QUOTATION: Prayers for the Dead

Let us help commemorate them. If Job's sons were purified by their father's sacrifice, why would we doubt that our offerings for the dead bring them some consolation? Let us not hesitate to help those who have died and to offer our prayers for them.

--St. John Chrysostom

QUOTATION: Fear and Devils

The servant of God ought to fear nothing and to give himself but little concern even as to the devils themselves; for every time they fail to terrify us they lose strength, and the soul masters them more easily. If the Lord is powerful and they are His slaves, what harm can they do to those who are servants of so great a King and Lord?

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: Divine Providence

Whoever casts himself into the arms of God's providence and allows himself to be ruled, is borne to Heaven in a chariot with all his crosses, so that he scarcely feels their weight. He who acts otherwise goes on foot, dragging them with labor and weariness.

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux

QUOTATION: Doing God's Will

It should be observed that perfect love of God consists not in those delights, tears, and sentiments of devotion that we generally seek, but in a strong determination and keen desire to please God in all things, and to promote His glory.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: Of Faith

For this reason the Fathers of the Vatican Council laid down nothing new, but followed divine revelation and the acknowledged and invariable teaching of the Church as to the very nature of faith, when they decreed as follows: "All those things are to be believed by divine and Catholic faith which are contained in the written or unwritten word of God, and which are proposed by the Church as divinely revealed, either by a solemn definition or in the exercise of its ordinary and universal Magisterium" (Sess. iii., cap. 3).

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

QUOTATION: Spirituality and Virtue

We are not to regard great favors from God so much as virtues but consider who serves the Lord with the greatest mortification, humility, and purity of conscience; for the latter without the former will surely be the more holy.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: Heavenly Reward

If man could see what reward he will have in the world above for well-doing, he would never employ his memory, understanding, or will in anything but good works, without regarding at all what labor or trials he might experience in them.

--St. Catherine of Genoa

QUOTATION: Communion

No one, therefore, unless in communion with Peter can share in his authority, since it is absurd to imagine that he who is outside can command in the Church.

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

QUOTATION: Candour and Simplicity

When we have to deal with astute and crafty persons, the best way to win them to God is to treat them with much candor and simplicity. This is the spirit of Christ the Lord; and whoever is destined to glorify Him must act according to His spirit.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Putting God First

Matthew and Luke recount the three temptations of Jesus that reflect the inner struggle over his own particular mission and, at the same time, address the question as to what truly matters in human life. At the heart of all temptations, as we see here, is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive him as secondary, if not actually superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives. Constructing a world by our own lights, without reference to God, building on our own foundation; refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and the material, while setting God aside as an illusion—that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.

Moral posturing is part and parcel of that temptation. It does not invite us directly to do evil—no, that would be far too blatant. It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illusions and throw ourselves in the work of actually making the world a better place. It claims, moreover, to speak for true realism: what’s real is what’s right there in front of us—power and bread. By comparison, the things of God fade into unreality, into a secondary world that no one needs.

God is the issue: Is he real, reality itself, or isn’t he? Is he good, or do we have to invent good ourselves? The God question is the fundamental question, and it sets us down right at the crossroads of human existence.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth.

QUOTATION: Doing God's Will

When one thinks he has done all that God requires of him for the success of any undertaking whether the result be good or bad, he ought always to remain in peace and great tranquillity of mind, contending himself with the testimony of his own conscience. 

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Self-Love

The dissatisfaction we often feel when we have passed a great part of the day without being retired and absorbed in God, though we have been employed in works of obedience or charity, proceeds from a very subtle self-love, which disguises and hides itself. For it is a wish on our part to please ourselves rather than God.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: Simplicity

The office of simplicity is to make us go straight to God, without regard to human respect or our own interests. It leads us to tell things candidly and just as they exist in our hearts. It leads us to act simply, without admixture of hypocrisy and artifice - and, finally, keeps us at a distance from every kind of deceit and double-dealing.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Obedience

If you ever are conscious of impulses, thoughts, and judgements opposed to obedience, though apparently good and holy, do not admit them on any account, but reject them promptly, as you would thoughts against chastity or faith.

--St. John Climacus

QUOTATION: Holy Indifference

If you will not do violence to yourself and will not be indifferent as far as you own interests are concerned, as to who is your Superior, do not flatter yourself that you will ever become a spiritual man and a faithful observer of your vows.

--St. John of the Cross

QUOTATION: Prayer

For prayer to be effective, our petitions should be for benefits worthily to be expected from God.

-- St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Mary

We must have frequent recourse to the Mother of God for she is the Mother of the supernatural life and the Mother of grace. The Lord desires that we receive all graces through her, and this depends on our approaching her.

--St. Maximilian Kolbe

QUOTATION: The Crucifixion

Nor did demons crucify him; it is you who have crucified him and crucify him still, when you delight in your vices and sins.


-- Saint Francis of Assisi

QUOTATION: Prayer

If He who was without sin prayed, how much more ought sinners to pray?

-- Saint Cyprian of Carthage

QUOTATION: Charity

It is by the path of love, which is charity, that God draws near to man, and man to God. But where charity is not found, God cannot dwell. If, then, we possess charity, we possess God, for "God is Charity" (1 John 4:8)

-- Saint Albert the Great

QUOTATION: Private Judgement

Our private judgment is made everything to us,—is contemplated, recognized, and consulted as the arbiter of all questions, and as independent of everything external to us. Nothing is considered to have an existence except so far forth as our minds discern it. The notion of half views and partial knowledge, of guesses, surmises, hopes and fears, of truths faintly apprehended and not understood, of isolated facts in the great scheme of Providence, in a word, the idea of Mystery, is discarded.

--Cardinal John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: Rationalism

Rationalism is a certain abuse of Reason; that is, a use of it for purposes for which it never was intended, and is unfitted. To rationalize in matters of Revelation is to make our reason the standard and measure of the doctrines revealed; to stipulate that those doctrines should be such as to carry with them their own justification; to reject them, if they come in collision with our existing opinions or habits of thought, or are with difficulty harmonized with our existing stock of knowledge. And thus a rationalistic spirit is the antagonist of Faith; for Faith is, in its very nature, the acceptance of what our reason cannot reach, simply and absolutely upon testimony.


--Cardinal John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: The Merits of Jesus Christ

Our wretchedness should not make us uneasy, for in Jesus crucified we shall find all richness and all grace (cf. 1 Cor 1:5, 7). The merits of Jesus Christ have enriched us with all the wealth of God and there is no grace we might desire that we cannot obtain by asking for it.

--St. Alphonsus de Liguori

QUOTATION: Gentleness

Nothing is so strong as gentleness, nothing so gentle as real strength.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Friendship

Friendships begun in this world will be taken up again, never to be broken off.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Graces

Wherefore I choke with grief, that when so many blessings are laid before us, we are slothful, and despise them; we use every exertion to have splendid houses here, but how to gain in heaven so much as a little resting-place, we care not, we think not.

--St. John Chrysostom

QUOTATION: The unborn Christ

Jesus Christ revealed to Venerable Agatha of the Cross that while He was in His Mother’s womb, that which afflicted Him more than any other sorrows was the hardness of the hearts of [those] who would, after His Redemption, despise the graces which He came into the world to dispense.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Faith

Faith is not a contract. Faith is surrender. If no other relationship in our experience is one of self-surrender, if it’s all contractual, people won’t know how to believe.

--Cardinal Francis George

QUOTATION: God and Freedom

The German Jesuit, Alfred Delp, who was executed by the Nazis, once wrote: “Bread is important, freedom is more important, but most important of all is unbroken fidelity and faithful adoration.”

When this ordering of goods is no longer respected, but turned on its head, the result is not justice or concern for human suffering. The result is rather ruin and destruction even of material good themselves. When God is regarded as a secondary matter that can be set aside temporarily on account of more important things, it is precisely these supposedly more important things that come to nothing. It is not just the negative outcome of the Marxist experiment that proves this.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth.

QUOTATION: Abortion

However we may pity the mother whose health and even life is imperiled by the performance of her natural duty, there yet remains no sufficient reason for condoning the direct murder of the innocent.

--Pope Pius XI

QUOTATION: Obedience

The chief merit of obedience consists not in following the will of a mild, amiable Superior who asks rather than commands, but in remaining patiently under the yoke of one who is imperious, rigorous, harsh, ill-humored, and never satisfied. This is a pure fountain of water gushing from the throat of a bronze lion.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Obedience

True obedience manifests itself in executing gladly and without any repugnance, things which are objects of antipathy or contrary to one's interests.

--St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

QUOTATION: Obedience

 

The devil, seeing that there is no shorter road to the summit of perfection than that of obedience, artfully insinuates many repugnancies and difficulties under color of good, to prevent us from following it.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: Obedience

All the good of creatures consists in the fulfillment of the Divine Will. And this is never better attained than by the practice of obedience, in which is found the annihilation of self-love and the true liberty of sons of God. This is the reason why souls truly good, experience such great joy and sweetness in obedience.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Gentleness

A most important means of acquiring interior mildness is to accustom ourselves to perform all our actions and to speak all our words whether important or not, quietly or gently. Multiply these acts as much as you can in the time of tranquillity, and so you will accustom your heart to gentleness.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Personal Disposition

We ought to deal kindly with all, and to manifest those qualities which spring naturally from a heart tender and full of Christian charity; such as affability, love, and humility. These virtues serve wonderfully to gain the hearts of men, and to encourage them to embrace things that are more repugnant to nature. 

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: The Pursuit of Holiness

If I do not become a saint, I am doing nothing.

--St. Dominic Savio

QUOTATION: God's Action in the World And Bible Scholarship

The common practice today is to measure the Bible against the so-called modern world-view, whose fundamental dogma is that God cannot act in history—that everything to do with God is to be relegated to the domain of subjectivity. And so the Bible no longer speaks of God, the living God; no, now we alone speak and decide what God can do and what we will and should do. And the Antichrist with an air of scholarly excellence, tells us that any exegesis that reads the Bible from the perspective of faith in the living God, in order to listen to what God has to say, is fundamentalism; he wants to convince us that only his kind of exegesis, the supposedly purely scientific kind, in which God says nothing and has nothing to say, is able to keep abreast of the times.


--Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth.

QUOTATION: Mortification

There are some so much inclined to mortify themselves that they take care to find in everything some means of mortification. What a beautiful practice is this, and of how much advantage.

--St. Alphonsus Rodriguez

QUOTATION: Humility

The most powerful weapon to conquer the devil is humility. For, as he does not know at all how to employ it, neither does he know how to defend himself from it.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Belonging

No human being “belongs” to another in the way that a thing does. Children are not their parents’ “property”; spouses are not each other’s “property.” Yet they do “belong to each other in a much deeper way than, for example, a piece of wood or a plot of land, or whatever else we call “property.” Children “belong” to their parents, yet they are free creatures of God in their own right, each with his own calling and his own newness and uniqueness before God. They belong to each other, not as property, but in mutual responsibility. They belong to each other precisely by accepting one another’s freedom and by supporting one another in love and knowledge—and in this communion they are simultaneously free and one for all eternity.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth.

QUOTATION: The Presence of God

If you wish for a method brief and compendious, one which contains in itself all other methods and is most efficacious in conquering all temptations and difficulties, and acquiring perfection, this is the exercise of the presence of God.

--St. Basil the Great

QUOTATION: How not to find God

The arrogance that would make God an object and impose our laboratory conditions upon him is incapable of finding him. For it already implies that we deny God as God by placing ourselves above him, by discarding the whole dimension of love, of interior listening; by no longer acknowledging as real anything but what we can experimentally test and grasp. To think like that is to make oneself God. And to do that is to abase not only God, but the world and oneself, too.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Jesus of Nazareth.

QUOTATION: The Obedient Man

A truly obedient man does not discriminate between one thing and another, since his only aim is to execute faithfully whatever may be assigned to him.

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux

QUOTATION: Charity

It is to those who have the most need of us that we ought to show our love more especially.

--St. Francis de Sales