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: Grace

You will ask, perhaps, what is the source of this liberty and the glorious victory which it enables us to gain. After God, its source is grace, which, by means of the virtues it nourishes in us, subdues our passions and compels them to submit to the empire of reason. Certain men are said to charm serpents to such a degree that, without injuring them or lessening their venom, the snakes are rendered perfectly harmless. In like manner, grace so charms our passions-the venomous reptiles of the flesh – that, though they continue to exist in our nature, they can no longer harm us or infect us with their poison.

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: The Pleasure of Piety

Hence it is that they who serve God very often find more pleasure, even sensible pleasure, in recollection, silence, pious reading, meditation, prayer, and other devout exercises, than in any worldly amusement. In this happy state the work of subduing the flesh is rendered very easy.

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide.

QUOTATION: Chastity

In a fight between vice and a man of vice, vice wins and pins the man down. This is why continence and chastity are praised so highly: because they enable a man to abstain from the pleasures and delights that nature and passion offer him.

--St. Anthony Mary Claret, Autobiography

QUOTATION: Self-Mastery

Control your appetites before they control you.

--St. John Climacus

QUOTATION: Self-Mastery

A man who governs his passions is master of his world. We must either command them or be enslaved by them. It is better to be a hammer than an anvil.

--St. Dominic

QUOTATION: Self-Mastery

To be subjected to our lusts, and to yield to them, is the most extreme form of slavery. To keep those lusts in subjection is the only liberty.

--St. Clement of Alexandria

QUOTATION: The Passion

There is no remedy so powerful against the heat of concupiscence as the remembrance of our Savior’s Passion. In all my difficulties I never found anything so efficacious as the wounds of Christ: In them I sleep secure; from them I derive new life.

--Saint Augustine

QUOTATION: Prayer and Self-Mastery

When one does not love prayer, it is morally impossible for him to resist his passions.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori