Welcome to the traditional Catholic Daily Devotional.

Today's Wednesday, April 16th, 2025, the Wednesday of Holy Week, first class with the color of violet.

In this episode, the Meditations, Holy Week, and the Sufferings of Christ, and 40 Steps to Easter.

A preview of the sermon, Padre Pio's considerations on the agony in the garden,

and today's thought from Archbishop Marcel Lefevre.

But first the collect of today's Mass.

Grant we beseech thee, Almighty God,

that we who are continually afflicted by reason of our waywardness

may be delivered by the passion of thine only begotten son.

Today's first meditation, Holy Week, and the sufferings of Christ. Good people are often

disgusted with themselves because they have a distaste or a loathing for their crosses. Even when

they summon up their courage and try to accept them generously, this repugnance

remains. They fear that they are not faithful disciples since they feel no eagerness for the cross.

But there is a great deal of illusion in this pattern of thinking. An illusion that the devil is only

too happy to foster in order to discourage us.

Dom Van Zeller addresses this misunderstanding well.

The cross is not so much a weight when it presses on our shoulders.

It is rather that quality of suffering,

which comes up through the soles of the feet and spreads exhaustion through every bone and muscle and nerve until it reaches the head

and turns even the mind to lassitude and disgust.

But even when we have had the sense to say amen, accepting the cross with as good a grace as we

can manage, the weariness of it all goes on as before.

...