QUOTATION: Obtaining Heaven

God is so good and so merciful, that to obtain Heaven it is sufficient to ask it of Him from our hearts.

--St. Benoit Joseph Labre

QUOTATION: The Unforgivable Sin

If God is totally good, he is not Scrooge. He does not forgive some things; he forgives all things. The only possible sin that cannot be forgiven is not accepting forgiveness, which is why in traditional Christian theology, pride is the worst of sins: “I am too good to be forgiven; there is nothing to forgive.”

--Peter Kreeft, quoted in Socrates in the City, ed. Eric Metaxas, 2003

QUOTATION: Divine Mercy Created Saints

There are saints who are the work of divine mercy, and who became greater saints by the power of mercy and by the constant homage they afterward rendered to it, than they would have been by innocence and virginity. Witness Saint Peter, far greater, far more devoted after his sin than before, also Saint Paul and Saint Magdalen. Their sanctity was nourished on mercy, their tears were the food of their love.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: God's Mercy

The malice of him who abuses the choice graces  of God is so great, and men are so alive to the fact of its deserving His vengeance that the majority of those that fall after having been loaded with special privileges of grace by the good God, remain in evil, not so much because they love evil as because they despair of pardon for a sin so great as theirs. Every sinner, however. must of necessity consider God under the aspect of His mercy. Before His other attributes, His sanctity, His majesty, His justice, he would feel crushed.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: God's Mercy

The days of our life are much less numerous than our sins, for; we can offend by every one of our thoughts, and even mix up sin with our good works. We should have to despair at having sinned so much, of feeling ourselves again so borne to evil, if God were not infinitely good.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Everyone Benefits from the Divine Mercy

Let me suppose that you have never committed sin; but can you not commit it? Oh! yes, as much as the greatest criminals. If, then, you can commit it, what difference is there between you and him who has really committed it? What has preserved you? Mercy, the same that reclaimed me, a. sinner. We are then, both the one and the other, debtors to this divine mercy.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Everything Rests on God's Mercy

Even if we have thousands of acts of great virtue to our credit, our confidence in being heard must be based on God’s mercy and His love for men. Even if we stand at the very summit of virtue, it is by mercy that we shall be saved.

--St. John Chrysostom

QUOTATION: Justice and Mercy

If the devil tempts me by the thought of Divine justice, I think of God's mercy ; if he tries to fill me with presumption by the thought of His mercy, I think of His justice.

--St. Ignatius Loyola, Letter 8

QUOTATION: Purgatory

Purgatory is nothing else than the last effort of God's mercy in behalf of the sinner. Above the portals of that fiery prison is written : Misericordia Dei!

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Pride Kills Mercy

Our sins will never be so great as the mercy of God. There is one thing, however, one thing that it cannot conquer, and against which it can do nothing, and that is, the pride of supernatural gifts, which with full knowledge rejects God's goodness, and kills itself.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: God's Mercy Won't Save You from His Justice

 

Who taught you to reason that because God was good you could sin with impunity? Such is not the teaching of the Holy Spirit. On the contrary, those who listen to His voice reason thus: God is good; therefore, I must serve Him, obey Him, and love Him above all things. God is good; therefore, I will turn to Him with all my heart; I will hope for pardon, notwithstanding the number and enormity of my sins. God is good; therefore, I must be good if I would imitate Him. God is good; therefore, it would be base ingratitude in me to offend Him by sin.

Thus, the greater you represent God's goodness the more heinous are your crimes against Him. Nor will these offenses remain unpunished, for God's justice, which protects His mercy, cannot permit your sinful abuse of it to remain unavenged.

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: God's Forgiveness

Man in pardoning shames the culprit, and the fear of shame prevents the child from asking forgiveness. The good God pardons with goodness. His forgiveness is a grace which restores honor, purifies, sanctifies, embellishes. It is one same act to be pardoned and to become holy. It at once restores the robe of innocence, the white robe. One abases himself only to be raised up immediately by mercy.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: God's Forgiveness

Men grow weary of pardoning. They are more severe toward the relapsing sinner, and impose more conditions on him. But the more He pardons, the more merciful does God seem to become. Great sinners who return to Him are His greatest friends. He came for the sick, and for one sinner, He left the angels. Provided there are some humility and confidence in our confession, we are always sure of being welcomed.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Justification

The self-contented conscience does not content God; and that man alone is just before Him, who knows that all justice and grace proceed from the divine mercy.

--St. John of Avila, Letters, XXIII

QUOTATION: How God Forgives

God pardons absolutely and forever. He casts our sins behind His back, say the Scriptures, He plunges them into the sea, and the scarlet of crime assumes the whiteness of snow, of innocence, in the bath of His mercy. They will never again rise up to accuse us! I love this thought of a large number of theologians, according to whom, they will not even be mentioned at the Last Judgment, because the Lord says "I will pardon you them, and I shall remember them no more!"

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: God's Mercy

Know, then, that it is a need for Our Lord to pardon. His Heart is weighed down by the thought of the necessity of condemning us. He weeps over us, and when He forgives us. He is relieved and His Heart is dilated by mercy. If Our Lord could still suffer, it would be at seeing us despairing of His mercy and failing to ask pardon.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: God's Mercy

Beginners in the service of God sometimes lose confidence when they fall into any fault. When you feel so unworthy a sentiment rising within you, you must lift your heart to God and consider that all your faults, compared with divine goodness, are less than a bit of tattered thread thrown into a sea of fire.

--St. Paul of the Cross

QUOTATION: God's Mercifulness

Some people attribute a hard heart to the Eternal Father. Oh, how mistaken they are! The Eternal Father, to disarm His own justice, gave to His Son an excessively tender heart; no one can give what he does not possess.

--St. Jean Vianney, the Cure of Ars

QUOTATION: Knowledge of One's Sins

Till you know the weight of your sins, and that not in mere imagination, but in practice, not so as merely to confess it in a formal phrase of lamentation, but daily and in your heart in secret, you cannot embrace the offer of mercy held out to you in the Gospel, through the death of Christ.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "The Religion of the Day", Parochial and Plain Sermons

QUOTATION: God's Mercy

The blood of Jesus cries out, and asks mercy for us; and cries out so loudly that the noise of our sins is not heard.

--St. John of Avila