This is the title of the fourth aid published by the Dicastery for Evangelization in preparation for the upcoming Jubilee of 2025. It was written by Paul Brendan Murray, an Irish Dominican, theologian, and teacher of mystical literature, author of numerous books on spirituality.
The fundamental thesis, paradoxical in some respects, is this: many saints, but we could include the experience of all Christians, learn to address God and convert through the prayer of repentance of famous sinners. Indeed, the more one perceives one’s sin as distance from God and lack of love, the more intense and effective becomes one’s invocation to the Lord.
Isn’t the prayer of the tax collector in the Gospel of Luke a splendid example for all: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner” (Luke 18:13)? He returned home justified (Luke 18:14), he who did not know how to pray. If someone had asked him how to pray, he might have said to ask the Pharisee; but unlike him, he inwardly felt his unworthiness and at the same time clearly intuited God’s mercy and forgiveness.
The same can be said of the good thief: “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom!” (Luke 23:42). In the throes of agony, touched by grace, he understands that Jesus, on the cross like him, is founding a kingdom of love and forgiveness. Christ’s response is immediate, lightning-fast, certain: “Today you will be with me in Paradise!” (Luke 23:43).
The author then analyzes the prayer of four giants of holiness, true witnesses of God, two men and two women, all Doctors of the Church and masters of spirituality: Saint Augustine, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Teresa of Ávila, Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, to explain that prayer is a lifelong journey, as is conversion: it has a starting point, development, moments of difficulty and crisis, a fulfillment, an atmosphere, a source that continually nourishes it. These saints propose a path that all of us can follow.
Saint Augustine
In the Confessions, Augustine reviews his whole life in the light of God. It is a praise to Him by a man who feels himself His small creature and carries on his shoulders the burden of mortality and has the certainty that God resists the proud; at the same time, it is a confession of his own faults, of the fragility of his life, of the passions that chained him for many years; finally, a confession of faith in God who forgives and recreates.
In his return to faith, Augustine discovers the beauty of prayer in the Psalms: they become the perpetual cry of his soul for all his life and also the object of his study in a commentary on the entire Psalter, lasting over thirty years, the Expositions on the Psalms.
“When I call, answer me, God… have mercy on me!” (Psalm 4:2). In the Psalms Augustine found healing for the deepest wounds of his heart: “Let the cry of your misery resound and the Lord will listen to you!” (Expositions, Psalm 33); in them, he experiences the full range of human feelings purified by prayer: joy, suffering, hope, fear, the certainty of daily forgiveness of our weaknesses, the poignant desire for God and His presence.
He distinguishes three voices in the Psalms: the historical voice of the psalmist, the present voice of the supplicant, and the eternal voice of Christ who “prays in us as our priest; prays for us as our head; is prayed to by us as our God. Thus, we recognize in him our voice and in us his voice” (Expositions, Psalm 85).
By praying the psalms, Augustine understands that the humbler and smaller one becomes, the more one opens to God and one’s conduct is shaped by His word. Only if you feel like a sinner, united with Jesus who expiated for you, do you experience God’s forgiveness and embrace.
Saint Teresa of Ávila
Saint Teresa of Ávila was very devoted to Saint Augustine because he was a sinner; and just as he was reached by God’s forgiveness, she hoped the same would happen in her life.
In our imagination, the sculptural group by Gian Lorenzo Bernini in the Roman church of Santa Maria della Vittoria might be present: Teresa caught in ecstasy, trembling with divine love, while a smiling angel holding a dart has just pierced her heart, and she seems completely surrendered to this mystical grace that envelops and enlightens her.
But this saint, strong in character, courageous and tireless founder of monasteries, master of spirituality, who became a nun at twenty, also experienced as a young nun the difficulties of prayer with continual distractions, aversion to meditation, moments of discouragement. Yet, despite everything, she persevered in the will to pray. She tried to strip herself of everything, to become evangelically small, to concentrate on the simple prayer of the Our Father, and to practice living in the presence of God. After eighteen years in this spiritual dryness, a total conversion to the Lord occurred in her, characterized by numerous mystical gifts and intense apostolic activity.
“If God has endured for so long a worthless creature like me… who no matter how bad can have anything to fear?” (Book of Life, ch. 8, 8, 138). She feels that the Lord’s forgiveness gives unity to her life and helps her recover lost time, even reviving her past: “Oh infinite goodness of my God… You take into account, my Lord, all the moments that (a person) dedicates to loving You and for a moment of repentance forget how much they have offended You. I know this clearly from personal experience…” (Book of Life, ch. 8, 6, 136).
Yes, the Lord can help us recover lost time: “Recover for me, my God, the lost time, granting me Your grace for the present time… if You will it, You can” (Exclamations of the Soul to God IV, 1, 1486).
This is a wonderful insight: repentance gives unity to life, cancels out the negative aspects of past years, brings back and recovers the positive ones, illuminates the present, and despite the awareness of human fragility, projects hope toward a future of love for Christ and for others.
Saint Thomas Aquinas
Saint Thomas Aquinas, recognized as one of the greatest thinkers in the history of the Church, carefully avoids using the pronoun “I” in his theological and philosophical works. Only in the prayers attributed to him does his individuality clearly reemerge. “To You, God, Source of Mercy, as a sinner I come, deign to wash away my filth…” (Prayer for Forgiveness). As a theologian, he states that no one in this world, by their own strength alone, can avoid sin: only Christ, who possessed the Spirit without measure.
The Eucharistic hymn Adoro te devote is recognized as the most beautiful and profound prayer composed by the saint. The figure of the evangelical good thief first comes to mind: “I ask You what the repentant thief asked You,” and he compares himself with the doubting Thomas who touched the wounds of Christ and confessed his faith: “I do not see the wounds like Thomas, yet I confess You, my God.” The invocation to Jesus who nourishes us with His body and blood is splendid: “Cleanse me, who am unclean, with Your blood!” With this strong contrast of words, very forceful in Latin (“me immundum munda tuo sanguine”), he clearly expresses how he perceived himself as needing forgiveness before Jesus, confident of His love.
Thomas Aquinas loves prayers of humble and trusting request: in every petition through the mediation of Christ, Himself clothed in weakness, we ask God to show His mercy, to give us Himself, so that His Spirit becomes the protagonist, that is, both object and subject of our spiritual life. This joyful intimacy with God paves the way for us to return to prayer every day with ever greater confidence.
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux
Thérèse is not presented according to the conventional image of a saint perfumed with roses and religious sentiment, but as a woman who in her relationships with others sought truth and simplicity, desiring a hidden life rich in faith and evangelical insights. She loved and read the great Spanish mystics Saint John of the Cross and Saint Teresa of Ávila but understood that the path to holiness they indicated did not suit her spirituality. She did not feel called to asceticism or mysticism; she was not attracted to common meditation with the sisters, often falling asleep during that time, nor to spiritual readings. Her favorite book was the Gospel; she desired neither mystical gifts nor apparitions but to walk the ordinary way of Mary in Nazareth. She felt united to sinners who converted, and two Gospel figures especially pleased her: the tax collector and Mary Magdalene.
Thus, Thérèse proposed her “little way,” not one of mystical ascent but of mystical descent: letting oneself fall into Jesus’ arms with the total abandonment of a child, letting Him carry her in joy and freedom, conscious of her weakness and limits, accepting the challenge of the cross. He will make me holy. Alone we are just zero; Jesus is that infinite One who transforms and gives value to our ordinary life and prayer for missionaries and sinners.
Thérèse is fully confident in Jesus’ love: “Even if I had on my conscience all the sins that can be committed, I would go with a heart broken by repentance to throw myself into the arms of Jesus” (Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, ch. XI, p. 304).
She prayed much for those far from God. When she realized she had little time left—she was only twenty-four!—initially in faith she saw the way to Paradise open before her, but then God allowed her soul to be invaded by the darkest darkness. Inside, she heard the voice of sinners—an experience common to many believers—mocking her: “Death will not lead you into the light, but rather into an even deeper night, the night of nothingness” (Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, ch. X, p. 251). But Thérèse accepts this from God as well, to end spiritually outside the Carmelite convent, sitting at the table of the mockers and sinners, whom she feels as her brothers, while continuing to pray for them: “Lord, Your daughter asks forgiveness for her brothers… absolutely does not want to leave this table where poor sinners eat… can only say on her behalf, on behalf of her brothers: Have mercy on us, Lord, for we are poor sinners!” (Story of a Soul, Manuscript C, ch. X, p. 250).
The prayer of a Saint who offers her life to the Lord becomes a prayer of intercession for the salvation of all sinners.
Fr. Giuseppe Oddone