I serve as one of the spiritual directors of the World Apostolate of Fatima in this country and was asked to give a talk recently on the idea of making daily sacrifices for the conversion and salvation of sinners, one of the central themes of the Portuguese apparitions. It’s a deep (and deeply unfashionable!) subject, and one that appears to have been mostly the orbit of monks and nuns until the late Middle Ages. While most believers could understand the importance of making penance for confessed sins, or praying for the souls of a friend or family member who might be being purified in purgatory for heaven, the idea of deliberately forsaking one’s comfort on behalf of people one did not know, and might never know this side of the grave, was not widespread until people like St Margaret Mary Alocoque began to promote making reparation on behalf of others generally in the 17th century, as part of her devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. The messages at Fatima pressed this theme, urging us to become what St Augustine called ‘little Christs,’ offering up daily sacrifices for the good of the world.   

The Tradition of the Church offers us handrails to keep such a piety within healthy limits, identifying the extremes of mollities and misosomatia. The first is softness, a resistance to any kind of mortification, very prevalent in our consumerist age, where comfort has become a kind of god, and even the most minor of inconveniences quickly becomes a subject of complaint. Paradoxically, the other extreme is also evident at the moment. It is a hatred of one’s body, and the idea that only inflicting a kind of violence on it can produce the desirable end. Though very different to mollities, it is similarly self-obsessive.  

In the wider world of human experience, suffering does not always produce holiness. It can also lead (and perhaps more frequently does) to blame, bitterness and despair, which are inimical to the Christian life. Only with love can we offer up anything pleasing to God, and only heaven can give us the joy and peace to do this convincingly.  

With such a disposition (please God!) we hardly need go looking for mortification, for the very drudgery of everyday life, indeed our own mortality, offers us plenty of material to be transformed from a burden into a gift that we offer to a God who is willing to help us to make such offering well, who both calls and equips us to be loving and generous despite everything. When we see this disposition in others, it is so beautiful that we are inspired to emulate it. That is holiness, and it is always for the good of the world. 

Fr. Marcin Budzinski 

a Catholic priest, born in Poznań, in western Poland, in 1980. A physicist and biologist by training, and a teacher by passion; he graduated from the Archdiocesan Seminary in 2012 and was ordained for the Archdiocese of Poznań; his main academic interests are the natural sciences and philosophy, on which he wrote his master’s thesis; he worked mainly in secondary schools with young people, whom he evangelised through theatre; his dream was to work abroad; for the past three years he has been working with the Polish Catholic Mission in England and Wales; he is dean of the north-western deanery of the Polish Catholic Mission and parish priest in Lancaster; he is deeply devoted to Our Lady of Fátima and to the devotion to Divine Mercy.