It is our duty to prefer the service of the poor to everything else and to offer such service as quickly as possible. If a needy person requires medicine or other help during prayer time, do whatever has to be done with peace of mind. Offer the deed to God as your prayer.... Charity is certainly greater than any rule. Moreover, all rules must lead to charity.
Interpretation
Helping those in need is more important than following rules, and such acts should be done with a peaceful heart.
This quote emphasizes the importance of prioritizing service to the less fortunate over strict adherence to rules and rituals. It suggests that true devotion comes from acts of charity, and that these acts should be performed selflessly and promptly, indicating that the spirit of compassion should guide one's actions, especially during times of prayer or devotion.
In practice
During a charity event, I quoted St. Vincent to emphasize the importance of helping the needy.
It ought to be considered a great misfortune, not only for individuals, but also for Houses and Congregations, to have everything in conformity with their wishes; to go on quietly, and to suffer nothing for the love of God. Yes, consider it certain that a person or a Congregation that does not suffer and is applauded by all the world is near a fall.
Let us love God my brothers, let us love God. But let it be with the strength of our arms and the sweat of our brow.
It is from your hands that Our Lord, in the person of the sick, seeks relief.
Charity is the cement that unites communities to God and individuals to each other_x000D_ so that he who contributes to the union of hearts in a community_x000D_ binds it indissolubly to God.
We ought to deal kindly with all, and to manifest those qualities which spring naturally from a heart tender and full of Christian charity; such as affability, love and humility. These virtues serve wonderfully to gain the hearts of men, and to encourage them to embrace things that are more repugnant to nature.
However great the work that God may achieve by an individual, he must not indulge in self-satisfaction. He ought rather to be all the more humbled, seeing himself merely as a tool which God has made use of.
Be ever watchful for the opportunity to shelter little children with the umbrella of your charity; be generous to their schools, their hospitals, and their places of worship. For, as they must bear the burdens of our mistakes, so are they in their innocence the repositories of our hopes for the upward progress of humanity.
If you disclose your alms, even then it is well done, but if you keep them secret, and give them to the poor, then that is better still for you;?and this wipes off from you some of your evil deeds.
Charity is no substitute for justice. If we never challenge a social order that allows some to accumulate wealth--even if they decide to help the less fortunate--while others are short-changed, then even acts of kindness end up supporting unjust arrangements. We must never ignore the injustices that make charity necessary, or the inequalities that make it possible.
Let us also love our neighbors as ourselves. Let us have charity and humility. Let us give alms because these cleanse our souls from the stains of sin. Men lose all the material things they leave behind them in this world, but they carry with them the reward of their charity and the alms they give. For these they will receive from the Lord the reward and recompense they deserve.
The ministry of mercy, then, is the best advertising a church can have. It convinces a community that this church provides people with actions for their problems, not only talk. It shows the community that this church is compassionate.
While we pay lip service to the virtues of reading, the truth is that there is still in our culture something that suspects those who read too much, whatever reading too much means, of being lazy, aimless dreamers, people who need to grow up and come outside to where real life is, who think themselves superior in their separateness.
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