QUOTATION: Take Risks!

Let us go forth, then, let us go forth to offer everyone the life of Jesus Christ. Here I repeat for the entire Church what I have often said to the priests and laity of Buenos Aires: I prefer a Church which is bruised, hurting and dirty because it has been out on the streets, rather than a Church which is unhealthy from being confined and from clinging to its own security. I do not want a Church concerned with being at the centre and which then ends by being caught up in a web of obsessions and procedures. If something should rightly disturb us and trouble our consciences, it is the fact that so many of our brothers and sisters are living without the strength, light and consolation born of friendship with Jesus Christ, without a community of faith to support them, without meaning and a goal in life. More than by fear of going astray, my hope is that we will be moved by the fear of remaining shut up within structures which give us a false sense of security, within rules which make us harsh judges, within habits which make us feel safe, while at our door people are starving and Jesus does not tire of saying to us: “Give them something to eat” (Mk 6:37).

--Pope Francis Evangelii Gaudium #49, November 24, 2013.

QUOTATION: A Message of Hope

Be not cast down because the persecutors of religion, having laid the Church, like its Founder, in the tomb, utter the boast: ‘Behold the place where we laid it.’ The law of progress of the Church is the reverse of the law of progress of the world. We are most progressive when we are most hated. It is only because the fires of its Truth are blinding evil eyes and convicting them of sin and judgement, that the world vainly tried to put them out. And though the world is tearing up all the photographs and blueprints of a society and a family based on the moral law of God, be not disheartened. The Church has kept the negatives.

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Lenten & Easter Inspirations

QUOTATION: Mary, Mother of the Church

Since Mary produced the head of the elect, Jesus Christ, she must also produce the members of that head, that is, all true Christians. A mother does not conceive a head without members, nor members without a head. If anyone, then, wishes to become a member of Jesus Christ, and consequently be filled with grace and truth , he must be formed in Mary through the grace of Jesus Christ, which she possesses with a fullness enabling her to communicate it abundantly to true members of Jesus Christ, her true children.

--St. Louis de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, 12.

QUOTATION: The Church and Politics

The problem is not that the Church is too political; the problem is that our politics is too pagan.

--Fr. Frank Pavone

QUOTATION: The Church is For Sinners

The operation of the Church is entirely set up for the sinner; which creates much misunderstanding among the smug.

--Flannery O’Connor

QUOTATION: Trials

We must be prepared to undergo great trials in the not-too-distant future; trials that will require us to be ready to give up even our lives, and a total gift of self to Christ and for Christ. Through your prayers and mine, it is possible to alleviate this tribulation, but it is no longer possible to avert it... How many times has the renewal of the Church been brought about in blood! It will not be different this time.

--Pope St. John Paul II

QUOTATION: The Church Grows By Attraction

The Church does not engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by “attraction”: just as Christ “draws all to himself” by the power of his love, culminating in the sacrifice of the Cross, so the Church fulfills her mission.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: The Church Endures

Our Lord seems to sleep; then the tempest threatens, hell rises up against the Church and by persecution endeavours to annihilate it; but cry of distress is heard and our loving Saviour rises, with word appeases the storm, and the holy Ark of God continues its triumphant progress throughout all ages.

--St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Conferences and Instructions

QUOTATION: The Church Tolerant and Intolerant

The Church is intolerant in principle because she believes. She is tolerant in practice because she loves. The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe. They are intolerant in practice because they do not love.

-- Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange

QUOTATION: Why Become Catholic?

And now, my brethren, who are not Catholics, perhaps you will tell me, that, if all inquiry is to cease when you become Catholics, you ought to be very sure that the Church is from God before you join it. You speak truly; no one should enter the Church without a firm purpose of taking her word in all matters of doctrine and morals, and that, on the ground of her coming directly from the God of Truth.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Faith and Doubt”

QUOTATION: The Church is Indestructible

Many forces have tried, and still do, to destroy the Church, from without as well as within, but they themselves are destroyed and the Church remains alive and fruitful.

--Pope Francis, Homily, June 29, 2015

QUOTATION: No Closed-In Churches!

Whenever Christians are enclosed in their groups, parishes, and movements. If a Christian goes to the streets, or to the outskirts, he or she may risk the same thing that can happen to anyone out there: an accident. How often we have seen accidents on the road! But I am telling you: I would prefer a thousand times over a bruised Church to an ill Church! A Church, a catechist, with the courage to risk going out, and not a catechist who is studious, who knows everything but is always closed—such a person is not well.

--Pope Francis, Address to the Participants at the International Congress on Catechesis, September 27, 2013.

QUOTATION: Oppression of the Church

For the Church is afflicted and pressed, not only by the Jews, but also by the Gentiles. It is also afflicted by those who are called Christians, but are not such in reality.

--St. Hippolytus, c. 205 AD

QUOTATION: New Ideas are Simply Old Mistakes.

The other day a well-known writer, otherwise well-informed, said that the Catholic Church is always the enemy of new ideas. It probably did not occur to him that his own remark was not exactly in the nature of a new idea. It is one of the notions that Catholics have to be continually refuting, because it is such a very old idea... Nine out of ten of what we call new ideas are simply old mistakes. The Catholic Church has for one of her chief duties that of preventing people from making these old mistakes; from making them over and over again forever, as people always do if they are left to themselves.

--G.K. Chesterton, “Why I Am a Catholic”

QUOTATION: Protesting Too Much

Stop slandering the church by protesting against the conduct of those whom the church herself condemns.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: What Kept St. Augustine in the Catholic Church?

For in the Catholic Church, not to speak of the purest wisdom, to the knowledge of which a few spiritual men attain in this life, so as to know it, in the scantiest measure, indeed, because they are but men, still without any uncertainty (since the rest of the multitude derive their entire security not from acuteness of intellect, but from simplicity of faith,)—not to speak of this wisdom, which you do not believe to be in the Catholic Church, there are many other things which most justly keep me in her bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep, down to the present episcopate. And so, lastly, does the name itself of Catholic, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house. Such then in number and importance are the precious ties belonging to the Christian name which keep a believer in the Catholic Church, as it is right they should, though from the slowness of our understanding, or the small attainment of our life, the truth may not yet fully disclose itself. But with you, where there is none of these things to attract or keep me, the promise of truth is the only thing that comes into play. Now if the truth is so clearly proved as to leave no possibility of doubt, it must be set before all the things that keep me in the Catholic Church; but if there is only a promise without any fulfillment, no one shall move me from the faith which binds my mind with ties so many and so strong to the Christian religion.

--St. Augustine, Against the Letter of Mani Called ‘The Foundation’, 397 AD

QUOTATION: The Church and Her Authority

When we speak of the Church—allow me this parenthesis—let us think of what she truly is. Let us not have an attenuated conception of her; let us not picture to ourselves a mere spiritual administration. Let us remember that she is herself a mystery, that she is the Mystical Body of Christ, a living person, at once divine and human, whose head is Christ and all of whose members the Holy Ghost joins together, the great Contemplative who aspires to beget all men unto eternal life, and all of whose movements—so far as the Church herself is concerned (whatever the human frailty of individuals may be)—proceed from divine wisdom and the most pure gifts of grace. We shall not then bargain over the terms of our allegiance, we shall not follow her like peevish children who have to be dragged along; we shall understand that her doctrinal authority is not limited to defining solemnly what one cannot deny without being a heretic, but extends, on the contrary, according to all the degrees and all the nuances that what one calls the ordinary magisterium of the Church admits of in the tone of its voice and the authority of its affirmations, to all that concerns the integrity of faith in souls.

--Jacques Maritain, St. Thomas Aquinas, 1958

QUOTATION: The Church is a Love Story

We, the women and men of the Church, we are in the middle of a love story: each of us is a link in this chain of love. And if we do not understand this, we have understood nothing of what the Church is.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: The Church

Without the Church, Jesus would be at the mercy of our imagination.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Christ and the Church

About Jesus Christ and the Church, I simply know they're just one thing, and we shouldn't complicate the matter.

--St. Joan of Arc