QUOTATION: Conscience

Before conversion, conscience seemed to be a restraining, coercive power; God was a hostile and exacting judge; the commandments were prohibitions; and the Church was an inhibition. Responsibilities were identified with obligations; duty was seen as opposed to desire; the morally right was identified with the physically unpleasant; and love was opposed to morality. But after conversion the conscience no longer accuses; it never seems to command, or order, or inhibit, because there are no longer two wills in opposition. The will of the convert is the will of God. There is no need for a conscience to tell him what ought to be done.” Conscience is swallowed up in love and there is no duty or “must” between lovers.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: Faith

Philosophy gives a proof for the existence of God; the science of apologetics gives the motives for believing in Christ, the Son of God; but all the incontrovertible proofs they offer fall short of the certitude that actually comes to a convert through the gift of Faith. Imagine a young man whose father has been lost for years. A friend, returned from a trip, assures him that he has certain evidence that his father really exists on another continent. But the young man is not fully satisfied with the evidence, however convincing it is; until he is restored to his father’s actual presence, he will not have peace. So it is with conversion: before, one knows about God; afterward, one knows God. The first knowledge the mind has is notional and abstract; the second is real, concrete, and it becomes bound up with all one’s sentiments, emotions, passions, and habits.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: Learning to Become Catholic

Discovering the Church is apt to be a slow procedure but it can only take place if you have a free mind and no vested interest in disbelief.

--Flannery O’Connor

QUOTATION: Conversion

Every conversion starts with a crisis: with a moment or a situation involving some kind of suffering, physical, moral, or spiritual; with a dialectic, a tension, a pull, a duality, or a conflict. This crisis is also accompanied, on the one hand, by a profound sense of one’s own helplessness and, on the other hand, by an equally certain conviction that God alone can supply what the individual lacks.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: Belief

Man's natural inclination draws him to the visible, to what he can take in his hand and hold as his own. He has to turn around inwardly in order to see how badly he is neglecting his own interests by letting himself be drawn along in this way by his natural inclination. He must turn around to recognize how blind he is if he trusts only what he sees with his eyes. Without this change of direction, without this resistance to the natural inclination, there can be no belief. Indeed belief is the conversion in which man discovers that he is following an illusion if he devotes himself only to the tangible.

--Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1968

QUOTATION: St. Paul's Conversion

In reality, St. Paul's conversion was not a passage from immorality to morality, from a mistaken faith to a right faith, but it was a being conquered by Christ: the renunciation of his own perfection; it was the humility of one who puts himself without reserve in the service of Christ for the brethren. And only in this renunciation of ourselves, in this conforming to Christ, are we also united among ourselves; we become "one" in Christ. It is communion with the risen Christ that gives us unity.

--Pope Benedict XVI, June 25, 2009

QUOTATION: Evangelization

He who converts his neighbour has performed the most practical Christian-political act of all.

--C.S. Lewis, “Meditation on the Third Commandment”, God in the Dock

QUOTATION: Becoming Catholic

From the time that I became a Catholic, of course I have no further history of my religious opinions to narrate. In saying this, I do not mean to say that my mind has been idle, or that I have given up thinking on theological subjects; but that I have had no variations to record, and have had no anxiety of heart whatever. I have been in perfect peace and contentment; I never have had one doubt. I was not conscious to myself, on my conversion, of any change, intellectual or moral, wrought in my mind. I was not conscious of firmer faith in the fundamental truths of Revelation, or of more self-command; I had not more fervour; but it was like coming into port after a rough sea; and my happiness on that score remains to this day without interruption.

--Blessed John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: Conversion is Effort

You must struggle and combat; for, notwithstanding the abundant succor which is offered to us, we must expect hard labor and difficulties in the beginning of our conversion. That you may not be discouraged, bear in mind that the prize for which you are striving is worth more than all you can ever give to purchase it. Remember that you have powerful defenders ever near you. Against the assaults of corrupt nature you have God's grace. Against the snares of the devil you have the almighty power of God. Against the allurements of evil habits you have the force of good habits confirmed by grace. Against a multitude of evil spirits you have numberless angels of light. Against the bad example and persecutions of the world you have the good example and strengthening exhortations of the saints. Against the sinful pleasures and vain joys of the world you have the pure joys and ineffable consolations of the Holy Ghost.


--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: The Conversion of Heretics

Heretics are to be converted by an example of humility and other virtues far more readily than by any external display or verbal battles. So let us arm ourselves with devout prayers and set off showing signs of genuine humility and go barefooted to combat Goliath.

--St. Dominic

QUOTATION: Conversion

Man is the recipient of the Divine Mercy, yet this does not exonerate him from the need to be transformed.

-- Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Evangelization

No one becomes a Christian alone.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Dogma and Preaching

QUOTATION: St. Dominic and St. Francis

It is an old story that, while we may need somebody like Dominic to convert the heathen to Christianity, we are in even greater need of somebody like Francis, to convert the Christians to Christianity.

--G.K. Chesterton, The Dumb Ox

QUOTATION: Conversion

Most cradle Catholics have gone through, or need to go through, a second conversion which binds them with a more mature love and obedience to the Church.

--Dorothy Day

QUOTATION: Conversion

Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God.

--St. Frances Cabrini

QUOTATION: Deathbed Conversions

We put off our conversion again and again until death, but who says that we will still have the time and strength for it then?

--St. Jean Vianney, The Cure of Ars

QUOTATION: Last-Minute Repentance

Do not say: 'Tomorrow, I will be converted; tomorrow, I will give thanks to God; and all my sins, today's and yesterday's, will be forgiven'. It is true that God promises forgiveness for your conversion; but He does not promise tomorrow for your delays.

--St. Augustine of Hippo

QUOTATION: Kindness

Kindness has converted more people than zeal, science, or eloquence.

--Blessed Mother Teresa of Calcutta

QUOTATION: Evangelization

Many, many people hereabouts are not becoming Christians for one reason only: there is nobody to make them Christians.

-- St. Francis Xavier

QUOTATION: Sin, Contrition and Conversion

But we do well to recall and emphasize the fact that contrition and conversion are even more a drawing near to the holiness of God, a rediscovery of one's true identity which has been upset and disturbed by sin, a liberation in the very depth of self and thus a regaining of lost joy, the joy of being saved, which the majority of people in our time are no longer capable of experiencing.

--Pope John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia