A while ago, a young man called me and told me that he was upset with some young men in his parish who had spoken ill of him in his absence. I know those whom he mentioned. They are all good brothers who serve God and the Word of His grace. I told him: \u201cPardon me. Not all those who mention us in our absence are slandering us. You know that those whom you have mentioned are making every effort so that we all, that is, both they and we, progress in the life of repentance. If they mention you, trust that it is for your good\u201d. He was not in front of me; nevertheless, he brought me into moments of silence, indicating to me that he had called in order to talk, and to listen. I broke his silence by urging him to preserve the love of the brethren, and then, if he knew that they had criticized him for something, to accept their words as if they had said them to him face to face. The lad broke his silence. He said goodbye to me, and ended his call. Will he have a place for what he had heard? What I know is that God wants us to always commit ourselves, in the presence of brethren as well as in their absence, that the Church is a meeting place for the goodness that only asks that we all be greater.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A while ago, a young man called me and told me that he was upset with some young men in his parish who had spoken ill of him in his absence. I know those whom he mentioned. They are all good brothers who serve God and the Word of His grace. I told him: \u201cPardon ...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":88889,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[343],"tags":[2567,2797,1326,413,1241],"class_list":["post-7614","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reflections","tag-brotherly-love","tag-christian-forgiveness","tag-church-unity","tag-repentance","tag-spiritual-growth"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7614","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/88889"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7614"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7614\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7900,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7614\/revisions\/7900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7614"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7614"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.fatherelia.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7614"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}