God Reward You

Jesus: Impress deeply upon yourself, dear soul, that the Holy Mass is the same sacrifice as the sacrifice that I offered on the Cross to My Heavenly Father for the redemption of the world. Like the sacrifice of the Cross, so too the sacrifice of the Mass is a sacrifice of infinite value, because I, equal God with the Father and the Holy Spirit, offer Myself in every Mass to the Heavenly Father.

The offering and hearing of the Holy Mass is therefore of all good works of the greatest value. As the sun shines brighter and benefits the earth more than all the stars together, so the offering and hearing of the Holy Mass is worth more than all the good works of all men taken together. All good works are only human works. But in the Holy Mass you offer up My Body and My Blood, indeed Myself, the only-begotten Son of God. Attend Mass, therefore, dear soul, as often as it is possible for you.

The Holy Mass is the most sublime sacrifice of adoration and praise. God is the eternal, infinite Majesty, the embodiment of all perfections, the Lord of heaven and earth. To Him is due infinite homage, praise and glory. But no creature, not even Mary, My dearest Mother, can of herself adore, praise and glorify God as He deserves. Only I, the Son of God, can honor, praise and glorify the Godhead worthily, and at every Mass I offer to God infinite adoration, praise and glory, just as is due to Him.

Through the sacrifice of the Holy Mass you too, dear soul, can offer to the divine Majesty infinite homage, adoration, praise and glory, as often as you attend it with the right intention. O rejoice and offer to God zealously the sacrifice of adoration and praise of the Holy Mass. The Holy Mass is the most perfect sacrifice of thanksgiving.

For the countless graces and benefits of which God unceasingly makes you a partaker, you cannot give thanks as God deserves. What you cannot do by your own strength, that I have made possible. In every Holy Mass I offer Myself, in the highest spirit of thanksgiving, to My Heavenly Father as a perfect sacrifice of thanksgiving. With Me and through Me you too, dear soul, at every Holy Mass which you attend in a spirit of thanksgiving, can give thanks to God in a perfect way.

Through Me and My Eucharistic Sacrifice you have become so rich that you can consecrate to the Heavenly Father an ineffably high gift in return in thanks for all His benefits. But gratitude is also a glorious virtue. Therefore you should give thanks to God not merely at the Holy Mass, but always and everywhere.

The Holy Mass is the fully sufficient sacrifice of reparation and satisfaction. Sin is an infinite offense against God. No man is capable of making full reparation and satisfaction for a single sin. Therefore I had mercy on mankind and offered Myself on the wood of the Cross to the Heavenly Father as reparation and satisfaction. This sacrifice of reparation and satisfaction I continue in the Holy Mass. […]

As a sacrifice of satisfaction the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass effects the remission of the temporal punishments of sin which, after the forgiveness of your sins, you would have to expiate on earth or in Purgatory.

This remission of the punishments of sin is the more perfect, the freer you are from attachment to sins. The sacrifice of satisfaction of the Holy Mass you can also apply to the Poor Souls, indeed you cannot render them any better service than by attending Holy Mass for them or having it said for them.

The hour of the Holy Mass is truly a golden hour, because through it your whole day’s work is transformed into gold of eternal value.

God, who sees your desire, also lets the effect of the Holy Mass flow out upon you and your day’s work.

The Holy Mass also obtains for you, dear soul, many temporal benefits: blessing for your calling, consolation, courage, help in your needs. But since you do not know what serves your salvation, always add to your temporal petitions the condition: “If it is God’s will,” “If it serves for salvation.” In any case it is certain that in all your concerns you most surely find a hearing when at Holy Mass you unite your petitions with My intercession, for through My sacrifice they are fulfilled more surely, sooner and completely.

By hearing Holy Mass you grow in the love and grace of God, and therefore everything you do during the day has an incomparably greater value than if you had not attended Holy Mass. But if it is truly impossible for you to attend Holy Mass, then at least take part in it in wish and desire. Indeed, I advise you to make the intention of wanting to take part daily in all Holy Masses.⁹

⁹ Fr. Bonaventura Blattmann OFM, Gnadenströme, Imprimatur: August Vindel, May 4, 1934, vic. Gen. Dr. Eberle.

In the octave of Corpus Christi in June 1675 Jesus showed St. Margaret Mary Alacoque His Divine Heart and said to her:

Behold this Heart which has so loved men that it spared nothing, even to exhausting and consuming itself, in order to prove its love to them. In return I receive from most of them only ingratitude, by the coldness and contempt they show Me in this Sacrament of Love. But what is most painful to Me is that even souls consecrated to Me treat Me so. Therefore I ask of you that on the first Friday after the octave of Corpus Christi a special feast be instituted in honor of My Most Sacred Heart. On that day one should receive Holy Communion and make amends to Me by a solemn act of reparation, in order to atone for the dishonor done to the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar […].

By visiting Jesus again and again in the Sacrament of His love and thanking Him for all that He has done for us, we console His Most Sacred Heart and make reparation to Him for the ingratitude and indifference of so many souls. In this way we receive countless graces for ourselves and for all whom God has entrusted to our prayer. For gratitude is the key to the treasury of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus.

But even when we do not always have the opportunity to visit Jesus in the mystery of His love and to receive Him sacramentally, we always have the possibility, by means of our longing desire, of greeting Him in all the tabernacles of the world, adoring Him and receiving Him spiritually with loving gratitude.

St. Thérèse of the Child Jesus gave her sister by blood, Céline, this advice: What draws the most graces from God is gratitude. When we thank Him for a benefit, He is moved and hastens to give us ten more.

When we then thank Him again with the same sincerity, what an incalculable increase of graces!

I have experienced this myself: try it, and you will see. My gratitude is boundless for everything He gives me, and I prove it to Him in a thousand ways.

The humbler and more lowly a soul is, the more grateful, but also the stronger it becomes in the faith that even suffering is a gift of God.

Daily the whole Church sings and prays, united with the Mother of God, the great canticle of praise of the Magnificat, in order to glorify the Triune God and to thank Him in the name of all mankind. The more we let Mary praise and thank God in us, the more she grants us a share in her glorious graces and merits. These are so great and sublime that the graced abbess Sr. Mary of Ágreda writes: She alone, the treasury of the Most High King and the sanctuary of the “great mystery,” offered Him, in her own name and in the name of the whole human race, far more homage and thanks than all angels and men together.¹⁰

¹⁰ Maria von Agreda, Leben der jungfräulichen Gottesmutter Maria, Jestetten 1982, Vol. II, p. 144.

Jesus: Dear soul, have you ever considered the importance of a moment?

Soul: No, my good Jesus. O please, teach me about it!

Jesus: Then listen to Me and take to heart what I tell you. Every moment, both grace and trial stand ready for you, dear soul. Both stand, so to speak, always before your door. This, however, is certain, that I always go ahead with My love and grace before I let a suffering or a trial come upon you. To you, of course, it does not seem so, for instead of the grace you see only the sufferings. The reason for this is that grace is communicated deep within the soul, while sufferings and trials, on the other hand, mostly approach the soul from without. Let it be said to you in particular that I not infrequently use men as My instruments to inflict on you the sufferings and trials destined for you. Or I also permit human weaknesses and illnesses, under which you groan, because you do not want to know and do not want to understand that all these sufferings are not only great gifts of grace from God, but that under all these sufferings and trials the most precious graces are also hidden. I have given you, dear soul, a very great good, and that is insight. If you make use of it, you can turn all sufferings and trials to rightful account and also cooperate in all that you recognize as right. Through insight and through sufferings borne in the rightful sense these become graces, and through grace used at all times you will be led to intimate union with My most holy will. Every moment can contain a thought or an act of the will, a resolution, a self-offering, or a separation from Me. Yes, two powers often contend and fight in the soul, and it is a moment in which the soul decides either for good or for evil. In a moment a life of thirty, fifty or eighty years is concluded for this time. It is a moment in which judgment is passed on the soul by Myself. And again it is a moment in which the soul is told whether it will be eternally happy in heaven or eternally unhappy and damned in hell.

The whole life is composed of nothing but moments. No one can count all the moments that were given to him during his whole life. But God knows them all. To Him you will also one day have to give an account of the use of every moment. Happy and blessed, however, are all those souls who have both cooperated with grace and borne sufferings and trials in such a way that all became for them eternal merits.

The Franciscan ideal of grateful simplicity of heart shows itself to us in quite a special way in the life of the holy Capuchin brother Felix of Cantalice (1515-1587). Already as a child Felix, who never learned to read and write, prayed before self-made crosses while he tended his father’s sheep and goats. When he later entered the service of others as a farmhand, one day two oxen shied while plowing and ran over him with the plow. Felix, who remained unhurt as if by a miracle, clearly felt in this event the call of God and entered the nearest Capuchin monastery. In following Jesus the humble illiterate came to regard the Cross so much as a textbook that he said: Whoever does not understand this book does not know what books are. The contemplation of the sufferings of Christ, of all the good that the Lord has done for him, was for him the perpetual source and deepest secret of his gratitude and joy. He liked to explain: I study six letters: five red ones and one white one. The red ones are the wounds of the Savior, the white one is Mary, whom he loved like a child.¹³

His friendly Deo gratias – Thanks be to God! for everything that he received as the alms beggar of his monastery on his rounds through Rome, earned him among the people the name Brother Deogratias.

Even though he was convinced that all things are able to raise us to God if we look at them with a humble eye, he went, in order to remain inwardly with God, with lowered gaze and praying the Rosary through the streets of Rome, knocked undaunted at the doors of palaces as well as of poor dwellings, always cheerful and content with whatever he was given. Even to mockery and vile insults he replied smiling with a sincere Thanks be to God – Deo gratias! In everything, not only in the alms of the people, but precisely in the humiliations, Br. Felix saw a gift from God’s hand, which served for his own and others’ sanctification. The Capuchin had an enchantingly childlike and open nature. Besides the poor and the sick, many of whom he healed, the children of the city were therefore his special darlings. He liked to gather them around him and had them repeat the Deo gratias!, as it were in order to let them help him to give thanks to God perpetually. A special friendship and kinship of soul bound him to St. Philip Neri, the Apostle of Rome and founder of the Oratorians.

When Br. Felix returned to the monastery with the collected “treasures,” tired, he contented himself with a few crusts of bread and a little wine. At night, when the brothers slept, he went alone into the monastery church and laid there the intentions of his benefactors and the whole Roman people in intimate prayer before God. Praying with outstretched arms before the Blessed Sacrament, he spent hour after hour, often in tears, in intercessory prayer, in deep contemplation.

In the course of the 40 years in which Br. Felix faithfully and with unparalleled humility performed his office, the Romans came to know and love him, until he could no longer be imagined away from the cityscape.

In the last seven years of his life he was often tormented by violent colic, yet he said of these sufferings: These are roses, they are flowers. On the day before his death Br. Felix suddenly fell into ecstasy with an astonished Oh! and said: Our Lady is here, accompanied by angels. After he had received the sacraments of the dying the next day, which was Whit Monday, May 18, 1587, the Capuchin cried out three times, growing ever louder: Deo gratias!, and calmly closed his eyes as if wanting to sleep.¹⁴

¹³ Brother Lupus, who had once given Felix the ingenious advice to repeat the Deo gratias often on his begging rounds, observed one night how Brother Felix threw himself down before the high altar and begged the Mother of God earnestly: Lend me a little of your Divine Child. Suddenly the image of Mary on the altar came alive, the Mother of God bent down to him and laid her little Son in Felix’s arms, whom he pressed to himself with blissful love and in tears.

¹⁴ Main source: Fr. Edilbert Lindner OFM Cap, Die Heiligen des Kapuzinerordens, Verlag der Bayrischen Kapuziner, Altötting.