I have a question. How does one know if they are a victim soul? Is it something that the holy spirit reveals to you interiorly?  Can the desire to become one lead to spiritual pride and deception?

Thanks

I believe that St. Therese was also a victim soul.

I have a question. How does one know if they are a victim soul? Is it something that the holy spirit reveals to you interiorly?  Can the desire to become one lead to spiritual pride and deception?

Thanks

Within the present economy of divine Providence, an interior soul can effectually and appropriately offer itself unto God as a reparatory and propitiatory oblation together with the infinite merits of the Sacred and Immaculate Hearts of Jesus and Mary out of an excess of divine and fraternal charity only when it is completely purified from all stain of mortal and venial sin (as much as is possible), by the passive purifications of the senses and of the spirit which precede the illuminative and unitive stages of the spiritual life respectively, and by the constant exercise of the theological and moral virtues and by acts of mortification (interior and exterior). This presupposes a proximate call to the hidden life of prayer and reparation, and the great portent of such a call, such an inspiration of grace, is the arrival at the unitive life, or at least an earnest and indefatigably industrious effort to attain thereto.

With the soul thus purged thoroughly by great interior trials (involuntary and inculpable aridity of spirit, unsought temptations, the dark night of the soul, &c.) and by the Crosses divine Providence deigns to send to the soul (the filial abandonment to the good pleasure of God in the midst of difficulties of sundry and various sorts), it is ready to be lead passively by the Holy Ghost, by an ever-greater and never-decreasing charity that makes each act more fervent and meritorious than the previous one, unto the heights of contemplation and a life of prayer and mortification; so that it is no longer the self that takes the lead in the interior life but rather the operation of the gifts of the Holy Ghost, so that even discursive reason is rendered mute in the midst of contemplation.

Such an interior soul is ready to offer sacrifice for sinner, in reparation for the injuries done to the sanctity, justice and majesty of Our Lord in a special manner of the victim-soul properly so-called.

It is definitely a sign of presumption and delusion, if one entertains ideas of becoming a victim soul without endeavoring to seriously undertake even the practices of the purgative life (interior and exterior mortification, recollection and interior silence, mental prayer, spiritual reading, regular examination of conscience, submission to a spiritual director, &c.).

If, for example, one delights in notions of elevated spirituality but cannot so much as retrain the tongue from idle words or refrain from unnecessary delectation that is in itself not illicit or sinful (such as candy), then such an one has much work to do in order to arrive at a the thresholds of elevated spirituality.

Best to follow the great spiritual path laid out for us by the great Carmelite mystics, of whom St. Teresa and St. John of the Cross are the eminent exemplars and teachers:

This is beautiful. Thank you so much Hobble.... wow great post.