If you’re a regular reader of this Substack, you know how often our authors proclaim that what we need now is more saints. And with good reason; Church history attests to the ecclesial reform that has come through the very holiest. But as basic as this goal is, I have no idea how to become a saint.
Yet there is something I do know how to do, that will help others on their road toward sanctity: offer my life up, day after day (and often hour after hour). And this, I will argue, is what we need now: for all of the Church’s faithful to become masters of offering everything up.
Why This Matters
Some of the most shocking words in the Bible come from St. Paul: “Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake, and in my flesh I am filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church” (Colossians 1:24). Is Jesus’ sacrifice then somehow incomplete or deficient? St. John Paul II explains, “No. It only means that the Redemption, accomplished through satisfactory love, remains always open to all love…” (Salvifici Doloris, 24).
So what is lacking is the application of Christ’s suffering to His Body, the Church. And here’s where we come in and why it matters so much: we can aid in this application or let the opportunity go to waste, based on our choices. This sums it up nicely:
The wisdom, the will, the justice of Jesus Christ, requireth and ordaineth that his body and members should be companions of his sufferings, as they expect to be companions of his glory; that so suffering with him, and after his example, they may apply to their own wants and to the necessities of others the merits and satisfaction of Jesus Christ, which application is what is wanting, and what we are permitted to supply.1
Here we see the conditionality involved—we “may” apply the merits and satisfactions of Jesus. There’s a lot to unpack here, so let’s delve into grace and merit.
Applying Grace
The Church’s greatest patrimony “is the infinite value, which can never be exhausted, which Christ’s merits have before God” (CCC 1476). Our “treasury” is the store of grace won by Jesus. No surprise here.
But then the Catechism goes on to explain, “In the treasury, too, are the prayers and good works of all the saints, all those who have followed in the footsteps of Christ the Lord and by his grace have made their lives holy and carried out the mission in the unity of the Mystical Body” (CCC 1477).
Why are we fallen humans able to mysteriously add our own merits to the treasury of superabundant grace won by Christ’s sacrifice? Because of the miracle of Baptism. This great sacrament makes “us members of the Body of Christ… [and] incorporates us into the Church” (CCC 1267). In other words, adopted as sons into the Son, we are part of the Mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church, and His life can be lived in us. By the power of the Holy Spirit, we can unite ourselves to Christ and offer up all of our experiences in love, as He did, for the good of souls.
May our familiarity with this doctrine never dull us to how life-changing it is! We mere mortals can add to the infinite treasury of grace won by the God-Man Himself! Because of our Baptism absolutely everything in our lives can be used for good. But this isn’t all.
Jesus gave His Bride, the Church, a certain right to “dispose” of the treasury of merit that Christ won on the Cross.2 This is the foundation of indulgences and, for our purposes, of the power of offering things up for specific intentions. When we offer things up in union with Christ, we add to the treasury of grace, and can then also recommend how those graces be disposed of, or in more common language, applied.
There is nothing that necessitates this arrangement. God freely chose it because He wants us to participate in His own work. The idea of “filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ on behalf of his body, which is the church” leaves me in awe, because it is yet another example of God’s extreme generosity and desire for us to be like Him. God could have chosen to win and apply every single grace on His own; He doesn’t need our cooperation. And since the graces He merited are more than sufficient—there is zero need for us to merit any more. But to think this way misses the heart of God.
God wants us to experience His transforming love so fully that, with His divine life flowing through our souls and Jesus’ Precious Blood pumping through our veins, we fervently desire to be fully conformed to Christ. Christ living in us3 makes it possible to follow His example and offer the entirety of our lives up to God, directing the graces merited by such love. As the Catechism explains, all the baptized can “enter deliberately into the divine plan by their actions, their prayers and their sufferings. They then fully become ‘God's fellow workers’ and co-workers for his kingdom” (CCC 307).
So, no, God doesn’t need our cooperation, but He wants it. God chose not to automatically apply all the graces Himself—He leaves some available, if you will, for us to apply by offering everything of ours in union with Christ. Doing so has powerful consequences. The Angel of Portugal instructed the children before Our Lady of Fatima’s appearance, “Make of everything you can a sacrifice, and offer it to God as an act of reparation for the sins by which he is offended, and in supplication for the conversion of sinners. You will thus draw down peace upon your country.”4
The Emphasis on Suffering
Since the Church teaches that we can offer up everything in our lives, why does she emphasize the importance of offering our suffering specifically? Let’s explore only two of the many answers to this question. One, suffering provides the opportunity for Christ’s Paschal Mystery to be played out in our own lives and, again, God’s desire is our conformity to His Son. St. Paul couldn’t be clearer that “we suffer with him so that we may also be glorified with him” (Romans 8:17). St. John Paul II beautifully explains why we can’t have one without the other:
Every man has his own share in the Redemption. Each one is also called to share in that suffering through which the Redemption was accomplished. He is called to share in that suffering through which all human suffering has also been redeemed. In bringing about the Redemption through suffering, Christ has also raised human suffering to the level of the Redemption. Thus each man, in his suffering, can also become a sharer in the redemptive suffering of Christ. (Salvifici Doloris, 19)
Two, the Church recognizes that suffering is uniquely powerful when united to Christ’s. Why? Because of the love and trust implicit in such an offering. Jesus instinctively recoiled from the Cross but, “By his loving obedience to the Father, ‘unto death, even death on a cross’ (Phil 2:8), Jesus fulfills the atoning mission” (CCC 623; see also Matthew 26:39). When we do likewise, our sufferings also bear great fruit. As Jesus told St. Gemma Galgani, “In suffering you will learn how to love.”5
This is what makes suffering so powerful: it is an expression of love while simultaneously growing our love. “It is charity with other holy dispositions that ‘gives their worth and value to all our actions,’ says St. Francis de Sales.”6 And the greater the love, the greater the merit, which is precisely why Christ’s sacrifice, done with perfect love, was superabundantly efficacious.
This is also why it is helpful to make offerings throughout the day, instead of being content with only the Daily Offering in the morning—we live the various “whats” of our lives with more love when we remember the “why” behind them. For instance, I am more likely to remain patient in my suffering when throughout the day I unite it to Christ’s (whose sufferings I am all too quick to forget amidst my own); I am more likely to offer up my work in love during its mindless tasks if in those moments I remind myself that all work has dignity (and that Jesus probably didn’t love everything about being a carpenter); I am less likely to get dragged down into an unhealthy inwardness by any annoyance if I actively think about the person for whom I am offering it up. As St. Therese of Lisieux told her sister, “You know well that Our Lord does not look so much at the greatness of our actions, nor even at their difficulty, as at the love with which we do them.”7 The Daily Offering is crucial because it means everything from our day will be offered up, but those offerings are imbued with more love when we also consciously make them throughout the day.
The prayers of periodic offering can be as brief or formal as you like. “Use this Jesus” and “For Andrea” (or whomever I am making the offering) are typical for me. You could also follow Our Lady of Fatima’s instructions to the children in her third apparition in 1917: “Sacrifice yourselves for sinners, and say many times, especially whenever you make some sacrifice: O Jesus, it is for love of you, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.”8 Ultimately the words don’t matter; it's the love behind the offering that makes the impact.
Our Choices Matter
The flipside of this incredible gift is that when we don’t offer our “prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day” to Christ, as the Daily Offering instructs, some of the graces that God desires to dispense will not be applied. Shocking, no? This is how seriously God takes our cooperation; this is the weight of the responsibility that comes with the gift of our free will.
The world needs this grace. Our country needs this grace. Our loved ones need this grace. God is outside of time, so you can start now by retroactively offering up your past. Then commit to the Daily Offering each morning and periodic offerings throughout the day so you can offer your life up with intentionality. This is what we need now from you, my brother or sister in Christ. Let us follow St. Therese of Lisieux’s example that “I will let no tiny sacrifice pass, no look, no word. I wish to profit by the smallest actions, and to do them for Love,”9 and not let any of our lives go to waste.
Denise Fath is editor of What We Need Now. She has a Masters in Theology from Franciscan University of Steubenville and has previously worked in the publishing departments of the Augustine Institute and Lighthouse Catholic Media.
George Leo Haydock, Haydock’s Catholic Bible Commentary (New York: Edward Dunigan and Brother, 1859), Col 1:24.
See Ludwig Ott’s Fundamentals of Catholic Dogma (Rockford, Illinois, TAN Books, 1960), 442ff.
See Galatians 2:20, 2 Corinthians 13:5, to name just a few relevant Scripture passages.
Mark Miravalle, “Marian Private Revelation: Nature, Evaluation, Message” in Mariology (Goleta, California: Seat of Wisdom Books), p864. (Citing Sister Lucia’s Memoirs, Second Memoir.)
Dom Vitalis Lehodey, Holy Abandonment (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books, 2003), p110.
Dom Vitalis Lehodey, Holy Abandonment (Rockford, Illinois: TAN Books, 2003), p125. (Citing Treatise on the Love of God, Book XI, Chapter VI.)
Letter of St. Therese to her sister, Celine, October 20, 1888.
Mark Miravalle, “Marian Private Revelation: Nature, Evaluation, Message” in Mariology (Goleta, California: Seat of Wisdom Books), p871 (citing Sister Lucia’s Memoirs, Fourth Memoir).
Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, The Story of a Soul, Translated by T. N. Taylor (London: Burns and Oates, 1912), 185.
Geez this is wonderful…thank you