QUOTATION: Old Doesn't Mean Bad

Is the idea of Catholicism old and therefore unacceptable? —The sun is older and has not lost its light; water is more ancient, and it still quenches the thirst and refreshes us.

--St. Josemaria Escriva

QUOTATION: Our Faith is a Revealed Faith

Ours is not a “lab faith” but a “journey faith”, a historical faith. God has revealed himself as history, not as a compendium of abstract truths.

--Pope Francis, My Door is Always Open: a Conversation on Faith, Hope and the Church in a Time of Change

QUOTATION: Opposition to the Catholic Faith

I was glad that all this time I had been howling my complaints not against the Catholic faith but against something quite imaginary which I had thought up in my own head…I had not yet discovered that what the Church taught was the truth.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Judging the Catholic Church

Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live by its spirit, but by the example of those who live closest to it.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: The Advantage of Being Catholic

(...)Athough we ought always to hope, for the sake of charity, that this or that Protestant is in good faith, we can’t be sure that he is in good faith, nor, for that matter, can he. Therefore we should always encourage the conversion of a Protestant, if only for safety’s sake. But, you know, even if you could be certain that some friend of yours was in good faith, and was on the whole a clean-living sort of person, so that there was no great reason to worry about him, it isn’t true to say that you and he enjoy exactly the same supernatural advantages. First, you have the certainty of faith; you are spared the anxious uncertainties which often assail him; he’s not certain whether there is a future life, whether his life’s worth living, whether anything you do or say really matters much – from these doubts you are set free. Second, you have access, where he has no access, to sacramental grace; he can win forgiveness for his sins (for example) only by an act of perfect contrition, and who can be certain that he is making an act of perfect contrition? Whereas for you attrition suffices, as long as you make use of the sacrament of penance. Third, you have the merits of the Church at your disposal; you can go out to Rome in the vacation and get a plenary indulgence, or (if your dispositions are not sufficient for that) an indulgence of some kind; he can go out to Kamchatka and he won’t get off a day’s Purgatory for it. The reason why you don’t realize your privileges as Catholics is because you don’t use them more.

--Msgr. Ronald Knox, The Unconscious Catholic

QUOTATION: Bench Warmers

We're at a time for the Church in our country when some Catholics — too many — are discovering that they've gradually become non-Catholics who happen to go to Mass. That's sad and difficult, and a judgment on a generation of Catholic leadership. But it may be exactly the moment of truth the Church needs.

-- Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Being Catholic

The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.

--G. K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Untried

One thing that is not being tried in any particularly enthusiastic way by people who call themselves Catholic is Catholicism. -

- Fr. Benedict Groeschel, The Reform of Renewal

QUOTATION: The Catholic Label

It has always been the custom of heretics and schismatics to call themselves Catholics and to proclaim their many excellences in order to lead peoples and princes into error.

--Pope Pius IX, Quartus Supra

QUOTATION: Catholicism

There are men who will build up a hundred weak and frivolous arguments against Catholicity, that they may have the easy pleasure of refuting them. They remind me of children who build up houses of tile-shards, such sport it is for them to cast them down again.

--St. Thomas More