Pride versus Sainthood....and the medicine which heals us...

"Enter, let us bow down in worship; let us kneel before the Lord who made us. For this is our God, whose people we are, God's well-tended flock.
Oh, that today you would hear His voice: do not harden your hearts as at Meribah, as on the day of Massah in the desert..." Psalm 95, 6-8.

"Are ye ashamed to be corrected? This is the vice of the proud. It is, forsooth, a degradation for the learned man to pass from the school of Plato to the discipleship of Christ, who by His Spirit taught a fisherman to think and to say, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by Him;...in Him was life; and the life was the light of men. And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not" [Jn. 1:1-5}.
"The old saint Simplicianus, afterwards bishop of Milan, used to tell me that a certain Platonist was in the habit of saying that this opening passage of the Holy Gospel, entitled, "According to John," should be written in letters of gold, and hung up in all churches in the most conspicuous place. But the proud scorn to take God for their Master, because "the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us" [Jn. 1:14].
"So that, with these miserable creatures, it is not enough that they are sick, but they boast of their sickness, and are ashamed of the medicine which could heal them. And, doing so, they secure not elevation, but a more disastrous fall."
--St. Augustine, The City of God, book X

Recife, Brazil [February 17, 1988]

"If you do what I am asking of you today (penance, mortification), you put in my hands a powerful force of intercession and reparation. And thus I am able to present myself before the throne of the Lord, great and terrible, just and holy, to implore for you His divine mercy: 'Pardon, O Lord, the iniquity of your people, whom You have acquired at the price of your Most Precious Blood..."
-To The Priests-Our Lady's Beloved Sons, MMP (2009);Interior locutions to Fr. Stefano Gobbi, MMP (1973-97). #374, p. 551