" "Illness," says a good Catholic writer P. Lejeune:
(Introd. a la Vie Mystique, 1899, p. 218), "is the most excellent
corporeal mortifications, the mortification which one has not
one's self chosen, which is imposed directly by God, and is the
direct expression of his will. 'If other mortifications are of
silver,' Mgr. Gay says, 'this one is of gold; since although it
comes of ourselves, coming as it does of original sin, still on
its greater side, as coming (like all that happens) from the
providence of God, it is of divine manufacture. And how just are
its blows! And how efficacious it is! . . . I do not hesitate to
say that patience in a long illness is mortification's very
masterpiece, and consequently the triumph of mortified souls.'"
According to this view, disease should in any case be
submissively accepted, and it might under certain circumstances
even be blasphemous to wish it away.
Of course there have been exceptions to this, and cures by
special miracle have at all times been recognized within the
church's pale, almost all the great saints having more or less
performed them.
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