Be Wise and Prudent

 July 28, 2026 

Hello!  How is each and every one? I am stuck!  I do not know what to say.  I am presently occupied with learning the works of preparing a manuscript for a possible book.  I have been thinking of making a particular segment of this blog family-occasions easily accessible to all ages.  I have heard it said that when you have something in mind, let’s say an initiative, mention it to others so that you are somehow energized to see it through.  I am trying to heed that suggestion and I trust that the initiative comes through.  I even got wind of a suitable title which is “Give It One More Year, Sir”.  Having mentioned it I trust you will sustain the momentum with your prayers.

Now let us get down to business.  Following is the continuation of the third word and this time it is on prudence (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).

5 Prudence

The greatest crisis in the history of the world was the arrest and conviction of a Man found guilty of no other charge than an excess of love. What was tragic about that crisis reaching from a Garden to a Cross was: man failed! 

Aleteia

Peter, James, and John, who had been given the flashing light of the Transfiguration to prepare them for the dark night of Olives, slept as His enemies attacked. Judas, who had heard the divine admonition to lay up treasures in Heaven, peddled his Master for thirty pieces of silver — for Divinity is always sold out of all proportion to due worth. 

The Holy See

Peter who had been made the rock and key bearer, warmed himself by a fire and with an atavistic throwback to his fisherman days, cursed and swore to a maidservant that he knew not the man.

As Pilate submitted to the crowd the choice of Christ or a revolutionary upstart, the mob chose Barabbas. Finally, on Calvary where were the men? Where were those whom He cured? Peter was not there, nor his brother Andrew, nor James, nor any of the other Apostles except John, who might not have been there had it not been for the encouragement given him by Mary. 

Aleteia

But though men failed in this crisis, there is no instance of a single woman failing. In the four trials, the voice heard in His defense was that of a woman, Claudia Procul, the wife of Pontius Pilate, warning her husband not to do anything unjust to that just man. Events proved that the politician was wrong and the woman right.

Catholic Culture

On the way to Calvary it is the woman who offers consolation: first, Veronica wiping away the blood and sweat from His Sacred Face to receive the reward of its imprint on her towel; then the holy women to whom the Prisoner turned, suggesting that only such multiplied mercies and charities as their own could avert catastrophe for their children.

Missio Dei Catholic

Again on Calvary, it is woman who is fearless, for there are several of them at the foot of the Cross. Magdalen, among them as usual, is prostrate. But there is one whose courage and devotion was so remarkable that the evangelist who was there indicated the detail that she was “standing.” That woman was the Mother of the Man on the central Cross.

When we realize that He who is pinioned to that Cross is the Son of God and therefore possessed of infinite wisdom and power, we are at first inclined to wonder why she should not have been spared the sorrow of Golgotha.

Since He had made her of incomparable beauty of body and soul, why should He not keep those eyes made for paradise from gazing on a Cross? Why not shield ears attuned to the Divine Word from the blasphemies of ungrateful humans? Since preserved from original sin, why should its penalties be visited upon her? Must mothers go to gallows with their sons? Must the innocent eat the bitter fruit planted by the sinful?

These are questions of false human wisdom, but God’s ways are not our ways. Our Blessed Lord willed her presence there. Since He was the second Adam undoing the sin of the first, Mary would be the new Eve proclaiming the glory of womanhood in the new race of the redeemed.

The woman Eve would not be so cured that her most glorious daughter could not undo her evil. As a woman had shared in the fall of man, so woman should share in his redemption. In no better way could Our Lord reveal woman’s role in the new order than by giving John, that disciple whom He loved above the others, to His Mother, whom He loved above all: “Son! Behold thy Mother. . . . Woman! Behold thy son!”

The kingdom of God was born! Heavenly prudence had chosen the right means to reveal the new ties born of redemption. Mary was to be our Mother, and we her children.

The Savior’s death was at the same time a birth; the end of a chapter of crucifixion was the beginning of the chapter of a new creation.

As light is instantaneous in dispelling darkness, so the Divine Savior wills that not even a moment shall intervene between breaking down the attachments to Satan by sin and the incorporation of man into the kingdom of God. Mary exchanges her Son for the advantages of the Passion and receives its first fruit — John. Jesus had kept His word: “l will not leave you orphans” (John 14:18).

On the Cross was Wisdom Incarnate, dying that we might live. If Our Savior could have thought of any better means of leading us back to Him, He would have put us in other hands than hers.

There are many falsehoods told about the Catholic Church: one of them is that Catholics adore Mary. This is absolutely untrue. Mary is a creature, human, not divine. Catholics do not adore Mary. That would be idolatry But they do reverence her.

And to those Christians who have forgotten Mary, may we ask if it is proper for them to forget her whom Christ remembered on the Cross? Will they bear no love for that woman through the portals of whose flesh, as the Gate of Heaven, He came to earth?

One of the reasons so many Christians have lost a belief in the divinity of Christ is because they lost all affection for her upon whose white body, as a Tower of Ivory, that Infant climbed “to kiss upon her lips a mystic rose.” 

Aleteia

There is not a Christian in all the world who reverences Mary who does not acknowledge Jesus her Son to be in truth the Son of the Living God. The prudent Christ on the Cross knew the prudent way to preserve belief in His divinity, for who better than a Mother knows her son?

The gift of Mary did something to man, for it gave him an ideal love. To appreciate this fact fully, dwell for a moment on the difference between two faculties: the intellect, which knows, and the will, which loves.

The intellect always whittles down the object to suit itself. That is why the intellect insists on examples, explanations, and analogies. Every teacher must accommodate himself to the mentality of his class, and if the problem, which he is presenting, is abstract and complicated, he must break it up into the concrete, as Our Lord described the mysteries of the kingdom of God in parables.

But the will never works that way. While the intellect pulls down the object of knowledge to its level, the will always goes out to meet the object. 

If you love something, you lift yourself up to its level; if you love music, you subject yourself to its demands, and if you love mathematics, you meet its conditions. We tend to become like that which we love. Boys who love gangsters are already the making of gangsters. As our loves are, that we are. We scale mountains if the object loved is on a mountain; we jump down into the abyss if the object loved is there.

It follows that the higher our loves and ideals, the nobler will be our character. The problem of character training is fundamentally the inculcation of proper ideals. That is why every nation holds up its national heroes, that citizens may become like to them in their patriotism and devotion to country.

If we have heroes and ideal prototypes for those who love sports, the stage, the country, the army, and the navy, why should there not be an ideal in the all-important business of leading a good life and saving our souls?

That is precisely one of the roles the Blessed Mother of our Divine Lord plays in Christian life: an object of love so pure, so holy, and so motherly that, to be worthy of it, we refrain from doing anything that might offend her. 

There has hardly ever been a mother in the history of the world who did not at one time or another say to her son or daughter: “Never do anything of which your mother would be ashamed.” But what these mothers say is only an echo from the Cross, when Our Divine Lord gave us His Mother as our mother. In giving her to us, He was equivalently saying: “Never do anything of which your Heavenly Mother would be ashamed.”

The nobler the love, the nobler the character, and what nobler love could be given to men than the woman whom the Savior of the world chose as His Own Mother?

Why is it that the world has confessed its inability to inculcate virtue in the young? Very simply because it has not co-related morality to any love nobler than self-love. Things keep their proportion and fulfill their proper role only when integrated into a larger whole.

Most lives are like doors without hinges, or sleeves without coats, or bows without violins; that is, unrelated to wholes or purposes that give them meaning. If, for example, a speaker concentrates upon his hands, wonders whether he should put them in his pockets or behind his back, it will not be long until he feels he is all hands.

The modern emphasis on sex is a result of tearing a function away from a purpose, a part away from a whole. It can never be handled properly unless integrated into a larger pattern and made to serve it.

That is, to some extent, the role Our Blessed Mother plays in the moral life of our Catholic youth. She is that ideal love for which lesser and baser loves and impulses are sacrificed. Just as a skilled orator so integrates his hands into the pattern of speech that he is never conscious of their presence, so the Catholic youth maintains that healthy self-restraint out of respect for one whom he loves.

The level of any civilization is the level of its womanhood. What they are, men will be, for, to repeat, love always goes out to meet the demands of the object loved. Given a woman like the Mother of Our Lord as our supernatural Mother, you have one of the greatest inspirations for nobler living this world has ever known.

In this hour, as never before, the world needs to hear again this third word from the Cross. It needs the inspiration of the Good Woman. Unfortunately, the woman who is admired today is not the virtuous woman, but the beautiful woman — and by “beautiful” is meant not that inner beauty of the king’s daughter, but that beauty which is only skin deep and sometimes only powder deep.

Glance at the advertisements flashed across the pages and billboards of our country! They are, for the most part, pictures of women who ten years from now would not be accepted for the same advertisement because they will have lost what they now possess — a passing beauty.

Our modern world does not really love woman; it loves only her external beauty. If it loved woman, it would love woman as long as she is woman. But because it loves the mask of a woman, it ignores the woman when the mask disappears.

The alarming increase of divorces in our land and the consequent breakup of family life is due principally to the loss of love for the ideal in womanhood. Marriage has become identified with pleasure, not with love. Once the pleasure ceases, love ceases. The woman is loved not for what she is in herself but for what she is to others. The tragedy of such a state is not only what it does for woman, but also what it does for man.

How to restore love for woman as woman? By giving as the object of life’s love a woman who has given Life and Love to the world — a woman who is beautiful on the outside all the days of her life, because she is beautiful on the inside.  

Apostles of the Interior Life

That was the means Our Lord chose on the Cross to remake the world: Remake man by remaking the woman.

Conceived in the Divine Mind, sculptured by the creative fingers of the Heavenly Sculptor, touched by ever radiant color from the palette of heaven, the Artist on the Cross points to His masterpiece and says to man: “Behold the Woman!”

There is told a legend that illustrates the intercessory power of Our Blessed Lady. It seems that one day Our Blessed Lord was walking through the kingdom of heaven and saw some souls who had got in very easily. Approaching Peter at the Golden Gate, He said: “Peter, I have given to you the keys to the kingdom of heaven. You must use your power wisely and discreetly. Tell Me, Peter, how did these souls gain entry into my kingdom?” To which Peter answered: “Don’t blame me, Lord. Every time I close the door, Your Mother opens a window.”

Inter Mirifica

When, amidst the thousand and one allurements of this world, you know not which way to turn, pray to the Woman — the Virgin most prudent. She knows the true from the false, for in the language of Joyce Kilmer: 

At the foot of the Cross on Calvary

Three soldiers sat and diced

And one of them was the devil

And he won the Robe of Christ.

 

I saw him through a thousand veils

And has not this sufficed?

Now, must I look on the devil robed

In the radiant robe of Christ?

 

He comes, his face is sad and mild

With thorns, his head is crowned

There are great bleeding wounds in His feet

And in each hand a wound.

 

How can I tell, who am a fool

If this be Christ or no?

Those bleeding hands outstretched to me

Those eyes that love me so!

 

I see the robe — I look, I hope — 

I fear — but there is one

Who will direct my troubled mind.

Christ’s Mother knows her Son.

 

O Mother of Good Counsel, lend

Intelligence to me

Encompass me with wisdom

Thou Tower of Ivory!

 

“This is the man of lies,” she says

“Disguised with fearful art:

He has the wounded hands and feet

But not the wounded heart.”

 

Beside the Cross on Calvary

She watched them as they diced

She saw the devil join the game

And win the Robe of Christ.

 

 The Seven Virtues by Joyce Kilmer, “The Robe of Christ.”

Isn’t it wonderful to bring to mind our history and be grateful for it?   I am recalling Pope John Paul II’s words in Duc in altum (Put Out Into the Deep).  He is calling people to “remember the past with gratitude, live the present with enthusiasm, and look to the future with confidence”.  As we do so, let us also keep in mind our identity, that you and I are children of God and each of us has a mission that goes with our identity, that is, you and I are sent to proclaim the Kingdom of God. God is our Father.  And then the famous Filipino proverb that goes in English:  “He who does not look back to where he came from will never reach his destination.” (Ang hindi lumingon sa pinanggalingan, hindi makakarating sa paroroonan.

Let us now bring the above thoughts into our quiet moments of prayer.  Let us ask Jesus and His mother to intercede for us that you and I may receive the gift of wisdom from the Holy Spirit.  I am sure if we do so, the Holy Spirit will also give us His other gifts of understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.  Listen intently to what He tells you and do as He tells you to do.

See you in the next post, “May tomorrow be a perfect day; may you find love and laughter along the way; may God keep you in his tender care; ‘til He brings us together again.”

Affectionately,                    

Guadalupinky