QUOTATION: Heresy

Redemption is conditioned on orthodoxy, as is the correct conception of eternal life: orthodoxy is not just a theory about God, but a matter of God’s personal relationship with me. For that reason, heresy always affects that personal relationship, because it separates God who is truth from the revelation of that same truth.

--Cardinal Gerhard Müller

QUOTATION: Religious Extremism

To push piety to the point of superstition is to destroy it. To push orthodoxy to the point of religious purism is also to destroy it.

--Henri de Lubac

QUOTATION: Orthodoxy Isn't Enough

It is not enough that our truth be orthodox and our pastoral action efficient.  Without the joy of beauty, the truth becomes cold, even heartless and arrogant, as we see in the speech of many embittered fundamentalists. It is as if they were chewing on ashes instead of savoring the glorious sweetness of Christ's truth, which illuminates all of reality with a gentle glow, accepting as it is each day.

Without the joy of beauty, any work for the good becomes a gloomy concern for efficiency, as it is for many overwhelmed activists.  They go about clothing reality with mournful statistics instead of anointing it with the oil of inner gladness that transforms hearts, one by one, from within.

--Pope Francis (Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio),  Homily at the Chrism Mass, 2011

QUOTATION: The Liberal Double Standard

The drivel of heretics, both priests and laymen, is tolerated; the bishops tacitly acquiesce to the poisoning of the faithful. But they want to silence the faithful believers who take up the cause of orthodoxy.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: Orthodoxy

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Orthodoxy Versus Relativism

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. ... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Laity

Who is going to save our Church? Not our bishops, not our priests and religious. It is up to you, the people. You have the minds, the eyes, the ears to save the Church. Your mission is to see that your priests act like priests, your bishops, like bishops, and your religious act like religious.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, before the Knights of Columbus, June of 1972.

QUOTATION: Faith and Virtue

We are firmly convinced that the truths of faith cannot deceive us, and yet we cannot bring ourselves to trust to them; nay, we are far more ready to trust to human reasonings and the deceitful appearance of this world. This, then, is the cause of our slight progress in virtue, and of our small success in what concerns the glory of God.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Orthodoxy and Communion

The practice of the Church has always been the same, as is shown by the unanimous teaching of the Fathers, who were wont to hold as outside Catholic communion, and alien to the Church, whoever would recede in the least degree from any point of doctrine proposed by her authoritative Magisterium. Epiphanius, Augustine, Theodore drew up a long list of the heresies of their times. St. Augustine notes that other heresies may spring up, to a single one of which, should any one give his assent, he is by the very fact cut off from Catholic unity. "No one who merely disbelieves in all (these heresies) can for that reason regard himself as a Catholic or call himself one. For there may be or may arise some other heresies, which are not set out in this work of ours, and, if any one holds to one single one of these he is not a Catholic" (S. Augustinus, De Haeresibus, n. 88).

Pope Leo XIII, Satis Cognitum,  On the Unity of the Church. 1896.