QUOTATION: Choice

You cannot insist on the right to choose, without also insisting on the duty to choose well, the duty to choose the truth.

--Pope John Paul II, Homily at Columbia, South Carolina, 1987

QUOTATION: Atheism

Atheism nine times out of ten is born from the womb of a bad conscience. Disbelief is born of sin not of reason.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Priests

There are few workers to reap such a great harvest. We should feel a deep sorrow, for although many wish to hear the good news, few are willing to preach it to them.

--Pope St. Gregory I Homiliae in Evangelia

QUOTATION: Law and Morality

It is certainly true that institutions have disappeared from the greater part of the world, it would seem permanently, whose disappearance every Christian must welcome. (Whether the non-Christian welcomes it equally, depends upon his point of view.) Formal slavery has disappeared, and physical torture used for judicial purposes, and the exposure of children, and the amphitheatre, and the duel, and child labour, and the grosser forms of purposeless cruelty towards animals. But these are not vices personal to the individual; they are vicious systems, against which the conscience of individuals long protested, before the community took any steps. The progressive enlightenment of the public conscience is fortunately a fact; though it is not certain what guarantee we have against retrogression. But the fact that the public obeys its own conscience is due, if we will be honest with ourselves, very largely to the policeman. The really salient fact about the modern age, from the Wars of the Roses onwards, is the growing effectiveness of centralised government, ultimately traceable to the influence of explosives. Not only have we better laws, but our laws are better kept. Where morality involves justice towards your neighbour, there is less temptation to do wrong now than formerly; indeed, there is every
temptation to do right. But does all this mean that, given the free opportunity, the average man to-day resists his temptations, such as they are, better than he did in the Dark Ages?

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

QUOTATION: State Churches

Today state churches throughout the world are characterized by their fatigue. Moral force-- the foundation on which to build-- does not emanate from either the religious bodies subservient to the state nor from the state itself.

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

QUOTATION: Needing Christ

I need Christ, not something that resembles Him.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION:The Wrong Meaning of Freedom

To claim the right to abortion, infanticide and euthanasia, and to recognize that right in law, means to attribute to human freedom a perverse and evil significance: that of an absolute power over others and against others.

--Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae

QUOTATION: Religious Disaffection

People are turning away from Christianity today not because it is too hard, but because it is too soft; not because it demands too much, but because it demands too little.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: The Afterlife

Our life in heaven or in purgatory will be that same supernatural life which we enjoy here and now, lived under different conditions.

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

QUOTATION: Idolatry

Idolatry is committed, not merely by setting up false gods, but also by setting up false devils; by making men afraid of war or alcohol, or economic law, when they should be afraid of spiritual corruption and cowardice.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: The Philosphical Legacy of Marxism

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized-- so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals-- the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today. Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger […].

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

QUOTATION: Charity

True charity consists in putting up with all one's neighbor's faults, never being surprised by his weakness, and being inspired by the least of his virtues.

--St. Therese of Lisieux

QUOTATION: Evil

Evil may have its hour, but God will have His day.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: The Body of Christ

Christ has no body now, but yours. No hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks compassion into the world. Yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which Christ blesses the world.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: The Final Test

On the last day, when the general examination takes place, there will be no question at all on the text of Aristotle, the aphorisms of Hippocrates, or the paragraphs of Justinian. Charity will be the whole syllabus.

--St. Robert Bellarmine

QUOTATION: You cannot have two masters

Anyone who wishes to frolic with the devil cannot rejoice with Christ.

--Saint Peter Chrysologus

QUOTATION: God

What do you possess if you possess not God?

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Repentance

People cannot come to true and genuine repentance until they realize that sin is contrary to the ethical norm written in their inmost being.

--Pope John Paul II, Reconciliatio et Paenitentia

QUOTATION: God's Existence

The very nerve of our contention is that the material world which meets us in our experience does not provide the explanation of its own existence, or of the forces which control it, or of the laws which govern it, that the explanation, consequently, must be looked for in something that is outside and beyond itself. Our thought can only be satisfied by the existence of some necessary Being, to which all this contingent existence around us, the world of creation, is secondary, and upon which it depends.

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

QUOTATION: Sin

All sin is self-mutilation.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Fear of the Lord

Not only are we missing something when fear is absent from religion, but (far worse) we are sinning grievously. For the absence of the fear of God is arrogance and pride. How dare sinners sashay up to God as a chum without first falling down in repentance and fear and calling on the Blood of Christ to save us?

--Dr. Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Conforming to the World

Statistics tell us that the more churches adapt themselves to the standards of secularization, the more followers they lose. They become attractive, instead, when they indicate a solid point of reference and a clear orientation.

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

QUOTATION: Opposition

I know well that the greater and more beautiful the work is, the more terrible will be the storms that rage against it.

--St. Faustina Kowalska

QUOTATION: Free Will

Free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Suffering

Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.

― Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Unpopular Doctrines

But the prevalent irreligion of the age does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like a disused organ, to atrophy.

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

QUOTATION: The Apostle John

We may wonder how both the sons of Zebedee, James and John, came to drink from the chalice of martyrdom, since Scripture tells us only that the apostle James was decapitated by Herod. John, on the other hand, died a natural death. But in the history of the Church we are told that he was to be martyred in a vat of boiling oil; an athlete of Christ, he was saved from the oil and banished to the island of Patmos. John too suffered martyrdom; he, like the three young men who stood in the burning fire, drank from the chalice of martyrdom, though his persecutor failed to spill his blood.

--St. Jerome, Commentary on Matthew, 20, 23.

QUOTATION: Preaching Heaven

Our preaching, our proclamation, really is one-sided, in that it is largely directed toward the creation of a better world, while hardly anyone talks any more about the other, truly better world. We need to examine our consciences on this point. Of course one has to meet one’s listeners half-way, one has to speak to them in terms of their own horizon. But at the same time our task is to open up this horizon, to broaden it, and turn our gaze toward the ultimate.

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

QUOTATION: The Spirit of the Age

To think clearly, one must remember that to marry the spirit of an age is to become a widow in the next one.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Religious Liberty

Religious liberty is supposed to mean a man is free to discuss his faith, in practice it means he is hardly allowed to mention it.

--G.K. Chesterton, Autobiography

QUOTATIONS: Watered-Down Christianity

When "the failure of the Churches" is discussed in public print, our well-meaning advisers always insist, with a somewhat wearying reiteration, on the need for a more comprehensive Christianity, which shall get away from forms and ceremonies, from dogmas and creeds, and shall concentrate its attention upon those elementary principles of life and devotion which all Christians have at heart. Each prophet who thus enlightens us makes the curious assumption, apparently, that he is the first person who has ever suggested anything of the kind. As a matter of fact, the brazen lungs of Fleet Street have been shouting these same directions at us for a quarter of a century past. And have "the Churches" taken no notice? On the contrary, as I have suggested above, the pilots of our storm-tossed denominations have lost no opportunity of lightening ship by jettisoning every point of doctrine that seemed questionable, and therefore unessential; hell has been abolished, and sin very nearly; the Old Testament is never alluded to but with a torrent of disclaimers, and miracle with an apologetic grimace. Preachers of the rival sects have exchanged pulpits; "joint services" have been held on occasions of public importance; even the inauguration of a new Anglican cathedral cannot take place nowadays without a fraternisation of the Christianities. In hundreds of churches and chapels everything has been done that could be done to meet this modern latitudinarian demand. And the result?

The result is that as long as a man is a good preacher, a good organiser, or an arresting personality, he can always achieve a certain local following; and among this local following a reputation for broad-mindedness stands him in good stead. But the ordinary man who does not go to church is quite unaffected by the process. He thinks no better of Christianity for its efforts to be undogmatic. It is not that he makes any articulate reply to these overtures; he simply ignores them. Nothing, I believe, has contributed more powerfully to the recent successes of the "Anglo-Catholic" movement than the conviction, gradually borne in upon the clergy, that the latitudinarian appeal, as a matter of experience, does not attract. Dogmas may fly out at the window but congregations do not come in at the door.

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