The Associates of Attoban, from the Province of Africa, are pleased to greet you and welcome you with these words of Saint John Eudes, taken from the Interior Conversations, on the occasion of the shared prayer for April 2025.
In connection with the upcoming Easter season, we have chosen the Letter of Saint Paul the Apostle to the Romans (6:3b-11), along with a text by Saint John Eudes on Baptism, Death, and Resurrection, to nourish our faith and share the spirituality of our founder. Easter, which etymologically means “passage,” thus symbolizes the passage from death to life.
Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?
Therefore we have been buried with him by baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life.
For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we will certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his.
We know that our old self was crucified with him so that the body of sin might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.
For whoever has died is freed from sin.
But if we have died with Christ, we believe that we will also live with him.
We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over him.
The death he died, he died to sin once for all; but the life he lives, he lives to God.
So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
Remember Jesus Christ, risen from the dead.
He is our salvation, our eternal glory.
1. If we die with him, with him we shall live.
If we suffer with him, with him we shall reign. (Refrain)
2. In him are our sorrows, in him is our joy;
In him is our hope, in him is our love. (Refrain)
3. In him is all grace, in him is our peace;
In him is our glory, in him is salvation. (Refrain)
“Dead to all that is not God, so as to live only in God and in Christ.”
Baptism is both a death and a resurrection.
It is a death, for as Saint Paul says, “If one has died for all, then all have died” (2 Corinthians 5:14), meaning all who are incorporated into Him as His members through Baptism. For being members of a crucified and dead Head, we too must be crucified and dead to the world, to sin, and to ourselves.
It is a resurrection, since through Baptism we pass from the death of sin into the life of grace.
Such is the life that all the baptized are called to live. And those who, instead of living this life, live the life of the world—which Saint Ambrose calls the body of the dragon—the life of pagans, of beasts, of demons, these people renounce their Baptism and become more condemnable than the pagans and demons themselves.
Oh, how dreadful sin is! It extinguishes in us such a noble and precious life as the Christian life received in Baptism—the life of God, the life of Jesus Christ within our souls—and replaces it with such a horrible existence as the sinful life, a diabolical and detestable life!
Let us detest our sins. Let us renounce, with all our heart, the life of the world and of the old self.
Let us give ourselves to Jesus and pray that He may annihilate that old self in us and establish His own life in its place.
Lord Jesus Christ, true God and eternal life,
in your ineffable mercy, you chose to endure death on the cross and to rise on the third day,
so that the living might no longer live for themselves,
but for the One who died and rose again for them;
May the image of your death and resurrection be so present within us
that we may place all our glory in your cross,
and, dead to sin, crucified to the world, renouncing ourselves,
may we live forever in you and for you,
Lord, you who reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
forever and ever. Amen.
O God, Father of mercies, we, the Eudist family, adore you as the origin, beginning and foundation of our life, salvation and sanctification, accomplished by your Son Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh in the womb of Mary, and continued by the Church, his Mystical Body.
We thank you for having shown us your mercy in the Heart of your Son, home of love for you and for every human being, in communion with the Heart of the Virgin Mother. We thank you for having chosen Saint John Eudes, "Father, Doctor and Apostle of the liturgical cult of the Hearts of Jesus and Mary" to announce the life and kingdom of your Son, to proclaim the unfathomable riches of your love, and to teach us to "serve Christ and his Church Corde magno et animo volenti", in this school of holiness spread throughout the world.
We ask your forgiveness for our faults against charity, the supreme norm and soul of our family, for our lack of zeal for the salvation of souls, and for our failure to bear witness to the Hearts of Jesus and Mary by a life of holiness and a spirit of service, so that we form one heart among ourselves.
We surrender ourselves to you, so that during this jubilee year, we may allow ourselves to be transformed by the Holy Spirit into pilgrims of hope, so that we may renew the joy of being Eudists, missionaries of mercy who live forgiveness and reconciliation; so that we may be able to boldly continue the mission of your Son Jesus, the Good Shepherd who goes out in search of the lost sheep in the existential peripheries and offers the world the tenderness of your love.
Blessed be the loving Heart and holy Name of Jesus Christ our Lord, and of his mother the glorious Virgin Mary, forever and ever. Amen.