From the Office of Reading for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
My sweetest Lord, benignly turn your merciful eyes to this people and to the mystical body that is your Church; because greater glory will follow for your holy name by forgiving such a great multitude of your creatures than if you only forgive me, a miserable sinner, who has so seriously offended your majesty. What consolation could I find in possessing life, seeing that your people are deprived of it, and seeing how the darkness of sin covers your beloved Bride , for my sins and those of your other creatures?
I wish, therefore, and I ask you as a special grace for this forgiveness , for that incomparable love that moved you to create man in your image and likeness. What, I wonder, was the cause of your placing man in such high dignity? Certainly, only the incomparable love with which you looked into yourself at your creature and fell in love with it. But I see clearly that because of his sin he deservedly lost the dignity in which you had placed him.
But you, moved by that same love, wanting to freely reconcile the human race, gave us the Word that is your only begotten Son, who was truly a reconciler and mediator between you and us. He was our justice, since he took upon himself Email Data all our injustices and iniquities and suffered the punishment that we deserved for them, in obedience to the command that you, eternal Father, imposed on him, when you decreed that he was to assume our humanity. Oh incomparable abyss of charity! What heart is so hard that it does not break when considering how the divine sublimity has descended so far down to our own humanity?
We are your image and your image of us, through the union verified in man, veiling the eternal divinity with this cloud that is the infected mass of Adam's flesh. What is the cause of all this? Only your ineffable love. For this, your incomparable love, I implore your majesty, with all the strength of my soul, to benignly grant your mercy to your miserable creatures.
From the Dialogue of Saint Catherine of Siena, virgin, On divine providence
Allow me a brief personal reflection. When I read that someone of the holiness of Saint Catherine of Siena defines herself as a miserable sinner, how can I not define myself? It makes you want to run into a cave, just like the prophet Elijah did - today's first reading - and stay there quietly, without sticking your head out. But where sin abounded, grace abounded all the more (Rom 5:20). Only let us not use grace as an occasion to sin (Rom 6:15).