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To: Judith Anne
"I’ve said, a number of times, that I serve the poor out of love and gratitude to Christ my Lord."

Your reward will be great because Jesus himself came to serve such as these. Those who because of social status, poverty and physical deformity had been barred from the Temple. Let us not forget that the poor of spirit are in even more need of our charity and works as those poor materially.

I have been reading a lot lately about St. Peter Canisius and his efforts as a catechist during the counter-reformation. He rejected severe criticism of anti-Catholics teaching that we follow Christ's examples in dealing with them. He rejected Catholic attacks against Calvin and Melanchton with the words: "With words like these, we don’t cure patients, we make them incurable". In his letters to his Jesuit superiors he implored them;

"It is plainly wrong to meet non-Catholics with bitterness or to treat them with discourtesy. For this is nothing else than the reverse of Christ’s example because it breaks the bruised reed and quenches the smoking flax. We ought to instruct with meekness those whom heresy has made bitter and suspicious, and has estranged from orthodox Catholics, especially from our fellow Jesuits. Thus, by whole-hearted charity and good will we may win them over to us in the Lord."

"Again, it is a mistaken policy to behave in a contentious fashion and to start disputes about matters of belief with argumentative people who are disposed by their very natures to wrangling. Indeed, the fact of their being so constituted is a reason the more why such people should be attracted and won to the simplicity of the faith as much by example as by argument."

2,834 posted on 11/19/2011 10:30:23 AM PST by Natural Law (If you love the Catholic Church raise your hands, if not raise your standards.)
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To: Natural Law

Ah, the crippled in spirit...the deformed in the soul...


2,835 posted on 11/19/2011 10:34:19 AM PST by Judith Anne (For rhe sake of His sorrowful passion, have mercy on us, and on the whole world.)
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