Sister Mary,
If it is on this feast day that God has reconciled you, and he has done it truly, you have reason to rejoice. It is the day of the establishment of the Church, of the perfect reconciliation of God with the Apostles. It is the conclusion of all the mysteries of the Son of God after which he did not do anything more. He only did what God did after having created and formed all the natures of the world. If you live in peace and silence as Jesus Christ will live up until his Second Coming when he must come to act and to speak in another way than he acted and spoke in the First. You will bear witness that you have received the grace of a perfect reconciliation at Pentecost. For you have one quality as a religious woman more than the Apostles because God has not sent you to make voyages in the world to teach it because by the grace you have received you have been cloistered and attached to one place. In that consists the perfect devotion of a religious woman who has been reconciled with Jesus Christ on the feast day of Pentecost. If there is activity in her words and works, she contradicts herself and distances herself from the ressemblance she should have with Jesus Christ, who does not speak at all and does nothing new since Pentecost, as greatly as she distances herself from silence and peace. There is the thought that I received for you this day. I feel obligated as a penitent to give you some sense not of my suffering and my solitude here in prison, as you indicated you want in your letter, and which in truth are nothing, but of the prayers I make to God. I pray that he may see me in those who have offended me and for whom I ask him (as I ask for myself) the spirit of penitence. Everything happens in common in the Church and the least grace that God spreads about in it is received in the whole community as is all the effusion of the Holy Spirit received by it on the day of Pentecost. But the spirit of penitence has this in particular among whoever asks and receives it, receives it to the degree that God has pity on him, to humble himself among all those who have sinned like he.
Translated from the French by Daniel McNeill
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