Prayer: Peter Canisius, S.J.

I feel sorry for those who despise religious discipline as a ponderous and unbearable yoke, because misguided by vain and childish fear they flee from inconveniences of evangelical poverty, taken up by the Apostles and the first Christians. Similarly they completely reject the yoke of religious obedience, which is better than all sacrifices, and, hindered by their own judgment, they recoil from the laborious struggle that spiritual people have to wage between spirit and body. For no athlete of Christ and no real spiritual person will be crowned without efforts.