QUOTATION: Love

Often we speak about love as if it is a feeling. But if we wait for a feeling of love before loving, we may never learn to love well.

--Henri Nouwen

QUOTATION: Love in Marriage

Our teaching on marriage and the family cannot fail to be inspired and transformed by this message of love and tenderness; otherwise, it becomes nothing more than the defence of a dry and lifeless doctrine.

--Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, 59

QUOTATION: Love

Lord, in my zeal for the love of truth, let me not forget the truth about love.

--St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Bad Religion

Perhaps the reason why the standard of holiness among us is so low, why our attainments are so poor, our view of the truth so dim, our belief so unreal, our general notions so artificial and external is this, that we dare not trust each other with the secret of our hearts. We have each the same secret, and we keep it to ourselves, and we fear that, as a cause of estrangement, which really would be a bond of union. We do not probe the wounds of our nature thoroughly; we do not lay the foundation of our religious profession in the ground of our inner man; we make clean the outside of things; we are amiable and friendly to each other in words and deeds, but our love is not enlarged, our bowels of affection are straitened, and we fear to let the intercourse begin at the root; and, in consequence, our religion, viewed as a social system, is hollow. The presence of Christ is not in it.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Christian Sympathy”, Parochial and Plains Sermons, Vol.5

QUOTATION: Hell

Hell is not so much a place of punishment as the guarantor of love. We cannot truly love God unless we can freely choose not to love him. Hell is the choice not to love God. It is the choice to prefer something else to God.

--Scott Hahn, Angels and Saints

QUOTATION: Truth and Love

Truth without love is bitter and can drive the wounded away; and “love” without truth isn’t love at all, but a comfortable form of lying.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput.

QUOTATION: False Freedom

Our culture, strongly influenced by the media, almost no longer believes in that deep and enduring love that is the foundation of the family’s stability. It presumes itself to be free and liberating, but it multiplies the phenomena of dependence: drug addiction, pornography, alcoholism, tobacco, superstition, fetishism, satanic cults, etc. We think ourselves free when we make love to any one, but the result is the failure of love and bitter disenchantment, which sometimes causes despair and even suicide. We avoid these ills by the mastery of self, chastity and prayer.

--Cardinal Marc Ouellet, “Rajeunir l’Église” (2003) reprinted in Dieu plus Merveilleux que les rêves, 2004.

QUOTATION: Love

Love is the measure of our ability to bear crosses.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION:Love

Love ought to consist of deeds more than of words.

--St. Ignatius of Loyola

QUOTATION: Love and Justice

True love is excess of justice, excess that goes farther than justice, but never destruction of justice, which must be and must remain the basic form of love.

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

QUOTATION: See What Love Can Do!

One day I picked up a man from the gutter. His body was covered with worms. I brought him to our house, and what did this man say? He did not curse. He did not blame anyone. He just said, “I’ve lived like an animal in the street, but I am going to die like an angel, loved and cared for!” It took us three hours to clean him. Finally, the man looked up at the sister and said, “Sister, I am going home to God.” And then he died. I’ve never seen such a radiant smile on a human face as the one I saw on that man’s face. He went home to God. See what love can do!

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, No Greater Love

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: Overcoming Existential Fear

When a child has to walk through the woods in the dark, he feels frightened however convincingly he has been shown that there is no reason at all to be frightened. As soon as he is alone in the darkness, and thus has the experience of utter loneliness, fear arises, the fear peculiar to man, which is not fear of anything in particular but simply fear in itself. Fear of a particular thing is basically harmless; it can be removed by taking away the thing concerned. For example, if someone is afraid of a vicious dog, the matter can be swiftly settled by putting the dog on a chain. Here we come up against something much deeper, namely, the fact that where man falls into extreme loneliness he is not afraid of anything definite that could be explained away; on the contrary, he experiences the fear of loneliness, the uneasiness and vulnerability of his own nature, something that cannot be overcome by rational means. Let us take another example. If someone has to keep watch alone in a room with a dead person, he will always feel his position to be somehow or other eerie, even if  he is unwilling to admit it to himself and is capable of explaining to himself rationally the groundlessness of his fear. He knows perfectly well in his own mind that the corpse can do him no harm and that his position might be more dangerous if the person concerned were still alive. What arises here is a completely different kind of fear, not fear of anything in particular, but, in being alone with death, the eerieness of loneliness in itself, the exposed nature of existence. How then, we must ask, can such fear be overcome if proof of its groundlessness has no effect? Well, the child will lose his fear the moment there is a hand there to take him and lead him and a voice to talk to him; at the moment therefore at which he experiences the fellowship of a loving human being. Similarly, he who is alone with the corpse will feel the bout of fear recede when there is a human being with him, when he experiences the nearness of a "you". This conquest of fear reveals at the same time once again the nature of the fear; that it is the fear of loneliness, the anxiety of a being that can only live with a fellow being. The fear peculiar to man cannot be overcome by reason but only by the presence of someone who loves him.

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

QUOTATION: Obedience

Obedience is the test of our love of God. His laws are God’s way of enabling us to prove our love for Him; there is no obedience where there is no love, there is much obedience where there is much love.

--Fr. John Hardon, “St. Joseph - Foster Father of Jesus”

QUOTATION: God's Love

With whatever love I am loved, with that love I respond. 

--God to St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue 

QUOTATION: Faith and Love

Love is the true ruling principle of the regenerate soul, and faith ministers to it. Love is the end, faith the means; and if the means be difficult, much more is the end.

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

QUOTATION: Paradise

Paradise is God possessed, the term of God's love for us. Love longs to give itself and to share all that it has and all that it is. God, who is infinite love, does not desire to be happy alone. He puts us in Paradise, in order to, give Himself to us just as He is, in all His perfections, in His infinite happiness.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Love

The Saints tell us that
Faith is love that believes.
Hope is love that expects.
Adoration is love that worships.
Prayer is love that petitions.
Mercy is love that pardons.
Charity is love that sacrifices itself.
Mortification, martyrdom, is love that immolates itself.

-- St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Conferences and Instructions

QUOTATION: Love

We become what we love and who we love shapes what we become. If we love things, we become a thing. If we love nothing, we become nothing. Imitation is not a literal mimicking of Christ, rather it means becoming the image of the beloved, an image disclosed through transformation. This means we are to become vessels of God´s compassionate love for others.

--St. Clare of Assisi

QUOTATION: Love of Men

He has as yet no perfect love, whose disposition towards men depends on what they are like, loving one and despising another for this or that, or sometimes loving, sometimes hating one and the same man. Blessed is the man who can love all men equally.

--St Maximus the Confessor, First Century on Love