Padre Pio's diary: 11 March

Letter to Father Augustine dated March 12, 1913: "... Hear, my father, the righteous complaints of our most sweet Jesus:" With how much ingratitude my love for men is repaid! I would have been less offended by them if I had loved them less. My father no longer wants to endure them. I would like to stop loving them, but ... (and here Jesus was silent and sighed, and afterwards he resumed) but alas! My heart is made to love! Cowardly and weak men do no violence to overcome temptations, which in fact delight in their iniquities. My favorite souls, put to the test, fail me, the weak abandon themselves to despair and despair, the strong gradually relax. I am left only at night, only during the day in churches. They no longer care about the sacrament of the altar; one never speaks of this sacrament of love; and even those who talk about it alas! with how much indifference, with what coldness. My heart is forgotten; nobody cares about my love anymore; I am always saddened. My home has become an amusement theater for many; also my ministers whom I have always regarded with predilection, whom I have loved as the pupil of my eye; they should comfort my heart full of bitterness; they should help me in the redemption of souls, but who would believe it? From them I must receive ingratitudes and ignorance. I see, my son, many of these who ... (here he stopped, the sobs tightened his throat, he cried secretly) that under hypocritical features they betray me with sacrilegious communions, trampling on the lights and the forces that I continually give to them ... ".

Today's thinking
I would prefer a thousand crosses, indeed each cross would be sweet and light to me, if I did not have this proof, that is, to always feel in the uncertainty of pleasing the Lord in my operations ... It is painful to live like this ...
I resign myself, but resignation, my fiat seems so cold, vain! ... What a mystery! Jesus must think about it alone.