Don't Feel Guilty

Do you ever feel guilty because your ailing and/or aging body won’t allow you to do all of the good things you used to do for love of God and His people? “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak,” said Jesus.

As vehement as he was about Christians regularly attending worship services, Saint Padre Pio—the famous stigmatist-priest who bore the five ever-bleeding wounds of Christ Crucified in his hands, feet, and side for fifty long years—often ordered ailing and/or aged spiritual children to be easy on their bodies. For example, he forbade one of his dearest friends and “servants”—Mary Pyle, a once-Protestant American who went to live near Padre Pio’s monastery in Italy after she met him—to go to church services because “Brother Body was too heavy and her energy was no longer that of a young girl.” (see p. 118 in Mary Pyle, by Bonaventura Massa)

Of course, like Mary Pyle, you want to keep going, keep doing everything you’ve been doing, since you were young and strong and healthy, but “Brother Body”—or Sister Body—won’t allow it. Saint Padre Pio said to Mary Pyle in her suffering, “Fasten yourself to the Cross until He who was crucified comes to take out the nails.” In support of Padre Pio’s words, here is what Saint Paul said, “I have been crucified with Christ; it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and this life I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself for me.”

In conclusion, here is a blessing for you from Saint Padre Pio: “May Jesus be always with you; may He sustain you in all the trials which He sends you out of sheer goodness; and may He fulfill in you His holy will for your salvation and for the salvation of all the other souls He wants to save. Amen.” (Saint Padre Pio’s Letters, Volume II, p. 557)

May Jesus always smile on you, my dear friend whom I love.
Eileen Dunn Bertanzetti