QUOTATION: Divine Mercy

Many receive the message of divine mercy as tantamount to a denial of the reality of sin, as though sin no longer matters. But just the contrary is the case. To speak of mercy is to be intensely aware of sin and its peculiar form of destructiveness.

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

QUOTATION: It is Difficult to Repent at Death

It is necessary to die hating sin and loving God beyond all things ; but how can he hate forbidden pleasures, who, until that time, has loved them, so much? and how can he love God beyond all things, who, until that time, has loved the creature more than God ?

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death

QUOTATION: Fighting Sin

You don't dispel Satan using Satan's ways.

-- Padre Pio

QUOTATION: Sin and Death

What is it that renders death terrible? Sin. We must therefore fear sin, not death.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: O Happy Fault

Blessed is the crisis that made you grow, the fall that made you gaze up to heaven, the problem that made you look for God!

--St Padre Pio

QUOTATION: Salvation

Everyone wants God to save them from Hell, few want God to save them from sin.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: How God's Mercy Works...

God pardons sin; but He will not pardon the will to sin.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Sin

There is only one thing to be feared and that is sin. Everything else is beside the point.

--St. John Chrysostom

QUOTATION: To Err is Human

He who does not sin is not human.

--Pope Francis, My Door is Always Open: a Conversation on Faith, Hope and the Church in a Time of Change 

QUOTATION: Sin and Virtue

Brother, if you commit a sin and take pleasure in it, the pleasure passes but the sin remains. But if you do something virtuous even though you are tired, the tiredness passes but the virtue remains.

--St. Camillus de Lellis

QUOTATION: The Unforgivable Sin

If God is totally good, he is not Scrooge. He does not forgive some things; he forgives all things. The only possible sin that cannot be forgiven is not accepting forgiveness, which is why in traditional Christian theology, pride is the worst of sins: “I am too good to be forgiven; there is nothing to forgive.”

--Peter Kreeft, quoted in Socrates in the City, ed. Eric Metaxas, 2003

QUOTATION: The Unborn Jesus

Even whilst he was in the womb of Mary every particular sin passed in review before Jesus, and each sin afflicted him immeasurably.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ

QUOTATION: Our Lord's Indignation

Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were saved for those who had sinned and had not been found out. That was why He said to the woman taken in sin, “he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). Only innocence has a right to condemn. He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traders. They were everybody’s target and everybody knew that they were wrong.

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

QUOTATION: The Unforgivable Sin

The really unforgivable sin is the denial of sin, because, by its nature, there is now nothing to be forgiven.

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

QUOTATION: Judging

The Inquisition confused sin with sinners and judged both. Modern Americans make the same mistake but judge neither.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Manifest Grave Sin = No Communion

The judgment of one's state of grace obviously belongs only to the person involved, since it is a question of examining one's conscience. However, in cases of outward conduct which is seriously, clearly and steadfastly contrary to the moral norm, the Church, in her pastoral concern for the good order of the community and out of respect for the sacrament, cannot fail to feel directly involved. The Code of Canon Law refers to this situation of a manifest lack of proper moral disposition when it states that those who “obstinately persist in manifest grave sin” are not to be admitted to Eucharistic communion.

--Pope St. John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 18

QUOTATION: Sinners

We are not sinless, but we must be sinners without sin.

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Where There is Love, There is God, Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., Ed.

QUOTATION: Connect Your Behaviour to Jesus

When I am unkind, uncharitable-- it's that slap I give to Jesus; it's a humiliation to God. That was the greatest suffering for Jesus to accept-- that slap. Connect His Cross with the cross you wear. Today did I wipe the blood from the face of Jesus?

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Where There is Love, There is God, Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., Ed

QUOTATION: National Sin

Men call themselves the nation when they sin in a body, and think that the nation, being a name, has nothing to answer for, and may do what it will; that its acts are only the "course of events," and necessary, as the motion of the earth. They do very rash acts, without the fear of God before their eyes, making large and bold changes (whether allowably or not, is not here the question; their plain fault being that they do not ask themselves whether or not it is allowable,-the question does not enter their minds); I say they make large changes,-they endanger God's holy religion,-they encourage scoffers and deceivers. Then, perhaps, they see they have gone too far, and they change their course; perhaps try to reverse what they have done. Now the thought never crosses them that any one has any thing to repent of; or, if they are determined to put the blame on the nation, that the nation has any thing to repent of. Accordingly, persons who hail the return of any portion of the nation to a sounder state of mind, never hint or seem to feel that a national sin has been committed, that Almighty God has books in which are set down the events of every year and day, books which will be opened at the Day of Judgment, and men judged out of them.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, "Chastisement and Mercy, " Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol.4

QUOTATION: The Harm of Sin

Every sin is more harmful to the sinner than to the one sinned against.

--St. Augustine of Hippo