Prayer to Jesus Christ Crucified

Behold, O kind and most sweet Jesus, I cast myself on my knees in Thy sight, 

and with the most fervent desire of my soul, 

I pray and beg Thee to impress upon my heart lively sentiments of 

faith, hope, and charity, 

with true repentance for my sins, 

and a firm desire of amendment, while with deep affection and grief of soul 

I contemplate Thy five most precious Wounds, 

having before my eyes that which David spoke in prophecy:

 "They pierced My hands and My feet; 

they have numbered all My bones." 

God has loved us from all eternity. 

So He says: "Remember I first loved you. 

You had not come to be, nor did the world yet exist,

 but I loved you already. 

From all eternity I have loved you."

'The World's First Love'

Every person carries within his heart a blueprint of the one he loves. What seems to be "love at first sight" is actually the fulfillment of desire, the realization of a dream...Calm minds like calm music: the heart has its own secret melody and one day, when the score is played, the heart answers: "This is it." So it is with love. A tiny architect works inside the human heart drawing sketches of the ideal love from the people it sees, from the books it reads, from its hopes and daydreams, in the fond hope that the eye may one day see the ideal and the hand touch it. Life becomes satisfying the moment the dream is seen walking, and the person appears as the incarnation of all that one loved. The liking is instantaneous-because, actually, it was there waiting for a long time. Some go through life without ever meeting what they call their ideal. This could be very disappointing, if the ideal never really existed. But the absolute ideal of every heart does exist, and it is God. All human love is an initiation into the Eternal. 
- "The World's First Love"| Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Faith in Love

Thoughts on the question: Is love necessary to have faith?

The act of faith is love, the act of love is faith.                                                                                      

This marriage bears the union of concept and action. We have faith because we love, we love because we have faith.

The genesis of man is seen borne by Love; and faith a response to that Love. Not merely in the constriction of cause and effect; the effected needing the caused; but also in the sense of the cause employing the effect, not out of necessity for being, but because if this employment wasn’t instituted, then the cause would not truly be Being. 

With this, it seems as if the mission of faith, giving back to love what is it’s own, allows us to ascent to that which true and all-loving.  

Habemus Papam.

The Holy Spirit crowns Christ's vicar on earth, as He gifts the Church a Shepard for the People. 

Viva el Papa Francisco!