"TO MY PRIESTS" BY CONCEPCIÓN CABRERA DE ARMIDA
Messages of Our Lord Jesus Christ to His favorite children
CV WITH WHAT LOVE SOULS SHOULD BE TREATED.
"Only a heart perverted to the utmost resists the call of divine love. Man is love because he was formed by Him who is Love; and the soul that informs the body brings with it the essence of love, because it came from God and to God it must return. For this reason, even when the earth attracts it, offering it all its joys, it feels within itself an emptiness that only God can fill.
If men do not resist when they are touched by the fiber of human love, how much more if they are touched by the holy fiber of divine love?
And this is what I have been seeking in these confidences: to render to My priests all for the love that is the essence of My Being; for that infinite love of nameless predilection with which they were chosen by Me. For it was not they who chose Me; My love went before their love, and even before giving them the being and with it the vocation to the priesthood so that they might serve My Church, My Father of all eternity had already engendered them in His mind with a singular choice, with the eternal gaze of a Father's love. From that beginning, the Father looked at Me in the priests and the priests in Me.
The events unfolded in time, in their own time, because God is order itself and neither delays nor advances: he works opportunely in all things and in all times and in all souls. but in God everything is present, and this is one of his essential joys, his own alone. And from sorrows and joys, which man calls his own, from prosperous or adverse events, He always draws glory for Himself and supernatural good for souls, because He is Goodness itself.
Man cannot penetrate the divine arcana, because he is limited, but God manages the world and events; and what is the end for man is the beginning and the present for God, and He is glorified in everything.
No doubt sin does not glorify me, but the sinner does, because he glorifies me in his repentance or he glorifies me in his punishment. Sin is the enemy of God, but the sinner can become a friend and even a saint, and glorify Me in his conversion.
My will is to save souls at any price; did I not already buy them heaven with My Blood and My infinite merits? Did I not even give My life so that they might have supernatural and abundant life in My Church and its sacraments? But, more than for anyone else, I sacrificed Myself for My priests who were to be the heads of generations of souls by their spiritual paternity.
Souls are so delicate! This is a point that my priests must take very much into account in order to treat them, to transform them, using, as I told you at the beginning, the great weapon of divine love which no one can resist. But in order to give love, My priests must overflow with love; and they will not succeed in filling their hearts completely with holy love, except by transformation in Me who am Love.
Impregnated with love, what will my priests have to give but love? Love and charity among themselves; charity and holy love for souls, leading them gently to Me, for that is their role. Priests must never, in any case, treat souls with brusqueness. Who finer, purer, more delicate than I whom they represent?
Let my priests take care that all souls are souls and not in the classes of rich and poor (naturally with the prudence and discretion that must be exercised); because there is much abuse on this point, with the poor. Let them not despise those rude souls in general, or without instruction, etc.; for they are always souls, and how many lost pearls, in that beloved class, within the shells of their coarseness, which can and should be polished for my crown!
All souls are won by patient love, humble love, sacrificial love, love sacrificed in Me, and how many times do my priests leave those pearls, those jewels abandoned, which only their bark is visible, but which contain hidden treasures of great virtues, of special dispositions for great sanctity.
Did I not deal with rustic people, with the solemnly poor, with patient love, with sacrificial love, or did I make of sinners apostles, martyrs, saints?
And if priests are transformed in Me, what will they not be able to do in common souls and in souls of choice, in Seminaries and Colleges and villages, by the confessional and spiritual direction?
All things can be done by holy love that breaks stones, that tames wolves, that transforms hearts.
Love, love is everything, it encloses everything, it embraces everything and unites earth with heaven.
Even in hell itself, if there were love, it would not be hell; but it is precisely the lack of love that constitutes hell, which turns into hatred.
And since souls were born for Love and of Love, and when they are condemned, that fecund germ that impregnates them with love, that most holy image of the Trinity which is love, is torn away from them; they find themselves deprived of Love.
And that is their great pain, and the greatest torment of the damned, the deprivation of what formed their supernatural being. And deprived of love, which is more than if the very marrow of their bones were torn out of their bodies, they feel in themselves an insatiable emptiness, a void as if infinite, which separates them from God and cuts the bonds of love which, whether they wanted it or not, had bound them in the world to this God-Love. And then, by condemning themselves, they come to replace love with hatred and hatred. This barter is the sorrow of sorrows, the eternal estrangement and separation from God.
Incomprehensible torment, the deepest and most profound of all torments!
Then the knowledge of what they have lost through their guilt is enlivened and the powers of the soul are martyred in a most cruel way, as they feel their primitive substance of love, in which the soul was formed, changed by hatred, as I say; but hatred that has replaced love -- so immense is it -- which is inexplicable. As if the blood were drained from the body and gall injected into it, so the soul feels that love has been squeezed out of it and that substance has been replaced with hatred, with eternal separation from God.
I alone know how to measure in my Justice the torment of the condemned souls, and my Heart of God-man weeps for their misfortune, because they were created and came forth from the Trinity for heaven.
And for this reason I cry out to the loving hearts of My priests so that, activating and sanctifying themselves, they may stretch out their hands to so many souls in danger, - even of their own brothers -; so that their hearts may be moved by love for souls, thinking of the misfortune of misfortunes, which is the supreme torment of the souls whose love is torn away from them, and eternally!
And my hope is in my zealous priests, in my priests in love with Me, in my priests transformed in Me! They see souls in Me and souls in Me! They see Love, they are wrapped in Love, and with Love they throw themselves without taking into account works or obstacles, because Love softens everything and conquers everything.
May souls love Me, may they not be lost, attracted by Me in transformed priests, to glorify My Father through the Holy Spirit who is the eternal Focus of uncreated Love!
Ask and cry out day and night to the Father of mercies with prayers, with sacrifices, with tears, with blood, so that He may multiply the workers in His vineyard, but transformed in Me; to wrest souls from hell, especially those of priests; and that multiplied and holy, they may form a dam where Satan and his will crash, defending and saving those beloved souls that cost Me even their lives".