QUOTATION: Mush Doesn't Feed Heroes

If men and women are really made for heroism and glory, made to stand in the presence of the living God, they can never be satisfied with bourgeois, mediocre, feel-good religion. They’ll never be fed by ugly worship and shallow moralizing. But that’s what we too often give them.

 --Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Mysticism

A religion without mystics is a philosophy.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Reason and Religion

Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.

--G.K. Chesterton, The Everlasting Man.

QUOTATION: Religion

Together with the works of mercy, feeding, clothing, and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate. We must "give reason for the faith that is in us"...otherwise our religion is an opiate, for ourselves alone, for our comfort or for our individual safety or indifferent custom.

--Dorothy Day 

QUOTATION: No Private Religion

Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? … Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: How Religions Resemble One Another

I observe, then, that whether it came from Noah after the flood or not, so it is, that all religions, the various heathen religions as well as the Mosaic religion, have many things in them which are very much the same. They seem to come from one common origin, and so far have the traces of truth upon them. They are all branches, though they are corruptions and perversions, of that patriarchal religion which came from God. And of course the Jewish religion came entirely and immediately from God. Now God's works are like each other, not different; if, then, the Gospel is from God, and the Jewish religion was from God, and the various heathen religions in their first origin were from God, it is not wonderful, rather it is natural, that they should have in many ways a resemblance one with another. And, accordingly, that the Gospel is in certain points like the religions which preceded it, is but an argument that "God is One, and that there is none other but He;"—the difference between them being that the heathen religions are a true religion corrupted; the Jewish, a true religion dead; and Christianity, the true religion living and perfect. The heathen thought to be saved by works, so did the Jews, so do Christians; but the heathen took the works of darkness for good works, the Jews thought cold, formal and scanty works to be good works, and Christians believe that works done in the Spirit of grace, the fruit of faith, and offered up under the meritorious intercession of Christ, that these only are good works, but that these really are good:—so that while the heathen thinks to be saved by sin, and the Jew by self, the Christian relies on the Spirit of Him who died on the Cross for him. Thus they differ; but they all agree in thinking that works are the means of salvation; they differ in respect to the quality of these works.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “The New Works of the Gospel,” Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5

QUOTATION: Religion and Science

The collaboration between religion and modern science is to the advantage of both, without violating their respective autonomy in any way. Just as religion demands religious freedom, so science rightly claims freedom of research.

--Pope St. John Paul II

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: Politics and Religion

I never discuss anything except politics and religion. There is nothing else to discuss.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Voting

Consequently, there is a heavy responsibility on everyone, man or woman, who has the right to vote, especially when the interests of religion are at stake; abstention in this case is in itself, it should be thoroughly understood, a grave and a fatal sin of omission.

--Pope Pius XII,  Allocution of Pope Pius XII to the Congress of the International Union of Catholic Women's Leagues, Rome, Italy, September 11, 1947.

QUOTATION: Religion and Science

When there is an apparent conflict between science and religion it is either because of bad science or bad religion, or both.

--Father Robert Barron

QUOTATION: Individual Religion

There is a tremendous egotism and conceit in those popular articles and lectures entitled “My Idea of Religion” or “My Idea of God.” An individual religion can be as misleading and uninformed as an individual astronomy or an individual mathematics.

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

QUOTATION: Religiosity is a Talent

The phenomenology of religion demonstrates-- and we can all test this for ourselves-- that there are, or at least appear to be, in religion, as in all other realms of the human spirit, various degrees of endowment. Just as in the field of music we find the creative, the receptive, and finally those who are completely unmusical, so it seems to be in religion, too. Here, too, one meets people who are religiously "talented" and others who are "untalented"; here, too, those capable of direct religious experience and thus of something like religious creativity through a living awareness of the religious world are few and far between. The "mediator" or "founder", the witness, the prophet, or whatever religious history likes to call such men who are capable of direct contact with the divine, remains here, too, the exception. Over against these few, for whom the divine thus becomes undisguised certainty, stand the many whose religious gift is limited to receptivity, who are denied the direct experience of the holy yet are not so deaf to it as to be unable to appreciate an encounter with it through the medium of the man granted such an experience.

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

QUOTATION: The Average Believer

I say plainly, and without fear of contradiction, though it is a serious thing to say, that the aim of most men esteemed conscientious and religious, or who are what is called honourable, upright men, is, to all appearance, not how to please God, but how to please themselves without displeasing Him. I say confidently,—that is, if we may judge of men in general by what we see,—that they make this world the first object in their minds, and use religion as a corrective, a restraint, upon too much attachment to the world. They think that religion is a negative thing, a sort of moderate love of the world, a moderate luxury, a moderate avarice, a moderate ambition, and a moderate selfishness.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "Obedience without Love, as instanced in the Character of Balaam", Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 4

QUOTATION: Religion

We do not really want a religion that is right where we are right. What we want is a religion that is right where we are wrong.

--G.K. Chesterton, The Catholic Church and Conversion

QUOTATION: Compartmentalizing Religion

People who separate religion from the rest of life are trying to get rid of religion altogether; for they do not want it to interfere with the way they live.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Address of October 20, 1946 cited in Memoirs, 1974

QUOTATION: Straightening Out

I am but a crooked piece of iron, and have come into religion to be made straight by the hammer of mortification and penance.

 --St. Aloysius Gonzaga

QUOTATION: Religion

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.

--Flannery O'Connor

QUOTATION: Faith

Many a man likes to be religious in graceful language; he loves religious tales and hymns, yet is never the better Christian for all this. The works of every day, these are the tests of our glorious contemplations, whether or not they shall be available to our salvation; and he who does one deed of obedience for Christ's sake, let him have no imagination and no fine feeling, is a better man, and returns to his home justified rather than the most eloquent speaker, and the most sensitive hearer, of the glory of the Gospel, if such men do not practise up to their knowledge.

--Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: The Privatization of Religion

Societies which regard religion as a personal matter unrelated to the conduct of public life, will soon be swallowed up in corruption, violence, and sin.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Address of October 20, 1946 cited in Memoirs, 1974