QUOTATION: Faith and Human Equality

In vain will the world seek for equality until it has seen men through the eyes of faith.  Faith teaches that all men, however poor, or ignorant, or crippled, however maimed, ugly, or degraded they may be, all bear within themselves the image of God, and have been bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ. As this truth is forgotten, men are valued only because of what they can do, not because of what they are.

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Preface to Religion

QUOTATION: Faith

Now, one of the truths that reason can discover is that God is a person, and the central claim of the Bible is that this Person has not remained utterly hidden but has, indeed, spoken. As is the case with any listener to a person who speaks, the listener to the divine speech has to make a choice: do I believe him or not? The decision to accept in trust what God has spoken about himself is what the Church means by “faith.” This decision is not irrational, for it rests upon and is conditioned by reason, but it presses beyond reason, for it represents the opening of one heart to another. In the presence of another human being, you could remain stubbornly in an attitude of mistrust, choosing to accept as legitimate only those data that you can garner through rational analysis; but in so doing, you would close yourself to the incomparable riches that that person might disclose to you. The strict rationalist, the unwavering advocate of the scientific method, will know certain things about the world, but he will never come to know a person.

--Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

QUOTATION: Contempt for Zeal

We should not set up a kind of blasé “enlightened” attitude that regards the zeal of those who have been seized by the Holy Spirit, and their uninhibited belief in the word of God, as being equivalent to that fundamentalism which is anathema; an attitude that allows only that kind of faith for which “ifs”  and “buts” become more important than the substance of what is believed itself.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “Church Movements and Their Place in Theology”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: It's Not Just a Personal Relationship with Jesus

Christian faith is never just spiritual and inward, never just a subjective or a personal and private relationship with Christ and his word, but is entirely concrete and ecclesial.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “The Ministry and Life of Priests”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: Faith

Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image.

--Flannery O'Connor, My Dear God: A Young Writer's Prayers

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: Life with God

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but Peace in difficulties.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

Faith is not fearful of reason; on the contrary, it seeks and trusts reason, since “the light of reason and the light of faith both come from God” and cannot contradict each other.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Faith

But just as a person becomes certain of another’s love without being able to subject it to the methods of scientific experiment, so in the contact between God and Man there is a certainty of a quite different kind from the certainty of objectivizing thought. We live faith, not as a hypothesis, but as the certainty on which our life is based. If two people regard their love merely as a hypothesis that is constantly in need of new verification, they destroy love in that way. It is contradicted in its essence if one tries to make it something one can grasp in one’s hand. By then it has already been destroyed. Perhaps so many relationships break down today because we are aware of the certainty only of the verified hypothesis and do not admit the ultimate validity of anything not scientifically proved. Thus, the essential phenomena of human life escapes us, with their different kind of certainty, which is in truth far higher. God, most of all, cannot be objectified as if he were a thing on a lower level than we are, which we could squeeze into our hand or into our apparatus.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith and Theology”, Address on the occasion of the conferring of an honorary doctorate of theology by the Theological Faculty of Wroclaw/Breslau, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: Faith and Our Weaknesses

Faith, if it be true and lively, both precludes transgressions and gradually triumphs over infirmities; and while infirmities continue, it regards them with so perfect an hatred, as avails for their forgiveness, and is taken for that righteousness which it is gradually becoming. And such is a holy doctrine; for it provides for our pardon without dispensing with our obedience.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Transgressions and Infirmities”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5

QUOTATION: Faith

Faith opens the door to understanding, unbelief closes it.

--St. Augustine, Letter 137

QUOTATION: Public Faith

Jesus died for you in public, so don’t just live for Him in private.

--Crystalina Evert

QUOTATION: Faith and Action

Life is for action. If we insist on proofs for everything, we shall never come to action: to act you must assume, and that assumption is faith.

--Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman

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: Faith is a Gift from God

You cannot argue, or study, or reason, or hypnotize, or whip yourself into faith. Faith is a gift of God. When anyone instructs you in Christian doctrine, he does not give you faith. He is only a spiritual agriculturalist, tilling the soil of your soul, uprooting a few weeds and breaking up the clods of egotism. It is God who drops the seed.

--Fulton J. Sheen, Preface to Religion          

QUOTATION: True Faith

True faith does not covet comforts.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Worship, a Preparation for Christ's Coming,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5

QUOTATION: Faith

Faith is not believing that something will happen, nor is it the acceptance of what is contrary to reason, nor is it an intellectual recognition which a man might give to something he does not understand or which his reason cannot prove, e.g., relativity. Faith is the acceptance of a truth on the authority of God revealing.

Faith is a supernatural virtue, whereby, inspired and assisted by the grace of God, we believe as true those things which He revealed, not because the truth of these things is clearly evident from reason alone, but because of the authority of God who cannot deceive nor be deceived.

--Fulton J. Sheen, Preface to Religion

QUOTATION: Faith and Love

Love is the condition of faith; and faith in turn is the cherisher and maturer of love; it brings love out into works, and therefore is called the root of works of love; the substance of the works is love, the outline and direction of them is faith.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Faith and Love”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 4

QUOTATION: Doing Our Duty

We shall not waste our time in looking for extraordinary experiences in our life of contemplation but live by pure faith, ever watchful and ready for His coming by doing our day-to-day duties with extraordinary love and devotion.

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, No Greater Love

QUOTATION: Religion within the Bounds of Reason

The comfortable attempt to spare oneself the belief in the mystery of God's mighty actions in this world and yet at the same time to have the satisfaction of remaining on the foundation of the biblical message leads nowhere; it measures up neither to the honesty of reason nor to the claims of faith. One cannot have both the Christian faith and "religion within the bounds of pure reason"; a choice is unavoidable.

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