"Father, forgive them, for
they know not what they do!"

"Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do!"

These famous words, found in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 23:24) are also part of Christ’s Seven Last Words (sayings actually) from the cross at Calvary. They can help us all to save souls! One of the wonderful aspects of our faith, one that I suspect is not better understood, much less appreciated, is how we can join Jesus in offering up our own sufferings to Him on the Cross at Calvary, as He did to His Heavenly Father in His Passion!

With this thought in mind, I’d like to start off this essay with two brief prayers of offering you can say anytime in whatever sufferings you may be enduring that can be quite efficacious not only for your own soul and your salvation, but those of so many others, including people you might not even know!

We start first with this well-known prayer the Blessed Virgin Mary taught the three Fatima visionaries, the children Lucia Dos Santos, and her cousins Francisco and Jacinta Marto, in 1917, to be said when offering up sufferings, sacrifices, or penances:

Oh my Jesus, I offer this for love of Thee, for the conversion of sinners, and in reparation for the sins committed against the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

And then there’s this prayer that is also short and easy to memorize:

(The petitions are in alphabetical order here if that helps: C, F, R, and S)

Dear Lord, I offer you (whatever your concern or problem may be)
For the conversion of sinners
For the forgiveness of sins
In reparation for sins and
For the salvation of souls. Amen.

Imagine for a moment just how much pain Jesus was in on the cross at Calvary! Yes, he had said in the Sermon on the Mount that we are to forgive our enemies and pray for those who persecute us.

But can any of us possibly imagine Christ’s having endured such excruciating physical and emotional suffering from His enemies, and then being able to say to His Heavenly Father “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do?”

Considering the overabundance of human malfeasance He saw in His earthly ministry, and what would be coming over the next two millennia, such an appeal seems that much more extraordinary!

While we often pray for those victimized by sins, in some ways it is the victimizers who need prayer the most because those who engage in various forms of wretched malfeasance are most in danger of losing their souls forever!

Asking for God’s mercy for those who cultivate evil in their hearts might well seem repugnant given our natural desire to see justice done. However, our prayers for the malicious malcontents among us just might inspire in them a glimmer of genuine contrition for their sins and help in turning their lives around.

That way they can turn their faces, not their backs to God! (This is referenced from the Book of. the Prophet Jeremiah chapter 32, verse 33.) As a famous example of this, St. Dismas, also known as the Good Thief, was able to reach paradise after showing contrition to our Lord at Calvary!

Sadly many of the crosses we bear, those outside of serious illness for example, come from those we inflict on each other for various reasons related to our fallen nature, out of pride, envy, and hatred, for examples.

Our Lord’s speaking of ignorance as a prime factor in his plea for forgiveness calls to mind these famous lines from the 19th Century poet Matthew Arnold: “And we are here as on a darkling plain/Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight/Where ignorant armies clash by night.”

A point can well be made that people who have what is called invincible ignorance, having no knowledge about Christianity and the Ten Commandments for example, might have a diminished responsibility for whatever grave sins they may have committed. The danger here is that this invincible ignorance can all too easily become invincible arrogance!

Following what is known as the natural law, our innate ability to distinguish through reason good from evil, grave sins such murder, larceny, adultery, and calumny, among others, can cause serious physical and/or emotional harm, and most of us should know this instinctively!

So this brings us back to the whole notion of offering up our sins to Jesus on the cross as He offered up our sins to His Heavenly Father in asking for forgiveness of others.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen once lamented that so much suffering is wasted, that is to say embittering those who endure it when instead they could offer their pains up to God out of love for Him as expiation for their own sins and those of others, as mentioned earlier.

Given that fallen humanity has a wretched ambivalence towards the Ten Commandments, let’s consider for a moment a unique way to unite our crosses with Jesus’ at Calvary, to offer them for those most in need of contrition for their misdeeds!

Father Donald Haggerty has noted that a key component of our love for God is to have “a zealous love for souls” and a great prayerful desire for their salvation.

St. Augustine wrote famously in his Confessions that our hearts are restless until they rest in God. And we see this restlessness all around us these days. There seems to be a spiritual famine with too many people, as the 1980’s country song went “looking for love in all the wrong places!”

They are either unwilling or otherwise unable to turn to Christ on the cross at Calvary, or at all, for the love and support He can give them best!

So let us consider all those needing our prayers in some way the most, while we not forget our own sinful proclivities as Christians.

"Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do!"

Pray for those who make themselves God and define truth as they see it, making anyone who disagrees with them in any way heretical and worthy of scorn, or even hatred. Especially those among our so-called elites, who, in their lust for power and control in a technocratic transhumanist trance, seek to impose a secular dystopian “utopia” where God is an afterthought at best!

Pray also in this regard for those among us, far too numerous I suspect, who bowing to what Pope Benedict XVI once called “the dictatorship of relativism” have so chloroformed their consciences as to render them comatose. Those who have convinced themselves, or others, that up is really down, stop really means go, and in their arrogance have become hopelessly delusional.

"Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do!"

Pray for those who, either through violation from abuse, or volition, have immersed themselves in the hypersexuality that seems to be the order of the day in our world these days. One in which indecency becomes decency and vice versa, with endless Satanic seductions bombarding us on our phones, laptops, tablets, and TV screens everywhere.

"Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do!"

Pray for those who, perhaps in seeing all the corruption around them in both the public and private sectors (with so many people "whose right hands are filled with bribes”, as referenced in Psalm 26, verse 10) feel they can join in; and for whom shoplifting is not a crime but rather "getting what’s owed to them”.

"Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do!"

Pray for those who have filled the vacuum in their hearts and souls meant for God with so-called secular humanism which can be anything but humane in practice, as well as for those afflicted by a Marxist miasma which also fuels alienation and nihilism among many students in our colleges and universities of so-called higher learning these days.

Pray also for those among them thus filled with nihilistic rage looking to burn things down and otherwise cause havoc. They’ve set themselves up for major heartaches for putting their trust in princes (Ps 146:3) rather than Jesus in the first place!

"Father, forgive them,
for they know not what they do!"

Pray for those who numb themselves up with various mood changers, both legal and illegal, to alleviate whatever emptiness quietly haunts them in their lives, especially those caught up in a tragic cycle of addiction which can all too easily lead to depression and despair.

And considering each of our own lives:

"Father, forgive us,
for we know not what we do!

Let’s not forget pray for ourselves and our friends, family, acquaintances, and colleagues, for all those times we’ve all fallen short in doing God’s will, where we’ve been intemperate, unforgiving, envious of others, slothful, immodest, lustful, and ambivalent, or even hypocritical, in practicing our faith.

Think of how much better off we’d all be if we would only put our Lord’s desires for each one of us over our own often misguided, and even at times nefarious, wishes!

And finally, let’s finish up with these inspiring words from Saint Paul, the great Apostle to the Gentiles, bemoaning his own sinful proclivities. If he could have persevered in spreading the Gospel all over the Mediterranean area with this insight, that should inspire us all in our own struggles against sin!

This comes from Chapter 7 of his letter to the Romans (Rom 15,19-25): “I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate…..For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!”

God Bless,

Christopher Castagnoli

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