"if we were required to die twice, we could jettison one death. But man dies once only, and upon his death depends his eternity. Where the tree falls, there shall it lie. If, at the hour of his death, someone is living in some bad habit, his poor soul will fall on the side of Hell. If, on the other hand, he is in the state of grace, it will take the road for heaven. Oh, happy road! .... Generally speaking, one dies as one has lived. That is one of the great truths which Holy Scripture and the Fathers repeat in many different places.

If you live as good Christians, you will be sure to die as good Christians, but if you live badly, you will be sure to die a bad death. The prophet Isaias warns us that the impious man who thinks only of doing evil is in a woeful state, for he will be treated as he deserves. At death he will receive the reward for the work he has done. It is true, however, that sometimes, by a kind of miracle, one may begin badly and finish well, but that happens so rarely that, as St. Jerome puts it, death is generally the echo of life. You think that you will return then to God? No, you will perish in sin....

The Holy Ghost tells us that if we have a friend, we should do him some good before we die. Well, my dear brethren, could one have a better friend than one's soul? Let us do all the good for it that we can, for at the moment when we would like to do our souls good, we shall be able to do no more!

Life is short. If you defer changing your ways until the hour of your death, you are blind, for you do not know either the time or the place where you will die, perhaps without any assistance. Who knows if you will not go this night, covered in your sins, before the tribunal of Jesus Christ? .... Yes, my dear brethren, as life is, so is death. Do not hope for a miracle, which God but rarely performs. You are living in sin; very well, you will die in sin.... If we desire to die a good death, we must lead a Christian life. And the way for us to prepare for a good death is to model our deaths upon the death of Jesus Christ.

Can the life of the good Christian be anything other than that of a man nailed to the Cross with Jesus Christ?"

Source: The Sermons of the Cure d'Ars 1960

Prayer for Lent: O Lord who, for our sake, didst fast forty days and forty nights; give us grace to use such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may worthily lament and acknowledge our wretchedness, and may obtain perfect remission and forgiveness of Thee, the God of all mercy, who livest and reignest with the Father and Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen

Source: Lent with the Cure d'Ars Compiled by the CAPG

"A day will come, perhaps it is not far off, when we must bid adieu to life, adieu to the world, adieu to our relations, adieu to our friends. When shall we return, my children? Never. We appear upon this earth, we disappear, and we return no more; our poor body, that we take such care of, goes away into dust, and our soul, all trembling, goes to appear before the good God. When we quit this world, where we shall appear no more, when our last breath of life escapes, and we say our last adieu, we shall wish to have passed our life in solitude, in the depths of a desert, far from the world and its pleasures. We have these examples of repentance before our eyes every day, my children, and we remain always the same. We pass our life gaily, without ever troubling ourselves about eternity. By our indifference to the service of the good God, one would think we were never going to die.

See, my children, some people pass their whole life without thinking of death. It comes, and behold! they have nothing; faith, hope, and love, all are already dead within them. When death shall come upon us, of what use will three-quarters of our life have been to us? With what are we occupied the greatest part of our time? Are we thinking of the good God, of our salvation, of our soul? O my children! what folly is the world! We come into it, we go out of it, without knowing why. The good God places us in it to serve Him, to try if we will love Him and be faithful to His law; and after this short moment of trial, He promises us a recompense. Is it not just that He should reward the faithful servant and punish the wicked one? Should the Trappist, who has passed his life in lamenting and weeping over his sins, be treated the same as the bad Christian, who has lived in abundance in the midst of all the enjoyments of life? No; certainly not. We are on earth not to enjoy its pleasures, but to labor for our salvation.

Let us prepare ourselves for death; we have not a minute to lose: it will come upon us at the moment when we least expect it; it will take us by surprise. Look at the saints, my children, who were pure; they were always trembling, they pined away with fear; and we, who so often offend the good God - we have no fears. Life is given us that we may learn to die well, and we never think of it. We occupy ourselves with everything else. The idea of it often occurs to us, and we always reject it; we put it off to the last moment. O my children! this last moment, how much it is to be feared! Yet the good God does not wish us to despair; He shows us the good thief, touched with repentance, dying near Him on the cross; but he is the only one; and then see, he dies near the good God. Can we hope to be near Him at our last moment - we who have been far from Him all our life? What have we done to deserve that favor? A great deal of evil, and no good.

There was once a good Trappist Father, who was trembling all over at perceiving the approach of death. Someone said to him, "Father, of what then are you afraid?" "Of the judgment of God," he said. "Ah! if you dread the judgment - you who have done so much penance, you who love God so much, who have been so long preparing for death - what will become of me?" See, my children, to die well we must live well; to live well, we must seriously examine ourselves: every evening think over what we have done during the day; at the end of each week review what we have done during the week; at the end of each month review what we have done during the month; at the end of the year, what we have done during the year. By this means, my children, we cannot fail to correct ourselves, and to become fervent Christians in a short time. Then, when death comes, we are quite ready; we are happy to go to Heaven.

Source: The Blessed Curé of Ars in His Catechetical Instructions  (1951) 

Prayer for Lent: O Lord who, for our sake, didst fast forty days and forty nights; give us grace to use such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may worthily lament and acknowledge our wretchedness, and may obtain perfect remission and forgiveness of Thee, the God of all mercy, who livest and reignest with the Father and Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen

Source: Lent with the Cure d'Ars Compiled by the CAPG

  "I have told you that you should have neat and clean clothes. I do not mean expensive clothes, but only ones which are not soiled or torn. That is to say, the clothes should be washed and mended if one has no others. There are some who have nothing to change or who, through laziness, do not do so; they do not change their linen, that is, their shirts.

For those who have no other clothes, there is nothing wrong in that. But those who have, do wrong, for it is lacking in respect to our Lord, Who wishes to come into their hearts.

Your hair should be combed and tidy and your face and hands clean. You should never come to the altar without stockings, good or bad.

One should not approve of those young people who, in going up to the altar, appear no differently at that moment than at the time when they are going to a ball or a dance.

I do not know how they go to receive a God Who was humbled and despised by all, with such a parade of vanity and style.

Dear Lord, what a contradiction this is!"

Source: The Sermons of the Cure d'Ars 1960

Prayer for Lent: O Lord who, for our sake, didst fast forty days and forty nights; give us grace to use such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may worthily lament and acknowledge our wretchedness, and may obtain perfect remission and forgiveness of Thee, the God of all mercy, who livest and reignest with the Father and Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen

Source: Lent with the Cure d'Ars Compiled by the CAPG

"No, my dear brethren, let us never forget that in order to receive Holy Communion, it is necessary to be converted and strong in a true resolution to persevere.

When Jesus Christ desired to give His Adorable Body and His Precious Blood to His Apostles, in order to teach them how pure one should be before receiving It, He even went so far as to wash their feet. By that He wishes to show us that we can never be purified enough of our sins, even our venial sins. It is true that the venial sin does not make our Communions unworthy, but it is a cause of our profiting hardly at all by such a great blessing and happiness. The proof of that is very clear when you consider how many times we have received Holy Communion during the course of our lives. And have we become any better? .... No, not at all, and the real cause of that is that practically all the time we are holding onto our bad habits; we do not break ourselves of any one of them more than another. We have a horror of the big sins which kill our souls, but all those little fits of impatience, those grumblings when some worries or troubles befall us, or some disappointments or setbacks -- these mean nothing to us.

You will admit that in spite of so many Confessions and Holy Communions, you are always the same, that your Confessions are nothing else, nor have they been for years, than a repetition of the same sins, which, although venial, are none the less damaging to the merit of your Holy Communions. You have been heard to say, with good reason, that you are no better one day than another, but who is stopping you from correcting your faults? 

If you are always the same, it is simply because you do not want to make even small efforts to improve yourself. You do not want to endure anything or to be opposed in anything. You would like everyone to be fond of you and to have a good opinion of you, which is a difficult enough thing. Let us try hard, my dear brethren, to destroy all that could be in the smallest way displeasing to Jesus Christ, and we shall see how our Communions will help us to make great strides towards Heaven. And the more we do this, the more we shall feel ourselves becoming detached from sin and inclining towards God.... This is what I desire for you."

Source: The Sermons of the Cure d'Ars 1960

Prayer for Lent: O Lord who, for our sake, didst fast forty days and forty nights; give us grace to use such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may worthily lament and acknowledge our wretchedness, and may obtain perfect remission and forgiveness of Thee, the God of all mercy, who livest and reignest with the Father and Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen

Source: Lent with the Cure d'Ars Compiled by the CAPG

Artist Francisco Herrera the Younger  (1627–1685)

Our Lady of Sorrow, Sacred Heart Dunn, NC ©CAPG

Our Lady’s Compassion in Passiontide (National Catholic Register)

Prayer: Our Lady, Mother of Sorrows pray for Priests, your special sons. Strengthen their faith and love of Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament, so that they may turn to Him for the grace they need to live a life faithful to their calling. Bring comfort, consolation and courage to those who are suffering under the weight of the Cross. Give them the love of your Son and zeal for the honor and glory of God, and the salvation of souls. Amen

Compassion of Our Lady (The Month, 1915)

Water and blood-in clear and crimson tide
Drawn by a soldier from His open side
When on the Calvary the Saviour died,
                       Upon the Rood:

Now in one Cup the water and the wine
Mingle together as a mystic sign,
Union of natures human and divine-
                       Water and Blood.

Water and Blood-the sorrows that transfix
Her heart with His, well from her soul's pure pyx
In anguish lachrymal and whitely mix
                       With that red flood:

Now wheresoe'er the Holy Mass is said,
Within one Chalice evermore is wed
Her passion white unto His Passion red-
                       Water and Blood.

M. S. J.

"On her return to her kingdom, the queen of Sheba could never weary of relating all that she had seen in the temple of Solomon; she talked of it unceasingly, with fresh pleasure.

The same thing should happen to the Christian who has assisted properly at holy Mass. When he comes back to his house, he ought to have a talk with his children and his servants and ask them what they have retained of it and what touched them most.

Alas! Dear God, what am I going to say? .... How many fathers and mothers, masters and mistresses are there who, if someone wanted to talk to them about what they had heard at Mass, would laugh at all that and say that they were tired of it, that they knew enough about it....

Although generally speaking it seems that people still listen to the holy word of God, the moment they come out of church, they fall into all sorts of careless and frivolous ways. They get up with a sudden rush. They hurry. They jostle at the door. Often the priest has not even come down from the altar when they are already outside the door, and there they give themselves up to discussions upon all sorts of secular subjects.

Do you know what the result of this kind of thing is, my dear brethren? This is it. People derive no profit and gain no benefit from what they have heard and seen in the house of God. What graces have been lost! What means of salvation trodden underfoot! What a misfortune that is, to turn to our loss what should have helped so much to save us!

You can see for yourselves how many of these services are a burden to the majority of Christians! For those few moments, they stay in the church as if it were some kind of prison, and as soon as they are out, you will hear them shouting at the door, like prisoners who have been given liberty. Are we not quite frequently obliged to close the door of the church in order not to be deafened by their continual noise? Dear God, are these really Christians, who ought to leave Your holy temple with minds filled only with all kinds of good thoughts and desires? Should not they be seeking to engrave these in their memory, that they may never lose them and that they may put them into practice as soon as the opportunity presents itself?

Alas! The number of those who assist at the services with attention and who try to profit from them is a little like the number of the elect: ah, how small it is!"

Source: The Sermons of the Cure d'Ars, 1960

Prayer for Lent: O Lord who, for our sake, didst fast forty days and forty nights; give us grace to use such abstinence that, our flesh being subdued to the spirit, we may worthily lament and acknowledge our wretchedness, and may obtain perfect remission and forgiveness of Thee, the God of all mercy, who livest and reignest with the Father and Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen

Source: Lent with the Cure d'Ars Compiled by the CAPG