QUOTATION: Virtue

Many men sneer at virtue because it makes vice uncomfortable.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Liturgists

When God saw that the Church in America lacked persecutions, he sent them liturgists.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Freedom

A certain concept of freedom, which has widespread support in public opinion at present, diverts attention from ethical responsibilities. Appeal is made today to freedom alone. It is often said: what matters is to be free, released from all constraint or limitations, so as to operate according to private judgment, which in reality is often pure caprice. This much is clear: such liberalism can only be described as primitive.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005

QUOTATION: Patience in Prayer

We should not bear it with bad grace if the answer to our prayer is long delayed. Rather, let us, because of this, show great patience and resignation. For He delays for this reason: that we may offer Him a fitting occasion of honoring us through His divine providence.

-- St. John Chrysostom

QUOTATION: Evangelical Poverty

You will observe the difference between the crowds who simply “followed” Christ, and Peter and the others who “gave up everything and followed”.

--Origen.

QUOTATION: The Visitation

One of the most beautiful moments in history was that when pregnancy met pregnancy when child bearers became the first heralds of the King of Kings.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, The World's First Love

QUOTATION: The Unborn Christ

The Body of Jesus Christ, formed by the work of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin Mary, enjoyed in the fullest degree the power of feeling and perceiving, more perfectly in fact than the bodies of all other men.

--Pope Pius XII, On Devotion To The Sacred Heart Of Jesus

QUOTATION: The Brotherhood of Man

To believe in the brotherhood of man without the Fatherhood of God would make men a race of bastards.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Obedience

It's not hard to obey when we love the one whom we obey.

--St. Ignatius of Antioch

QUOTATION: The Unborn Christ

Mary and Joseph needed to be instructed concerning Christ’s birth before He was born, because it devolved on them to show reverence to the child conceived in the womb, and to serve Him even before He was born.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, III, Q. 36, art. 2, ad 2.

QUOTATION: Celibacy

Celibacy is always, shall we say, an affront to what man normally thinks. It is something that can only be done, and is only credible, if there is a God and if celibacy is my doorway into the Kingdom of God. In this sense , celibacy is a special kind of sign. The scandal that it provokes consists precisely in the fact that there are people who believe these things.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World, 2010

QUOTATION: Seeking God

Ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying "God is hard to find".

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Happiness

God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: The Nominal Christian

No decent person wants free love; no decent person wants race suicide. They live, therefore, not by principle but by a compromise between principles; they are in favour of divorce, but not of easy divorce, of small families but not of too small families. Consequently, they feel themselves responsible for the decision where exactly the line shall be drawn, within the generous limits which our legal system allows. They do not like the responsibility; who would? Who, in tampering with institutions so sacred as those of the family, would not like to feel that he had an authority behind him, a "warrant" from somewhere to ratify his behaviour? If only there were some great spiritual institution which would act, in these matters, as a sort of public conscience, guiding, from a higher point of vision, the moral choice made by the individual!

So, naturally, he feels; unfortunately, he does not feel that the views of any non-Catholic denomination are worth having, even if they are discoverable. He knows that the advice of an individual clergyman will be unofficial and inexpert. He knows, if he has followed the course of recent ecclesiastical deliberations, that representatives of Christian thought speak with an uncertain voice on such subjects. He respects our Church for having, at least, definite opinions and fixed rules. He respects it, although he disagrees with it. He thinks us far too severe in forbidding remarriage after divorce, in forbidding the artificial restriction of the family; but although he disagrees with us for the rules we have, he respects us for having rules. If only the people whom we value as advisers would give us the advice we want!

--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927

QUOTATION: Broad-Mindedness

Broad-mindedness, when it means an indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in hatred of what is right.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Service to the Poor

It is not enough to give soup and bread. This the rich can do. You are the servant of the poor, always smiling and good-humored. They are your masters, terribly sensitive and exacting master you will see. And the uglier and the dirtier they will be, the more unjust and insulting, the more love you must give them. It is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you the bread you give to them.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Freedom and Truth

Freedom is properly so called to the extent that it implements the truth regarding the good. Only then does it become a good in itself. If freedom ceases to be linked with truth and begins to make truth dependent on freedom, it sets premises for dangerous moral consequences, which can assume incalculable dimensions. When this happens, the abuse of freedom provokes a reaction, which takes the form of one totalitarian system or another. This is another form of the corruption of freedom, the consequences of which we have experienced in the twentieth century, and beyond.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005

QUOTATION: Patriotism

Patriotism is a form of piety and there are three principle forms of piety, love of God, love of neighbor, and love of country. All three are grounded in justice.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Prayer

He who is unable to spend a long time together in prayer, should often lift up his mind to God by short prayers.

--St. Philip Neri

QUOTATION: The Vulnerable

Every child with Down syndrome, every adult with special needs — in fact, every unwanted unborn child, every person who is poor, weak, abandoned, or homeless — is an icon of God’s face and a vessel of his love. How we treat these persons — whether we revere them and welcome them or throw them away in distaste — shows what we really believe about human dignity, both as individuals and as a nation.

-- Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Practical Atheism

Again and again we encounter the signs of an alternative civilization to that built on Christ as “cornerstone”-- a civilization which, even if not explicitly atheist, is at least positivistic and agnostic, since it is built upon the principle of thinking and acting as if God did not exist. This approach can easily be recognized in the modern so-called scientific, or rather, scientist, mentality, and it can be recognized in literature, especially the mass media. To live as if God did not exist means to live outside the parameters of good and evil, outside the context of values derived from God. It is claimed that man himself can decide what it good or bad.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005

QUOTATION: Difficult People

People can be “offensive” by what they say or do, in fact by simply being who they are. No matter. God has placed other persons into our lives, with their weaknesses and oddities, with their selfishness and thoughtlessness, with their sometimes crude and even cruel speech and action toward us - among other reasons - in order that we might expiate our sins against God and obtain His merciful love.

--Fr. John Hardon

QUOTATION: Contraception

What Paul VI wanted to say, and what is still correct as a main vision, is that if we separate sexuality and fecundity from each other in principle, which is what the use of the pill does, then sexuality becomes arbitrary. Logically, ever form of sexuality is of equal value.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World, 2010

QUOTATION: The Philosophical Foundations of Faith

Let me then, to avoid further ambiguity, give a list of certain leading doctrines which no Catholic, upon a moments reflection, could accept on the authority of the Church and on that ground alone.

(i.) The existence of God.

(ii.) The fact that he has made a revelation to the world in Jesus Christ.

(iii.) The Life (in its broad outlines), the Death, and the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

(iv.) The fact that our Lord founded a Church.

(v.) The fact that he bequeathed to that Church his own teaching office, with the guarantee (naturally) that it should not err in teaching.

(vi.) The consequent intellectual duty of believing what the Church believes.

--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927

QUOTATION: Obedience

Naturally we all have an inclination to command, and a great aversion to obey; and yet it is certain that it is more for our good to obey than to command; hence perfect souls have always had a great affection for obedience, and have found all their joy and comfort in it.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Communism

We know that communism fell in the end because of the system’s socioeconomic weakness, not because it has been truly rejected as an ideology or a philosophy. In certain quarters in the West, there are still those who regret its passing.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005

QUOTATION: Church and State in America

American society was built for the most part by groups that had fled from the system of state churches that reigned in Europe, and they found their religious bearings in free faith communities outside of the state church.  The foundations of American society were thus laid by the free churches, which by the tenets of their creed and their very structure are not a state church but rather a  free assembly of individuals.  In this sense you could say that American society is built on a separation of church and state that is determined and indeed demanded by religion (a separation whose motivation and configuration could not be more different from the conflictual separation of church and state imposed by the French Revolution and the systems that followed it).  In America the state is little more than a free space for different communities to congregate; it is in its nature to recognize and permit these communities to exist in their particularity and their non-membership in the state.  This is a separation that is conceived positively, since it is meant to allow religion to be itself, a religion that respects and protects its own living space distinctly from the state and its ordinances.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Chistianity, Islam, 2004

QUOTATION: Real Presence

I throw myself at the foot of the Tabernacle like a dog at the foot of his Master.

--St. Jean Vianney, the Cure of Ars

QUOTATION: Nations

The history of every individual, and therefore of every people, possesses a markedly eschatological dimension.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005

QUOTATION: Praying for the Souls in Purgatory

If, during life, we have been kind to the suffering souls in purgatory, God will see that help be not denied us after death.

--St. Paul of the Cross

QUOTATION: Professional Catholics

It is sad that there are what you might call professional Catholics who make a living on their Catholicism, but in whom the spring of faith flows only faintly, in a few scattered drops. We must really make an effort to change this.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Light of the World, 2010