QUOTATION: Education

Parents have to respect their children’s freedom, because there is no real education without personal responsibility, and there is no responsibility without freedom.

--St. Josemaria Escriva

QUOTATION: A Child is a Gift

If a child comes into this world in unwanted circumstances, the parents and other members of the family must do everything possible to accept that child as a gift from God and assume the responsibility of accepting him or her with openness and affection.

--Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, 166

QUOTATION: Children Have the Right to Exist

From the first moments of their lives, many children are rejected, abandoned, and robbed of their childhood and future. There are those who dare to say, as if to justify themselves, that it was a mistake to bring these children into the world. This is shameful! … How can we issue solemn declarations on human rights and the rights of children, if we then punish children for the errors of adults?

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Children

Children are not a distraction from more important work. They are the most important work.

--C. S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Children

Please, let’s not unload our faults on children. Children are never a mistake.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Motherhood

Motherhood is sometimes presented as something backward or as a limitation of a woman’s freedom, thus distorting its true nature and dignity. Children are presented not as what they are — a great gift of God — but rather as something to be defended against.

--Pope St. John Paul II, Cuba, 1998

QUOTATION: Sex, Love and Procreation

To dissociate the child from love is, for our species, a methodological error: contraception, which is to make love without making a child; artificial (in vitro) fertilization, which is to make a child without making love; abortion, which is to unmake the child; and pornography, which is to unmake love: all these, to varying degrees, are incompatible with natural law.

--Jerome Lejeune

QUOTATION: Children

Europe is infected with a strange lack of desire for the future. Children, our future, are perceived as a threat to the present, as if they were taking something away from our lives. Children are seen as a liability rather than a source of hope. There is a clear comparison between today’s situation and the decline of the Roman Empire. In its final days, Rome still functioned as a great historical framework, but in practice it was already subsisting on models that were destined to fail. Its vital energy had been depleted.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Chistianity, Islam, 2004

QUOTATION: Children Born and Unborn in Salvation History

God has become a child, and so he wants first to be known and adored by a child, and this is one of the first emanations of the childhood of God, manifesting himself to the universe. God is a child, the world ignores, heaven adores, and a child is the first person in the universe to recognize and adore him, and he does so by the homage and secret operation of God himself, who wants to act upon children. He wants to honor himself as child by giving the first knowledge of himself to a child in the world, making him his prophet in the universe. Thus the Infant-God is recognized and manifested, not by and angel, but by a child. So his first prophet is a child, just as shortly his first martyrs will be children.

--Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle

QUOTATION: Maternal Love

Mothers of children, even if they have a thousand, carry each and every one fixed in their hearts, and because of the strength of their love they do not forget any of them. In fact, it seems that the more children they have the more their love and care for each one is increased.

-- St. Angela Merici