TO HAVE THE SENSITIVITIES OF JESUS
There is a constant theme in the Gospels, above all in Mark’s, which shows that each time Jesus performs a miracle or excites the people and they extol him, he silences them and sends them away. In some study on the psychology of Jesus it has been deduced that this characteristic is a sign of his mental health.
Claret had many reasons to be self-satisfied. Even in the hardest moments of his ministry there were many who acclaimed him as a hero. In the Canary Islands the people crowded around him that he had to be protected by a wooden fence; All I took away with me were five big rips in my old coat, which I got from the crowds that always used to press about me as I went from town to town’ (Aut. 486). As he passed through Madrid before going to Cuba they wanted him to join in the life of the aristocrats: ‘they made me go mad in receiving and paying visits to people of the upperclass’ (EC I p 424); they invested him with crosses, medals and decorations. And when he arrived and left the Island of Cuba he did so in the aroma of the multitudes and the greetings of the highest authorities.
Having arrived in Madrid he was named the royal confessor and they invested him with new medals. At once he started his preaching with enormous success: groups of 4,000 and even 6,000 people in the church (EC I p1441). He got improvements to the education law and to promulgate laws in favour of public morality, etc. He won the admiration of many Ministers, the Queen admired him even to the point of being superstitious, etc.
In the middle of all this, Claret always kept the important criteria of imitating Jesus as literally as possible, in his humility and in his preference for the humble. On being named as the royal confessor, he told a friend in confidence, ‘leave me to hear the confessions of peasants and drunks’ (EC I p1335). A witness of his time at the court declared, ‘every day he heard confessions in the churches of the poorest people….He did not deny the gift of God but ‘in the heights’ he was always uncomfortable and thought of himself as ‘a donkey badly loaded with jewels’ (AEC p688)
