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Do you feel drawn to the Holy Face of
Jesus?
Do you feel drawn to making reparation to God for the sins of the world?
Just what is the 'Holy Hour of Reparation' all about?
Would you like to participate in, or start a prayer group devoted to the Holy
Face of Jesus in your home or parish.
Reparation is not something
that any one of us is capable of doing on our own. To make reparation is a
response to a grace given by God. God gives the grace, we recognize it, welcome
it, and respond to it. We cooperate with the Grace of God. This grace influences
us to respond to the love manifested for us by Jesus. We desire to return love
to the One who loved us first. Therefore we can say that if we are drawn to make
reparation, we respond to a 'Calling' from God.
According to the Catholic encyclopedia, Reparation is a
theological concept closely connected with those of atonement and satisfaction,
and thus belonging to some of the deepest mysteries of the Christian Faith. It
is the teaching of that Faith that man is a creature who has fallen from an
original state of justice in which he was created, and that through the
Incarnation, Passion and Death of the Son of God, he has been redeemed and
restored again in a certain degree to the original condition. Although God might
have condoned men's offenses gratuitously if He had chosen to do so, yet in His
Providence He did not do this; He judged it better to demand satisfaction for
the injuries which man had done Him. It is better for man's education that
wrongdoing on his part should entail the necessity of making satisfaction. This
satisfaction was made adequately to God by the Sufferings, Passion and Death of
Jesus Christ, made man for us. By voluntary submission to His Passion and Death
on the Cross, Jesus Christ atoned for our disobedience and sin. He thus made
reparation to the offended majesty of God for the outrages which the Creator so
constantly suffers at the hands of His creatures. We are restored to grace
through the merits of Christ's Death, and that grace enables us to add our
prayers, labours and trials to those of our Lord "and fill up those things that
are wanting of the sufferings of Christ" (Col., i, 24). We can thus make some
sort of reparation to the justice of God for our own offences against Him, and
by virtue of the Communion of the Saints, the oneness and solidarity of the
Mystical Body of Christ, we can also make satisfaction and reparation for the
sins of others.
This theological doctrine, firmly rooted in the Christian Faith, is
the foundation of the 'Archconfraternity of the Holy Face' which was established
at Tours, around 1851, through the piety and efforts of
Leon Dupont, the 'Holy
Man Of Tours'.
If you feel called to the Devotion to the Holy Face of Jesus,
and would like to start a prayer group to pray the 'Holy Hour of
Reparation' in your area click on the button "To Start a Prayer Group" in the
left column.
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