All men are under obligation to make reparation

"Among the various devotions paid to the Sacred Heart, the one foremost in importance and interest is assuredly the Act of Consecration, whereby we give to the divine Heart of Jesus both ourselves and all that is ours; in recognition of the truth that all we have cometh unto us out of the infinite charity of the eternal Deity.  But it is expedient that any attempt of ours at self-consecration be accompanied with the purpose of making expiation (otherwise called reparation) to the most Sacred Heart of Jesus.  In consecration the predominant intention may be said to be the purpose to repay (as it were) the love of the Creator by the love of us his creatures.  But since Love Uncreate is passed over by human forgetfulness, and dishonoured by the sins of mankind, we should endeavour to repair such outrages; and the performance of this duty is ordinarily known as reparation.

If we are, for the aforesaid reasons, to undertake both of those practices, we must recognize that we are impelled to the duty of reparation by the most powerful motives of justice and love: of justice, in order to expiate the injury done to God by our sins, and to re-establish through penance the divine order which was violated by them; of love, in order to suffer together with Christ, (who patiently endured all possible dishonour,) so that we may offer him some solace in return for his sufferings.  For it is our duty to do more than honour God by the worship of adoration, whereby we adore his infinite Majesty, or by means of prayer, when we recognize his supreme dominion over us, or by acts of thanksgiving, when we praise his infinite generosity towards us.  Because we are sinners, burdened with many offences, we must also make satisfaction to the offended justice of God, because of the numberless sins, offences and negligences we have committed.  Wherefore, we must add to the act of consecration, by which we offer ourselves to God, and become thereby, as it were, sacred unto God by reason of the holiness which naturally floweth from an act of consecration, as the Angelic Doctor teacheth.  We must add the act of reparation, by means of which all our faults are blotted out, lest perchance the sanctity of Infinite Justice spurn our arrogant unworthiness, and look upon the gift of ourselves as something to be rejected rather than accepted.

All men are under obligation to make reparation; for our souls are disfigured as the Christian faith teacheth by original sin as a result of the pitiable fall of Adam.  We are also subject to passions, whereby we are corrupted in a truly sad state, and have thus made ourselves worthy of everlasting condemnation.  It is true that the proud philosophers of this world deny the aforesaid verities, and in their place do raise up again the ancient heresy of Pelagius: which taught that in human nature there is a certain innate goodness wherewith, by our own powers, we are raised up to ever higher levels of perfection; but such false theories, born of human pride, have been condemned by the Apostle in his saying that all men are by nature the children of wrath.  As a matter of fact, from the very beginning of the creation of the world, mankind recognized, in one way or another, the obligation of making reparation, impelled thereto, as by a natural instinct, in an endeavour to placate God by offering public sacrifices unto him."

-- From the Encyclical Letter of Pope Pius XI

An Act of Reparation to the Sacred Heart for the first Friday of the month

Adorable Heart of Jesus, glowing with love for us and inflamed with zeal for our salvation: O Heart! ever sensible of our misery and the wretchedness to which our sins have reduced us, infinitely rich in mercy to heal the wounds of our souls, behold us humbly prostrate before Thee to express the sorrow that fills our hearts for the coldness and indifference with which we have so long requited the numberless benefits that Thou hast conferred upon us. With a deep sense of the outrages that have been heaped upon Thee by our sins and the sins of others, we come to make a solemn reparation of honor to thy most sacred majesty. It was our sins that overwhelmed Thy Heart with bitterness; it was the weight of our iniquities that pressed down Thy face to the earth in the Garden of Olives, and caused Thee to expire in anguish and agony on the cross. But now, repenting and sorrowful, we cast ourselves at Thy feet, and implore forgiveness.

Adorable Heart of Jesus, source of true contrition and ever merciful to the penitent sinner, impart to our hearts the spirit of penance, and give to our eyes a fountain of tears, that we may sincerely bewail our sins now and for the rest of our days. Oh, would that we could blot them out, even with our blood! Pardon them, O Lord, in Thy mercy, and pardon and convert to Thee all that have committed irreverences and sacrileges against Thee in the sacrament, of Thy love, and thus give another proof that Thy mercy is above all Thy works. Divine Jesus, with Thee there are mercy and plentiful redemption; deliver us from our sins, accept the sincere desire we now entertain, and our holy resolution, relying on the assistance of Thy grace, henceforth to be faithful to Thee. And in order to repair the sins of ingratitude by which we have grieved Thy most tender and loving Heart, we are resolved in the future ever to love and honor Thee in the most adorable Sacrament of the Altar, where Thou art ever present to hear and grant our petitions, and to be the food and life of our souls. Be Thou, O compassionate Jesus! our Mediator with Thy heavenly Father, Whom we have so grievously offended, strengthen our weakness, confirm these our resolutions of amendment, and as Thy Sacred Heart is our refuge and our hope when we have sinned, so may it be the strength and support of our repentance, that nothing in life or death may ever again separate us from Thee. Amen.

The privilege to stand in the person of all men and chant the praises of God

"From the very beginning we were made aware of the grave and serious obligation that would always be ours to recite this Office. But we were made no less aware of the privilege that was ours to stand in the person of all men and chant the praises of God for the good of the Church and the salvation of souls. We received the right to harmonize with angels at the feet of the Lord. We were blessed to sing the chants of the suffering Christ; to raise our voices in joy at His victory.

Of all the men on the face of the earth, we were the relative few who had been chosen to pray for those who would not or could not pray. We had been given the right to use the official prayers of the Church which in the matter of sheer beauty and expressiveness stand unsurpassed. We lived every mood of the prayers we sang. Felt every pain. Experienced every joy. We wept with those lamentations of the Old Law which foretold the immolation of the Lamb. We rejoiced in the relentless poundings of the glorious Alleluias.

All this was, and is today, our privilege and our heritage as men of God. So we make our voices rise and fall in the unique cadences of the chant. We might be expected to kneel down and kiss the floor when we have made an obviously incorrect addition or omission. We might wish at times that the long chanting of prayers would come to an end, and all the constant movement cease. We might feel acutely our unworthiness to intercede with God for those which might have been, if given the opportunity, far better than we ourselves are. Still, we are the ones to do this. It is our life, our love, our sacrifice.

But easy or hard, it is always a consolation to know that in days when men have plotted to upset the throne of God on earth, when they have stood defiantly before their Creator with jutting jaws and hard, glowering eyes, it is a consolation for us to be able to stand in choir with our breviaries in our hands and make reparation for the sins of the world, to pray in its behalf.

And for each blasphemy that is spewed recklessly toward heaven, the friars in their brown and white can turn their eyes to the tabernacle, and with their many voices praying as one, keep the pages turning and the plea ever resounding: 'Spare us, O Lord, spare thy people. And be not angry with us forever.'"

-- Men in Sandals by Fr Richard of the Immaculate Conception (Madden), ocd

Penance and Reparation, part II

"If we ask, why penance and reparation, the first answer is: Because God wants it.

But if we press the question: Why does God want it? Then we must say, because in His mysterious wisdom, His justice requires it. We may legitimately say, without really understanding it, that He has no choice. Having given us a free will, if we abuse liberty, we must use our freedom to repay to God the love we have stolen from Him (which is penance) and repair the damage we have done (which is reparation).

Notice, all along I have been using the first person plural, "we", because penance and reparation are owed to God not only because I have individually sinned, but because we human beings have sinned and are sinning, in our day, on a scale never before conceived in the annals of history.

We know better than Cain after he killed his brother, Abel. We are our brother's keepers. We are mysteriously co-responsible for what other people do wrong. There is a profound sense in which all of us are somehow to do penance and make reparation, not only for our sinful misdeeds, but for the sins of our country and, indeed, for the sins of the whole human race.

We return to our question: Why penance and reparation? Because, in Christ's words, "Unless you do penance, you shall all likewise perish".

Is it any wonder that on Pentecost Sunday, after Peter preached his sermon, and rebuked the people for their sins, and they asked him, "what must we do," his first word to the multitude was the imperative verb, "Repent!"

Is it any wonder that Our Lady of Fatima's message to a sinful world in our day, may be summarized in the same imperative, "Do penance."

Indeed, the calamities that we have so far seen in this present century: two world wars with more casualties than in all the previous wars of history, and the threat of a nuclear holocaust that hangs over us like a tornado cloud. All of this is God's warning to do penance and reparation. Why? Because God is not mocked.

You do not offend God with impunity. You do not sin without retribution. You do not ignore the will of the Almighty and expect the Almighty to ignore what you do.

What bears emphasis, however, is that this retribution is either to be paid willingly, with our penance and reparation, or will be paid unwillingly within the divine punishment.

The divine logic is simple, awfully simple, and all we have to do is learn what God is telling us. Either we do penance and reparation because we want to, or we shall suffer (against our will) the consequences of our sins in this life, and in the life to come.

But remember, this penance and reparation is to be done not only for what we have personally done wrong. It is for all the pride and lust, for all the cruelty and greed, for all the envy and laziness and gluttony of a sin-laden human family.

God is merciful and in fact as our Holy Father has told us, Jesus Christ is the Incarnation of divine mercy. But God's mercy is conditional. It is conditional on our practice of penance and reparation."

-- Penance and Reparation: A Lenten Meditation Fr John A Hardon, SJ

Copyright © 2003 by Inter Mirifica

Seven themes found in the Lenten liturgy

"In the next six weeks there are seven themes that continually emerge in the prayers and readings for Mass and the Liturgy of the Hours. Lent is a time for penance. We need to be prepared to what we do not feel like doing. There are certain features of our lives, of our personalities that we would be better without; there are aspects of our personalities that are not beautiful or helpful for ourselves and others. Some of these are quite simply sins. Sin? Not an in-word today. At penitential services in Lent and before Christmas I frequently hear people say, “It’s six months—or even several years—since my last confession. I do not have any sins.” I feel like saying, ask your husband, wife, children, parents, or work colleagues if you are really without sin. The person may not have committed murder of adultery, but they will probably have many features of their lives which are not adding to the sum of human happiness or indeed to their own well-being. So there is firstly a need for penance, which is a matter of seeing what road we are on. We go astray in many ways, and strangely the smaller the faults, the more difficult it can be to eliminate them. Penance is being alert to our failings and a willingness to do something about them. The second theme is conversion. This means turning away from what is sinful or dangerous. The other side of conversion is a third theme of returning to God. We should view our behaviour and our lives in the mirror of the teaching of Jesus. Fourthly, we have to have an attitude to our failings and sin. This is sorrow. A feature of contemporary society is the lack of sorrow for evil-doing. Politicians and Church leaders hate saying sorry we know, but many people go around doing harm, even if in small ways, without any regrets. Sorrow for sin and for the evil in our lives is essential for spiritual health.

However, these four themes of penance, conversion, returning to God and sorrow for sin are not fully within our power. The Christian view is that we cannot really do much that is of value except with God’s help. Our spiritual health depends on God’s gift. Hence the fifth theme is redemption: God saves us. He will not do it without our co-operation. To recall a earlier text, we have to be willing to allow God to recreate our hearts and cleanse our inner being. The redemption we need arises from the sixth Lenten theme, the passion of Jesus Christ. Jesus came to save us; he taught and healed, before dying for us. The passion of Jesus is a truth that teaches God’s love for us, the reality of sin. Contemporary spirituality neglects too much the Cross of Christ; the Stations of the Cross are not nearly so popular today. The seventh Lenten theme is baptism. The weeks of Lent are a final preparation for the sacrament. They are also a time when we should reflect on our own baptism. What does the sacrament mean to us? Three ideas might be noted: baptism brings us into the family of God, with relationships to the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Baptism then brings us into the Church, the Christian community, with an obligation to love and serve. Thirdly, baptism draws us in imitation and discipleship of Jesus.

These seven themes found in the Lenten liturgy can give us a new vision of ourselves. Once they are pointed out, then we can hear them with new ears: penance, conversion, returning to God, sorrow for sin, redemption, the passion of Jesus and baptism will feature in the prayers and readings, with ever new lights and insights. But we will not plumb their depths without reflection. A lot of teaching is about facts; we can with more or less difficulty process information. There were two world wars in the 20th century: 1914-1918 and 1939-1945. Anyone who does not know this is ill-informed. Anyone denying them is plain wrong. But a lot of education is about attitudes and values. Generosity and open-mindedness have to be communicated in education, but these involve owning and valuing them, similarly with the values of Lent. You could have a page for noting these themes as we hear them at Masses during Lent. They could be the subject of prayer and reflection so that we have a new acceptance and esteem for them."

-- The meaning of Lent with some Carmelite insights by Christopher O'Donnell, OCarm

Penance and Reparation, part I

"Penance and reparation are the consequence of sin. Or again, penance and reparation are the price we have to pay for our own and other people's sin. Penance and reparation, finally, are what God requires from sinners as a condition for showing them His mercy.

In order to better understand the meaning of penance and reparation, we have to look for a moment at what happens whenever we sin. Two things happen:

• First: we incur guilt before God for the self-will that caused us to sin. We become more or less separated or estranged from God, depending on the gravity of our sin.
• Second: We deserve punishment for the disorder we cause by our sinful conduct. We become liable to suffering pain, again more or less pain, depending on how seriously we have done wrong.

Against this background, we can more easily see the meaning of penance and reparation.

• Penance is the repentance we must make to remove the guilt, or to reinstate ourselves in God's friendship.
• Reparation is the pain we must endure to make up for the harm we brought about by our self-indulgence when we sinned.

What then do penance and reparation have in common? They have this in common, that they are absolutely necessary if the justice of God is to be satisfied after we have offended the divine Majesty. They also have this in common, that God now has a right to demand more of us than He would have required had we not committed sin. The word more is basic to any correct understanding of penance and reparation.

But if penance and reparation have this in common, how do they differ? They differ, as we have seen, in the two different ways that we do wrong whenever we sin. Because we have failed in loving God, we now owe Him more love than He would have required had we not offended Him. We did wrong by our willful love of self. So now we have to make up by our selfless love of God. This is Penance.

And because we have brought disorder into the world by our sins, we must undergo pain to undo this harm we have caused. This is reparation."


-- Penance and Reparation: A Lenten Meditation Fr John A Hardon, SJ
Copyright © 2003 by Inter Mirifica

Act of reparation for blasphemies uttered against the Holy Name of Jesus

O Jesus, my Savior and Redeemer, Son of the living God, behold, we kneel before Thee and offer Thee our reparation; we would make amends for all the blasphemies uttered against Thy Holy Name, for all the injuries done to Thee in the Blessed Sacrament, for all the irreverence shown toward Thine immaculate Virgin Mother, for all the calumnies and slanders spoken against Thy spouse, the holy Catholic and Roman Church. O Jesus, who hast said: "If you ask the Father anything in My Name, He will give it to you," we pray and beseech Thee for all our brethren who are in danger of sin; shield them from every temptation to fall away from the true faith; save those who are even now standing on the brink of the abyss; to all of them give light and knowledge of the truth, courage and strength for the conflict with evil, perseverance in faith and active charity! For this do we pray, most merciful Jesus, in Thy name, unto God the Father, with whom Thou livest and reignest in the unity of the Holy Ghost world without end.

Amen.

Memorial of Saint Basil the Great & Saint Gregory Nazianzen

"What words can adequately describe God's gifts? They are so numerous that they defy enumeration. They are so great that any one of them demands our total gratitude in response.


Yet even though we cannot speak of it worthily, there is one gift which no thoughtful man can pass over in silence. God fashioned man in his own image and likeness; he gave him knowledge of himself; he endowed him with the ability to think which raised him above all living creatures; he permitted him to delight in the unimaginable beauties of paradise, and gave him dominion over everything upon earth.

Then, when man was deceived by the serpent and fell into sin, which led to death and to all the sufferings associated with death, God still did not forsake him. He first gave man the law to help him; he set angels over him to guard him; he sent the prophets to denounce vice and to teach virtue; he restrained man's evil impulses by warnings and roused his desire for virtue by promises. Frequently, by way of warning, God showed him the respective ends of virtue and of vice in the lives of other men. Moreover, when man continued in disobedience even after he had done all this, God did not desert him.

No, we were not abandoned by the goodness of the Lord. Even the insult we offered to our Benefactor by despising his gifts did not destroy his love for us. On the contrary, although we were dead, our Lord Jesus Christ restored us to life again, and in a way even more amazing than the fact itself, for his state was divine, yet he did not cling to his equality with God, but emptied himself to assume the condition of a slave.

He bore our infirmities and endured our sorrows. He was wounded for our sake so that by his wounds we might be healed. He redeemed us from the curse by becoming a curse for our sake, and he submitted to the most ignominious death in order to exalt us to the life of glory. Nor was he content merely to summon us back from death to life; he also bestowed on us the dignity of his own divine nature and prepared for us a place of eternal rest where there will be joy so intense as to surpass all human imagination.

How, then, shall we repay the Lord for all his goodness to us? He is so good that he asks no recompense except our love: that is the only payment he desires. To confess my personal feelings, when I reflect on all these blessings I am overcome by a kind of dread and numbness at the very possibility of ceasing to love God and of bringing shame upon Christ became of my lack of recollection and my preoccupation with trivialities."
 
-- From the writings of St Basil the Great
 
* Today the Church celebrates the memorial of these two great doctors of the church. You may learn more about them by visiting this site. Our brethren observing the 1962 liturgical calendar ("Extraordinary Form of the Roman Rite") observe St Basil on 14 June and St Gregory on 9 May.

Act of Reparation to the Immaculate Heart

"Most Holy Virgin and our beloved Mother, we listen with grief to the complaints of the Immaculate Heart, surrounded with the thorns which ungrateful men place therein at every moment by their blasphemies and ingratitude. Moved by the ardent desire of loving thee as our Mother and of promoting a true devotion to thy Immaculate Heart, we prostrate ourselves at thy feet to prove the sorrow we feel for the grief that men cause thee and to atone by means of our prayers and sacrifices for the offenses with which men return thy tender love. Obtain for them and for us the pardon of so many sins. A word from thee will obtain grace and forgiveness for all.

Hasten, O Lady, the conversion of sinners that they may love Jesus and cease to offend God, already so much offended, and thus avoid eternal punishment. Turn thine eyes of mercy towards us so that henceforth we may love God with all our heartwhile on earth and enjoy Him forever in Heaven. Amen."