The Cause of the Canonisation of John Henry Cardinal Newman

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A Meditation for the Third Sunday of Lent: the Repentant Life

Categorised as Featured and published Saturday, March 6th, 2010
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Priests hear confessions before the Papal Mass in Washington D.C., April 2008

“Let it not be supposed, because I say this, that I think that in the life-time of each one of us there is some clearly marked date at which he began to seek God, and from which he has served Him faithfully. This may be so in the case of this person or that, but it is far from being the rule. We may not so limit the mysterious work of the Holy Ghost. He condescends to plead with us continually, and what He cannot gain from us at one time, He gains at another. Repentance is a work carried on at diverse times, and but gradually and with many reverses perfected. Or rather, and without any change in the meaning of the word repentance, it is a work never complete, never entire—unfinished both in its inherent imperfection, and on account of the fresh and fresh occasions which arise for exercising it. We are ever sinning, we must ever be renewing our sorrow and our purpose of obedience, repeating our confessions and our prayers for pardon. No need to look back to the first beginnings of our repentance, should we be able to trace these, as something solitary and peculiar in our religious course; we are ever but beginning; the most perfect Christian is to himself but a beginner, a penitent prodigal, who has squandered God’s gifts, and comes to Him to be tried over again, not as a son, but as a hired servant.

From the sermon ‘Christian Repentance’  (1831)