Divine Mercy Conference 2013 | Fr Michael Gaitley M.I.C. 2nd talk

two years two years ago he's a Marion priests from Stockbridge in Massachusetts and he's he's a man who's developed he's written three books 33 days to Morning Glory consoling the Heart of Jesus and the third book I always get this title wrong it's three-in-one the one thing is free no wonder I got it wrong I'm a tree and one that's like what they call the oil isn't it so it's spiritual oil okay and he's also developed a computer lab for he's where he's put st. Faustina's diary under nests and people can download it free of charge and today one hundred and twenty five thousand downloads that's free downloads for especially young people do it where they can't afford to buy the diary they can download it free of charge so that's a wonderful service to the spreading of the Divine Mercy message so please put your hands together for father Michael Goethe Don Don made me a little bit nervous there he talked about there being three books and then he started saying three for one I thought no no no I'm just kidding no because all the all the book sales we have about God's really blessed our community we have about there's about 40 priests in our province in the United States and we now have about 30 men in formation so by the end of this year we'll have almost as many men in formation as we have priests so God's really blessing us but my provincial makes me go all around giving talks and selling books so that's what that's all about all right I am now sister Salvatrucha right I've been promoted all right let's get started with the prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen hail Mary full of grace the Lord is with thee blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb Jesus Holy Mary Mother of God pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death amen Saint Joseph st. Faustina in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen okay I would like to get started by sharing with you some good news the good news is this this talk is only half the length of yesterday's talk so God is showing mercy on you right at least it's supposed to be I got my stopwatch here but actually this the theme of this talk actually is good news it's a specific kind of good news specifically it's the good news that we are living in an extraordinary time of grace and mercy now I alluded to that in the last talk but I want to make that a bit more explicit in this talk the good news that we the present time right now is an extraordinary time of grace and mercy a time when God is pouring out a super abundance of grace on the world a time when in a certain sense I believe he's making it even easier than ever before to become Saints a time when God has just pouring out whole buckets of His grace and mercy and you may ask yourselves well why why is that the case it maybe seems too good to be true right well one of the reasons is because of what we read in Sacred Scripture were st. in st. Paul writes in Romans 5 verse 20 where it says where sin abounded grace abounded all the more in other words in times of great sin and evil God gives extraordinary grace God is never outdone by evil and the more the forces of evil seem to grow the more grace God is giving for a particular time and according to blessed john paul ii because our modern time in the culture of death it's that's continually growing especially in ireland as you know as it's making many of attacks as the forces of evil grow God is giving even greater Grace's and it's just up to us to accept and receive them and so the heart of this talk is really to convince us that this is an extraordinary time of grace and mercy that when it seems like there's reason to be discouraged we never have to be discouraged as Christians were people of hope and we know that God is giving even greater grace and greater mercy we just need to draw to it and not given to discouragement so this talk is really an encouragement to tap into that extraordinary time of grace and mercy but yet still at the same time some of you might be saying come on father Michael this seems too good to be true really a time of unprecedented grace and mercy a time of extraordinary grace and mercy isn't that a bit much well part of yesterday's talk and sharing that amazing story a blessed John Paul the second was to help convince us that it's true this is a time of mercy why would God wait in all of church history to give this extraordinary most amazing as I call that the second greatest story ever told in our own time it's because God wants to convince us it's true this is a time of grace and mercy it's a time of hope and as john paul ii would repeat over and over again echoing our Lord's words be not afraid and Jesus I trust in you now it is difficult sometimes for us to accept the great races in our time so in today's talk I want to continue the theme by sharing some of my own testimony I want to give a little bit of sharing the ways that I've discovered as a personal testimony that will hopefully inspire you that the way I discovered it's true this really is a time of great grace and mercy it's a time of hope and we just need to draw in and ask for it and receive it okay so without any further ado I'm going to start that testimony okay so my own testimony to the good news that ours is an extraordinary time of grace and mercy begins in sunny Southern California which is where I grew up I was born in Long Beach California and I was basically and at the time of high school or you know in my teens I was sort of a beach bum you know I would surf all the time I played a lot of beach volleyball I actually had aspirations to be a professional beach volleyball player and I was actually I was pretty good I wasn't as good as everybody else but several members of my my volleyball team were on the US Olympic team and won gold medals and that so there was some hope but the problem was I wasn't quite tall enough and so the only reason I went to mass this gives you an idea of the extent of my faith growing up our family wasn't a very religious home the only reason I went to Mass is that I thought if I didn't go to Mass God wouldn't give me the extra inches I needed to be a professional beach volleyball player and it gives you a little insight into my soul at the time is the reason I wanted to be a professional beach volleyball player is because well we'll put it this way professional beach volleyball players lived a very nice life of partys beaches and lots of other things right so I was a very worldly a young man caught up in the culture of death and really basking in all of the benefits of living in Southern California Hollywood and all of that I was right in the middle of it all and it was from a worldly perspective it was wonderful however I remember my mother and she was about the only one in our family who had much of a faith was praying the rosary and praying for her family and somehow she was able to persuade my brother and I to go with her to the bad part of town as it was called this area of Los Angeles that was known in this square mile area it had some of the most gang violence of anywhere in all of Los Angeles and my brother and I were saying mom why are you bringing us there to the hood you know to the place where we might get shot and she said because there's an amazing parish there with saintly priests who I want you guys to meet and to make our mom happy we went to Mass with her there and sure enough the priest gave a homily and there was something that he said that really touched my heart and I went to speak with him afterwards and he invited me to continue to meet with him you see I had dropped out of a confirmation program because I remember I was sort of I'd seen Pope John Paul the second on TV and I didn't really know who this guy dressed in white was but he had such a beautiful face and so I asked the priest who was running the confirmation who was that guy who's the guy dressed in white with that beautiful face and he said oh that's the Pope oh that's all political don't get too excited about it and I thought well what is this all about and so I dropped out of the confirmation program but I remember this other priest invited me back and he said look look Michael it's clear that you know he says you're you're sort of a sharp chap if you continue to come meet with me I will give you books to read and even though you're late in the program I'll let you make your confirmation with the rest of the rest of the young men and so I would meet with them every week and he would give me books to read and he would share with me some of the wonders of our faith and I began to there was something in my heart that began to grow for our Catholic faith I started to see you know it's not just this blind faith that makes sense it's beautiful it's reasonable and it's wonderful and so this priest he's seeing my excitement he started he had a little bit of a strategy and he would say you know you know Michael that seems like the Lord has given you some gifts and talents so maybe you know if you were to become a priest you could use those for the good of souls and I stopped him dead in his tracks with his strategy and I said father I'm not going to become a priest I'm gonna get married and raise a bunch of priests and nuns on top of it well not not knowing how to how to grapple with that type of logic he went to plan B which was to try and convince me to go to the Franciscan University of Steubenville which maybe some of you have heard of in the United States that sort of a bastion of really vibrant Catholicism in the United States and it's it's a place where there's a lot of you know just the young people really love the Lord and it's exciting Catholicism and they're vibrant and on fire and I said well father I'm planning on to going to UCLA so I could stick with my volleyball and be close to the beach and a long story short I this is a shorter talk so I don't have time to get into details but long tore story short have you ever heard of how st. Torres a little flower will give you different color roses to make a decision well I said all right all right Torres let's see what you can do red rose for red rose for UCLA because they're more common yellow rose for Steubenville no rose I'm going to UCLA so I stack the deck but Terez had the better part of it because I got all kinds of yellow roses and so that's why I decided to go to Steubenville but actually there was one other part of why was convinced to go to Steubenville I had gotten wind of a rumor that at Steubenville there was a three-to-one girl-to-guy ratio and I thought okay I'll I'll go to Steubenville and I did it's evened out now but back in the day it was it was wonderful anyway so my first semester at Steubenville it was really great and I came to discover it was actually a very cool thing to be from Southern California I would go around and people would say you're from California do you know that Hollywood stars do you surf and all that and it was a it became popular very quickly and I enjoyed it very much and there was a sure enough there was a three to one girl the guy ratio and I thought this is wonderful right and I had lots of friend the girls that were friends and you know is it was really really nice but during that first semester one of my friends saw me and he said you know he said and one of the things too that I noticed at the school is that a lot of the students were very holy and you know they were dedicated to the Rosary in prayer and and I was you know from Southern California my conversion was recent and I was looking at all these young people and they seemed so holy and good compared to me I was so sort of degraded by the culture of death I thought and and I remember the priest at my home parish would always talk about that the meaning of life is about becoming a saint and I would think at these holy students and I think there is no hope for me they're all so holy these homeschooled kids who love to play the rosary and eat glass as a as a as a sacrifice right not really they wouldn't eat glass but but you know they were just these very holy students I thought yeah there's no hope for me to become a saint and I started to get discouraged and I cheered I have a melancholic temperament I said to get depressed but then somebody gave me this little book that had a picture of Mary and they said Gately you got to read this thing and they gave me a copy of the book I flipped it over I said I don't have time to read this and he said just take it and I went back to my dorm room and I looked at that book and I flipped it over and and a one-sentence jumped off the page and blew me away it was the words of st. Louie de montfort because that was a book by st. Louie Montford about Mary and it was Louie de Montfort's word saying that total consecration to Jesus through Mary is the quickest easiest surest and most perfect way to become a saint right I shared that yesterday but when I saw those words for the first time I thought man that is what I need that's like my only hope the quickest easiest surest way so I said I'm gonna read this book and I read it I did the consecration on December 8th that first semester of my of my college years there and I did the consecration of Jesus through Marian as Blessed John Paul the second says I could say the same thing that was a decisive turning point in my life everything changed after that I sort of stopped chasing the girls around campus and I went into what I call bunk mode monk mode I became like the Irish monks right I sort of cooped myself up in my studies I stopped you know chasing the girls around and socializing and all of that and I would just study and pray and that was it and what was growing in my heart was a was what I felt was a call to the priesthood and I was very happy because after my consecration I felt all of these graces and blessings from our Blessed Mother now during that time also I met this this fellow who had been in the Special Forces of the US Marines he was like the cream of the crop of the most elite fighting forces in the US military and he had a dramatic conversion while he was in the Marines and he came right from the Marines to Steubenville and we became roommates and what we held in common was a deep love for our Blessed Mother and so the two of us we called our Elves Mary's Marines right and so every morning the alarm clock would go off we jump out of bed do push-ups consecrate ourselves to Jesus through Mary and we had a common bond because we both felt called to the priesthood and we're on this campus with these beautiful holy girls and we fought the battle together to try and avoid all these girls right and stay faithful to our vocations in fact I don't know if you've ever heard of it but there was a Bob Marley song and we would play it over and over again it was called no woman no cry right and we would pray that for solace and an encouragement right to stay faithful to her vocations and we'd say come on we got to be strong for the Blessed Mother but and we were doing pretty well in Mary's Marines and avoiding all the beautiful girls on campus but then we started get wind of the rumor about this French exchange student you know there was this French French grow as part of this wonderful family in France who had hat had gone to med Joe gorya right and she had a dramatic conversion there and she ended up coming to Steubenville and all the students at least all the guys students all the boys students were talking about this beautiful gorgeous French exchange student who is holy and radiated this beauty and goodness and they would all talk about her and her name was as beautiful as her face it was blush right and they were all talking about blush and and I thought ah we're Mary's Marines who forget about this blush girl but then one day I went to the cafeteria and there was blush and I forgot all about monk mode right I forgot about monk mode I walked right up to blush and I said hello blush my name is Michael and I'm from Southern California so blush it was nice talking to blush but as I was standing there talking to her looking into her big beautiful blue eyes I thought to myself forget about it Michael she's way out of your league right and so that was that we had a nice conversation and I forgot about blush and I went back into monk mode well a couple of about a week later you know I had this job at the at that what was called the Finnegan Fieldhouse a nice Irish name right that was the athletic facility where people would workout in things and back then before I lost all of my weight I used to be kind of a strapping guy and work out all the time and and I had a job at the Finnegan Fieldhouse there which was great because nobody came in I started really early in the morning and I could stay in monk mode studying and then go and work out well one day one of the first people in my early early morning ship shift was blush she came in and she comes up to the desk where I sign people in and she said Oh Michael hello I said hello blush and she said Oh have you had breakfast yet and I said well no you know I'm gonna have breakfast later when I get off my shift right and this was a Friday shift so I was fasting but not telling anyone right but she said oh you poor thing and then she went in and did her workout I thought all that was nice well the next week she showed up again same time same place but this time when she showed up she was carrying a brown bag and she said Michael did you have breakfast I said no she said well I've made you breakfast and she gave I thought whoa does she like me maybe and I thought nah she's just one of those nice Steubenville girls having mercy on her on somebody right and the next week she brought me breakfast again and I thought nah no way she's too far out of my league well that was that and I didn't think anything of it I thought she's just one of these nice holy Steubenville girls right having pity on somebody well a couple of weeks later she ran into I ran into her on campus and she said Oh Michael may I speak to you for a moment I said sure she said so we sat down somewhere quiet she said I just want to tell you I can't sleep I can't eat and I can't concentrate in my classes because I'm in love with you that's that's what I said and I said well blush you know these French women i said let's take it slow right and so we started dating and we did Steubenville version of dating which means you just go for walks and pray the rosary basically and I think one time we held hands but during that time of dating it was interesting because you know I got to know blush more she was this beautiful wonderful holy girl and during that time though my roommate his name was Morial my roommate Mario would remind me about Mary's Marines but he would also say I understand Michael anybody would say yes to blush right but interestingly I was still thinking about wait what about my vocation and one day blush and some of her friends invited us to go for spring break to sunny Florida and Morial and I were like hmm we also had an invitation to a go to a cold monastery in Boston so we were thinking to ourselves sunny Florida or cold Boston right a very difficult decision but well we thought we would give Mary a chance and we did what Blessed Mother Teresa calls a flying novena in other words we prayed nine times the member are a remember almost gracious Virgin Mary you know that prayer we prayed at nine times and we said to Mary all right Mary if you want us to go to this cold monastery during our spring break when we call the fellow who is organizing the trip have him tell us that it's between its gonna cost us between sixty and sixty five dollars if it's less or more than that we'll go to Florida all right so once again we stack the deck we called the fellow we said a moral and I are thinking about going on this trip how much would it cost us to chip in for the gas and everything he said oh say 62 dollars so we went to that monastery needless to say and while I was there the Lord was more confirming my vocation he was saying yes Michel I am calling you to the priesthood and I said okay and so Blanc got back from Florida I got back from boss and I said blown should we need to talk she said okay she had this beautiful French accent which I won't try to imitate because it will sound like a frog but but a beautiful French accent and I said I said blush it will never never work out between us because Jesus wants me to be a priest and I think she said I said but I'm gonna say a prayer that all the love you have for me will go to Jesus and I think she said okay that's nice but then it was interesting because the very next day she gave me a letter and on the letter it revealed her beautiful heart because it said dear Michael I think you made the right decision if Jesus wants you to be a priest I will be the happiest woman on earth but the path you chose is not going to be easy so I'll be praying for you bye bye boss you know and that was it and now now it was um after that actually blush was sort of prophetic she was right it was very difficult after that I unfortunately had the vision of the priesthood as a long lonely miserable horrible life where all you did I was just a life of sacrifice and suffering and no joy and so I was getting in my melancholic way very depressed about my vocation and I remember it didn't make yeah so I was getting depressed about my vocation I thought well I know what I'll do Steubenville has this program where a hundred students from the campus will go to a thirteenth century Carthusian monastery in Austria for a semester and I thought I'll do the Austrian semester maybe that will cheer me up right so I went to the Austrian semester where you know we left the 2,000 student campus with just one hundred students the problem is one of those hundred students was blush so every day I had to see blush and remember the sacrifice and it didn't make things any easier when blush started dating one of my best friends and I had to see them every day going on walks right on there praying the rosary all that soap I remember one day my depression was growing and I went to the chapel and I and this is where it ties in with this being an extraordinary time of grace and mercy I went into the chapel and I was complaining to the Lord actually angry at him in a way why are you doing this to me why did you give me this this miserable vocation when all my friends are having fun and dating and all of this and I have to be in this this boring Monk mode and I remember I heard some words come into my heart and they were the words from Sacred Scripture where Jesus said to st. Paul my grace is enough for you but being the knucklehead from Southern California that I am I said Lord you said that to st. Paul but it's not enough for me if you want me to be a priest I'm such a weak broken sinner I need super abundance of grace I need even more than what you gave to st. Paul I can only do unless you give me some type of superabundant extraordinary amazing buckets of grace and I felt like he said in my heart okay and I said okay and so I waited for all this buckets of grace to come down and it was during that time that someone shortly after that gave me a pamphlet on the message of divine mercy and as I open that pamphlet and begin to read from a knife I recognized the extraordinary graces that God was promising for our time the words of Jesus to Faustina in this pamphlet were so tender so beautiful so loving so generous such a super abundance promise of grace and mercy that I was blown away but I was also a bit incredulous I thought this seems too good to be true at the time Festina was not Saint Faustina she was just blessed Festina and not a lot of people knew about her and I thought who is this woman claiming that Jesus spoke to her how do I know I can believe this right and I was very scrupulous at the time and I thought there's no way that Jesus would love me so tenderly and so I decided I'll test it out and the way I tested it out is one of the things in the pamphlet it talked about Divine Mercy Sunday this day of superabundant extraordinary grace when Jesus promised to give a whole ocean of grace but hoped that the floodgates of his mercy would be wide open on that day and I said okay I'll test it out and Divine Mercy Sunday came around that year and all day long I prayed for my father who had stopped who was basically was in need of conversion he hadn't been to confession in years he had also been diagnosed with cancer and he was in deep deep depression about it all and so all day long and Divine Mercy Sunday I prayed for my father sacrifice for my father and at the end of the day you know after all day praying on Divine Mercy Sunday the chaplet of divine mercy for my dad I called home to California my mom answered the phone she said she said Michael I said hey mom she said Michael you'll never guess what happened I said what she said your father went to confession and I said I said well I got to see it to believe it right so I got back home to Southern California and sure enough for the first time in years the whole family went to Mass together and it was my mom my dad my sister my brother we were all there at Mass but something funny happened right before Mass right before Mass my dad stood up walked to the other side of the church sat down and then Mass began he was over here we were over there I thought that's kind of weird so Mass continued that way after Mass I said hey dad you know can I talk to you for a second he said sure I said you know it's it's it's awesome that you came to Mass with mom Joe Heather and I but why didn't you sit with us what was up with that and now my dad is very salt of the earth he was a truck driver he was a sailor he used lots of colorful language right now not in church but he is you know so we're there in church I said dad look what was it what was up with that why didn't you sit with us and he said all right Mike don't tell your mother this I said okay he said you see that picture over there I said yeah he said you see those rays I said yeah they're doing something to me is it and then he said don't tell your mother I said I won't dad and he and then I would talk to him a couple weeks later and he drove this cement truck in in downtown Los Angeles and he said Mike I gotta tell you something I pulled into this job I was the first one on the job you know the clouds they open up in those rays they came down right in front of my truck Mike I got out of the truck I stood those rays I tell you they're doing something to me and so I was like amazed I didn't tell anybody I went back to Steubenville and might one day my dad still had to go for treatment for the cancer and everything and one day he told my mom our last names Gately you don't call my mom gate for some reason he said hey gate the cancer is not coming back and she said oh Michael how do you know that and he said I just know and they went in to the doctor and the doctor said Mr Gatley the cancer hasn't come back you're cancer-free and from to this day 15 years later so he's the cancer has never come back he's completely healthy now so yeah exactly praise the Lord for that and and my dad attributed all to the the Rays of divine mercy he said he could feel those rays kind of a warmth coming from them and that he is convinced it was the Rays of Mercy from the divine mercy image and now it's funny he still he loves that image he's not a very religious guy but he loves that image of divine mercy in fact he wants to get he wants to get a tattoo of the divine mercy on there I was on a TV show once with father Groeschel and I said that an off-camera he's going like this and I said so I told him to tattoo it on his heart right now the father Groeschel went okay and I did tell him that but he wants to get this tattoo in fact I talked to him about six months ago or so and I said hey Dad how's it going he's like God it's going great he said I started lifted weights I said why are you doing that he said cuz I'm preparing Mike the canvas for the new tat anyway so all this is going on my dad's very happy but my mom wasn't so happy she was saying that's not fair all these years I've been praying the rosary in this and Jesus never appeared to me and your father's been a knucklehead all these years and he gets all these graces I said mom you're upset that your husband was it was cuz it was healed from cancer and now he loves Jesus what's the prob she's alright alright you're right but but it's just not it's and she said well I know why he got all those graces and I said why she said and my dad would get up really early in the morning to start work you know way before dawn and everything she said cuz that cuz for 30 years that alarm clock would go off he'd hit the alarm clock sit at the edge of his bed and the first words out of his mouth every morning were mercy so she said I know where he gets those graces okay Don said I got I get five minutes gonna take six minutes seven minutes all right that's all oh okay okay so the leather part of the story I tell that story because there's an answer to this extraordinary time of grace and mercy and it was a sign for me it's really true God really gives giving this extraordinary grace and mercy and as if that weren't enough part of God's grace and mercy is that it's super abundant and one of one yet the last part of the story that I want to tell quickly is that uh you know I remember I was telling that story about Blanche right she graduated a year before me and went during my senior year at Steubenville she called me on the phone and I said oh hello blonde she said oh hello Michael she said Michael I just want to tell you she was calling from her home in Paris she said I just want to tell you that next week I'll be entering the convent and I'll be giving my life in prayer for you to be a holy priest she said every day I'll be praying and sacrificing but for all priests but specifically for you so give your all Mike I said blush I'm gonna work hard and I have can I take a couple a couple more okay so one minute left so then I entered the seminary bla ended and she became sister Bernadette and then one day the founder of her community called me and this is like a big community in Europe there's all these nuns and and priests and one day the priest called me and III answered the phone I said oh hello I'm a seminarian at the time he said brother Michael I said oh hello father why is this famous priest calling me he said I just want to tell you I have holy envy of you I said why he said because I've never seen a sister pray for someone as much as I see sister Bernadette pray for you I just want you to know that bye-bye so the moral of the story with all of this is this was a sign for me that the Lord really does want to give extraordinary grace and mercy it doesn't always work that way where the people you pray for are automatically healed and this and that but God heals hears every prayer and he's counting on us to draw the extraordinary graces of for our time to beg for mercy on ourselves and on the whole world and so the reminder for this the whole heart of this is this has really been a testimony to the good news that this truly is a time of great grace and mercy don't pass it up it seems too good to be true but it is true don't give in to discouragement don't give in to despondency even in the news and with politically it seems like things are very discouraging the power of God's mercy is always more powerful never given to discouragement trust in the mercy of the Lord and call on that mercy on ourselves and on the whole world and we will be victorious so let's let's remember that in this conference never to get discouraged always to trust in the mercy of God and let's go from here filled with mercy with deeds of mercy for others and great trust in God's mercy let's close with a prayer in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit amen Heavenly Father we thank you and praise you for all the gifts and blessings you've given to us and your son Jesus Christ of divine mercy father help us to receive all of the grace and mercy you want to you want us to receive thank you also father for giving us our spiritual mother Mary Mary please intercede for us help our hearts to be open and wide like yours to receive the graces and mercy of God Mary we consecrate ourselves to you this day we consecrate this conference we give ourselves to you use us as your instruments for the great glory of your son so that we can go forth from this place from this conference setting the whole world on fire for the mercy of your son Jesus Mary lead us to the pierced side of Jesus so that we can receive that grace and mercy and always to trust in that fountain of Mercy which is given for us we ask all of this in Jesus name Amen the Lord be with you may Almighty God bless you the Father the Son and the Holy Spirit amen you

Channel: Divine Mercy Conference

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Keywords: Jesus I trust in You, Divine Mercy Conference, Dublin, Ireland, Divine Mercy, Divine Mercy Sunday, 2013, Saint Faustina, Mercy Sunday, RDS, DivineMercyConference.com, Eucharist, Archbishop Diarmuid Martin, Behold your Mother, John 19:27, Catholic, Fr. Michael Gaitley MIC, talk

Id: agQg1Y2bmZg

Length: 37min 3sec (2223 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 07 2014