Ave Maria!— January’s Theme: Divine Love
“In these days […], I have often been seized by those excesses of divine love that make my poor heart languish so much. I completely understood Jesus’ condescension toward me, and I directed my usual prayer to Him with more confidence: “Oh, Jesus! If only I could love You, if only I could suffer what you would like, and make You content and repair, in a certain way, the ingratitude of men toward You!” But Jesus made me hear His voice much more in my heart: “My son, love is known in suffering; you will feel it acute in your spirit, and you will feel it even more acute in your body.”
“How can it be that a soul who considers Jesus, crucified for her, can love something other than Him, and that after so many acts of fidelity which made us say, write, sing and sigh ‘Long live Jesus’, we want, like the perfidious and iniquitous Jews, to shout: May he be crucified, may he be killed in our hearts?”
