QUOTATION: Sickness

In sickness let us endeavor to resign ourselves entirely to the will of God; no devout exercise is more acceptable to him than this.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Holy Eucharist

QUOTATION: Sickness

There are some sick persons who, seeing themselves stretched on a bed of pain, complain, not so much indeed of their sorrows as of their inability to render Our Lord the services they were accustomed to render Him in health. In acting thus, they greatly deceive themselves, for one hour of suffering through love and submission to the will of God, is worth more than many days of labour with less love.

--St. Francis de Sales, Consoling Thoughts

QUOTATION: Illness as Sacrifice

The bed of the sick is an altar of sacrifice . . . Happy is the just man who disturbs not the sacrifice by his murmurs and his cries, who adores the beneficent hand that is hidden under the instruments which is vouchsafes to employ, who blesses the salutary strokes, who feels the honour of the distinction! How brilliant will his soul depart from the crucible of tribulation! It is as gold tried seven times, it is marked with the seal of the elect, it bears the impress of Jesus Christ.

--St. Francis de Sales, Consoling Thoughts

QUOTATION: Sickness

Though abstinence and prayer be of great merit, yet sickness, suffered with patience, is of much greater.

--St. Pachomius

QUOTATION: The Consequences of Original Sin

 

If for some wrongdoing a man is deprived of some benefit once given to him, that he should lack that benefit is the punishment of his sin. Now in man s first creation he was divinely endowed with this advantage that, so long as his mind remained subject to God, the lower powers of his soul were subjected to the reason and the body was subjected to the soul. But because by sin man's mind moved away from its subjection to God, it followed that the lower parts of his mind ceased to be wholly subjected to the reason. From this there followed such a rebellion of the bodily inclination against the reason, that the body was no longer wholly subject to the soul. Whence followed death and all the bodily defects. For life and wholeness of body are bound up with this, that the body is wholly subject to the soul, as a thing which can be made perfect is subject to that which makes it perfect. So it comes about that, conversely, there are such things as death, sickness and every other bodily defect, for such misfortunes are bound up with an in complete subjection of body to soul.

--St. Thomas Aquinas