Love Quote by Catherine McAuley

McAuley’s sentence feels like a prayer, but it’s also a piece of institutional engineering: a way to turn private emotion into public stamina. The pivot is sly. She doesn’t ask for strength, clarity, or even relief. She asks that God "look on us with love and pity" - not because she doubts divine power, but because she understands human psychology. If you can believe you’re seen tenderly, you can tolerate being spent.

The subtext is that duty, on its own, burns people out. Mercy is the fuel. McAuley binds obedience ("anything He wishes us to do") to consolation, making surrender feel less like self-erasure and more like being carried. It’s an emotional bargain: accept the gaze of compassionate authority, and the hard work becomes bearable even when it’s "painful to our feeling". That phrase matters. She doesn’t spiritualize pain into a noble abstraction; she admits the body’s resistance and the heart’s recoil. The line makes room for dread without granting it veto power.

Context sharpens the intent. As founder of the Sisters of Mercy, McAuley was building a culture of care in a century where poverty and illness were relentless and social safety nets were thin. Her communities would run schools, tend the sick, and confront deprivation daily. This is leadership language disguised as devotion: a method for sustaining a demanding mission without romanticizing it. Love and pity aren’t soft extras. They’re the mechanism that makes difficult service repeatable.