressed to the disciples who were present: - "I give you a new commandment ... is that you love one another, as I have loved you ... and the world will know that you are my disciples, if you love one another ".
There is absolutely no other sign to disprove the true false love of Jesus Christ ...
As for dogma, we Catholics, "we are one body in Christ, and we are members of each other ..." As the body is one, even though it has many: members, and like the members of the body, which are numerous, however, but a body ; so is Christ. We have all been baptized in one Spirit to form one body, whether Jew, Gentile, slave, or free! ...
This language is not mine, it belongs to S, Paulo; do not imagine just a metaphor which is the expression of a beautiful truth; how members form a physical body; like the family, the city or the homeland, they form a body they form a moral body, the Church forms a mystical body.
Every physical, moral or mystical body is governed by the law of solidarity. In the physical and human body, each member suffers or takes advantage of what goes on in the others. If the foot suffers, every man suffers; if the head is sick, fever invades the whole body; if the blood is in bad condition, the stomach senses. In the moral body, if a member covers himself with shame or glory, glory or shame stands out over other family members. Of luck in the church, everything is common; and the highest expression of solidarity is what is called, the Communion of Saints, that is, the communion of life and interests, by virtue of which what one does or has a member of the Church stands out over others; and not only does the members of the Church fellowship with Jesus Christ who is the head, but also,the members share each other's goods and services.
Dogma magnificent! I said and I repeat, because it makes the Catholic Church an immense mutual assistance society and presents us with the three regions that the Catholic Church covers, that is, earth, purgatory and heaven, as three federated provinces of the kingdom of Jesus Christ, which makes them in solidarity with each other, the common work of all three being the redemption of mankind.
What a brotherhood of the Church. What a calamity individualism! However, individualism in the Church is not only selfishness of those who, taking care only and exclusively of themselves or are not interested in sinners, or, if they are interested, do so in an incomplete way. There is also a big gap in Catholics' devotion. The fundamental law of devotion is twofold: intercession and spying. Interceding is good; expiate, the better. What do we see now? Pilgrimages, festivals, associations, creation of sanctuaries, signs that there is still intercession. But, atonement and penance?
Is it not certain that they are forgotten? That is why conversions do not appear or are very rare today. The causes are many; but the main one, says Father Desurmont, a great ascetic writer, is that devotees are not complete devotees, Catholics are not complete Catholics, Christians are not entirely Christian and people consecrated to God are not as holy as they should be.
At a time of such great moral decay, it is necessary that these truths be spoken; or else we are not worthy of the kingdom of God.
The kingdom of God, it is true, only at the second coming: it will be a complete kingdom; but, from now on, it is a reality for all those who want to be incorporated into the new Humanity of which Jesus is the leader.
What is the kingdom of God? humanity, says a Christian philosopher, knew only three kingdoms: that of matter, the animal kingdom and that of reason. Man only operated in this triple sphere; However, Jesus Christ revealed a new sphere, a new horizon, a new kingdom. This is the kingdom of God, of all conceptions the widest that history records,
because it is the spirit of God taking possession of humanity in Christ and Christ, freeing it from the bondage of the senses, from the brutalities of matter, from the daydreams of reason, and elevating it to a higher life, to the divine life. The kingdom of God is not an autocracy, a monarchy or a public network, a political or social form for the benefit of some to the exclusion of others; it is a kingdom, whose head is Jesus Christ, whose law is God's will, and whose subjects are all men. Everyone, because Jesus Christ invites all peoples and all races into his kingdom. The kingdom of God has no borders; challenges all of our petty conceptions of cosmopolitanism. It is the universal, eternal kingdom, which begins now and has already developed since, but which will only fill the universe in its definitive triumph, that is, in the second coming, when,in an immense palingenesis, humanity proclaims in Jesus Christ the king of creation.
The kingdom of God, as Jesus inaugurated it on earth, seems to be sought almost exclusively by the poor, unhappy and humble; but human ingratitude does not destroy the designs of God who, in Christ, offered him to all men.
All those who do not satisfy the present reality; all who have an ideal above the miseries of the earth; all who are hungry and thirsty for justice can and must enter the kingdom of God. Why don't you come in? Because the kingdom of God suffers violence, that is, because it is not part of it except by renouncing itself in what is seen, imperfect and bad.
The proud, the self-satisfied, the bloated with science, the enslaved by their passions cannot enter, cannot enter the kingdom of God, which began at the first and will be completed at the second coming of Jesus Christ.
The kingdom of God, therefore, has a historical evolution, at the same time divine and human, and that must fill the entire gap between the two comings. When it is said: the kingdom of God, it does not enunciate a metaphysical abstraction, a philosophical formula, a political theory, or a philanthropic utopia; an incomplete reality is affirmed, but already splendid, divine and humanly speaking.
Thus considered the kingdom of God, as an illustrious teacher teaches us, it has three phases: the beginning, the development, and the consummation. The beginning focuses on Jesus and the divine revelation that He brought to the world. development takes place in the Church and its  march through the ages. Consummation will be the glorious epilogue of humanity at the second coming of Jesus Christ.
These three phases are linked to one another, proceed from one another, and in such a way, that the kingdom of God encompasses the totality of times and centuries; it is inseparable from History, which, while showing us in messianic facts an evolution, at the same time divine is human, from the first coming of the Messiah, promised, desired, expected in the course of forty centuries, also shows us a divine and human evolution of the second coming, in historical facts of twenty centuries, successively fulfilling all the promises of Jesus Christ.
The historical evolution of the second coming is perfectly characterized in these two distinct periods; the first, long, in which the precursor signs developed, which Jesus Christ gave of his second coming; the second, in which, as soon as He appears, they will happen: the renewal of the universe, the resurrection of the dead, the Last Judgment, the end of time, the complete realization of the kingdom of God.
I must not now deal with these matters; but, consider how frivolous and ridiculous the thought of so many spirits that, speaking to them of the second coming, supposes that it is a problematic event, a doubtful episode, an unlikely event, in short, a fantasy or a a chimera; when, on the contrary, there is a logical consequence, a necessary complement to the epilogue of a work of God in history.
What did history do forty centuries before Jesus Christ? Prepare your first coming. What has history been doing for twenty centuries? To prepare for his second coming, which can no longer be doubted, take place in this age of the world, since the Angel of the Apocalypse passed through the earth and gave the tremendous warning that, with the convenient and dignified advance; it must precede Judgment Day.
That angel was Vicente Ferrer, the most extraordinary of the characters that, after the Apostles, humanity has ever seen and whose Church, recognizing that he was what he affirmed of himself, says in the bull of his canonization: "He had in himself the documents of the eternal Gospel to evangelize the inhabitants of the earth, like the year that flew through the sky, the day of the tremendous doomsday, to manifest to everyone tribes and tongues, that the kingdom of God and the day of judgment were approaching "
Why does the Church, in an authentic document, use such solemn expressions in relation to a man? Because, for twenty years of his life, Vicente Ferrer filled Europe with wonders, and because, he only went down to the tomb, precursor signs, hitherto invisible, of recent times began to appear on the horizon of history.
How Catholics have forgotten facts of this order and how we can; in relation to the second coming of Jesus Christ, to live without meditation, or to think that it is always something far away, very distant from us?! ...
Well; I say the opposite; and, affirming the proximity of the second coming of Jesus Christ, I do not prophesy; announcement.
Prophecy has already been made for twenty centuries: and by the One who gave the signs, to recognize the time of the second coming.
Although I was not a priest, that is, more than a prophet, I also need not be a prophet to study our time, to distinguish the signs of the time, and to urge my fellow men not to be deluded about the second coming, like the Jews who , because they did not know how to read the Scriptures, they were deluded about the first.
I do not prophesy; I do more than that: I announce!
Do you need light, to enlighten you, for free to enlighten you, for strength that encourages you in the face of this great and formidable subject, the greatest that the Christian pulpit at present can offer?
Today is one of the greatest days of humanity and the Church; and the most appropriate day to reach that light, that grace, that strength from heaven ... I have
spent centuries in fantasy; transport yourself by imagination to the most beautiful part of Asia ... Enter the famous city, of which Tasso said, in magnificent verses, seeing her, at the end of a sweet pilgrimage:
"It is she, it is herself, another cannot be,
What other city can this beauty have?
A chorus of a thousand voices in mystical union
Brada: it is Jerusalem; it is the daughter of Zion! "
Enter Jerusalem ... Contemplate what is happening in the Upper Room today. It is the biggest and most amazing of all the transformations. A handful of weak, cowardly, and helpless men stand up bold, bold, brave. In a moment the darkness of intelligence is dissipated; enlightened, they understand the divine plan of Redemption. In an instant, the fear that made them flee Calvary, where the Divine Friend and Incomparable Master had sealed with his precious blood the universal testament of Infinite Love, is replaced by the courage with which they face all the powers of the world.
What had happened?
The Holy Spirit had descended on the Apostles and the disciples gathered in the Upper Room from which he left, in a fiery impetus, to overwhelm the entire universe, the revolution that he proposed to humanity, for all the centuries of his earthly life, the worship of a dead God!
We are also in the Cenacle ... Apostles and disciples are gathered ... This day is truly the day of Pentecost.
It is not a trope, a figure, a prosopope, what I say. In the Church nothing passes, nothing is extinguished, nothing dies; everything continues, everything is perpetual, everything is immortal .... Like passion and death, like the Calvary of Jesus Christ are reproduced daily, incessantly, across the surface of the globe, by the reality of the Mass; also, for the merits of the Church, each Temple is an upper room, where the Holy Spirit is poured out on the faithful who supplicate its effusion.
Let us supplicate it, this effusion, and be sure that, just as the Apostles and disciples in Jerusalem, leaving the Upper Room, They were no longer afraid to proclaim the resurrection of the dead God; You too, leaving this Calvary today, to enter the city, which is our Jerusalem, will fear neither at home, nor in the family, nor in the city, to proclaim the glorious coming, not of the dead God, but of the living God .

VIII

THE MANIFESTAL AND WELL VISIBLE SIGNS, IN OUR TIME, OF THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST

Woe to the inhabitants of the land because, at present, the purest terrestrial feelings are falsified: - patriotism, and divine feelings the most beautiful: - charity.
There are many causes that have corrupted and degraded patriotism. Political vanity, diplomatic cunning, national pride, ambition for power and glory would undoubtedly suffice to explain how the notion of the country is disfigured in our time, and how the less oriented spirits of true civism and less solicitous peoples of true moral greatness, these are precisely those who instill heralds in a nation, or models of other peoples.
These causes would suffice; but I want to point out others, not without first mentioning an enormous contradiction of our time with regard to the phenomenon at hand. On the one hand, the ideal that prevails in politics, in diplomacy and in the civic education of peoples is that of elevating a country over the others, whether through progress and industry, or through war and conquest. On the other hand, what most fascinates spirits today is humanitarianism, that is, the universal federation of peoples, the totality, the universality of international relations; is pacifism, for which our age holds congresses, but against which,
at the same time, it prepares militarism, war, and conquest. Having pointed out the contradiction, I must also add to the already mentioned causes of the decay of patriotism: the government's confusion with the people who exercise it and the misconception of cosmopolitanism.
They all know, by instinct, what the country is, what the country must be. Fully considered, the motherland is not only the present; it is also the past. It is not just progress; it is also the tradition. The homeland, said an eloquent voice, is the birthplace, the homeland, the family, the city; it is a beautiful thing in the dreams of the youth, it is a holy thing in the meditations of the mature age.
I allowed myself to add such beautiful words to my words. The homeland is not only the right, justice, parliament, simple pulmonary organs of a people, that does not breathe if it has no life, and the life of a people is the great and strong feeling that it has of God. Homeland is not only the flag that covers fights, the blood that bloods wars, the enthusiasm that faces death. The country is God in combat, because it is God who makes the true soldier. The homeland is not only the enthusiasm that fascinates, the freedom that takes away, the love that delights, No; the homeland is not only in these great and beautiful things: life, freedom, love. The homeland for a man is also his baptismal font, the temple of his ancestors, the prayer that his mother taught him in childhood, a luminous cross that she showed him on the walls of the home,the sacrosanct affection that the mother's soul overflowed in yours, in this word the most beautiful of all human language: God!
You understand how this Christian notion of the homeland is far from the notion of those who confuse it with the government, with the rulers, or with the notion of those who intend to absorb patriotism in cosmopolitanism.
The government of a country is not the nation, much less the motherland. Governments change; political forms vary; the rulers succeed one another; the homeland remains.
Cosmopolitanism, as they understand it modernly, is a mistake. To say like Renan that the homeland is a complex of ideas and limited prejudices, is to state an absurdity; it is to pretend with Brison that patriotism excludes the universal and fraternal union of peoples, it is to repudiate the Gospel.
Patriotism is a legitimate affection, consecrated by Jesus Christ, He came to earth, it is true, to make unity among men and substitute the idea of ​​a new humanity, in which to say there is no Jew, neither Gentile, nor Greek, nor Barbarian. However, it is necessary to distinguish, in the personality of Jesus Christ, his human nature and his mission. His mission made him the man of all times, of all races; from everywhere, from the point of view of the vocation to supernatural life. His human nature made him the citizen of a defined country, with feelings and duties that he did not want to repudiate. Jesus wants on the earth one flock and one shepherd; this is humanity. But at the same time, He is the Son of David, the glory of the people of Israel, and, as it was recorded from the inscription of the Cross, the king of the Jews: this is the country,Someone wrote: humanity has love, but the homeland has the tenderness of Jesus. Homeland is humanity, therefore, they are not mutually exclusive, they are harmonized in the kingdom of God, which will have at the second coming of Jesus Christ, not only the triumphant acclaim of Christian souls and peoples, but also the Hosanna of humanity!
The forgery of charity is presently no less than that of patriotism. What is called philanthropy has taken over spirits; and, even when the word charity is not excluded and replaced by vain and ridiculous neologisms, the prevailing idea is that which confuses charity with service, gift, almsgiving, beneficence, natural compassion.
Apostle S. Paulo said: “If I speak the language of men and angels, and have no charity, I am like the ringing metal, or the ringing bell. And if you have the gift of prophecy, and know all the mysteries and how much you can know; and if I have all the faith to the point of transporting mountains and have no charity, I am nothing. And if I distribute all my goods for the support of the poor; and if I surrender my body to be burned, and have no charity, neda of this takes advantage of me ".
Compare, gentlemen, compare this notion of charity with that of the modern age, and tell me what to think of so many spirits, without excluding the exclusion of Catholics, who are supposed to be charitable, because they sympathize with man's physical miseries, because they give alms. , because they contribute to the construction of nursing homes, hospitals, orphanages "...
Great and beautiful, I do not contest it, that is what can be called the apostolate of physical miseries. The pains, the tears, the groans of man will always touch the heart; nor is it to be despised, on the contrary, much is to honor the solicitude of all those who dedicate themselves, in various ways, to the relief of the indigent, to the relief of poverty. Jesus Christ, with his example, made this solicitude sacred and the Church was never indifferent to man's material needs. Let us not forget, therefore, that even in this solicitude charity must enter; and that the rich, in relation to the poor, must be aware of the idea, which Scripture gives us, when it says: - "Beatus qui intellgit super egenum et pauperem", Happy is he who understands what the poor is! It is not enough to look at the poor with the eyes of the flesh; you have to look at it with the eyes of intelligence and faith,seeing in him a mystical representation of Christ, the great Friend of the poor, the Benefactor: compassionate of all human miseries, and who wept seeing the hungry crowd, - misereor super turbam, - as the Gospel says.
CristoThe Christ, however, did not make a single benefit to the body of man, without raising his purpose higher and without giving the kindness of alms the love of souls that does not exist today in the philanthropy of those who confuse natural compassion with charity. The confusion is great and regrettable; but I don't have to insist. What I need to insist on is that if philanthropy of our time is enough to give relief to the compassion that every man feels, seeing leprosy, ulcers, gangrene as similar, it is not enough to fulfill the commandment of charity; not to love God, to identify with Jesus Christ, in this charity that He himself spoke to the apostles, describing one of the most grandiose scenes of the Second Coming.
The second coming of Jesus Christ was previously demonstrated, it is not a hypothesis, a reality, a simple pious aspiration; it is a promise of Jesus Christ himself, which, being the complement of the kingdom of God, which he inaugurated on earth, has for this very reason and implicitly in the historical facts that developed that kingdom, an evolution that is both divine and human. It is divine, because its historical march is part of the revelation. It is human, because, not only is revelation a historical goal; all other facts, on which the truths of faith rest, are also historical.
An evolution, wherever it takes place, involves a complex of facts that not only characterize it, but also serve as signs to be recognized. Now, what are the signs of the second coming of Jesus Christ?
Tradition, Scripture, the Gospel, and according to all these sources of Catholic truth, the teaching of the Fathers and Doctors of the Church gives them to us, for our government and direction, as well as for the justification of Divine Providence, which he does not want. that the last cycle of humanity on the planet is closed unexpectedly; and for this reason, the Church, forbidding that the day is the hour, calls, in various ways, the faithful to study the time and examine the signs of the second coming of Jesus Christ.
These signs are of two kinds: some that must precede, others that must accompany the second coming; some previous, others concomitant. It is necessary not to confuse them, as many people do, always having in mind, as unique signs of the second coming, the universal disturbance of the terrestrial globe, the darkening of the sun, the invasion of the waters; or else, the appearance of Antichrist and the great battle that he must, throughout the world, fight against the Church. Now, the physical signs, which we are dealing with, are concomitant signs, and simple common sense says that we should not wait for them for the second coming: The appearance of Antichrist, his reign and the great universal battle will shortly precede the second coming ;and common sense also teaches us that we must not save the preparation of our weapons for the occasion when the enemy has already appeared and fought the fight.
What signs then do we have so that, when examined, they can be our help and our guarantee? Those that precede, with greater or lesser interval, the second coming of Jesus Christ. These signs, characterized by facts, are formed, developed and completed. The main ones are: the apostasy of the nations, the rarity of the faith, the universal preaching of the Gospel, the conversion of the Jews, and that which among all, in our time, stands out as the great sign, that is, the excess of material life .
1st Apostasy of nations. - Absolutely necessary for men, faith is also absolutely necessary for nations. It is a dogma that nations belong to Jesus Christ: it is a fact, however, that more or less all of them, non-Catholics, or even Catholics, have bet on the faith and repudiated Jesus Christ.
Since paganism, from the grave into which Christianity had thrown it, has been unearthed by the Renaissance, which once again introduced it to letters, arts, philosophy and politics, the tendency of actions has been to secularize each other more, understanding each other. if by secularism the successive repudiation of all ties, which united religion with governments, and the Church with the State. Not only did schism and heresy separate entire kingdoms from their relations with the Church; not only, through so-called reform, most of Europe has become Protestant; Catholic nations themselves gradually removed the Christian base from their codes and constitutions, proclaiming in their legislation all freedoms incompatible with the preponderance of religion in the relations of public and even private life. Secularize marriage, secularize teaching,secularize education, secularize politics, detach it completely from all Christian influence: this is the more or less realized ideal of modern nations, both in Europe and in America, where a nation, Brazil, publicly, officially, proclaimed its apostasy, banishing God from all his codes and laws, his teaching, his education, his politics and his government.
All dominated since 1789 by the revolutionary spirit, which made that date the greatest catastrophe in history, the nations, for the most part, are presently pagan. This is not a statement, but a truth that is very easy to demonstrate.
What was the essence of paganism? It was certainly not the outward worship of idols; it was the divorce between man and God. In the intellectual order, the emancipation of reason in matters of dogma; in the social order, the emancipation of divine authority in matters of government; in the moral order, the emancipation of the will in everything that concerns customs; in the material order, the emancipation of the divine law of progress by the excesses of material civilization. Now, which of these errors has not been adopted by modern nations, except for the so-called Catholic nations ?! All of them, more or less, are paganized; in all, the revolutionary spirit that dominates and enslaves them has formed, developed and has almost completed the apostasy, which is one of the signs of the second coming, without this excluding the punishments that have already predicted the philosophy of history,the prediction of great men, armed socialism. The philosophy of history, because it shows that equal sins attract identical punishments, and therefore modern nations cannot escape the punishments that fell on the pagan peoples. The prediction of great men, among many others Napoleon, Donoso Cortez, De Maistre, announcing to the world this double barbarism: - the savage, which will be that of the new Barbarians; the wise, which will be that of the revolutionaries. Armed socialism, because it already cries and complains and threatens.announcing to the world this double barbarism: - the savage, which will be that of the new Barbarians; the wise, which will be that of the revolutionaries. Armed socialism, because it already cries and complains and threatens.announcing to the world this double barbarism: - the savage, which will be that of the new Barbarians; the wise, which will be that of the revolutionaries. Armed socialism, because it already cries and complains and threatens.
2nd Rarity of Faith. - Faith is rare at present. Why deny it? S. Paulo had prophesied, without a doubt, the most anomalous of all contemporary phenomena, when - he said: “the time will come when men will not endure sound doctrine, but, impelled by foolish desires and a sickly itching of the ears, they will choose teachers they will flee from the truth and turn to the fables ”.
At present it is not only for practical faith, as the almost universal abandonment of the sacraments, especially by men, proves. The theoretical faith itself is also very rare; since, everywhere, there is a way of thinking completely opposite to the Gospel, and opinions, maxims, Judgments, diametrically opposed to those of Jesus Christ. Even excluding unbelievers, the faith is not whole, complete, integral, in the majority of those who call themselves believers and Catholics. There are many who accept certain dogmas and refuse others; those who practice religion, but, dominated by human respect, do as little as possible, and as much as possible, on the sly; those who believe and practice, however, mechanically; without awareness of what they believe, and what they practice: those who mix the profane with the sacred, making the church a meeting point, a hobby,or simple family and educational convenience. Where, today, the courageous, brave, audacious faith? Where?!
In fact, in this matter, it is necessary to say them: in the past there were heresies, today there are no more; because they all merged into one: rationalism:
Yes; rationalism presently covers all heresies: It is the idolatry of man by man; it is the cult of the Self; it is the practice of the most extravagant and absurd religions, replacing the practice of revealed religion.
Faith is rare, whether it be national faith, and We have already seen the conduct of modern nations; whether it is an individual faith, impossible with the various forms that can be seen today, of the so-called cold-blooded sin, which translates into many, and mainly in these iniquities: the desecration of Sunday; contempt of fasting and abstinence; illicit profit in buying and selling; fraud in all contracts; the falsification of genders, weights and measures; the violation of the physiological laws of marriage, a monstrous crime, an abominable struggle against nature, against religion and against love itself!
There is no national faith, not even in peoples, nor in a multitude of men, individual faith. Will there be domestic faith? I do not dispute that it still exists in blessed homes, in blessed families; but if you sift through many homes, if you observe what goes on in many families, you will see, of course, two different flags unfurled in the same sumptuary: the one that mothers and daughters support and that says Faith, and the one that supports fathers and children and that says Incredulity.
3rd universal preaching of the Gospel. - On the universal preaching of the Gospel, third of the signs listed, two things, say the interpreters, we must observe.
First. It is not necessary that, before the Last Judgment, the entire universe at one time knows or - professes the Catholic religion; it is enough that little by little, and successively it has been preached in everyone, otherwise it has disappeared through heresy, apostasy: or idolatry. It is not necessary that it be preached again by the apostles themselves, and where, in remote times, there were already numerous churches founded. The stubbornness of the East, the blindness of Africa does not prove against the current universality of evangelical preaching.
The second observation to make is that, thanks to the incessant travel of numerous navigators, It can already be said that the entire globe has been traveled, by sea and by land; and that in the five parts of the world, everywhere, the Gospel has penetrated.
4th The conversion of the Jews. - Phenomenon that almost nobody reflects is the one that the world has since the French revolution, the conversion of the Jews. As it is of faith that, during the persecution of the Antichrist, the mass Jewish people must return to Jesus Christ, it was necessary that, dispersed as it was throughout the world, and hated and despised by all nations, it should begin, with due advance, the receive the influx of Christian civilization. Well then; the French revolution, as an illustrious historian shows, was the instrument that God used to put the Jews on the path of salvation. Emancipating the Jews (which she had for anti-Christian hatred), the eighty-nine revolution did nothing but accomplish a divine plan, that is, by putting Judaism in such immediate contact with Christianity, that it broke into pieces,just like a clay vase thrown against an iron one.
Judaism is over, as a religious system. Innumerable conversions took place. Jews penetrated everywhere. In all countries, they return to the traditional faith. The number of conversions in the last century is so stupendous that Drach found that more Jews were converted in ten years than in the past two centuries!
5th Excess of material life. - This is, as I said, what stands out among all of us, in our time, as the great sign of the second coming of Jesus Christ.
What will be, the disciples asked the Divine Master, the sign of your coming and the consummation of things?
After having told the disciples that the day and hour of the end of time does not affect the revelation, he adds that, from his second coming, they will be able to recognize the time, by the sign that he will give them:
"It will succeed at the second coming, says Jesus Christ, the same as it happened in the time of Noah. Just as before the flood men were eating, drinking, getting married, until the day Noah entered the ark, and they did not know the flood came, if not after he came, and took them all, so will it happen, when the Son of Man comes, As it happened also in Lot's time; men ate, drank, bought, sold, planted, edified .. . and the fire that consumed them all fell from heaven. The same will be the day the Son of Man appears ".
Let us analyze this sign, and it is impossible that our age will not fill us with immense compassion; because it is clearly, evidently the predicted time, and described by Jesus Christ as the great sign of his second coming.
What sin is there in eating, drinking, marrying, planting, edifying ?! Evidently none, if all these acts are necessary for man, if all these acts are necessary for man, he practices them within the limits prescribed by his own needs. What then does Jesus Christ mean by that? It means, say the interpreters of Scripture, that He will return, when the majority of men live only for the body: when to eat, drink, sell, buy, build, they are the dominant occupation of men; when, astonished by matter and slaves to the senses, wealth, physical well-being, enjoyment, pleasure, are the care that absorbs their time, no impression causing them the promises of Jesus Christ and the voice of the Church!
Contemplate the excess of material life in our time: See not only the animal man of which S. Paulo speaks, absorbed by the concern for money and business, indifferent to everything that is not sensitive and material; also see what they want, each for their own turn, politics, industry, commerce, administration, government, all the strife, working exclusively for the material progress of nations; see what the peoples most fervently desire, restless disaffected, rebelled against all political authority, not because they really detest despotism, or really love freedom, but only because they aspire, like the Roman people, in ancient paganism, panem et circenses - food and pleasures; see, it is impossible not to recognize in the material excess of contemporary society a faithful copy of the material excess that preceded the flood,and that Jesus Christ made the great sign of the second coming.
All the enumerated signs, as already mentioned, are formed, developed and completed. It cannot be said precisely of the apostasy of the nations, of the decay of the faith, of the universal preaching of the Gospel and of the conversion of the Jews - that nothing is missing from these signs to be complete, and something may still come. the sign, however, given by Jesus Christ and which consists in the excess of the material life of our time, seems to have reached its entire development, it seems complete.
And why should we delude ourselves ?! The difficult time has come, twenty centuries ago pointed out by Jesus Christ, and in which the man (oh what an exact traits given prophetically by St. Paul!), Proud, blasphemous, self-loving, still has an appearance of piety, but he absolutely does not have this virtue, nor will he have it, because he always learns, without ever reaching the knowledge of the truth!
The difficult time has come! What resource do we have left? Defend the soul! Yes, defend it, because everything conspires against it. They conspire against the soul today, in the most dreadful of all the collusions that Hell has already done with the world: the mystification of spiritism, impelling it to the real cult of the Demon, which truly under a thousand frauds and cunning dominates and governs it; the monstrous aberration of positivism, making it, in the most chimerical of abstractions, adore itself; the perfidy of Protestant sects, deviating from the Gospel and the Church; the betrayals and evils of Freemasonry, making it receive as false gold from charity the false coin of its touted philanthropy; the ridiculous skepticism of thousands of newspapers encouraging it, with mockery and scorn, to disregard the most useful and necessary truths of Religion.
But today they do not conspire against the human soul, only spiritism, positivism, Masonic societies, the libertine press. conspire against it science, politics, art, poetry itself! Undoubtedly, the science that conspires against the soul is not true science; nor is politics, which animalizes man, the noble function of governing; nor is industry, which sees only the body in it, the true genius of progress; nor is it that which is inspired only by matter, it is that which emanates from the true and the beautiful; nor is poetry, which decays the rot of sin, the one that echoes the harmony of heaven in the exile of the earth. But what does it matter? Evil spreads; plague plows; wickedness, like a sea, invades everything: home, faith, the city, the homeland, humanity.
Oh!my friends, in this shipwreck, greater than those you have heard of in the ocean, because it is a spiritual shipwreck, and the saddest of all times, because it is a shipwreck in the soul, oh! I lost everything in this wreck, the wealth, the power, the tranquility, the peace; defend, however, against everything and everyone, your soul created by God and for God, and for this very reason consecrated by Christ who; on the first coming, he rescued her with his blood, and on the second coming he will give her eternal happiness, among the splendors of love in the Infinto!

IX

AS IT IS NOT LATER THAT JESUS ​​CHRIST APPEARS, TRIUMPHANT AND GLORIOUS, IN HARMONY, POMPA AND JUSTICE OF THE SECOND COMING

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because everything foreshadows a great and extraordinary event in our time; because the foresight of great thinkers, the philosophy of history and a series of contemporary facts await the greatest and most stupendous interventions by Divine Providence in the march of the world; because the world itself is, since without discerning what it is, in the expectation of a formidable success, which will change the face of the universe; and in the meantime, the vast majority of the inhabitants of the land live, like contemporaries of the flood, engulfed in the present, careless of the future, absorbed by business, only sensitive to earthly pleasures and enjoyments, without any concern for the supernatural and divine!
There is, I repeat and repeat, a universal expectation! Conscious or unconscious, the world is under the impression and the influence of this expectation. It is not clear, luminous, glowing, like that of Messianism, which preceded the first coming of Jesus Christ, but it is real and stands out from all the sadness and disappointments of modern civilization. The noise of the factories, the manufacture of weapons, the spectacle of the proletarian populations, the groans of pauperism, the threats of socialism, the hypothesis, not infrequently formulated, of new barbarians and new invasions, all this, undoubtedly, makes our historical period a dramatic time, full of terror and tears. But that is not precisely what characterizes the current expectation.
What characterizes it, giving our age the irrepressible aspiration of a supernatural and divine remedy to the ills of humanity, is the radical incapacity of science and the already inertia of politics, for the happiness of man; it is the complete failure of that happiness through education and progress. It is on this that the prediction of great thinkers is based, as to the next intervention of God in the march of the world.
For its part, the philosophy of history states that, being history, not a chronicle or a gazette, but a construction, at the same time human and divine, obeys laws, among which, that of analogy, and this authorizes us to to affirm that, as the experience already made by humanity, of its misery, determined from God a great remedy, that is, the mercy of the first coming of Jesus Christ; the already complete experience of the pride of humanity will determine, by default, what it is, the punishment it must have, that is, the justice of the second coming of Jesus Christ.
As for the series of contemporary facts that I have previously enumerated and analyzed: apostasy of nations, rarity of faith, universal preaching of the Gospel, conversion of Jews and material excess of life, to those who hear or read me, whether Catholic or non-Catholic, absolutely not assists the right to deny the reality of such facts. To deny such facts is to deny the notorious, historical truth; it is to deny the known truth, which constitutes a sin against the Holy Spirit. If you are a Catholic, to recognize these facts, but not to believe that they are signs of the greater or lesser proximity of the second coming, is to repudiate a teaching taken from Tradition, Scripture, the Gospel, and the lesson  of the priests and doctors of the Church .
The sin of those who are not Catholics, when they deny the known truth, is great, and Scripture presents it as one of the most odious forms of the repulsion of the Holy Spirit by the man who, if he is blind when, contemplating the magnificences and the beauties from the universe, he does not see the order, harmony, omnipotence and fruitfulness of God-Creator; if he is ungrateful when, breathing the Christian atmosphere that Jesus Christ gave to the world in wonders of infinite love, he does not see in these wonders the goodness, devotion, mercy of God the Redeemer; it is in reality a rational creature that degrades and demeans itself when, resisting the graces that the Sanctifying God gives it, it consciously prefers the lie to the truth, or proclaiming that or not believing in it. The sin that denies the known truth, I repeat, is great; but on the part of Catholics,even in things that are not dogmatic, preferring the teaching of Tradition and the doctors of the Church to their own judgments and opinions, is temerity and so extraordinary and audacious that devotion with such vanity cannot be understood in them.
In any case, the ill will of men does not frustrate the designs of God, which are revealed, in this very solemn moment in the history of the world, by the facts that, in advance of centuries, were given as characteristic signs of the second coming of Jesus Christ .
He is what the world's expectation awaits; unaware of what is going to happen, but at the same time with the divine instinct that warns him that it cannot be repressed, that great things are reserved for the present age and that powerful human and divine reasons make us believe that this is the last time of humanity.
The philosophy of history, the precision of great thinkers and contemporary facts, usto is, the five great signs of the second coming of Jesus Christ at this time are in agreement (and this is an extremely valuable consideration) with the great universal tradition, which fixes the second coming in the sixth millennium, the end of which is precisely our century.
What is this tradition that everyone, and especially Catholics, need to know?
It is a tradition, the doctors and publicists of the Church tell us, doubly respectable: respectable for its antiquity, because it comes from remote ages; respectable by the names that corroborate it. Common to Jews and Christians, it summarizes the thinking of the two peoples; entered the Church; it has manifested itself since apostolic times and is general among priests and commentators, who adopt the feeling that the second coming of Jesus Christ will take place in the century we are in.
S. Barnabé and S. Justino, in apostolic times; the great doctors of the East and the West; S. João Crisóstomo, S. Cirilo, S. Hipólito and other more modern commentators and writers; the wise Cardinal Belarmino and the famous Malvenda reproduce, comment and justify this tradition, of which, finally, the great and distinguished Cornelius the gravestone affirms that, common, ancient it is probable, it has the pagans, the Christians, the Jews, the Greeks and the Latins.
Here, then, is a formidable tradition, which not only demonstrates the duty we have to expect in the course of this century for the second coming of Jesus Christ, but it also demonstrates that the hope of that coming in an era prior to the dent had no basis or foundation, no it was the expression of Catholic tradition and teaching, as it happens today, in which I announce it. It is about to come true. It is not long before Jesus Christ appears, triumphant and glorious, in the harmony, pomp and justice of the second coming.
In harmony. - The two advents, that is, the two coming of Jesus Christ to earth are always considered and described in Scripture differently, but completely; one in weakness and obscurity; the other in strength, majesty and triumph. In the first, he comes, feeling sorry for the immense misery that forty centuries, in the saddest of experiences, showed man the enormity of sin, visiting humanity, comforting and instructing it. In the second, the time of trial is over, consummate the destiny of man on the planet, complete the kingdom of God, inaugurate, for mankind, the empire of eternity. At first, it comes to atone, to suffer, to die. In the second, he appears to receive the honors and homage of the rescued souls. In the first, he enters the world silently, and neither the vagaries of the Nativity scene,not even the drops of blood from Calvary can reveal an Omnipotence that was made so small and a majesty that was made so humble.
In the second, he appears as the lord of the Universe, who will then be no longer an asylum in which Jesus will reside for some time, but a throne on which he will sit forever. From this antithesis, which is only apparent, the most beautiful and ineffable harmony arises, which characterize all the works of God.
What would be in Jesus Christ the humiliation of the first coming without the glorification of the second? An absurdity, considering the greatness of God; a nonsense, if we consider the smallness of man. Without the second coming, the work of Jesus Christ, that is, the kingdom of God would have no meaning, since it would be a work without an epilogue, and man would be more powerful to mock God's mercy than God to take from his mercy despised the glory that must confuse man.
Look! the second coming is a harmony! Calvary, that is, the death of a God, sacrificed by humanity, demands that humanity collectively see its glorification.
Also, and for that very reason, still in the midst of pain, surrounded by ignominiousness, oppressed by sinners, persecuted, Judged, condemned by the world, Man-God never removed from his eyes the magnificent vision of his second coming, in which the world that sought to confuse Him is in turn confused, watching in the universal acclaim of the earth and the heavens, the triumph that He announced more than once to his enemies, affirming that they would later appear victorious, over the clouds, with great power and great majesty.
In pomp. —— The triumph of Jesus Christ at the second coming requires pomp proportional to his greatness; demands that in the universe scenario, which must receive your Monarch, everything is prepared to receive Him. That is why the interpreters point out, regarding the second coming of Jesus Christ, two distinct periods: a long one, in which the precursor signs in advance of so many centuries indicated by Tradition, Scripture, Gospel, Doctors of the Church, are formed, developed and complete each other, as has already been demonstrated; the other fast, one almost instantly, Jesus Christ, appears and the great and last scenes of human drama take place.
If, therefore, so many centuries have been necessary for the complement of the kingdom of God, then we must not take away either reason for discouragement or reason for unbelief. Not to wait, and not to wait firmly, in such a painful human crisis, in such a universal apostasy, God's intervention, is to deprive the Catholic faith of its rational strength and divine philosophy. Doubting the second coming, because at some time, yet the signs have not yet been completed, it was wrongly announced, and for this reason it has not been realized, it is to proceed: without reflection, like these men of which the apostle S. Pedro speaks. They ask, says the apostle, what has become the promise of the Lord's coming; since all things, from the beginning, remain in the same state; not considering, adds the apostle,that the earth and the heavens are kept and reserved for the punishment of the second coming, nor considering that God is not unfaithful, nor slows down, as they imagine, the fulfillment of his promise, but waits patiently for men to return to Him by penance; which does not prevent, however, that the day of the Lord comes, and that He appears suddenly, when they least expect Him.
In justice. - Our Imagination cannot figure, but our heart can sense the Justice of the second coming. The first coming was the madness of Love; the second coming will be the reprisal of Love!
The madness of Love ?! Yes!Imagine on the head of a God who is Man the weight of all iniquities, all crimes of the heart, all crimes of the senses, all of the orgies of humanity, the pride of all intelligences, the lust of all imaginations, all the aberrations of science, all the profanations of Art, all the adulteries of Poetry, the sacrilege of all religions, the ambition of despots, the tyranny of governments, the attacks of politics, the iniquities of judges, the absurdities of philosophy, the violations of Moral, all the scandals of the world, the aberrations of Sodom and Gomorrah, the prostitutions and Babylon, the bacchanals of Greece, the ambition and cruelties of Rome, the idolatry of the pagan peoples, the perversities of the Jewish nation, the iniquities of all the modern peoples and the perfidy of monarchies, the imposture of republics,the falsity of democracies, - imagine all this, and that this God who is Man, clothed with all these sins, by the remedy of all this offers to Justice his death on Calvary! I will still have, palely, described the madness of Love!
Imagine now this Love despised, mocked, rejected by a multitude of human beings, who loved everything: the joy, the pleasure, the wealth, the glory, the false joys of this world; who had compassion for all pains, except for the supreme pain of the Crucified One; who had the intelligence to study all truths, except the truths that He revealed; who had a taste for all poetry, except for the Redemption poem; who did not often refuse to acknowledge their ingratitude towards simple human benefactors, but never worried or afflicted their ingratitude towards the Divine Benefactor; who tremble and love, I do not deny them, home, family, country, humanity, but absolutely do not love the One who gave them, creating them, these treasures of the heart; imagine. that these human creatures,thus deformed by the greatest and most monstrous ingratitude that can be conceived, they come face to face with Jesus Christ, as it will happen at the second coming.
Oh!they despised in the mercy of God, who is Man, the madness of love; will have in Momem's Justice, which is God, the reprisal of despised love.
Love despised! But do you know what He is ?! Ask him the saddest episodes of terrestrial life, the most dreadful catastrophes in history, the most desperate furies of souls, the most horrifying crime statistics, the darkest poems and the most desolate pictures that Poetry and Art have given to the human ingenuity to compose; evoke from your tombs all the great unfortunates, whom despised love has desolated; ask all of them what is despised love! Despised love is no longer love! In man it is hate; in God - it is an undeniable need of Justice that, in the very work of our redemption, cannot be omitted by Jesus Christ.
Three things come into this work: the love of Jesus Christ, the freedom of man, the Justice of God, love was complete, so complete that Jesus Christ can exclaim, in the supreme instant of divine tragedy: consummatum est! ... everything is made for the salvation of man! This salvation cannot be forcibly and violently given to man, whom God has made free and treats, as Scripture says with great respect: cum magna reverentia disponet nos. However, man cannot avoid (which would be the greatest absurdity) Justice, which owes Justice that will judge him, and that will actually (without excluding the private judgment), Judge him, in the face of gender whole human, at the second coming of Jesus Christ.
I cannot now describe the great and last scenes of human drama; the renewal of the terrestrial globe; the resurrection of the dead; the universal assembly of mankind in the final judgment; the last and definitive triumph of the Church.
What I want, and I have done so in full and very clear awareness of a mission for which, I am sure, was that God especially made me a priest; what I want is to preach the proximity of the second coming of Jesus Christ; that is, to give the “announcement for which God prepared me, twenty-five years, in prayer, in study, in meditation, in penance, and I must say it, in many and great humiliations.
I regret that today I was unable to give a more complete idea of ​​the harmony, pomp and justice with which the second coming of Jesus Christ will dazzle and confuse the universe.
Alexandre de Humboldt had an astronomical utopia in his head. He imagined that our eyes would be given a greater optical power, much greater than those of the most powerful telescopes: Could man then contemplate the spectacle of the universe with a supernatural force: What would happen if it were so? The apparent immobility of the sky would disappear for man ... He would see that the stars run in opposite directions .... that nebulae condense into planets, and planets dissolve into nebulae ... that the Via-Lactea, like a belt huge, divides into a thousand fragments ... he would see the transition of the solar system ... the extinction of certain stars and the appearance of others .... man would see without the illusion of the senses, agitation, movement, life of the Cosmos.
The Catholic dogma of the second coming, which is not a utopia, but a promise of Jesus Christ, will in reality be a spectacle for the entire universe, infinitely more beautiful than the utopia of the celebrated naturalist.
The entire universe, and not just man, will contemplate their Creator! ... From the rough stone, which has a thousand applications in architecture, to the diamond, which gives vanity its ornament; from the low moss to the gigantic tree; from the zoophyte, this first vestige of circulation, to man, the supreme function of blood; palm trees; grasses, and rosettes; mammals, fish, reptiles and birds; the wind, the cloud, the snow, the lightning, the storm, the planets and their satellites and the innumerable stars; the earth and the multiple worlds, each illuminated by several suns, - the whole universe will contemplate in Jesus Christ, triumphant and glorious, a glow that, everything erases a glow that clarifies everything, an endless clarity; and, as if inanimate things also had intelligence, reason and freedom,all of them transfigured in man, from one end of the world to the other, will release through the man's mouth, saluting Jesus Christ at the second coming, an immense cry, whose harmonious echo we can already perceive: - it is the Hymn of Creation!

X

LIKE THE VIRGIN, WHICH WAS THE HUMANITY RELIEF FOR THE FIRST COMING, WILL BE, AS THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST, THE AID OF SOULS IN THE PILGRIMAGE OF THE ANTICHRIST.

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because at present there is no place in the world where there is no intention to expel God as an annoying guest who wants to receive and demands, without right, our tributes.
Three abominations! three great calamities of our time! And how absurd they are! In the beautiful kingdoms of creation, where the mineral, the vegetable, the animal and the man, each of these creatures raises, it can be said, a hymn to the Creator; - the mineral, in the geometry of its forms; - the vegetable, in the mysterious strength of the seed; - the animal at the junction of the sensitive to the vegetative force; - man in the perfection that reason, conscience and will give to simple sensitivity; in the beautiful kingdoms of creation, they do not want to see the God that mathematics proclaims in numbers; that physics proclaims in light, heat and movement; that chemistry proclaims in the indifference of molecules; that mechanics proclaims in the transformation of forces; physiology in the phenomena of life, and all positive sciences, in the fundamental laws without which they do not exist! How absurd!
Expel God from social regimes! conspire against divine action, lest it have any influence on laws or social customs! Absurd, which offends both reason, tradition and history. To reason, because human reason recognizes that God not only helps man in the difficulties and vicissitudes of private life, in the most varied episodes and scenes of the domestic home, but also influences the great and tragic events in the lives of peoples. To tradition, because tradition nourishes all peoples, who believe in this providential and beneficial intervention of God, and testify to their belief in temples, in sacrifices, in prayers, in universal supplication; to history, because history is a series of events linked and directed by Divine Providence as Scripture teaches, peoples and kings are subject,nations and their legislators; it being for Him that rulers govern and legislators enact fair laws; it is God who enlightens and confuses the nations, rewarding them; or punishing them; since without God no one can understand history, this gigantic and colossal struggle of truth against error, freedom against despotism, virtue against sin. But, even greater absurdity than that of false science, not wanting to see God in creation, and that of false politics, expelling God from political societies, is the absurdity of false religion, desecrating the Temple; is that of false devotees, wanting Catholic worship, but not respecting the presence of God in the special places that have been reserved for Him in the Universe,it is God who enlightens and confuses the nations, rewarding them; or punishing them; since without God no one can understand history, this gigantic and colossal struggle of truth against error, freedom against despotism, virtue against sin. But, even greater absurdity than that of false science, not wanting to see God in creation, and that of false politics, expelling God from political societies, is the absurdity of false religion, desecrating the Temple; is that of false devotees, wanting Catholic worship, but not respecting the presence of God in the special places that have been reserved for Him in the Universe,it is God who enlightens and confuses the nations, rewarding them; or punishing them; since without God no one can understand history, this gigantic and colossal struggle of truth against error, freedom against despotism, virtue against sin. But, even greater absurdity than that of false science, not wanting to see God in creation, and that of false politics, expelling God from political societies, is the absurdity of false religion, desecrating the Temple; is that of false devotees, wanting Catholic worship, but not respecting the presence of God in the special places that have been reserved for Him in the Universe,of virtue against sin. But, even greater absurdity than that of false science, not wanting to see God in creation, and that of false politics, expelling God from political societies, is the absurdity of false religion, desecrating the Temple; is that of false devotees, wanting Catholic worship, but not respecting the presence of God in the special places that have been reserved for Him in the Universe,of virtue against sin. But, even greater absurdity than that of false science, not wanting to see God in creation, and that of false politics, expelling God from political societies, is the absurdity of false religion, desecrating the Temple; is that of false devotees, wanting Catholic worship, but not respecting the presence of God in the special places that have been reserved for Him in the Universe,
Without a doubt, the entire universe is a temple full of the glory of God, present everywhere, having the right to receive man's homage! It is impossible for man, wherever he is, to avoid the presence of God! Rise to the heavens, or descend to the abyss! Hide where you please, live and move and work in God! The creature is so attached to the Creator and by a bond so narrow and strong, that even sin cannot tear it apart; and this is precisely the greatest malice, the greatest horror of sin, since we cannot commit it without, as it were, using God in the work of iniquity.
The presence of God consecrates the universe in such a way that, everywhere, everywhere we must be pure and exempt from all taint, certain that the divine gaze is fixed on each one of us, and we cannot sin without desecrating the universe. In the universe, however, there are places especially devoted to Divinity, and where the Redeemer God truly wants to live in the ineffable mystery of the Eucharist, which responds and perpetuates the life of Jesus Christ, giving himself, in all his, prodigalities, so truly as in the thirty-three years of human life in Judea.
Bethlehem, Egypt, Nazareth, Capernaum, Tabor, Bethany, Jerusalem, Getsemani and Calvary, - are not, for those who enter a Catholic temple, cities or remote places; they are living episodes that we must contemplate; mysteries that we can use; mystical, but real, continuations of the Divine Word, because the Eucharist really reproduces his Incarnation, and, reproducing it, he is born again, he grows again, he again desensolves, again he preaches and crucifies himself , dies again and resurrects again.
O! how beautiful, how sublime is this truth of Faith! The Eucharist is also the glory of the Church! and if from our temples you take away the hidden but real God, who resides in the tabernacles, waiting for souls to seek him and ask for his salvation, these temples will be nothing more than stone houses, empty like the houses of prayer of Protestants. The
beauty and sublimity of the Eucharistic truth necessarily corresponds to a duty, the infraction of which cannot but be the abomination of the Temple: - the duty of reverence - which, if in the whole universe it is due to God, in the Temple it is the duty of one. in a special way, and it cannot be understood if it is carried out without a disposition of innocence, or at least penance, without recollection of the spirit, without decency or external modesty.
As for innocence or penance, how many men presently attend temples with this disposition ?! The Church does not repel any sinner, but wants the sinner, coming to the temple, appearing before the majesty of the Redeemer God, to bring at least wishes of justice and penance, wants him to understand that, feeling guilty of sins and not thinking about means of rescue; having a corrupted heart and not wanting the remedies that can regenerate it; to separate himself from Jesus Christ, and even where he resides to accept the union that the Church proposes to him, is it to despise Jesus Christ, to insult his love, and to mock the ministry of his priests.
As for recollection, it must be translated into worship, thanksgiving and supplication. How many men, of those who currently attend the temples of Christendom, truly prostrate themselves before the Redeeming God ?! How to understand that so many men are in the temples with no sign of annihilation before the majesty of God, without awareness of the misery that they are full of, without any sign, nor an indication in their conduct, in their acts, that they understand greatness and wonders of Redemption ?!
It is in the temple that the death of a God is reproduced incessantly, the altar being, in the sacrifice of the Mass, but another Calvary, and the Mass, the same immolation of the same victim. It is in the temple that, as a well of abundance, the sacramental well in which the stains of sin are washed is revealed, and from which the sinner emerges purer and whiter than snow. It is in the temple that the banquet of souls is served to mankind with a simplicity that disguises opulence, since the food of this banquet is the flesh, and the wine of this banquet is the blood of a God. It is in the temple that, rivaling the sacraments, the priest's word, whether in the height of sublime discourse or in the simple effusions of a family practice, reproduces the teachings of the Divine Master! To despise all this is not to truly desecrate the temple ?!
As for decency and external modesty, it is not untamed profanity to make luxury a weapon of war against the God of the poor, but what is it also for the rich ?! appearing in the temples not only with pride and vanity, but also with immodesty and recklessness, opposing the groans and tears that the Church asks for sins, the crazy sparkle of diamonds that dazzle the world !! to make garments that have no end but the modesty of the human body, means, on the contrary, to expose the human body, like a public sack, of the lust for lust ?! Come to the temples to dispute Jesus Christ for the looks and tributes that are due to Him alone ?!
Ah!Catholics who come to the temple, not to humble themselves, but to quench the worms of lust, - these desecrate the temple! and its course is, without a doubt, much worse, much more abominable than the pride of false science and the inertia of false politics!
O! of all the crimes of that time, the greatest of all and the one that most outrages divine majesty is the desecration of the Temple, from which today, as of all other places on earth, it seems that they want to expel even those who make a profession of piety .
The Temple! this is the last citadel that remains to Jesus Christ! There is little lack, however, for it to be uprooted; and, whichever it is, besieged as it is already by the enemy army, whose legions are Protestants, Spiritists, Positivists and Freemasons, he will enter it, arrogant, haughty, proud, the one that all languages ​​call Antichrist!
The great tyrant in him will enter with the power and operations of Satan, with all sorts of lying wonders, signs and miracles. Since not many men have received the truth that He wanted to save them, God, in punishment, will let them believe the lie; being certain, says Doctor Angelico, that Antichrist will not less seduce men by lavish promises of earthly goods, nor by the fallacious apparatus of his false miracles, with the wonder of which he will exceed in power all the precursors that he has had, since the foundation of the Church.
Did you hear, S wrote, John, that Antichrist must arrive. For since now there are several antichrists. S. Paulo also, revealing the same truth, said: the mystery of iniquity is at work now.
Right from the beginning, the Church finds itself in struggle with the Roman empire, that furious monster, greedy for blood, persecuting Christians, and that was punished by God with the tremendous catastrophe that annihilated him. Idolatry was followed by heresy; to heresy, Mohammedanism; Mohammedanism, the Renaissance; renaissance, reform; to reform, the revolution. All these forms of error have had their personification in small antichrists, precursors to the great, the last, the most terrible of all, the Antichrist himself who, properly said, has completely prepared the enormous army that awaits him and that is formed by all the enemies of the Church, will appear clothed with all diabolic power. St. Paul defines it, saying: "the Wicked One is the man of sin, the son of perdition". The Doctrines of the Church describe it as a compound of all vices,a ghastly summary of all crimes, the most finished type of the wickedness of hell, a monster of iniquity, like the earth has never seen and of which the greatest monsters in history would have been simple sketches.
One could say that a demon was infused with human flesh, endowed with various talents, astute, immensely powerful; managing, in front of many, to pass for a new Redeemer; denying the divinity of Christ; entering the Temple and wanting to be worshiped as the true Messiah; succeeding, aided by all the forces of hell, to dazzle and drag the nations; finally establishing, from one end of the world to the other, the anti-Christian kingdom, of which he will be the leader and exceeding in the height of power, by cruelty, the dreadful fame of Nero, Diocletian, Muhammad, and how many despots preceded him; through hypocrisy, all false preachers of the truth; for blasphemy, all the greatest the greatest tyrants of which history speaks.
When it comes to this anti-Christian kingdom and the hideous tyrant who will be its leader, says an illustrious interpreter, some smile mockingly; others hesitate, in believing, some think it is a chimera; others that it is an event impossible to predict, isolated, without connection with the facts of real life, levity and ignorance! There are two things about the anti-Christian kingdom: one that was divinely predicted; another that is humanly uncontroversial. Thus, it is by faith that at the end of time the anti-Christian kingdom will rise, which will be the Church's most terrible enemy for its power, wickedness, cruelties and means of seduction; and it is also certain that such a kingdom has preparations in the history and life of men and peoples.
The Scriptures speak to us of the anti-Christian Kingdom. The Apostles foretold it; the Fathers of the Church give us their main features. The heretics, the wicked, the tyrants have always been considered by the Doctors of the Church as precursors of Antichrist, that is, the supreme and last chief of that kingdom, which has its delineations, its developments and its progress in all periods of history, which in it shows, separating itself day by day and more and more from the kingdom of God, by heresies, by persecutions, by the so-called modern freedoms, by positivist theories, by naturalism, by protestantism, by freemasonry, by spiritism, by revolution, this it is, by the impious and blasphemous declaration of the rights of man against the rights of God. This error, which is nothing but rationalism in the last expression, is the last error; and,once he reaches the height of the already universal rebellion against the truths of the faith, the world, by virtue of a law never contradicted, and from which we see splendid confirmation in history, will see a man emerge who will be the exact personification of errors, vices , of crimes, of the apostasy of the time. With the use of science, with the power of wealth, with the wonders and wonders of material progress, with the most varied means of malice that will give him hell, he will give the Church the sign of the great battle, which (without excluding previous partial matches), will be the last.With the use of science, with the power of wealth, with the wonders and wonders of material progress, with the most varied means of malice that will give him hell, he will give the Church the sign of the great battle, which (without excluding previous partial matches), will be the last.With the use of science, with the power of wealth, with the wonders and wonders of material progress, with the most varied means of malice that will give him hell, he will give the Church the sign of the great battle, which (without excluding previous partial matches), will be the last.
It is for this great and last battle that we are headed vertiginously; that everything is in turmoil; and today we have, before our eyes, this double opposite phenomenon: on the one hand, the material unification of the world by the speed of all means of locomotion, so that the tyrant and his armies can easily travel; on the other, the moral dissolution of the world by the confusion of all sects and false religions in one heresy, - rationalism - so that, over the wreckage of all of them, Antichrist will proclaim his triumph.
This triumph, although ephemeral, since Jesus Christ will dispel it with the brilliance of his second coming, will have the necessary time, which will be a few years, to show in a ghastly encounter the two armies, which are already quite different in the world at present: that of the Church, and that of Antichrist. Not to see that the time of the great battle is ours, is to have eyes so as not to see that everything is running with amazing speed for the tremendous days; it is also having ears to not hear God's warnings; it is, finally, as this great thinker and seer pondered; Count De Maistre, profess: the lighthearted maxim, invented by laziness, so as not to reflect "that all centuries have always been the same", which is what I say, in relation to our time; because, if it is true that there were always wicked, never there was, as now, a general uprising against God.says an illustrious writer, Desurmont, our age brings together all the characteristics that make the great battle foresee very soon. Great battle, yes! the one that will desolate the cities, fill the proud capitals with blood, destroy the monuments of human vanity, open paths everywhere for the demons who will preside over universal war and put all the machines of revenge and extermination at the service of the Antichrist who, according to Catholic teaching, will appear just before the second coming of Jesus, personally: to, for three and a half years, give to the persecutions that have already begun in all countries, the supreme development and the supreme refinement.fill the proud capitals with blood, destroy the monuments of human vanity, open paths everywhere for the demons who will preside over universal war and put all the machines of revenge and extermination at the service of the Antichrist who, according to Catholic teaching , just before Jesus' second coming, he will appear in person: for, for three and a half years, to give to the persecutions that have already begun in all countries, the supreme development and the supreme refinement.fill the proud capitals with blood, destroy the monuments of human vanity, open paths everywhere for the demons who will preside over universal war and put all the machines of revenge and extermination at the service of the Antichrist who, according to Catholic teaching , just before Jesus' second coming, he will appear in person: for, for three and a half years, to give to the persecutions that have already begun in all countries, the supreme development and the supreme refinement.to give to the persecutions that have already begun in all countries, the supreme development and the supreme refinement.to give to the persecutions that have already begun in all countries, the supreme development and the supreme refinement.
Who in such tremendous tribulation, as there has not yet been in the world, will be able to help human beings, who do not want to bow to the Satanic yoke of Antichrist, nor receive this ominous mark on the forehead, which Scripture calls the sign of the beast? ! Who?! That very kind and most holy Virgin who, having been the relief of humanity for the first coming, will be about the second coming of Jesus Christ, the help of souls, in the persecution of Antichrist.
It would be improper to talk about the reasons, the harmonies, the beauties, the magnificence and the necessity of the cult of the Virgin, that splendid figure who, two thousand years ago, received, on a throne illuminated by the earth and the sky, the most exceptional priests of the Church and humanity. She is not just a human person, sanctified and offered on the altars of Christendom to the veneration of souls; it is an integral part of the divine plan of redemption; it is in this plan a conscious and voluntary co-worker that God did not want to do without to rescue and save man, whose flesh the Divine Word clothed in her and with her acquiescence.
For this very reason, the cult of the Virgin is not a free devotion like that of other saints, but inherent in the economy of salvation and necessary to Christian worship, which is not perfect on the part of devotees, if they purposely despise or omit that devotion. As far as being necessary, this devotion is, in the hands of the devotees of the Virgin, a terrible weapon against the devil. That is why in the Book of Songs the Holy Spirit compares the Virgin Mary to a mysterious arsenal, where the soldier of faith can at every moment, without ever exhausting them, find all the resources necessary for victory in the battles of life.
There are many invocations, and all beautiful, all delicious, under which the human soul invokes, in its tribulations, the protection of the Virgin, whose double ineffable name of Mother of God and Mother of Men, it seems, could not leave to ours. arbitration other denominations. As varied, however, are our needs in this earthly exile, as varied is the mercy of God, who offers us in the Virgin the most varied forms of the power that she has. One of these modalities, one of the most fruitful in practical results for the faith, which invokes the Virgin, is to invoke her under the name of Our Lady of Perpetual Help.
O! it is a perpetual help, that is, constant, ceaseless, of every moment, that man needs for the battles of earthly life against impiety, against indifference, against human respect, against the varied temptations of the world, of the devil and meat. That help, man finds him in the Virgin, a truly mystical arsenal where, as an ascetic says, they are gathered, to overcome ourselves, the helmet of the breastplate of innocence, the shield of penance; and, to defeat the demon, offensive and attacking weapons: the shutter and the spear, the gladius and the sword.
The august function of the Virgin Mary is always, at all times, to help humanity, which - she helped in a special way, helping to bring about the first coming of Jesus Christ. But if it is for Mary that the salvation of the world began, it is for Mary that this salvation must be consummated. The Virgin being the way in which Jesus Christ came to us at the first coming, so was She, although differently, when He comes the second time. Since She is the safe way to seek Jesus and find Him, it is also for Her, with her help, that the demons at the end of time will not be able to separate her from Jesus Christ, nor will Antichrist win in the great battle, for the which souls, more than ever, will need your help; and they will need it so much that God, in private revelations to his servants,among which Blessed Grignon de Montfort, deigned to show that it will be the servants, the devotees of the Virgin, the apostles and saints, that She has been preparing for the second coming for a long time, those who will have the palm of victory.
Lady! the revolution passed through the face of Brazil! Men and things got confused in a whirlwind!
Damn winds took your son's cross from here and from there, but they didn't take it out of the constellation, which shines on us, nor did it take it out of the hearts of Brazilians, where with the blood of all mothers and the smile of all their children , these words are written: Virgin Mary.
Virgin Mary! Your Son gave Brazil the famous oceanic river, the famous fiery waterfall and a formidable giant at the entrance of the most beautiful bays in the universe ... Hence the Brazilians, in the battles and in the great Battle, that will be fought, a wider faith than the immensity of the Amazon, more untamed than the torrent of Paulo Afonso, more unshakable than the Stone Giant.
Great Brazilian poet in an epic verse asked this giant:
“However, if one day the fickle fortune We
want belief and the homeland to end,
Throw yourself into the waves, O tough Giant!
Flood these hills, move this sea! ”
I the Most Holy Virgin, I ask you otherwise, and much more than that; - so great is your power and far superior to the prodigy I impose. If, one day, Antichrist comes here, to personally record on the forehead of the city, which is the head of Brazil, the sign of the beast; even if he comes, accompanied in a procession by all the enslaved squadrons of the world, make the city go up beyond the hills, hover above, far above the stone giant, and so high that, carried by the winds of faith, even the squadrons cannot reach the city, nor the Antichrist to contemplate in the Ark the men saved by your love!

XI

JOÃO BATISTA, PRECURSOR OF THE FIRST COMING AND TYPE OF THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST

Woe to the inhabitants of the earth, because everywhere, spirits atrophied by error, and hearts corrupted by vice, skepticism dominates most men, who no longer believe that some of their fellow men, with conviction, sincerity and boldness, tell them the truth.
It is true that in all times of humanity, even those of greatest moral decay, the truth has never ceased to have its testimonies nor has God also failed to give it authorized organs, worthy interpreters. History can, with many examples, prove this statement, in any of the spheres in which the human race has carried out its social or religious political evolution on the planet, and it is not licit to deny the existence of providential men in any of these spheres, much less in the one in which turns the properly religious truth
It can be denied (since everything is denied in our time): this noble aristocracy of generous and ardent souls, which has always risen up against all injustices, against all violations of the law, against all the slavery of the human soul, the greatest is the bondage of sin!
Therefore, the trail left by these souls is not erased in history; nor is it less certain that, in all ages, God made the reflections of heaven shine among the darkness of the earth.
Never, not even before the new covenant, not even before God revealed himself completely in Christ and through Christ, did He abandon humanity!
Degraded as it was by Adamic prevarication, man cannot obtain the knowledge of the truth without effort, without labors; but the truth has always been possible to acquire; already because she always had on earth, in various forms, a divine deposit, already because God proclaimed her by the organ of providential men.
In the old covenant, God made the prophets, the promoters of his Law, the defenders of his right, the champions of his royalty. Honored by their contemporaries, glorified by the generations that saw them appear, the prophets received from God prerogatives superior to those of princes and kings; and their power exceeded that of all captains and generals, yet the very desires that overwhelmed the nations with the most brilliant military triumphs. Not infrequently, penetrating the. mystery of the times, they saw in the future the vicissitudes of the peoples, of whom the tribunes were, boldly announcing the truth.
One of the most beautiful pages in the history of the Church is that of prophecies, whose strength is for one who examines them in antiquity, in number, and in harmony with events, such a great force for proving religious truth, which exceeds that of the miracle; therefore, Jesus Christ was able to affirm, referring to unbelievers that if they did not accept the testimony of the prophets, they would also not accept that of the dead who would be resurrected. The prophecies of Christianity, by their priority to the event, by the certainty of the event, by the harmony of the event, with all the facts of history prove the divinity of the Christian religion in a magnificent and so divine way, that the divine could not fail to be the ministry. of the prophets, to whom, however, God succeeded the apostles, these new messengers of truth, these messengers of the law of love,charged with the same mission to proclaim the truth to all nations on earth.
Jesus Christ gives them no less honor than the honor given to the prophets. Consider them your companions; favors them with their intimacy; he distinguishes them, calling them from the outset to the sharing and labors of the redemptive work that has just begun, and to the complete execution of which the divine Master to the apostles succeeded the priests. These are the heirs of the prophets and apostles; share their honor and prerogatives; they even exceed it, because the dignity of the priest (this is a truth of the Catholic faith) is so much above that of the prophets and simple apostles, before how the New Testament is above the old; salt of the earth, light of the world, servant of God, co-worker of redemption, ambassador of Christ, continuator of his work, dispenser of the mysteries of God, minister of reconciliation, angel and messenger from heaven.
mediator between God and men, another Jesus Christ! I am well aware that all these prerogatives that I enumerate and that accumulate in the priest make the priesthood the scandal of the world, which cannot comprehend such greatness in a man! But what do the judgments of the world matter? It is certain that the priesthood is the omnipotence of God in the weakness of a man; it is the same charge that Christ put on for the salvation of men; is that there are no two priesthoods, that of the Christ and that of the priest; that Christ and the priest are the same Pontiff, rescuing souls with the same sacrifice; that the sacrifice I offered today, on the altar, was for Jesus Christ, twenty centuries ago, previously offered in his and similarly with his, both equal.

I understand that this greatness of the Catholic standard scandalizes many, if it does not make them smile and mock; it is certain that it oppresses and crushes me, but what do you want me to do? Dogma is dogma, and if your modern sensibility, so effeminate and so weak, cannot bear it, I, in an ecstasy that has lasted for twenty years, kiss my own hands every day, because daily they raise for you and for your salvation in sacrifice, which my lips reproduce, a divine victim.
Here, then, at least in the sphere of religion, are the men who, despite universal skepticism, cannot but call providential men: the prophets, the apostles, the priests. I do not exclude the same solicitude from God from other spheres of humanity. I do not deny that in politics, in war, in diplomacy or in science, providential men also appear, and that they correspond, in certain circumstances and conditions, to the needs of each age or country. On the contrary, I proclaim, it is God who also makes these heroes: the statesman, the general, the diplomat; the wise man. It does, however, as St. Augustine said, only as simple ornaments of the present century. The prophets, the. apostles, priests, He makes them for the kingdom of God, for that empire of eternity that, unique, carried out the second coming of Jesus Christ,it will stand among the ruins of all kingdoms and all empires.
Skepticism (I return to the main point) does not accept, neither in the present nor in the past of humanity, providential men. But, while skepticism is a lie, because it opposes the truth of history; a vanity, because it levels all superiorities; disguised jealousy, because nihil admirare is its motto; whereas skepticism is an aberration, the Church is, in its sphere of action, the claimer of the glory of all great men.
See him whose figure, one of the greatest of humanity, she exalts today in the Mass, in the divine Office, in the liturgy, in the pulpits of Christendom.
Look at John the Baptist! There is no reasonable price, due, that the Church has not paid you in twenty centuries!
The cult that immortalizes him is not based on a fable or a chimera of piety; it is based on the social reality of an age, on the private life of a people, on the most irrefutable of all human documents - history - and on the most authentic of all divine documents - the Gospel.

John the Baptist is truly a providential man! One word sums up his vocation: Precursor! two words sum up his character: no licet! Three words sum up his glory: kind of priests!
Threefold point of view from which, everyone understands, it is not possible to do more than an analysis of the character in question.
Precursor. - The social moment in which John the Baptist appears is the most critical moment in the life of Israel. The great and beautiful Messianic tradition was obscured in the conscience of the Jewish nation, which, like all nations in political decay, was divided into parties or rather into factions without civic orientation, without patriotism capable of elevating itself: above sterile and inglorious struggles. The entire country dominated the hatred among the Romans who had assailed it, enslaving Judea to a Yoke that, incidentally, was but a just punishment of Divine Providence, inflicted on all social classes; degraded by the obliteration of religious sentiment: Just as it happens today, the alleged liberators of peoples oppressed by dictators or despots did not see that dictatorship or despotism - it was the personification - adequate of errors,that they themselves filled the spirit of the people in speeches or writings, in which Just Government, political freedom, social prosperity were never taught as the fruits of Christian politics, but as conquests, of the revolutionary spirit.
For it was not only Greek philosophism, the despotism of Rome and the paganism of false religions that the facts or episodes gave John the Baptist an exceptional and grave appearance; it was the pitiful situation of the country, from whose bosom he emerged as an envoy from heaven.
No doubt the insanities of philosophism had reached the last limit of folly in Greece, demonstrating what human reason is capable of without the discipline of faith; the despotism of Rome given the ambition for grandeur and power the extremes of cruelty towards all peoples; the paganism of false religions had, through all forms of idolatry, reached the complete identification of man with matter.
What happened, however, in Judea was, perhaps, a more serious phenomenon; it was the repudiation by the unfaithful nation of the greatest and most beautiful of vocations that God can give to a people, predestinating them to be the herald of all other peoples, the benefactor of all nations, the universal organ of truth.
Like every man, it is certain that each people has its vocation; because each people must carry out in time and space the divine designation that presides over their formation, and which often leaves itself surrounded by political constructions that are simple works of man. No sociology can deny the truth that Scripture bears witness to, teaching that nations are made by God and for God and that people who do not serve God will be destroyed: regnun quod non serviet Deo peribit.
Nations that apostatize may have colossal factories, extensive railways, great museums, pompous arsenals and great battalions; they can boast in the eyes of the foreigner all the favors of material progress; they may even attract by all lawful or illicit means, that politics or diplomacy provides them, the admiration and praise of other peoples, but these nations are condemned to moral death, which will give them disorder, rebellion, anarchy, the revolution.
A nation, like a man, does not repudiate its vocation with impunity, which is often very clear and manifest! Let me give you an example, repeating what in the Historical Institute you can say without dispute from Brazil: "Christianity is the historical religion of Brazil, whose vocation, - to give Jesus Christ social preponderance, - could not be doubtful; because, when daring navigators came to our plagues and in front of the amazed world they unfolded this wide page of wonders, the first thing they did was to plant the cross of Jesus Christ in the ground, erecting, formed with the wood and flowers of our forests, the altar for that first Mass, whose blood, in the divine sacrifice, was the ink with which the initial minutes of our nationality were written! Brazil, therefore, not only from a divine point of view; but historically too,belongs to Jesus Christ! It belongs for many reasons, but mainly for possession, which the law of all civilized nations is respected in the last of men, and that it is not possible only Brazilian jurisprudence to claim should not be respected in a possessor who is called - God!
It was because she had repudiated her vocation that Judea did not understand the role of John the Baptist.
Since long prophesied as the Angel, who was to prepare the ways of the Messiah, he appears in fact, to awaken the hopes of the chosen people. Prepared, long years, for silence and meditation in the desert; when, at last, then he intones the divine pipe of preaching, and announces that the kingdom of God is at hand, the popular masses are stirred up, the Messianic enthusiasm is reborn and his mouth of the eloquent boldly speaks to the nation the word, which befits the punished peoples for the Justice of God: do penance.
John the Baptist does not fear the great, nor does he flatter the small, the thought, which has grown and developed in his soul for so many years, expands, impetuous and ardent, gives his word the ardor of conviction, and his apostolate the greatest and the most complete of all the rewards, the praise of the Messiah himself, who appears, giving Judea the supreme proof that John had truly been his forerunner. However, the movement operated by João Batista was ephemeral and did not save the nation from the greatest of all catastrophes.
Non licet! - One word sums up, as has just been seen, the vocation of John the Baptist. Two words, as you will see, sum up his character. How degraded today is that which makes a man's moral greatness and that if he does not have or allow himself to be corrupted, neither talent, nor power, nor glory can compensate him for this, disgrace!
Character is, without a doubt, in the moral wreckage of our time, one of the greatest losses, not compensated by the audacity that characterizes modern intelligence, complaining and protesting against all despotisms. Such complaints and protests do not emanate from the probity of the soul, the purity of conscience, the rightness of understanding: They are not, one might say boldly, products of character; because you all have the experience proving that, by the very men who claim and protest, in the social sphere, the principles that they call freedom, equality and fraternity; by themselves these principles are accepted or rejected, according to personal convenience and the circumstances in which they are placed.
Nor is it possible that the character can be formed and established with the principles and maxims, which are currently in force in the preparation of man for combating public life, unfortunately being confused with education and instruction. That is why there is such a great moral imbecility in our time, and the need to put before him the great models of humanity in strength, virility, character.
That of John the Baptist builds spirits, even after twenty centuries, in which we heard not only the first and more eloquent cries that announced the first coming of Jesus Christ, but also the inflamed, indignant and fearless apostrophe with which he would say and repeat to monstrous tyrant, called Herod: non licet! You are not allowed not to have your brother's wife as your own!
Who does not know the horrific episode that cost João Batista the hate, the prison and the death ?! Why repeat it in the pulpit ?! What is necessary is that the episode does not have in the eyes of anyone who wants the value of just an individual fact, and the courage of John the Baptist does not appear to anyone who is a vulgar predicate.
Herod is the type of man corrupted by lust and in whom neither the bonds of marriage, nor the bonds of blood can arrest and subdue the depraved appetite.
John the Baptist is the type of man, not only strengthened by the power of intelligence, which is enough to apprehend what is true and what is just, but also by the strength of the will, indispensable to unmask the lie and proclaim injustice.
Herod is vice, selfishly intending, even with the usurpation of the most sacred rights, the enjoyment of sin.
John the Baptist is the offended virtue, with his haughtiness, his audacity, his eloquent alarms.
Herod is imbecility; John the Baptist is character.
The lust of the former, the product of his moral weakness, has undoubtedly benefited no one yet; the courage of the second, the product of his character, has been used by twenty centuries for all the oppressed; and to the immortal advocate of rights, especially the rights of marriage and family, - to the Church - she has given, as an invincible weapon and shield, that non licet with which she condemns, condemns, anathemaizes adultery, divorce, the so-called free love!
At what time more than in our time, and in what country more than in this country, can John Baptist's non licet be feasible today, striking Herod's adultery, avenging the sanctity of the family, proclaiming the indissolubility of marriage ?!
Certainly at no other time, and in no other country; but what is also certain is that the danger that marriage, the domestic home and the family are in today, does not stem from the lack of intelligences that understand the danger, but the lack of necessary characters that, quite high proclaim it.
Type of priest, - These three words sum up the glory of John the Baptist! Undoubtedly, he was not, nor could he be, the type of priest in properly priestly acts, among which the sacrifice that Jesus Christ had not yet instituted at the Supper and had actually consummated at Calvary; but it was the finished type of the priest in virtues that will always make the greatness and fruitfulness of the priestly ministry: humility, disinterest, penance, the courage to tell the truth to everyone, even to a Herod, at the risk of his own life; the forgetfulness of oneself, the love of duty and justice carried to martyrdom. He was the type of priest in the apostolate of the word, in the ardor of preaching, in the enthusiasm for the Divine Master, who came down from heaven to enlighten souls on the paths where Jesus Christ seeks them. It was the type of the priest announcing to the world a new kingdom, the kingdom of God,that the Messiah was to inaugurate. He was the type of the priest, because he is truly a precursor of the second coming, as John the Baptist was of the first.
For the first, it was enough, in God's designs, a precursor, which matched the simplicity, the humility, the no splendor with which Jesus wanted to appear in the world. As for the second coming, the pomp, the magnificence, the splendor of the victory with which Jesus Christ has to appear, God considered it convenient, not one, but many precursors; and so many are the Catholic priests, as many are the precursors of the second coming, more elevated in dignity than that of the first. John the Baptist only showed, indicating to the crowds, the Messiah who had arrived. The priests deliver it, truly give it to souls in the ineffable mysteries of sacramental grace. John the Baptist gave a testimony in a moment that the Messiah was already in the world. Priests bear witness at all times that, in the sacramental form of the Eucharist,the Messiah continues and is always in the world. John the Baptist preached the Messiah not only as a Redeemer, but also as a Judge, warning everyone about Jesus that - the shovel in his hand is found; that He will clean the threshing floor; it will collect the wheat in the barn, but it will also burn the straws in a fire that will not be extinguished. The priests are also responsible for the preaching of the Messiah-Judge, preaching the final judgment, teaching souls what they often say in the Creed, celebrating the Mass: "Iterum venturus est cum gloria Judicare viva et mortuos": He will return again and with glory to judge the living and the dead ”.The priests are also responsible for the preaching of the Messiah-Judge, preaching the final judgment, teaching souls what they often say in the Creed, celebrating the Mass: "Iterum venturus est cum gloria Judicare viva et mortuos": He will return again and with glory to judge the living and the dead ”.The priests are also responsible for the preaching of the Messiah-Judge, preaching the final judgment, teaching souls what they often say in the Creed, celebrating the Mass: "Iterum venturus est cum gloria Judicare viva et mortuos": He will return again and with glory to judge the living and the dead ”.
I cannot meditate on the exceptional mission. of the priest, without my conscience revolting against one of the great, the greatest injustices of contemporary civilization: - the ban of the priest, - a genuine ban on respect, veneration, homage, the privileges that are due to him.
In this. season. in which rationalism overcame all that is traditional, no tradition more despised than that of the priesthood; and truly the great loser is the priest, because the notion of the supernatural has been obliterated to the completely emancipated spirits of F, because the false devotion of a multitude of Catholics does not understand the duties of piety towards the priest, because the priest himself let it win.
For unbelievers, - the priest is like a ghost of other ages; interposed like a shadow among the shining of light, which in his cassock, shows nothing but the tunic of Nessus of ridicule.
For false Catholics - he is a simple employee of the Church, in charge of the Church to serve them in the different mysteries of worship; he is not the follower of the Messiah, the participant in his priesthood, the divine distributor of the treasures of redemption.
Well, I don't accuse, I don't want to accuse the unbelievers or the wicked! May they make the priest an exile in the land they took care of, intoxicated by his civilization and his progress! If they don't believe in God, in the soul and in immortality; how they will believe in the greatness of the Father !! My protest, the protest that I raise very high and that I want to survive my death; the protest that I wish for ever and ever remains recorded in the annals of the pulpit and when I am already in my tomb, it still unfolds like the voice of an indignant Christian, my protest is against the false Catholics of this generation, complicit in this great crime : the priest's contempt!
You will often have it checked!
Without the slightest reverence they or they pass in front of the same priest, whose hands have often ended up receiving absolution or sacramental communion, if they happen to find him in the streets or public squares.
Without the slightest reverence they or they speak of their sermons; without the least reverence they or they discuss the articles of faith with him; without the slightest reaction from filial charity they or they hear, against their real or imagined faults, true or slanderous, the most tremendous accusations. If for any eventuality they find themselves the Father and one of the rich; of the great or powerful of the land, for these, the greatest servility, and for the Father, on the same occasion, the omission of the most elementary duties of delicacy and politeness!
Here's the situation!
What the priest must do, he who in turn, let it be said, also let himself be overcome, assimilating the spirit of the world, identifying himself with the habits and customs of the century, not always showing his enthusiasm for the greatest and most sublime of all vocations? What is the current duty of the Catholic priest?
To react, in the sphere of the sacred ministry, against everything and against everyone, who wants to strip him of his supernatural greatness! claim your sacred rights! exalt your unknown priestly dignity! to expose a perfidy that demeans them to a crowd of Catholics! preach the dogmas even the least pleasing to the decadent Christians of our time! examine and not forget the signs of the time! to consider all the apparent defeats of the Faith well compensated, in this period of human history, with the resplendence of the triumphant and glorious figure that is already emerging on the horizon !!! ...
Yes; I see it !! ... No, my friends, it is not a flight of fantasy, a chimera of the imagination! ... It is the deep conviction of dogma, the enlightened certainty of faith !! ... I see it in realities magnificent of his promise! ...., the only one left to complete the imposing cycle of prophecies !! ...
My vision increases! I contemplate him! As if looking at the Church with her eyes full of love, because it is the only one of her works that remains holy and immaculate on the surface of the globe !! ... How does the groaning and tears of the Righteous delight her ears, which still maintain , opposed to the Iniquities of the earth, the balance of the world !! ...
My vision increases! He approaches !! ...
John the Baptist, get out of your sepulcher! ... Lend me your mouth! ... I want to have that formidable voice on my lips that startled Judea! ... but it is not now, to see the sins that I am borrowing! it is to direct it, like an inflamed tuba, to heaven itself and to send this cry to the Messas-Judge: Come, Jesus!

XII

THE SECOND COMING OF JESUS ​​CHRIST AND THE DEVOTION OF THE SACRED HEART

Woe to the inhabitants of the land, because at present, even in Christians and Catholics, faith is weak, wavering, tepid; and such lukewarmness is nothing but what God hates, as Scripture teaches, because it is neither cold nor hot, but conducive to vomiting.
Where the display, the energy; the courage, the boldness that faith once had, not only stirring spirits, but moving peoples, whole nations to claim the principles or things of religion ?! What enthusiasm is there today for the great religious ideals, which filled beautiful periods of history ?! What men stand out today in front of nations and who embody a Christian idea in politics, diplomacy or science !!
The same apostle who, with such beautiful words, did this that can be called the hymn of Charity, teaching that it is more than compassion, more than tears, more than pain, than physical torture, more than the shed blood , more than martyrdom, because it is love, and without any love, things have value; the same apostle also chanted what can be called the triumphal song of the Faith when he describes it to us as the vision of what is not seen, as the possession of what we do not have, as the certainty of what is promised to us, and as joy than we hope yet!
It is from this Faith that one can ask: where is it today ?! Isn't the faith that we contemplate, and that we can judge by the actions of most Christians and Catholics, a stunted, bashful faith, without elevation or greatness ?! And it is not so exceptional today - the whole Faith, ardent, fearless and that if some still have it, and testify of it, the world is amazed and doesn't believe it ?!
And why does the world no longer believe in the enthusiasms of the Faith, but because it truly touched the period of life when the organism, exhausted of sap, weakened blood, unnerved sensitivity, reaches decrepitude?
Physiology teaches us that man has childhood, youth, virility and old age with decrepitude, which impels him to death: These are the periods of man's life, which philosophy also verifies in the life of nations.
Nations are collectively considered man. The same laws of life and death govern the individual man and the collective man. Not only does physiology proclaim these truths; history shows us that the world has gone through these periods: childhood, youth, virility and old age.
The great universal tradition, of which I have already told you, gives the existence of the world the path of its thousand years. and fixes our millennium, which will end in a century, like the last.
It is the right of any Catholic, especially a preacher, to insist on what is not forbidden by the Church to believe, previously permitted, and furthermore authorized with the example of priests and doctors of the Church.
I insist, therefore, with regard to this tradition, repeating with the great and distinguished commentator Cornelio a Lapide: 1st - it is common to the Jews, the Greeks, the Pagans, the Latins, and therefore, - old and universal; 2nd - it is a likely opinion.
Cornelio a Lapide gives the numerical list of the doctors and priests of the Church who adopt the tradition, affirming that, as long as the DAY AND TIME is not set for the end of time, it is legitimate to believe that this occurs in the sixth millennium. Cardinal Belarmino, in the book De Summi Ponticis potestate, supports and defends tradition, which is adopted and accepted in the Splendors of Faith by one of the greatest sages of our time, - Moigno; developed and defended, still in the last century, by the illustrious Catholic publicist - Gaume, in two books: Where are we? and Where are we going ?; accepted by Cardial Manning, in his book: - Temporal dominion of Jesus Christ - and very recently for the glories of the Church: Faber, distinguished mystic, and Desurmout, the distinguished ascetic.
In view of tradition, therefore, the youth of the world is not acceptable. But this alleged youth has also been denied by history. History shows us how the world successively coated the indications, ideas and habits characteristic of the different ages of life in the individual man, because he was successively domestic society, civil society, national society, universal society; Because, finally, and this is the main fact that confirms the decrepitude of the world, it began to decline since four centuries, reaching, through the apostasy of faith and repudiation of God, the limits that revelation and universal tradition sign for it.
Open the story! What videos? At the end of the 15th century, a single family of Christian peoples, the same symbol, the same cult, the same law; everywhere one God, one faith, one ballism! And then? ... What happened to that unit? Renaissance ... Reformation ... Revolution ... Socialism ...
Since the end of the 15th century, has the world walked or not, from degree to degree, invariably, in a decay, in a continuous decline? What was the Renaissance? The resurrection of paganism in literature. The reform? The resurrection of paganism in religion. The French Revolution? The resurrection of paganism in politics. What is Socialism? The resurrection of barbarism.
Are they symptoms of death or not ?! How can we deny that the world's old age touched decrepitude ?! What can you imagine to avoid catastrophe? ... The rejuvenation of the world? Christian restoration? Regeneration by a new religion?
The first hypothesis is absurd; the second, a miracle; the third, blasphemy.
The rejuvenation of the world is absurd, because nothing in creation rejuvenates. As rivers do not release to their source, as man does not return from old age to virility, nor from virility to youth, nor from youth to childhood, nations also do not retract from to another age. This has never been seen in history; not even with the invasion of the barbarians, or with the flood, since, in one case as in another, the world was not taken over, it was absorbed.
A miracle the Christian regeneration of the world! And what an extraordinary, extraordinary, unprecedented miracle! The world, repudiating everything it adores today; revoking, in different nations, all laws, all constitutions, all codes; replacing in all this with the Catholic principles that he abhors, the revolutionary principles that he glorifies in government, administration, politics, teaching, education; radically transforming its letters, its sciences, its arts, its industries into heralds of religion, which is banned from all these spheres of human activity in our time; replacing, in democracies and monarchies, the sovereignty of the people, which is their idol, with the sovereignty of God, who is their ghost; not only liberating the Church, but giving it to the Church in domestic life, in civil life,in political life the place that belonged to him and from which he was expelled; the world, finally, building on the ruins is the wreckage of this civilization a completely Catholic civilization, symbolized, no longer on the standards of its anti-Christian sects and its Masonic lodges, but on the Cross of Jesus Christ!
What a miracle! what an extraordinary, extraordinary, unprecedented miracle! ... And where is the promise of this miracle written? For: is it not insignificant to substitute, for the chimera of a miracle that was not promised, the second coming of Jerus Christ promised for the definitive triumph of the Church and punishment of the world, when it came to complete apostasy ?!
There remains one of the three hypotheses formulated: the regeneration of the world by a new religion. A new religion! But this is blasphemy, because the hypothesis of a new religion implies the claim that Christianity is not a divine and revealed religion; that Jesus Christ is not God; that the Church is not the teacher of truth; that the Gospel is not enough for the salvation of souls; that the world must expect a new Messiah, a new Church, a new Gospel!
What the world must expect, you see, is its judgment, its sentence, its condemnation. And in order to regenerate him, compassionate for him, it is that God has sent him, in the great crises and in the most opportune historical moments, now those who can be called - sent from the truth, now those who can be called - sent from Love.
Convincing of the truth, or persuading of love, - as shown in the historical evolution of humanity, the main purpose, of Divine Providence, arousing in the Church, at all times, those, of whom it has already been told, the convenient and the necessary.
And sophistry, is it error, is it heresy that oppresses the world? God raises Saint Augustine, Saint Benedict, Saint Bernard, Saint Ignatius of Loiola, Saint Dominic, Francis de Sales, ”Afonso de Ligório, sent from the truth, who proclaim it, defend it, avenge it!
Is it lukewarmness that makes souls cool? God raises the Francisco de Assis, the Vicente de Paulo, the Don Bosco, the Helena, the Juliana, the Santa Tereza de Jesus, the Clara de Montefalco, the Margarida Maria, sent from Love, who rescind him and make him revive in sparkling flames!
Divine solicitudes in affectionate revelations have not been lacking in the world at any time; (but, in the modern age, of all the revelations of the
The greatest and most amazing love of all is, without a doubt, that of the 17th century. The revelation of the Sacred Heart of Jesus is truly the great and divine remedy offered to the world so that, in the midst of the lukewarmness that cools it, at least those souls who have not yet lost their sense of the divine and the instinct for salvation are ignited.
I need to expand on some considerations about the origin, beauty, need, harmony, object and opportunity of this devotion; and I will have, therefore, for the greatness and magnificence of the subject, given a worthy complement to that other, which was the theme of the present sermon series, which I will not conclude today without first giving a very high testimony of my contentment regarding the good pastor of this parish and auditoriums that so often filled the temple. The parish priest's zeal, his manifest interest in indoctrination, how much he did for the effectiveness and success of the sermons; likewise, the silence and respect, the composure and always noble attitude of the audiences so numerous that they have heard them, I have the most grateful impression.
The origin of devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus can be said to go back to Calvary where, according to the expression of the Evangelist, in relation to Jesus Crucified: "one of the soldiers opened his side with a spear, and immediately blood and water came out" .
It was impossible that this episode did not always concern Catholic piety in all the centuries; and that is why, in all ages, the pierced Heart of Jesus was the object of the most beautiful and sweet meditations. Cipriano, Ambrósio, Agostinho, the doctors and the priests of the Church, always contemplated with delight the Sacred Heart, which also received from the faithful, not an explicit and formal worship as in our days, but the most delicate effusions of the tenderness that has always awakened. In the doctrine of doctors and in the piety of the faithful also, before ours, in all Christian times, art was inspired, representing the Heart of Jesus as the great source of love, which flows in the torrent of the Precious Blood. How many ardent and passionate souls were ecstatic before the Heart of Jesus, even before it was preached as an object of special devotion! Never,it is true, He ceased to be contemplated, adored, loved; nor can the contrary be understood, since, since Calvary, the wounded Heart of Jesus, letting blood and water flow, fascinated souls; some gave rise to sublime contemplations; to others, tender ecstasies; not a few, inflamed desires to penetrate deep into that Sacred Heart, which revealed to many servants, but above all, with extremes of unprecedented tenderness, in the 17th century, to the one that He had, for a long time, prepared to be in a great revelation, the apostle of a new devotion, that would give the world the highest testimony, after Pentecost, of God's mercy. This apostle, this one sent from love, is Margarida Maria, whose life she would call a novel, if it had not been a poem at the same time divine and human,because it is a poem written with the tears of a woman and the blood of a God.
No!I couldn’t, without a lot of emotion, which still reproduces in my soul, contemplate, a few years ago, in Paralemonial, a small but famous French city, the sanctuary in which a God forgotten by man, by man despised in his love , without being able to resign himself to this contempt and forgetfulness, he comes, no longer as a God who demands and orders, but as a beggar who pleads, asks, pleads, entreates the love of men, makes himself the organ of this supplication, no more distinguished doctors, enlightened theologians, apostles impelled by the ardor of proselytism, but a woman, a virgin, a religious.
I had already seen, with these eyes, in Montefalco, a small Italian town, in the heart that is intact there, like the whole body of Santa Clara da Cruz, who died in the 13th century, all the instruments of the crucifixion of Jesus Christ, formed in a wonderful reproduction , with the nerves, the veins, the arteries of this extraordinary and sublime devotee of the Passion. Approaching the two wonderful prodigies, and hesitating about which one was the greatest, I said to myself, remembering the incredulity, the disbelief, the skepticism of so many spirits of our time: “My God! as in the face of these prodigies I will be able to understand that the greatest of the Church's labors, the most difficult of her tasks, the heaviest of her apostolates, is not that of destroying the powers of the earth, humiliating and overcoming empires, leaving triumphantly out of revolutions,but to persuade man that God loves him!
And what greater love than that of the Sacred Heart?
The beauty of this devotion is the beauty of the Heart of Jesus. As much as a man's heart enchants us, imagine that enchantment must not have the Heart of a God for us.
If I had been obliged (I appropriate the thought of a beautiful spirit), if I had been obliged to adore a human creature, I would not adore intelligence in it, however high it was, not even reaching the verge of genius; I would not love eloquence in it, no matter how ardent and reassembled it was, not even reaching the sublime; I would not love beauty, no matter how pilgrim and complete it was, not even realizing the ideal of Art. No; I would also not worship a human creature, neither power nor fortune; would love the heart!
Science, I know, claims that the heart is simply a gut; physology says of him that he is simply a muscle; medicine in it sees nothing but a blood boiler, the laboratory of life. All peoples, however, according to God, see in the heart of a man the summary of that man.
So great for God is the beauty of the heart, that it is not seen in Scripture that God has ever asked a man for his intelligence, his value or his glory; whereas he often says in the holy books to man: give me your heart. The beauty of the heart is so great for the people everywhere, that the people never knew how to give a man greater or better praise than saying: he is a man of heart.
It is certain, however, that, placed between two currents, one that impels him to the greatest and most sublime of all devotions, and another that attracts him to all the miseries of the earth, in a multitude of human beings, the heart lives full of all these iniquities, of which the Divine Master speaks in the Gospel, and which, according to his expression, make man unclean.
The human heart, therefore, needs a crucible in which to be purified, a pyre in which to be burned, a model that he reproduces.
Man has it all in the devotion of the Sacred Heart.
The Heart of the God-Man! ... Who can describe it?
If I cannot describe the perfection of your intelligence; the perfection of his character, the perfection of his will; how can I describe the perfection of his heart which, in Jesus too, as in every man, the summary of man!
Jesus Christ himself: said: "learn from me that I am meek and humble in heart".
It is necessary, therefore, to satisfy the need for this devotion, to consider certain truths.
Some see in the Heart of Jesus only a material object, that is, the carnal laboratory of blood that rescued the world: it is too little. Others refer to the lovely Heart all the operations of Jesus' theand life: it is too much. The heart, in the sense that it occupies us, must be considered as the center of sensitivity, the organ of love and pain; and in the Sacred Heart of Jesus we must especially consider, with abstraction from other operations, the range of his affections and sufferings; which does not prevent another truth, that is, that the object of devotion is twofold: spiritual and material. the spiritual object, - the love of the Heart of Jesus - is the main one; but the material object, the heart of flesh, the material portion of holy humanity, is no less worthy of our homage.
Jesus Christ, in the great revelation, distinguished the double object, the material, saying: this is the heart ... and the spiritual, adding: that he loved men so much.
Desire, hope, joy, sadness, all of this is found in the Heart of Jesus, source of love, source of tears and humiliation, source of rest and peace.

Source of love, - it closes and tells us of Jesus' love for his Eternal Father, for his immaculate Mother, for the Church, his immortal wife, and for the men, whose sufferings he made his own.
Source of tears and humiliation, - he reminds us of the pain of Jesus, humiliated in his love, in his dignity, in his honor, no man having been more hurt in his sensitivity, more despised in his love.
Source of rest and peace, - it shows us the peace and rest of Jesus in that Sacred Heart, exempt from all sin, and for that very reason in absolute tranquility,
The devotion of the Sacred Heart is, na. present time, a devotion of perfect harmony with the state of souls, and that of greater opportunity in the current conditions of the world.
Modern man! ... what most bewitches you today is the terrestrial, the material, the sensitive ... Well then you have a divine crucible, to purify yourself.
World! .... what envelops you today as in a blanket of ice, what cools you is the lukewarmness of faith, so wavering, so weak, and indeed so rare that you can no longer doubt, the last times have come . prophesied, characterized by the Divine Master himself. Well then; it was the Divine Master himself who more than once revealed that this devotion was kept for the last time; be it the medicine offered to the world to keep the world warm; O. lavish remedy for souls: for souls to be saved. --From - "
tlas, because the serenade is close to Jesus Christ, souls must surrender vidal, without further struggle or combat, renouncing, without effort, all hopes of being formed and wearing 167!
No!Complete mistake! The second coming of (Jesus, by contrast, demands from souls and the world a better and clearer understanding of their duties. On the
part of souls, - the need for individual perfection must be more active, prayer more fervent, penance more proportionate to the sins committed, and, also, the fight against the enemies of the Church, the struggle for social reform, the activity in the associations, in the press, civil and political life must be greater than ever.
From the world, - its enormous inequities they demand enormous reparations.For the world as for the man, individually considered, all the time is favorable time to repair the crime to profess virtue.
However small, as is certain, the interval that separates us from the second coming of Jesus Christ, neither the death of man nor the death of the world justifies inaction, neglect, abstaining from the struggle.
Death, as someone said, is a strong and manly idea; it is the expression of energy and activity; and I add: the idea of ​​death must inspire enthusiasm and not cowardice.
In man, death is a deliverance; in the world it will be palingenesis. Freedom from this ignoble weight that drags to the land; palingenesia that is, transformation of this incomplete, irregular and disturbed state of the globe and of creation in a better and definitive state. Man's death is not just a deliverance; it will be, after a transitory separation, the reunion, the reunion of the soul and the body in primitive and adamic perfection, so that man can direct to death unsuccessful this sublime apostrophe: "death, where is your victory?! ... death, where is your sting ?! "
The death of the world will not be a simple palingenesis, that is, a simple physical renovation of the universe; it will be, for humanity, a new vital means, a new condition of glorious existence, a life that, undoubtedly, we cannot understand now, because it is a mystery, but in which we must believe, because we believe in so many other mysteries, which in fact no one denies the light, the heat, the movement, the strength.
No!nothing dies; everything is immortal!
The death! Ephemeral queen!
Therefore, you who hear me: you have a rope!
Let us break the chains of sin; and we will not be oppressed by the only death, which is real and not apparent, the death that is called hell!
Sursum rope! Let us put the lie, vanity, pride at our feet; and hearts rise to the Heart of Jesus!
Sursum rope! Let us adore this Sacred: Heart; and, rescued and saved, we will all have the ineffable joy of contemplating her in the splendours of the second coming!