24 & NOT Ready to Die: Emily vs Lydwine‏

About this sermon

Emily, a young healthy woman of 24 living in Bruges, Belgium, recently obtained legal permission to commit doctor assisted suicide because of “unbearable psychological suffering.” Thank goodness she did not go through with this evil choice. Emily and her dysfunctional family and life typifies modern western civilization: divorced, entertained, medicated, doubting, impure and depressed… in despair. The cure for Emily and what she stands for is captured in another young lady...a saint of the Lowlands, the 15th Century victim soul, St. Lydwine of Schiedem. The contrast between these two women, each a type of something bigger than themselves, is amazing and instructive. In a word, St. Lydwine possesses the solution to the depression and despair of Emily. How important it is for us respond to the kisses of God, to be drawn by Him such that He shows us His wonders...many of which require we look back before we can overcome the present. St. Lydwine is someone to look back upon so that any present crisis can be conquered. For more please visit http://www.reginaprophetarum.org & remember to say 3 Hail Marys for the priest Emily documentary found here https://youtu.be/SWWkUzkfJ4M www.msjb.info “Most people consider hunger, plague and war to be punishment from God because in them they see more clearly the hand of divine justice that afflicts the nations. But these adversities, however great and terrible they may be, do not appear as punishments if we look with the pure eyes of faith illuminated with the light of God and compare them with other afflictions of the justice of an offended God. These are spiritual punishments which consist in decreasing the good effects of religion in a town, province or kingdom, or in stripping them, or in the withdrawal of God and abandoning them to the disorder of their passions, to error, to heresy, in one word to Satan’s claws. As there is no greater good in the world than true faith and the Catholic religion, neither can there be a more cruel, more terrible more terrifying affliction for a Catholic nation than being handed over to the devils and to the wicked sects so that in punishment for their sins they root out the holy tree of Religion. As a consequence, they burn the churches, kill the priests and remove all the visible signs of faith. Temporal punishments, properly speaking, are not real punishments, but rather mercies of the Lord, that with them it would oblige persons to wake up from the lethargy of vices and sins, to return to God and be converted. But spiritual punishments are of wrath, indignation and fury. They are the true outcome of the anger of a God who turns the obstinate sinner away from Him. They are the real temporal abandonment, the source and the reason of that eternal abandonment where the demons and those who are condemned in hell” (Bd. Francis Palau, OCD, The Struggle of the Soul with God, 2nd Conf, Article 1, no. 4).

Topics

• Heaven & Eternity