Sobre la necesidad de la penitencia

Extractado de una carta del Padre Ramón Anglés, SSPX.


[…] We cannot forget that there is a law, an ineluctable command, calling all the children of Adam to do penance. This law was decreed in the garden of Eden at the moment of the first fall, and again proclaimed in Calvary at the time of our regeneration. Heirs to the sin of Adam, we are also heirs to the sentence which has condemned him to suffer, and which sheds a comforting light on the mystery of sorrow and pain: we must suffer because we have all sinned in our first parents, and suffering leads to redemption.
This sin of the first couple brought upon the human family, along with the sentence of punishment, the promise of the Redeemer. The perfect expiation was consummated on Golgotha. As children of the Cross, as fruits conceived in the agonies of Calvary, we are also called to a liberating penance. Although the sacrifice of Our Saviour has been complete in all that regards the Person and the merits of the Victim, this sacrifice must continue in His members, who with Him form but one and the same Mystical Body, the Church. The Cross of Christ remains forever planted in the midst of His Church, to recall to us the sweet obligation of attaching ourselves to it and of dying on it with Him; and there shall be something wanting to His passion, as St. Paul understood, if it is not accomplished also in our own body; if the blood of Jesus does not continue to flow in the veins of His martyrs and all those who believe in Him, until the time when the whole Church will have passed from the state of suffering and of combat to the possession of glory. Christians, we are children of the King, but of a King crowned by sorrow; we are born to the purple, but the purple of His Precious Blood. Our live should not belie our origin! Penance, then, accepted and carried as the holy livery of the household of Christ the King.
The law of penance binds us also as individual sinners in need of expiation. Who can count exactly all the sins of his life? So many transgressions make us debtors to Divine Justice, and insolvent debtors too, without any doubt, if God had not deigned to accept our feeble satisfactions in consideration of the superabundant merits of His Son.
At this remembrance, our conscience compels us to chastise and reduce to order the instruments of our falls. But we always procrastinate the time for penance, if we ever think about it […]

(RCS)