February 18, 1947prev home
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Concerning the Visions and Dictations on February 24 and 25, 1944,
January 3, 1945, and January 17, 1945
Jesus says:
“In reality, the visions and words given in regard to my temptation, including the part of it which was not known, are so clear that they are themselves replies to all the objections by those asking questions in this connection, and it would not be necessary for Me to give them broader ones, for the additional reason that - let the one requesting these answers remember this - beginning on February 25, 1944, I clearly let it be understood that I was not fond of dwelling upon or returning to the episode and did not like others to dwell upon it, drawing the instrument’s special attention thereto and thus acting in a manner diametrically opposed to mine, when I replied to the instrument herself, who was then proposing the same objections to Me which she is proposing to Me again now, spurred on once more by the same individual, ‘I did not want you to speak about the sexual temptation of your Jesus. Even if your inner voice had brought you to understand Satan’s motive in attracting Me to sensuality, I preferred to speak about it Myself. And do not think any more about it.’
“I would have wanted all of you to follow my example of prudence towards the little boy I have placed in your midst, who must tell you everything he sees - that is, everything which has been used for and against Christ - but for whom his inexperience and the paternal goodness of God act as providential protection against the crudest forms of wretchedness and actions by men and Satan.
“I would have wanted this out of respect for the little boy, whose eyes see God, and I would have wanted it because this would have witnessed to me concerning the state of your spirits, which I would like to be just, even in the slightest nuances. There is nothing insignificant or useless or irrelevant in justice. Therein the great and visible action of being able to die for its sake has value, as silent, hidden imitation of Me in the way of acting towards your brothers or spiritual children or disciples. For you, as spiritual fathers and teachers, shepherds to whom I have entrusted my lambs, have voluntarily consecrated yourselves to this spiritual paternity and this teaching of the little ones, and you must be imitators of Me.
“Finally, I would have wanted this because it would have witnessed to Me concerning the state of your intellect, free from what creates confusion and haze for the truths so clearly visible in my pages demonstrating the constant perfection of Jesus Christ the God-Man in all the circumstances of his mortal life, in all his actions, words, and even silences. For there are silences which speak more than all words and teach more than all doctrine.
“And this episode, at the point which you do not want to accept, calling it ‘inappropriate,’ speaks to you precisely with the magnificent lesson of my silence, set against this impure part of Satanic temptation. My silence and my complete indifference to the titillations of Satan should have articulated for you the glorification of Christ. Instead, in your view, they articulated something else - the degradation of Christ. Christ’s being tempted by impurity gives you the impression that Christ’s dignity was damaged. You are getting the attempt mixed up with the result. A result would have meant damage. Glorification is the failure of the attempt. Weren’t you able to consider this difference? You were not able to read the truth which was silenced, but clearly visible in the vision and the dictations.
“To be able to read! Not all are able to do so, and do so with precision. To be able to, and to do so with precision, one must have sight purified of internal flames and external obscuration. If your spiritual sight - that is, your thought - is clear and pure, you see things as they are. In this case, involving Christ’s glorification. But if your thought is obscured or enveloped in the smoky flames of human knowledge and the pride of having to be the only ones to know, or, worse, by impure fires, then it is your reflection that tinges what you contemplate with tones opposed to the real ones and turns a chaste, innocent episode into a sensual, sinful one. Place the episode once again far from your lights, though, in its true light, and it will go back to being what it was: witness to a heroic chastity and innocence which are dishonored in vain.
“Now, if you cast the reflection of your humanity upon the episode because you cannot admit that someone may not feel internal disturbance over an external temptation, because you cannot admit that not even the Christ, the Holy One of God, may have been tempted from outside without undergoing internal disturbance, then it is you that are giving that coloring to the episode. But you must not say, then, that this episode testifies to an inappropriate disturbance in Christ, a disturbance which truly may not be admitted out of respect for the dignity of the Lord Jesus, since, in reality, in Christ there always was order and harmony between the flesh and the spirit, both of them always submissive and perfect in giving glory to their Creator. Say, then, if your opinion differs from what appears not at all doubtfully in the episode in question, that it is you that are casting upon this point in the episode what is churning in yourselves when you make ‘suppositions,’ as you call other elements of yours, suppositions which nothing in the episode authorizes or justifies anyone to suppose or believe. This is serious.
“Why do you make Me dictate these words? Don’t you understand what pain you bring Me by forcing Me to dictate them even for just one among you? Don’t you understand that it is not a praiseworthy matter to display scandalized concern - which you do not really feel - just to disturb the spokesman, to tempt him to doubt about the Voice speaking to him, to be distrustful, or even to tempt him to modify parts of the work? An act that you would later reproach him for and set against him as capital evidence that the work is the result of his thought. To modify parts of the work, as if a creature could do so with pages dictated by Me. And why pry over and over into a certain point that I did not dwell upon, not even while I was undergoing it, in either thought or word, by stooping to discuss it with Satan, and my advice had been not to linger over it or go back to it because it fills Me with disgust, now as then? Disgust, I say. This is the only reaction which Satan’s obscene insinuation provoked in Me.
“But now - and let it be forever - I will give you the replies you want so that ‘you will get the perfect clarity on that point’ which one of you states ‘would be desirable.’ I will give them, not the spokesman, and much less will he take the liberty of retouching the text afterwards (p. 111 of the First Year of the Gospel) ‘to make it crystal clear,’ as one of you would always like. Let each stay in his place. “What is temptation? The Catechism says, ‘It is an incitement to sin which comes to us from the devil or the wicked or our passions.’ It is an incitement. If it incites to sin, then, that is a sign that it is not a sin in itself. No, it is not a sin. Rather, it is a means to grow in justice and augment our merits by remaining faithful to the Law of the Lord. It begins to become a sin of imprudence when man voluntarily places himself in a position to sin, approaching things or persons that can lead him to sin.
“Who does temptation come from? From the devil, the wicked, and the passions. It comes, then, from external factors and internal factors. In all truth, I tell you, though, that the internal factors are the most dangerous ones - that is, the disordered inclinations and the instincts or incitements remaining in man with the other forms of indigence following upon Adam’s Sin. Internal factors which Satan incites or tries to incite with every means, in this work, which is greatly assisted by the men around you and by the human self, which is a field of constantly reappearing temptations, with a marked tendency towards the egotism of matter and the sensuality of the mind - the former spurring the flesh to rebel against God and the spirit, the latter leading the mind towards the foolish arrogance which believes everything is licit, even criticizing the works and justice of God.
“I tell you truly that the greatest help for Satan is provided by you by welcoming and cultivating in yourselves ‘the concupiscence of the flesh, the concupiscence of the eyes, and the pride of life,’ which do not come from the Father, but from the world. For, without your consent to preparing ground favorable to the invasions of the external factors, they could not penetrate into you, disturbing your interior and aggravating the internal factors. The incitements of sin could not by themselves lead to damnation if man did not cultivate them, as happens in most individuals - cultivating them as flowers of evil satisfying man’s disordered sentiment with their showy, inviting appearance and later turning into the fruits of sin.
“If a devoutly merciless good will were to fall upon the incitements, they would remain sterile, like pernicious plants which have dried up or are at least drooping, to the point where they cannot grow, but are instead subjected to ongoing enfeeblement until their complete destruction. Man instead lets them exist within him, and they grow; they grow, reinvigorated by the greedy mouthfuls which incautious man allows himself, without realizing that every act of yielding to what is illicit, even if small and apparently insignificant and innocuous, paves the way for greater concessions. For the more one savors their spicy taste, the more one’s appetite for the concupiscences increases. And satisfied appetite, in its ever-reappearing and growing violence, consequently increases the power of the disordered instincts, and these grow until filling the whole man with themselves and knocking down the barriers of conscience.
“Oh, it happens as with a plant bedded out in a narrow space. As long as it has not fully developed, it is content in the enclosure where it has been placed, but when it is full grown and its roots are as extensive as its leaves, then they can no longer be compressed into an excessively limited space and penetrate under the foundations of the confining walls to seek room, just as the branches have sought it above, and, on growing, they raise the walls, throw them out of joint, and cause them to cave in, opening up passageways through which thieves or boys can come in to set their hands on the plant and strip it of its fruits and branches and mistreat it, sometimes to the point of provoking its death. In the case of the soul, the plant of the disordered inclination towards the concupiscences - in contrast to the spirit’s inclination towards its end: God - opens the way for Satan and the world, forming an alliance against the incautious self as seducers and bringing death or violation, the mutilation of the spirit’s beautiful integrity.
“I tell you truly: It is not being tempted that ought to cause fear, nor should the strength of the temptation and the repetition of its violent attacks lead the soul to get discouraged with the thought that this is happening because it is outside the Lord’s grace and destined to eternal death. On the contrary, rejoice, O you that are so forcefully oppressed by Satan. It is a sign that you are enemies of Satan and that Satan already senses that you are prey that has escaped from him forever. Satanic wrath always hurls itself against the prey eluding his hunger and against God’s conquests.
“It is logical for it to be that way. In the battles between two enemy armies as well, where does an enemy repeat his mightiest assaults? Perhaps against the weakest and least important positions? No, on the primary, best fortified positions. The others are easy conquests which he reserves for last, when the militias are already weary, just to give them the incentive of a victory so that it will spur them on to tougher fights. The head of an army would be quite foolish if he exhausted men and means to carry out imposing displays of strength and wasted munitions against a city whose defenses had already collapsed through the defenders’ neglect or which was ready to surrender without a fight.
“Satan is never a foolish conqueror. He is very capable of organizing his assaults. And if where he sees spiritual and moral weakness and perceives the defensive protection of conscience to be greatly weakened - for man’s wicked inclinations have acted as a battering ram against it - or where he sees full consent to accepting him as a friend, he does not make violent assaults, but uses only flattery, where, on the other hand, he sees resistance and foresees a defeat, he rushes forward forcefully with all his means - from flattery to terror, and he does not tire of repeating a hundred or a thousand times, directly or with the help of the world and circumstances - with all his external means, then, to conquer the prey or torment - the eternal hater of the good wants at least this - the children of God.
“I tell you truly that when a creature has reached heroic virtue, or, as St. Paul says, the creature ‘has become strong in the Lord and in his powerful virtue,’ it is then that one must put on ‘the armor of God to be able to withstand the devil’s traps,’ for it is then that, as the Apostle always says, the creature ‘no longer fights with flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers, against the dominators of this world of darkness, against the evil spirits in the air’294 - that is, against mighty Hell, which directly unleashes the great tempests of powerful temptations in a last effort to try to demolish the giant spirit resisting it.
“Is temptation, then, a sin or a glory? A good or an evil? It is not sin. And, though an element of Evil, it can be turned into a means for good and glory through the goodwill with which man rejects it. The freewill decision to yield or not to yield to temptations is not forced upon any man - it was not forced even upon the Christ. A temptation rejected is a merit acquired. For this reason God has left man his splendid freedom to will, so that, through it, and by his own merit, man could arrive at a merited glory.
“Always remember this. And always remember, too, that man’s life is an expiation of the evil man does; at best - that is, in the case of someone who does not commit even a single conscious sin - it is always expiation, or, if you prefer, suffering resulting from Original Sin - though my Sacrifice and your being restored to Grace, which I obtained for you by that Sacrifice, have superabundantly reduced it - and every man is thus obliged to suffer to arrive again at that degree of justice, freely given, which the First Parents possessed together with life. Oh, holy, immaculate innocence of the first Creatures, which the present ones must reconstruct with their pain, along with the free gifts which I obtained for you by my Sacrifice!
“Accordingly, when you see the Holiest One of all or a saint powerfully tempted, do not say, ‘This is inappropriate.’ But observe the way those tempted react. And if you see that they remain indifferent to the temptation - a fact which testifies that they have reached the perfection I counseled for you: ‘as my Heavenly Father is perfect,’ a perfection which no agent can disturb - if you see they remain indifferent to temptation, having won the battle in themselves against all the reactions of flesh and blood, or if you see the just able to fight at the same time against the disorder provoked from outside, which would like to rise up again, and against the Beast, provoking and hurling forth calls to disorder, do not say that ‘this is inappropriate,’ but say that it serves to make the degree of perfection reached by those tempted shine out or to illuminate it.
“Who can undergo temptation? God? The angels? Men? God, as God, cannot undergo any temptation. The angels, who remained faithful even during the rebellion by Lucifer and his followers, cannot undergo temptation, as they were raised up, after the trial, to the supernatural order, to the contemplation and praise of God. It is only man, then, who can be tempted, man composed of a material substance and a spiritual substance, endowed with rational freedom, intelligence, and conscience, so as to be able to discern good and evil and will good or evil. It is only man, while still fighting his battle, that can be subject to temptation, through the sad inheritance which has come to him from the first ancestor of Humanity.
“Since the day of Adam’s fall from the state of innocence to that of sin, since the day the woman wanted firsthand knowledge of the forbidden plant and the Serpent was able to speak to Eve, who listened to him intently instead of fleeing from him and accepted his deceitful words and ruinous suggestions, man has perennially found himself close to the plant of Good and Evil that Lucifer is wrapped around and has undergone temptation. But it is through his victory over the promptings towards sin that he acquires justice and conquers his immortal crown or, if he repeats Eve’s gesture and picks the forbidden fruit, obeying the Charmer, gets poisoned, sometimes to the point of dying therefrom. It is precisely through the victory over external temptations and mastery over the senses and pride and thus over internal stimuli that you men become ‘gods and sons of the Most High,’295 like your Most Holy Brother Jesus, who underwent temptations, but never sinned because He did not want to sin. One can be tempted without one’s consent thereto. One becomes a sinner only by one’s consent.
“I, Jesus, never consented to sin. On the contrary, having combatted every human reaction which was not acceptable to God, through a spirit of voluntary, loving justice, and having done so since my earliest years, ‘remaining subject to my (putative) father and my mother, two just people who taught Me justice, and growing in wisdom, age, and grace,’296 I eliminated in Myself forever every possibility of sudden disorder or inner disturbance from pressures and circumstances, which, when I grew older, arose around Me, intensifying until my death.
“Do not misunderstand Me! I say ‘pressures and circumstances’; I do not say ‘lust.’ The pressures and circumstances of uncomprehending relatives, of citizens even more obtuse than my relatives, of hostile fellow countrymen, of treacherous enemies, and of betraying friends. It is not only sensuality that serves to prompt sin. There are so many reasons for which man may sin. And what do you say? Do you say, for instance, that Judas’ conduct would not have been a motive for a sin against love in anyone else? Do you say, for example, that the animosity of the scribes and pharisees and all my adversaries, so sly in opposing Me and also so base in their means and the accusations they used to oppose Me, was not a perpetual temptation to react in a human way?
“I did not sin. I said, ‘And who among you can convict Me of sin?’297 I said so to my enemies at that time. I can say so to my enemies at present, and also to the incredulous and those doubting my sanctity. But even if I do not say so to you, whom I want to regard as friends, even though you cause Me pain through the pain you cause my little John, my works tell you so.
“Is there perhaps a word or act written in the Work I dictated and elucidated which can convince you of sin, of a single sin, by your Master? I am that work. It is not only I who dictate and elucidate it, but it is I who live it out, I who present Myself to you as I was in my mortal days, in the environment surrounding Me, in the little holy world of my family, in that vaster and different world, in keeping with the beings comprising it, of my disciples, in the vaster, inconstant one - all Palestine - whipped up and traversed by varying currents, like a sea moving around Me, under a changeable March sky, sometimes entirely calm and serene, and immediately afterwards covered with storm clouds and traversed by gale winds stirring up the sea into breakers roaring their acrimony against Me, threatening and also attacking, until the final violence of Good Friday.
“Why don’t you want to recognize Me? Why don’t you understand my language? Why do you want to be like those attacking Me in the Temple, saying, ‘We don’t know who You are’? Are you, too, like the apostles who at the Last Supper showed they still did not know Me for what I was: the Word, Son of the Father, who was returning to the Father after having long been among men to give them the words which the Father gave Him? But they, my poor Apostles, had not yet received the Holy Spirit, He who illuminates all truth. But you have received Him. Does not even his Light illuminate for you the Christ who is in these pages? The eternal, most wise Word, who is carrying out a new work of love and salvation because He has mercy on the excessively large number who are dying of spiritual starvation, who are being lost because they do not know Me, who are freezing because they are not assisted with the fires of apostolic love, who are going off the track because they are blind and there is no one to reach out and lead them to Me, whom they are seeking, getting lost on other roads you condemn, but do not pull them away from, poor children whom you condemn because they travel those roads as blind people seeking the Light and whom I will not condemn because I see the movements of their hearts, and I will draw them to Me because I am the Savior of the Jews and the Gentiles, of all who seek the Truth.
“I ask you again, Why do you make Me dictate these words? Are these the ones I would like to say to you? Do not bring Me pain. The pain I am caused by those I want to regard as my friends is the pain which is most painful to Me....
“I, Jesus, never consented to sin. I never felt disturbance because of sin. The only disturbance - remember this - I could be occasioned by the stench of evil stirring around Me was nausea, disgust over sin. I preferred to draw near lepers dying of this disease rather than healthy people covered with the scabs of vice and stinking of lust, especially if they were impenitent. My infinite love for sinners, who were to be saved, always made Me overcome the nausea caused by their spiritual stench. My Father, my Father alone, knows what sort of prolonged passion it was for Me to have to live enveloped in the whirlpool of temptations and the muddy wave of the sins streaming over the earth, doubling over and knocking down men. To have to live and see the shipwreck of so many, without being able to imprison the Beast, because the time to do so had not yet come. It still has not. And it heads on, with its hellish breath fuming out, sowing its poison, and is followed by the ever-growing wave of ever-increasing sins. Now, too, I feel nausea and pain over this.
“Who was I? I was the Incarnate Word. I was God, then. And I was Man, then. I was truly God and I was truly Man. I was the Redeemer, the new Adam, ‘the First-Born from among the dead,’ as my John says, also writing in his Apocalypse, ‘Jesus Christ, who loved us and cleansed us of our sins in his Blood,’ and in his Epistle, ‘There are three that bear witness in Heaven: the Father, the Word, and the Holy Spirit, and these Three are One alone; and there are three that bear witness on earth: the spirit, the water, and the blood, and these three are one alone.’298
“Three in Heaven who witness to the Divine Nature of Jesus, who is Christ, from birth until death and beyond Death and Resurrection, forever and ever, with no interruption at all, as some heretics have wanted to maintain.
“The Father, who three times during my public life indicated Me as his beloved Son and his good pleasure and glory. And if on Tabor the Eternal Father’s voice was heard by just three persons, who, because of their condition as disciples, can be silenced by the deniers as exalters or deceivers, at the Jordan and especially in Jerusalem, jam-packed for the approaching Feast of Unleavened Bread, many people - to the point that they were indeed termed ‘multitudes,’ where Israelites were mixed with Gentiles, Jews with proselytes, and disciples with enemies of Christ - heard the testimony by my Father.
“Three times, in three times and three different places and circumstances, the Father bore witness to Me without ever retracting. Now, only true versions remain immutable, whereas those which are not true, with the passing of time, undergo alterations which disclose their deceitful source. If, then, on three occasions, in three different times, places, and circumstances, a Voice, always with the same power, and quite different from mine and from that of every other man, thundered from the Heavens to bear the same witness to Me, it is a sign that I was really God, like the Father, since God the Father can be said to glory in only one Son, God, like Him, having begotten Him, and to take pleasure in Him, seeing He is perfect as He, the Father, is by Divine Nature, and perfect in terms of will and grace in the human nature taken on.
“The Word, with his most wise Doctrine and his works, of such a nature and power that they testify by themselves that it is He - a God - who teaches the former and carries out the latter.
“The Holy Spirit, manifesting Himself in the form of a Dove at the Jordan and as Fire in the Upper Room at Pentecost to finish the work of Christ, purifying and perfecting the Apostles for their ministry, just as I had promised them, and, for those able to see, being present and transparent in every word of infinite, charitable wisdom issuing forth from the lips of the Master, Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit never comes to the aid of liars. He abandons them to the Father of Deceit and flees far from them. But He was always with Me because I am Jesus Christ, God and Man, just as I said I was.
“And there are three things bearing witness on the earth to my true Humanity: the spirit I gave back, like all men, after a painful agony, my Blood, shed in the Passion, and the water which issued from my lifeless side together with the final drops of cadaveric blood gathered into the cavity of my dead Heart. Now, you know that only a real body yields blood if wounded and that only a real corpse presents a separation of the watery part of the blood - which you term ‘serum’ - from the other, which coagulates into clots or at least is already thicker and darker than living blood, if the time elapsed between death and the discharge of blood is still too short. But I - as my Turin Shroud attests - discharged blood that was already clotted because I had already been dead for some time when my side was stricken, and I was already growing cold and stiff, very quickly, on account of the specific conditions which had brought about my rapid death.
“By the testimony of John the Apostle, then, a witness to my death, I am a true Man.
“Paul of Tarsus wrote to those who could have rebutted him if he had exaggerated or lied in describing Me: ‘That Jesus, made only slightly inferior to the angels, because of the death He endured, is crowned with glory and honor, having tasted death by the grace of God for the sake of all. And it certainly was very fitting for Him through whom and from whom all things exist... to make the author of their salvation perfect by way of suffering.... He, too, shared flesh and blood with men to destroy, by dying, the one who held sway over death.... Indeed, He did not take on angelic nature, but the seed of Adam. He thus had to be, in all things, like his brothers and sisters to become the merciful, faithful high priest before God and to atone for the sins of his people, so that, in having suffered and in being tried Himself He could help those who are enduring trials.... We do not have a high priest who cannot be compassionate towards our infirmities, since He was tempted in every way, like us, but without sin.... Every high priest... is constituted... so that he will offer gifts and sacrifices for sins and have mercy on the ignorant and misguided, since he himself is surrounded by infirmity.... It was certainly appropriate for us to have such a high priest - holy, innocent, immaculate, separated from sinners, exalted above the Heavens.’299
“Saul, then, a learned man and a contemporary of the Jews of my time, when he became Paul, full of wisdom and truth, with the reality of my historical figure and the lights of the Holy Spirit, also testifies that I am true God and true Man, equal to my Father, by divine, uncreated Nature, equal to my Mother, by human, created Nature, Christ uninterruptedly and eternally, the Perfect One Making Reparation, Savior, and Redeemer.
“And if, then, I was Man, why should I not have suffered temptation, as every other man suffers? If my Father wanted to make Me ‘like’ you ‘in all things,’ why should He have granted Me the unjust privilege, and why should I have wanted to claim the unjust privilege of not experiencing the suffering and exertion of temptations, which all men undergo and to which they react in different ways, according to the prevalence or absence in them of the good will to sanctify themselves - that is, of their spirituality or their carnality? But it is precisely because I perfected Myself by way of continual suffering that I was a Perfect Host! If the Father had not wanted the Devil to approach the Man who was his Incarnate Word, couldn’t He have prevented him? Didn’t He do so in keeping Me hidden from Satan’s searching for thirty years through a whole set of providential circumstances? And, if He had wanted to, couldn’t He have placed set limits on the temptations to which I was subjected, if He had wanted to permit some of them, but not all, not that one, as inappropriate for Christ? And couldn’t He have made Me superior to men and angels? Why, then, did He make Me slightly inferior to angels and similar to men? Am I not similar to you, then? And isn’t there a contradiction in these words of the Apostle, who says I am a Man like other men in all respects and nonetheless also says I am slightly inferior to the angels? Am I not similar to you, then? Am I not similar to God, then, since God is more than the angels? Did the Apostle thus articulate blasphemies, foolishness, and lies? And if he did not, where do we find this difference, this equality, and this inferiority in being different from the angels, inferior to them, and equal to men and at the same time unequal, since I am slightly inferior to the angels? But is it not blasphemy to say that the Incarnate Word is inferior to the angels? What does this difference in Me from the angels and men consist of?
“Have you never asked yourselves these questions, with a sincere desire to respond and bringing your intellect to work in the light of God? For, my children, all of you are duty-bound to ask them in the divine light and to strive to understand, to strive on your own to understand - not to make do indolently with the explanations provided by others, so as not to make an effort to understand. If you were to read all the books which speak of Me and of the Most High Lord, they would not be such use to you, if you read them mechanically, as one single notion attained by your own effort to understand, with loving humility turning to the Holy Spirit so as to be able to understand, with heroic justice to have the Holy Spirit as a friend and be led by Him to comprehend the divine language. For only ‘those who are led by the Holy Spirit are the children of God.’ It is Paul, once again, who says so.300 And it is natural for children to understand the language of their father.
“But I will tell you the difference and how it is possible for Me to be like you and at the same time slightly inferior to the angels.
“I am like you. I am Man and thus, beyond doubt, inferior to the angels, for man is not a spiritual creature, the noblest one in creation, as are the angels - purely spiritual, markedly intelligent, and possessing a very quick intelligence because they are not weighed down by flesh and the senses and are confirmed in grace, always worshipping the Lord, whose thought they understand and implement with no obstacle. But can man elevate himself to a supernatural degree? He can by living voluntarily in purity, obedience, humility, and charity, exactly as the angels do. And this is what I did. That Jesus, made slightly inferior to the angels, was Man through the desire of his Divine Father so that He could be the Redeemer. Moreover, He became slightly inferior to the angels through his own will to give you the example of how man, if he so wills, can elevate himself to angelic perfection and lead an angelic life.
“Oh, human life fused so intensely to the supernatural as to cancel out matter in its clamor and weakness in order to take on angelic resonances and perfections! A life oblivious to concupiscence, living by love and in love! Man becoming an angel - that is, creatures composed of two substances who purify the lowest part with the fires of Charity, and all the virtues are in Charity, like numerous seeds enclosed in a single fruit, to the point that they may be said to strip themselves, or, rather, it strips them of all that is materiality until making even matter worthy to penetrate into the Kingdom of the Spirit one day. They place their purified clothing in the tomb while awaiting the final command. But it will then rise glorified, to the point of becoming the admiration even of the angels, for the beauty of risen and glorified bodies will cause even the angels of God reverent astonishment, and they will wonder at these created brothers and sisters of theirs, saying, ‘We were able to remain in grace by way of one substance alone; they, men, are victors in trial with both their spirit and their flesh. Glory be to God for the twofold victory of the chosen ones.’
“Christ, similar to men in all respects, wanted to reach the beauty of angelic perfection by a life without a trace, not of sin, but of even attraction to sin, and, while remaining Man to undergo death with his flesh and blood so as to expiate the sins of flesh, blood, the mind, and the pride of life, with absolutely all pain to make reparation for absolutely all Sin, became slightly inferior to the angels, raising human nature up to angelic perfection.
“I am God, then. And I am Man. And as the angel is the intermediate link between man and God, I, who was to reweld the broken chain, reunite you to God, made my perfect Humanity into a joining of earth - men - and Heaven - angels - bringing Humanity back to a perfection equal to - indeed, greater than - that which Adam and Eve possessed at the beginning of days, when Man was innocent and happy through a free gift of God, without knowing of or experiencing the hard struggle against Evil and the causes of sin. The Divinity did not degrade Itself, then, in taking on Adam’s seed, but Humanity was divinized, brought back, by Man’s free will, to the perfection making men like my Father, who knows no injustice.
“The Apostle does not lie, blaspheme, or contradict himself when saying, by inspired words, that Jesus, the Man, became slightly less than the angels in heroic spirituality. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit were not at fault in giving the Redeemer the only covering suitable for Him so that He would be such and redeem you through the ongoing lesson of his growing in grace to the point of reaching spiritual perfection, in addition to the major action of his Sacrifice, to redeem you from your ignorance, from that ignorance resulting from sin, degrading man’s strength, conditioning him with the assumption that, since he is made more of matter than spirit, he cannot attempt his evolution in the spirit.
“No, matter strikes you as so great and overbearing because you see it and hear it shouting out its bestial sounds. It strikes you as so great because you fear it and do not want to make it suffer out of fear of suffering. It strikes you as so great because Satan alters its outlines before you. It strikes you as so great because you do not know. You are, moreover, ignorant of what that magnificent thing which is the soul really is, of what that most powerful thing which is the soul united to God is.
“Leave your fears aside. Leave your ignorance aside. Look at Me. I, Man, reached the Perfection of justice as a man like you because I wanted to. Imitate Me. Do not fear. Keep your souls united to God and advance. And rise. Rise into the luminous regions of the supernatural. Drag along your flesh with your burning will to the place to which your spirit is rising. Become angels. Become seraphim. The devil will no longer be able to wound you in your depths. His darts will fall at your feet after having struck your armor and you will not be disturbed, as I was not.
“It was just, then, for my Father not to grant Me a nature different from man’s, though He could have done so. Just. No one can say to Me, accordingly, when I propose my code and say to you, ‘Follow it if you want to be where I am,’ ‘You can be there because You are different from me, in whom the flesh fiercely battles. You are victorious over Satan because in You the flesh is not allied with Satan.’ No one can reproach Me for an easy victory or get discouraged about being created differently. In Me and in you are the same things: flesh, intellect, and spirit, to be able to live, comprehend, and overcome. I am the seed of Adam. You are the seed of Adam.
“Oh, I hear you grumbling, ‘You are Sinless. We....’ Adam, too, was sinless, and yet he sinned because he wanted to sin. I did not want to sin. And I did not sin. I, Man, did not sin. My Father made Me of your own seed to demonstrate to you that to be men does not mean to be sinners. I was in human nature, like you. Manage to be like Me in victory. The Father made Me Man, possessing flesh and blood in common with you with which to overcome Satan by dying, and He required the author of your salvation to become perfect as Man by his own will and by way of suffering and to obtain glory on account of the death He endured.
“Oh, isn’t it also death to be able to die to all that is seduction? Isn’t it continuous death to all that is concupiscence in order to live in Heaven eternally? I began to consummate my Sacrifice to defeat Satan, the world, and the flesh, that had been triumphing for too long, beginning with my first act of will against the blare of the flesh, the world, and their dark king. I died to Myself in order to live. I died to Myself to make you live by my example. I died on the Cross to give you Life.
“Destined to become your merciful Pontiff, I had to know man’s struggles through knowledge of man and remain faithful before God to teach you to remain so. A merciful Pontiff so that, having suffered and been put to the test, I would not display the proud repugnance and glacial isolation of those who, on seeing their sinful or weak brothers and sisters, say, ‘I am superior to them and draw away from them, not wanting to contaminate my perfection,’ and do not know they belong to the eternal race of the pharisees. An expert, merciful Pontiff so that I would be compassionate and ready to reach out - I, the Victor over Evilto - the weak, who are not always able to trample it underfoot as I did.
“Tell me, you that are scandalized by reading that I suffered that temptation, did I perhaps damage my divine and human Perfection because I was approached by the Tempter? What was altered in Me? What was corrupted? Nothing. Not even the most fleeting thought.
“Isn’t that temptation perhaps the most common one and the one most widely seconded by men? Isn’t it perhaps the one most used by Satan precisely because he knows it is the easiest one for obtaining assent? Isn’t it by that door - impurity, lust - that Satan often enters hearts? Isn’t it perhaps his favorite way and favorite weapon to manage to get in and corrupt?
“What other way did he seize upon at the beginning of man’s days to mar the unmarred plant of Humanity? How did he manage to corrupt the innocent of the two First Parents? If Eve’s act had been limited to the imprudence of approaching the forbidden plant or even listening to the Serpent, but without obeying or yielding to his suggestions, would Sin have arisen? Would the Condemnation have come? No. On the contrary, the First Parents, on rejecting Satanic seduction, would have imitated the good angels, tempted to rebel by Lucifer in vain, and they would have received an increase in grace.
“I repeat: to be tempted is not a sin. Sin is to embrace temptation. And Eve and Adam would not have been punished for imprudence which had already been expiated by resisting temptation. God is a loving and patient Father. But Eve and Adam did not reject the temptation. The lust of the mind - that is, pride - and of the heart - that is, disobedience - when received into their previously uncorrupted souls, corrupted them, awakening impure fevers which Satan augmented to the point of delirium and crime. I am not using mistaken words. I say ‘crime,’ and it is proper. By sinning, didn’t they do violence to their spirits, wounding them, inflicting harsh damage upon them? Isn’t what sinners do in slaying with mortal sin or in wounding, continually weakening their spirits with venial sins a crime against the spirit?
“Let us observe together the growing paroxysm of sin and the degrees of the fall and then compare it to the episode of my temptation. If there is clear sight and an honest heart, one cannot fail to conclude that temptation, an undisputed element of Evil, does not become sin, but a merit for those who are able to suffer through it without yielding to it. To suffer does not mean to enjoy. One suffers a martyrdom; one does not suffer enjoyment. Temptation is suffered by the saints, but temptation is perverted enjoyment for the nonsaints who receive and obey it.
“Eve, then, endowed with knowledge in proportion to her state - carefully note this, for it is an aggravating circumstance in her sin - and thus conscious of the value of prudence, went to the forbidden tree. The first, slight error. She went there thoughtlessly, not with the good intention of recollecting herself at the center of Eden in prayerful seclusion. When she got there, she entered into conversation with the Stranger. The phenomenon of an animal speaking, when all the others made sounds, but did not utter words which were humanly comprehensible, did not make her cautious. The second error. Thirdly, in her amazement she did not call upon God to explain the mystery to her and did not even remember or consider that God had told his beloved children that this was the tree of good and evil and that it should thus be regarded as imprudent to accept everything proceeding from it without having first asked the Lord about its true nature. The fourth error: her having stronger faith to believe the assertion of a Stranger rather than the advice of her Creator. Fifth: being covetous of knowing what only God knew and becoming like God. Sixth: the greediness of the senses, which sought to experience by touching, smelling, and eating what the Stranger had suggested that she pick and taste. Seventh: to change from someone tempted into a temptress. To go from the service of God to the service of Satan, forgetting God’s words in order to repeat Satan’s to her companion and persuade him to steal God’s right.
“The parching thirst was now at the maximum degree. The ascent of the fatal arch had reached the highest point. The sin was completely consummated there with Adam’s agreement to his companion’s enticement and represented the fall of both of them along the other part of the curve - a swift fall, much swifter than the ascent, because it was weighed down by the sin committed, and the sin was aggravated in its weight by the consequences - that is, a flight from God, insufficient apologies devoid of charity and justice and sincerity, too, in confessing the fault, and a spirit of latent rebelliousness preventing them from asking for forgiveness.
“They did not hide because of pain over being sullied by sin and appearing as such in God’s sight, but because they were naked - that is, because of the malice which had gotten into them and given everything a different appearance and made them so ignorant that they were no longer able to consider that God, who had created them and given them the whole Creation, well knew that they were naked and had not labored to cover them or become indignant on seeing them that way, for there was no need to cover innocence or indignation over observing an innocent body.
“Hear the replies of the two blameworthy ones, a precise index of the unrejected temptation and its sinful consequences: ‘I heard your voice and, becoming afraid, because I was naked, I hid’; ‘the woman you gave me as a companion offered me the fruit, and I ate some’; ‘the serpent seduced me, and I ate it.’301
“Among so many words the only one that should have been there was missing: ‘Forgive me, for I have sinned.’ Charity towards God, then, was missing. Charity towards one’s neighbor was missing. Adam accused Eve. Eve accused the serpent. Finally, the sincerity of the confession was missing. Eve confessed what was undeniable. But she thought she could conceal from God the preliminaries to sin - that is, her thoughtlessness, her imprudence, her weak will, which got contaminated at once after taking the first step towards disobeying the holy command not to expose herself to the temptation of picking the forbidden fruit. That command should have been a warning for her, who was most intelligent, to make her understand that they were not so strong that they could not place themselves with impunity in a position to sin without going so far as to sin. They would have gotten there by perfecting the freedom granted them by God with their own will, coming to use it only for Good. Eve lied to God, then, by remaining silent over the reason for which she had eaten the fruit: to become like God. Threefold concupiscence is thus in Man. All the signs of friendship with the serpent are evident in pride, rebelliousness, deceit, lust, and selfishness, which have replaced the virtues previously existing.
“And now let us compare this encounter of Lucifer with the First Parents to Lucifer’s encounter with Me, the New Adam who had come to restore the order violated by the First Man.
“I also went to a solitary place. But why? When? To do what? To prepare Myself with penance - an indispensable preparation for God’s works - for my mission, which was about to begin. The protective peace of home, family, and my city, a peace which could barely be grazed by inevitable contrasts in thinking between my relatives and Me - as I was entirely spirit, and they, entirely humanity, dreaming of human joys for Me. Now the time for evangelization was coming, the dangers of exaltation and hatred and contacts with sinners and with everything representing what is commonly called the ‘world.’
“I prepared Myself with penance and prayer. I completed my preparation with victory over Satan. Oh, he clearly felt that the Victor had arisen, on seeing Me steadfast before the seduction of impurity and strong in the face of hunger, pride, and avarice! But I want you to contemplate Me in the part you deem inappropriate and compare the Pure Jesus to the Pure Couple of the First Parents, in whom the Serpent’s venom was able to act because they wanted to accept him and did not want to endure the effort of rejecting him, since they had imprudently approached him. I did not seek Satan. I was sought by him. When he found Me, I endured his being close by. It was a right and proper experience so that I could be your merciful high priest, tested like you, not disdainful of you, and an example for you.
“Behold Me, O men, behold the Christ, tempted because He was a man, and not overcome because He had voluntarily taken his humanity to a perfection ‘slightly less than that of the angels.’ The angels lack a body and thus lack sensuality; therefore, impurity cannot harm or disturb them more than - or differently from the way - it disturbed Me: with horror at this beastly sin.
“Behold the Christ, who did not vilely flee because He was pursued or bargain or barter or negotiate with the Tempter about such a base matter, which does not deserve to be discussed. Let man, the noblest creature on earth, endowed with reason and spirit and conscious of his end, not corrupt himself with real or metaphorical contact with Lust. Let him not contemplate. Let him not discuss. Let him uplift his eyes. Let him look to God. As a son of God, let him love God and his neighbor. Let him call upon God. Let him remain silent as regards Satan and himself, in the part of himself which would like to deal with carnal matters. The silence of lips and the silence of thoughts on topics which give off homicidal fumes. There is not always silence where the lips are still. Sometimes there are a heart, thought, and will below which speak and rave impurely, even if the lips are able to keep silent and the eyes remain lowered or shift about in poses intended to deceive men. Men, who see man’s exterior. Not God, who sees man’s interior and regards every form of mental deceit aimed at appearing holy, in terms of both mental lust and calculated, calculating deceit, as dishonorable.
“Why did Satan begin his Temptation with Impurity? Because this sin is the most widespread one. It is in every place and part of the world, at all social levels, and, unfortunately, in all conditions. It has many names. It is sometimes even covered with legitimacy, but it sullies legitimate marriage beds as well as the beds of prostitutes, and I will not speak about other considerations. Because it was so useful to him the first time to introduce malice into man’s heart. Because he believed that with that means alone he would be able to shatter the thought of redemption forever by corrupting the irreplaceable Redeemer. Finally, because he needed to make sure whether I was the Redeemer.
“He had gotten a hunch that I was now in the world. He was looking for Me. He was wherever there was a form of holiness. But in all of them he saw relative aspects which made him unsure. For so many years he had been unable to part the veil enveloping the mystery of my Mother and Me. The manifestation at the Jordan had shaken him. But dread of Me made him still hesitate to resign himself. He did and did not want to know who I was. To know so as to deceive himself about overcoming Me. Not to know in order to deceive himself about not being overcome by the Man.
“He tempted Me with that. My steadfast bearing, so different from that of every other man - who flees or becomes afraid or yields or jeers, saying he is strong, and then falls even more than the one who flees - told him who I was. Convinced about my nature, he persisted. In his first temptation the other three were already concealed, especially the last one. My eyes chilled him. My silence exasperated him. My serenity bewildered him. He felt he was up against a force which it was vain to hope to bend. He sensed that the Pure One could only be nauseated at the dishonest fruit he was offering.
“He then tempted with a seduction which was apparently licit: ‘Tell the stones to become bread.’ To be hungry for bread is proper to man; it no longer corresponds to the brute beast, as does lust, hunger for flesh. And then, as a man, a son of God, not because I was the Word, but because I was the seed of Adam, like you, I responded. I responded to honor the Lord three times over. And Satan, convinced that it was useless to attempt other tests, no longer offered Me lust. Men did not. They are more foolish than Satan, and they tempted Me, so as to be able to say to the throng, ‘He is a sinner.’ The pages of the Work show you that men never had better luck than Satan. In any respect.
“Tempted in all things and by everyone, I remained without sin. The Eternal High Priest, by my own will I kept Myself innocent, immaculate, and separated from sinners, turned into an angel by having abolished sense to serve the spirit alone.
“Can you still say that this episode is appropriate, that it is heretical? Is Paul perhaps a heretic in saying in his epistle that I was ‘tempted in every way, tested in every way, as a man among men,’ with flesh, blood, intellect, and will, like you? Was Paul a heretic in writing to the Philippians, ‘Have the same sentiments in yourselves as Christ Jesus, who, possessing the form of God, did not regard this equality as a prize to be seized upon, but humbled Himself, taking on the form of a slave, and, in becoming like men, He appeared as a simple man’?302 Don’t you think that in this ‘humbling Himself’ of the Son of God there are found not only the opprobrious death on the cross, but also the wretchedness of being treated as a man by Satan and the world, that assailed Me with an ongoing siege and surrounded Me with temptations, bringing Me suffering? Don’t you think that great beauty and justice reside in not regarding my equality with God as a prize to be held on to, but wanting to be Man, the Man of reparation, the Man of expiation, the Man of redemption, treated as a man and showing Himself to be God by daily acts of heroism? And what is there in Me that you do not have? And what did I do that you cannot do? I am speaking of sanctifying oneself to become perfect as our Father in Heaven is perfect.
“With a pure heart and thought, without prejudice, after this lesson of mine reread the episodes you contest as inappropriate and tell Me whether you can go on characterizing them that way.
“You obstinately object in order not to say the words which are second in beauty among all words - ‘Forgive me’ - just as the first are ‘I love you.’ You say ‘But You said to Judas that there was Good and Evil in You. That is not appropriate! And further on You said, “Temptation stings. The act satisfies and sometimes nauseates, whereas temptation does not fall away, but, like a pruned tree, casts forth thicker foliage,” and that makes one assume that You were more and more intensely disturbed because You did not satisfy the temptation to impurity’
“Are you perhaps like Judas, who never understood, who was unable to understand Me, who could not understand Me because He was too full of his sick humanity, which cast its reflection upon everything? If you are like this, I tell you to change your thoughts. And I tell you to remember who I was talking to. To a man who, in being sinful with premeditation and tenacity and, above all, lustful, could not accept what Christ told him in confidence with proper respect and believe it was true.
“I could open my heart to John. The pure one among the disciples of Christ was able to believe and understand the secrets of Pure Christ. The other one... was incorrigibly filthy and a demon. I remained silent with him, as with Satan. Like father, like son, for Judas really wanted Satan as his father instead of God. I then spoke to the disciple who was sick with sensuality as I could speak so as to be listened to further, finishing with the assertion ‘I have never yielded,’ with the intention of demonstrating to him that people can live like angels provided they want to. Demonstration: the only thing that can make the satans silent and not derisive, if not good.
“I did not give in. I tell you, as I told Judas. No one kept Me from doing so. The Father had given Me free will, as with everyone born of woman. I could thus embrace either Evil or Good and follow what I wanted to. I wanted to follow Good. I did not want to follow Evil. No, the Son of Man did not want to sin. Satan puffed to keep his fires burning around Me, in the hearts of those encircling Me with hatred and unhealthy love, in order to prompt human reactions in Me. I underwent temptations of every kind. My will was always dominant. My purity put out the fire where lust was inflamed to tempt Me.
“Purity - not only mine - carries out this action around itself and also covers over those details which are crude and stimulating only for those who mentally or materially feed on impure things. For others, this is not so. I said, ‘Everything is pure for the pure.’303 They are words of divine wisdom. Thought is pure, the heart is pure, sight is pure, and flesh is pure in the pure, for they are centered on the vision of God.
“The more man grows in perfection, the more he is assaulted by the external forces of evil which are Satan, the world, and men. But in the man filled with God, brimming with purity, who has become slightly less than the angels through his desire for perfection, the assaults are not death, but life, not degradation, but glory. There is not one saint who has not suffered temptations, not one person crowned in Heaven whose crown has not been formed with the pearls and rubies of his or her tears and pain, sometimes bringing torment to the point of blood from the tortures by Satan and his allies.
“The martyrs are not only the ones who fell in the arenas and tribunals of the persecutors. ‘The great tribulation’ about which John speaks 304 is this one, too, and the stole of the blessed has become cleansed in the blood of the Lamb, but also in the fire and torture of a loving will and the hate of temptation.
“I did not want to be different from you or want you to be unable to come where I am. I, like you. You, like Me. Tempted and victors in order to be ‘gods’ in the kingdom of God. True God and true Man, I manifested God’s power and man’s capacity to become a ‘god,’ in keeping with the words of the Psalms and Pau1.305
“I have replied to you with the words of my apostles, joined to mine, for you find it hard to accept the words which little John conveys to you as holy. You cannot find it hard to accept those of my apostles; they cannot prompt doubts as to their supernatural authority. You read them at the altar, comment on them from pulpits, and teach them from magisterial chairs. You thus regard them as words of truth.
“And these words support my thesis, not yours - that, since I was Man, it was natural for Me to be tempted; that temptation is not inappropriate for Christ; that Christ does not emerge degraded therefrom, but even more glorified, for the high priest, who had to feel compassion for the weak and those led astray, having been tested, like them, and having been surrounded by infirmity, like them, was able to keep Himself holy, innocent, immaculate, and separate from sinners as regarded imitating them in evil, but remained their merciful Brother in order to say to all, ‘Come to Me, you that are afflicted and weary, and I will console you.’
“And I shall end with the words spoken three years ago to little John: ‘Do not think any more about the lowest of Satan’s actions towards Christ, when you have a thousand select actions by Christ to meditate on and imitate in the Work.”‘
294 Ephesians 6:10-12
295 Psalm 82:6; John 10:34.
296 Luke 2:51-52.
297 John 8:46.
298 1 John 5:6-8; Revelation 1:5
299 Hebrews 2:9-18, 4:14-15, 5:1-3; 7:26.
300 Romans 8:14.
301 Genesis 3:9-13.
302 Philippians 2:5-8¸ Hebrews 4:15.
303 Titus 1:15 (Matthew 15:11 and 18-20, Romans 14:14 and 20).
304 Revelation 7:14.
305 Psalm 82:6. “Paul” may have been written by mistake instead of “John” (John 10:34).