The Essence of All Sins
September 8, 2026
Hello! How is each and every one? Today is the birthday of our heavenly mother Mary. Following is an article from the Daily Roman Missal on this feast that we all celebrate with the Church.8 September
Birthday of
the Blessed Virgin Mary
The Church has celebrated Mary's birth since at least the sixth century. A September birth was chosen because the Eastern Church begins its Church year with September. The September 8 date helped determine the date for the feast of the Immaculate Conception on December 8 (nine months earlier). Scripture does not give an account of Mary's birth. However, the apocryphal Protoevangelium of James fills in the gap. This work has no historical value, but it does reflect the development of Christian piety. According to this account, Anna and Joachim are infertile but pray for a child. They receive the promise of a child that will advance God's plan of salvation for the world. Such a story (like many biblical counterparts) stresses the special presence of God in Mary's life from the beginning. St. Augustine connects Mary's birth with Jesus' saving work. He tells the earth to rejoice and shine forth in the light of her birth. "She is the flower of the field from whom bloomed the precious lily of the valley. Through her birth the nature inherited from our first parents is changed." The opening prayer at Mass speaks of the birth of Mary's Son as the dawn of our salvation and asks for an increase of peace. “Impart to your servants, we pray, O Lord, the gift of heavenly grace, that the feast of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin may bring deeper peace to those for whom the birth of her Son was the dawning of salvation.”
Please continue accompanying with your prayers for the
book Give It One More Year, Sir so that
after I have done my duty God will take care of the results. Remember the words of John Quincy Adams “Duty is ours; Results are God’s”. I find consolation and support on those
words. For indeed after all is said and
done the results are His to take care of.
For example, when I came over in August last year and September 8 came around I was looking for the baby Mary, which I remember the house had for many years and we would put her out on her birthday. It did not seem anybody knew about it. One day somebody was looking for something inside a cabinet of books and lo and behold she found the baby Mary in a box inside the cabinet. See, ask, seek and you or some other person will find what you are looking for. Indeed, He takes care, right? Today, she is out of the box as before since it is her birthday and we are remembering her fiat mihi secumdum verbum tuum (be it done to me according to thy word). To her we entrust our fiat as well.
Let us now continue with the fourth word of Christ from the Cross on pride (From The Cries of Jesus from the Cross, A Fulton J. Sheen’s Anthology).
4 Pride
Pride is an inordinate love of one’s own excellence, either of body or mind, or the unlawful pleasure we derive from thinking we have no superiors. Pride being swollen egoism, it erects the human soul into a separate center of origin apart from God, exaggerates its own importance, and becomes a world in and for itself. All other sins are evil deeds, but pride insinuates itself even unto good works to destroy and slay them. For that reason, Sacred Scriptures says, “Pride goeth before destruction” (Prov. 16:18).
Pride manifests itself in many forms: atheism, which is a denial of our dependence on God, our Creator and our final end; intellectual vanity, which makes minds unteachable because they think they know all there is to know; superficiality, which judges others by their clothes, their accent, and their bank account; snobbery, which sneers at inferiors as the earmark of its own superiority, “they are not of our set”; vainglory, which prompts some Catholic parents to refuse to send their boys and girls to Catholic colleges, because they would there associate only with the children of carpenters; presumptuousness, which inclines a man to seek honors and positions quite beyond his capacity; and exaggerated sensitiveness, which makes one incapable of moral improvements because of unwillingness to hear one’s own faults.
Pride it was that made Satan fall from heaven and man fall from grace. By its very nature, such undue self-exaltation could be cured only by self-humiliation. That is why He who might have been born in a palace by the Tiber, as befitting His majesty as the Son of God, chose to appear before men in a stable as a child wrapped in swaddling bands.
Added to this humility of His Birth was the humility of His profession — a carpenter in an obscure village of Nazareth whose name was a reproach among the great. Just as today there are those who sneer at the humble walks of life, so too, there were then those who sneered: “Is not this the carpenter’s son?” (Matt. 13:55). There was also the humility of His actions, for never once did He work a miracle in His own behalf, not even to supply Himself with a place to lay His head.
Humility of example there was too, when on Holy Thursday night, He who is the Lord of heaven and earth, girds Himself with a towel, gets down on His knees, and with basin and water, washes the twenty-four calloused feet of His Apostles, saying: “The servant is not greater than his lord. . . . If then I being your Lord and Master have washed your feet; you also ought to wash one another’s feet” (John 13:14, 16). Finally, there was humility of precept: “Unless you be converted, and become as little children, you shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3).
But the supreme humiliation of all was the manner of death He chose, for “He humbled himself . . . even to the death of the cross” (Phil. 2:8). To atone for false pride of ancestry, He thrusts aside the consolation of divinity; for pride of popularity, He is laughed to scorn as He hangs cursed upon a tree; for pride of snobbery, He is put in the company of thieves; for pride of wealth, He is denied even the ownership of His own deathbed; for pride of flesh, He was scourged until “there was no beauty in Him” (Isa. 53:2); for pride in influential friends, He is forgotten even by those whom He cured; for pride of power, He is weak and abandoned; for pride of those who surrender God and their faith, He wills to feel without God.
For all the egotism, false independence, and atheism, He now offers satisfaction by surrendering the joys and consolations of His divine nature. Because proud men forgot God, He permits Himself to feel Godlessness, and it breaks His heart in the saddest of all cries: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” There was union even in the separation, but they were words of desolation uttered that we might never be without consolation.
Two lessons emerge from this Word:
2. Glory in humility, for humility is
truth and the path to true greatness.
Why should we be proud? As St. Paul
reminds us, “Or what hast thou that thou hast not received? And if thou hast
received, why dost thou glory, as if thou hadst not received it?” (1 Cor. 4:7).
Is it our voice, our wealth, our beauty, our talents of which we are proud?
What are these but gifts of God, any one of which He might revoke this second?
From a material point of view, we are worth so little. The content of a human body is equivalent to as much iron as there is in a nail, as much sugar as there is in two lumps, as much oil as there is in seven bars of soap, as much phosphorus as there is in 2,200 matches, and as much magnesium as it takes to develop one photograph. In all, the human body, chemically, is worth a little less than two dollars — “O why should the spirit of mortal be proud?”(William Knox, “Mortality,” line 1). But spiritually we are worth more than the universe: “For what shall it profit a man, if he gains the whole world, and suffer the loss of his soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Mark 8:36–37).
God resists the proud. The Pharisee who
praised his own good deeds in the forefront of the Temple is condemned; the
poor publican in the rear of the Temple, who calls himself a sinner and strikes
his breast in a plea for pardon, goes to his house justified. The harlots and
the publicans who are conscious of their sin enter the kingdom of heaven before
the scribes and the Pharisees, who are conscious of their righteousness.
The Heavenly Father is thanked for concealing His wisdom from the self-wise and the conscious intellectuals and for revealing it to the simple: “I confess to thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because thou hast hidden these things from the wise and prudent and hast revealed them to little ones” (Matt. 11:25).
Surely anyone who has had experience with the proud will bear witness to the truth of this statement: if my eternal salvation were conditioned upon saving the soul of one self-wise man who prided himself on his learning, or one hundred of the most morally corrupt men and women of the streets, I should choose the easier task of converting the hundred. Nothing is more difficult to conquer in all the world than intellectual pride. If battleships could be lined with it instead of with armor, no shell could ever pierce it.
This is easy to understand, for if a man thinks he knows it all, there is nothing left for him to know, not even what God might tell him. If the soul is filled to the brim with the ego, there is no place left for God. If a vessel is filled with water, it cannot also be filled with oil. So it is with the soul.
God can give His truth and life only to those who have emptied themselves. We must create a vacuum in our own souls to make room for grace. We live under the impression that we do more than we actually do. Take, for example, the simple fact of drinking liquid through a straw. We erroneously believe that we draw up the liquid through the straw. We do not, for strictly speaking there is no such thing as suction. All that we do is create a vacuum; the atmosphere presses down on the liquid with a weight equal to that of an ocean covering the earth to a depth of thirty-four feet. It is this pressure that pushes the liquid up through the straw when we create the vacuum.
So, too, in our spiritual lives: the good we accomplish is not through the action of ourselves, as much as it is through the spiritual pressure of God’s grace. All we have to do is create a vacuum, to count ourselves as nothing — and immediately God fills the soul with His power and truth.
The paradox of apostolate, then, is
this: the less we think we are, the more good we do. It was only when Peter had
labored all night and taken nothing, that Our Lord filled his boat with the
miraculous draught of fishes. The higher the building, the deeper the
foundation; the greater the virtue, the more the humility.
God’s instruments for good in the world are for that reason only the humble; reducing themselves to zero, they leave room for infinity, whereas those who think themselves infinite, God leaves with their zero.
Even in the world, we find a natural
basis for humility. As long as we are small, everything else seems big. A boy
mounts a broomstick that is no more than four feet long, and yet to him it is a
Pegasus traveling through space; he can hear the hoofs beating the clouds as he
clings to the “whistling mane of every wind.” (Thompson, “The Hound of Heaven,”
line 39). His world is peopled with giants because he is so little; tin
soldiers to him are real soldiers fighting real battles, and the red of the
carpet is the blood of the battlefield.
When he grows to be a big man, the giants shrink in size; the horses become broomsticks, and the soldiers are painted tin no more than three inches high. In the spiritual order, it is the same; as long as there is a God who is wiser than we, greater than we, more powerful than we, then the world is a house of wonders.
Truth is then something so vast that not even an eternity can sound its depths. Love, then, is so abiding that not even heaven can dull its ecstasies. Goodness becomes so profound that thanks must ever be on one’s lips.
But just forget God, make yourself a god, and then your little learning is your title to omniscience. Then the saints become for you stupid fools; the martyrs, “fanatics”; the religious, “dumb”; confession, a “priestly invention”; the Eucharist, a “vestige of paganism”; heaven, a “childish fancy”; and truth, a “delusion.” It must be wonderful to know so much, but it must be terrible to find out in the end that one really knows so little.
It was that sense of independence or being without God that wrung out of the heart of Our Lord on the Cross this pitiable cry of abandonment: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” The humble soul, conscious of his dependence on God, is always the thankful soul.
How many singers, orators, musicians, actors, doctors, or professors ever think of thanking God for the special talents that made them outstanding in their profession? Out of the ten lepers who were made clean, only one returned to give thanks. “Were not ten made clean? And where are the nine?” probably represents the proportion of the ungrateful who do not thank because they are not humble.
The humble soul will always avoid praising his own good works and thus making void the virtue of his deeds. Self-praise devours merit; and those who have done good things to be seen by men, and who trumpet their philanthropies in the marketplaces, will one day hear the saddest words of tongue or pen: “Thou hast already had thy reward” (see Matt. 6:2).
The humble man, even though he be great in the eyes of the world, will esteem himself less than others, for he will always suspect that their internal greatness may far overreach his insignificant external greatness. He will therefore not flaunt his accidental superiority before his fellow man, for to do so is to prove one is not truly great. The really big men are the humble men; they are always approachable, kind, and understanding.
It is the little men who must put on airs. The rich boy need not wear good clothes to impress his friends with his wealth, but the poor boy must do so to create the false impression of wealth. So it is with those who have nothing in their heads; they must be eternally creating the impression of how much they know, the books they have read, and the university from which they graduated.
The learned man never has to “seem”
learned, as the saint never has to appear pious — but the hypocrite does. The
fact that so many men take honors seriously, change their voices, and cultivate
poses, proves they never should have had the honors — the honors were too big
for them. They could not assimilate the honors; rather the honors assimilated
them. Instead of wearing the purple, the purple wears them.
A sponge can absorb so much water and no more; a character can absorb so much praise and no more; the point of saturation is reached when the honor ceases to be a part of him and begins to stick out like a sore thumb. The truly great are like St. Philip Neri, who one day, seeing a criminal being led off to prison, said: “There goes Philip Neri, except for the grace of God.”
Suppose we began to be humble and esteemed others at least no less than ourselves. Suppose to those who wounded us with their slanderous darts, we answered: “Father, forgive!” Suppose to those who classified us with thieves, we made the best of it and converted them saying: “This day, paradise.” Suppose out of those who shamed us before relatives, as Jesus was shamed before His Mother, we made a new friend for our heavenly Mother: “Behold thy son!” Suppose to those beneath us in worldly dignity we humbled ourselves and asked them for a drink: “I thirst!”
Suppose we began to be truthful and estimated ourselves at our real worth. If we did these things for but one hour, we would completely revolutionize the world. We are not wanting an example, for we have before our eyes Him who humbled Himself to the death on the Cross, who surrendered divine consolation as Power put on the rags of weakness and Strength girded itself in abandonment, and, being God, appeared to be without God.
And why did He do this? Because we have been trying to lead our lives without God — to be independent. By choosing the humiliation of the Cross in reparation for pride, He takes us back again to the story of David and Goliath.
Goliath was a great giant clothed in an armor of steel and carrying in his hand a mighty sword. David was the shepherd boy without defensive steel and carrying no other weapon than a staff, and five little stones from a nearby brook. Goliath scorned him, saying: “Am I a dog that thou comest to me with a staff?” David answered humbly, not trusting in his own power: “I come to thee in the name of the Lord” (1 Sam. 17:43, 45). The outcome we know. The boy with a stone killed the giant with the armor and sword.
The victory of David symbolized the reality of Good Friday. Pride is Goliath. Our Lord is the humble David, who comes to slay pride with the staff of His Cross and five little stones — five wounds, in hands, feet, and side. With no other weapon than these five wounds and the staff of the Cross do we gain victories over the Goliath of pride on the battlefield of our soul.
To the worldly they seem ill-fitted for battle, and impotent to conquer, but not if we understand God’s plan from the beginning that: “the foolish things of the world hath God chosen that he may confound the wise; and the weak things of the world hath God chosen that he may confound the strong” (1 Cor. 1:27). It was with a cross and a crowned brow that God won the day. As Oscar Wilde puts it:
O smitten mouth! O forehead crowned with thorn!
O chalice of all common miseries!
Thou for our sakes that loved thee not
has borne
An agony of endless centuries,
And we were vain and ignorant nor
knew
That when we stabbed thy heart, it was
our own real hearts we slew.
Being ourselves the sowers and the
seeds,
The night that covers and the lights
that fade,
The spear that pierces and the side that
bleeds,
The lips betraying and the life
betrayed;
The deep hath calm: the moon hath rest:
but we
Lords of the natural world are yet our
own dread enemy. . . .
Nay, nay, we are but crucified, and
though
The bloody sweat falls from our brows
like rain,
Loosen the nails — we shall come down, I
know,
Stanch the red wounds — we shall be
whole again,
No need have we of hyssop-laden rod,
That which is purely human, that is
Godlike, that is God. (“Humanitad,” lines 25–48)
— Victory over Vice
There is so much to consider in what was said above. We cannot do that without the grace and inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Again let us remember to bring the above topic on pride and humility to our silent moments of conversation with Jesus and with His mother, our mother Mary during the day and wherever we may find ourselves at every moment.
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
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