“Everything is grace!” St. Therese of the Child Jesus used to say, without an in-depth knowledge of theology… This happens with the saints: they are assisted by a special action of the Holy Spirit, which leads them to affirm lofty doctrinal principles without having studied them.
And the maxim of the Saint of the Little Way applies in a particular way to the conversion of a soul.
Fruit of a divine initiative
No one seeks conversion of their own volition; rather, a special operative grace is needed to move souls towards a change of life
St. Thomas Aquinas1 categorically states that conversion is a grace that comes from God, as the fruit of His initiative. In other words, no one tries to convert on their own impulse, but rather God creates a grace to touch that soul deeply. Therefore, the first step towards conversion is taken under the impetus of grace. This theological principle was even the subject of a debate with the Pelagians.2
This is how the renowned Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange precisely explains it: “It is not by virtue of deliberation and a prior act that the sinner, at the moment of his conversion, is moved to efficiently will the ultimate supernatural end, because every prior act is inferior to this efficient will and can only predispose it. A special operative grace is therefore necessary.”3
In other words, any previous effort or act towards change is inferior to this grace, so it does not produce conversion.
Therefore, conversion is an operative and efficient grace: once given by God, it produces what it was created for, without the possibility of the person denying it, blocking it or putting up resistance to it. Receiving this grace, they are converted and become what God wants them to be.
A crazy illusion
The apostle often deceives himself, thinking that he is the one who is going to convince others by this or that method, because he has special insights and knowledge of Catholic doctrine; or because he is likable, a good conversationalist, endowed with a gift of attraction and a charisma by which he charms his interlocutor. This is delusion and folly, because it is not true!
What converts a person is grace! If God does not take the initiative, no matter how much one talks and uses reasoning to convince, the person will resist and all the apostle’s ability and diplomacy will come to nothing.
An image created by Dr. Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira illustrates this reality well. If Our Lord Jesus Christ, with all His divine wisdom, wanted to do apostolate with three hundred of the greatest sages in history, but without making use of the grace that He himself created, He would not move a single one of them to perform the least act of virtue.
Therefore, it is pointless to want to do apostolate apart from grace, because it is impossible. The main action of an apostle is prayer. If he does not pray, he will achieve nothing, no matter how great he thinks he is.
Everything depends on grace
This first grace of conversion is a rapture of the will, a wonder placed in the soul by God.
From the moment a person is converted and effectively wants their ultimate goal, they begin to put into practice means to reach it, also helped and driven by another grace, without which they would not do it. They begin to receive co-operating graces – those in which the soul is moved by God, but the contribution of the will is required – which invites them to adhere to what enchanted them through operative grace.
The apostle’s job will then be to treat the beginner well, to help him, to accompany him, to explain what is necessary. In this way he will facilitate the action of co-operating grace and create the environment for it to produce the effects of the first grace.
When someone has a good thought, the initiative came from God, who sustains and stimulates it. This grace awakens in him a desire to put that thought into practice, which in turn is another grace different from the first; it is a second grace.
If the person responds to this second grace and in fact makes a resolution based on it, the act he will carry out as a result involves another grace, different from the two previous ones.
He puts it into practice and an obstacle appears. To overcome it, he must make a decision: another grace. Now we have four distinct graces.
After this victory, he will need to repeat that action in other circumstances in order to persevere in virtue. Each time he does so, he receives a different grace.
Having practised the action many, many times, he becomes virtuous; looking back, in order not to succumb to a temptation of vanity, he will need yet another grace. And to reach the perfection of that virtue, yet another grace, because this cannot be obtained by effort alone.
Thus, everything is grace!
The example of St. Paul
Let us look at some magnificent examples of holiness, such as St. Paul. What an extraordinary saint, with fire, energy and decisiveness!
But he refers to himself as a criminal and even as an untimely birth (cf. 1 Cor 15:8). He was on his way to Damascus with the intention of harming the Church of God and putting to death the Christians he hated. It was on this road that he fell from his horse and soon became the Apostle.
St. Paul turned from persecutor to preacher by a gift of God: grace caught up with him and he was mercifully transformed
How did St. Paul go from persecutor to herald? What was the prayer he prayed? What act of virtue did he perform that moved God to give him a grace? What did he do to deserve conversion? Nothing!
On the contrary, he acted badly, he wanted to commit crimes, he was bent on the evil goal of persecuting Christians… And he was thrown from his horse because the Lord willed it.
It was a gift from God. Grace caught up with him at a certain point in his life and, out of mercy, transformed him from a persecutor into a herald, into a saint who lived with Our Lord Jesus Christ in a glorious body for three years in the desert and was instructed by Him.
Here is the image that St. John Chrysostom gives us of divine mercy:
“Consider Paul, who was first a blasphemer, then an Apostle; first a persecutor, then a herald; first a prevaricator, then a dispenser; first chaff, then wheat; first a wolf, then a shepherd; first lead, then gold; first a corsair, then a pilot. […] What, then, is sin compared to God’s mercy? A spider’s web. The wind blows, the spider’s web unravels.”4
A conversion wrought through the intercession of Our Lady
How many other similar events there are! Take, for example, the case of Fr. Alphonse Ratisbonne, founder of the Congregation of Our Lady of Sion.
He was a Jew by race and religion, and one day he entered the Church of Sant’Andrea delle Fratte in Rome, accompanied by a friend who had already urged him to convert, to no avail. He had only agreed to carry a miraculous medal in his pocket. While his friend went to take care of something in the sacristy, Alphonse Ratisbonne stayed by a side altar.
Suddenly, Our Lady appeared over the altar, indicating that he should kneel. Alphonse did so and was converted.
It was a spectacular conversion! Who could do that? Only a grace, by God’s initiative.
Trust in mercy
It is improperly said that God has mercy. But the reality is for greater: God is mercy. What is mercy? It is the essence of God!
“God precedes His name with mercy. He is therefore called the one who has mercy, the merciful, the most merciful, the father of mercies, the God of all consolation, etc. (cf. Ex 34:6; Ps 110:4; 2 Cor 1:3), to signify that it is proper for God to have pity and to forgive, and that mercy is connatural to Him, intimate and essential, and from it, as from His own name, God is glorified.”5
Every creature, even Our Lady herself, can only be an image of divine mercy and share in it. But if Mary Most Holy forgives us, imagine how much God does – even more so if we have the benefit of her intercession.
If Our Lady forgives us, so does God, and all the more. Regardless of our faults and defects, we must never lose heart!
So we, who suffer from our own miseries, who carry the weight of a series of defects, imperfections and inconstancies – which are part of our human nature tainted by original sin, marred by the sins of our ancestors, by our present sins and by the deteriorated condition of our generation – must never lose heart!
As long as we do not want to continue like this, out of laxity or lukewarmness, let us never troubled. Let us trust in God’s mercy, let us ask, ask and ask, and the solution will come at some point. Although we may be the worst disaster in history, no matter how enormous and complicated our problems may be, for God they are nothing more than cobwebs. He blows and nothing remains; they disappear.
If Providence acted like this with St. Paul, why will He not take pity on our generation torn apart by the centuries-old process called Revolution?
“Grand Retour”: the great conversion
God can overcome all of this.
There are still souls here and there who thirst for the marvellous and in whom there are glimmers of preservation, because the Revolution has not acquired an absolute degree of universality. It can reach lower – to the point where those who fulfil God’s Law are persecuted and considered unbalanced, crazy and abnormal – because just as the limit of perfection is Heaven, the limit of decadence is hell. We have no idea how long God will tolerate this situation…
Now, if it can take years for the devil to make someone fall, that same person can rise marvellously with an operative, efficient and superabundant grace.
The Holy Spirit will descend upon humanity with special graces, and in a divine breath will bring about a mass conversion
This is the confidence that Dr. Plinio had – confirming a prediction made by St. Louis Grignion de Montfort and based on his foresight – in the descent of the Holy Spirit on humanity with special graces, in a divine breath that, in the midst of immorality, madness and chaos, will suddenly blow away not only the cobwebs, but the Himalayan rocks that exist in our souls. Then there will be an impressive mass conversion. He called this grace the “Grand Retour”.
In his work Revolution and Counter-Revolution,6 Dr. Plinio speaks of a restorative shock by which people can, after reaching a point of decadence that drives them, metaphorically, to eat the pods of the pigs like the prodigal son, suddenly have a resurgence. So this conversion will have a truly marvellous effect.
Now, conversion is fulminating, but it has to bear fruit and this takes time: there must be changes in architecture, in ways of being, behaviour and outward appearances. It is not a conversion in which the person becomes ipso facto like a little baroque angel in Heaven; on the contrary, with weapons in hand and fighting, they will have to conquer everything. And this will not happen overnight.
This hope must be our horizon, it must be the foundation of our certainty of victory. We want nothing more than for us all to be one: one doctrine, one religion, led by one shepherd. It is a matter of never ceasing to trust in Our Lady’s love and intercession.
At a certain moment, our word will finally be answered, heard, received and welcomed. On the basis of the grace She obtains and distributes to us, we will be transformed and She will establish her Reign. ◊
Excerpts from: Conferences, 19/5/1997, 2/11/1997,
15/3/1998, 14/6/2000, 5/7/2000, 10/10/2008;
Classes, 2/8/2002, 30/8/2002;
Meditation, 17/8/1992
Notes
1 Cf. ST. THOMAS AQUINAS. Summa Theologiae. I-II, q.109, a.6. See the article from the section St. Thomas Explains, in this issue.
2 Cf. GARRIGOU-LAGRANGE, OP, Réginald. Les trois ages de la vie intérieure. Paris: Du Cerf, 1951, v.I, p.114.
3 Idem, p.120, nota 1.
4 ST. JOHN CHRYSOSTOM. In Psalmum L. Homilia II, n.3-4: PG 55, 578-579.
5 CORNELIUS A LÁPIDE. Commentaria in Ecclesiasticum. In: Commentarii in Sacram Scripturam. Lugduni: Pelagaud et Lesne, 1841, v.V, p.1083.
6 Cf. CORRÊA DE OLIVEIRA, Plinio. Revolução e Contra-Revolução. 9.ed. São Paulo: Associação Brasileira Arautos do Evangelho, 2024, p.177-185.
