QUOTATION: The Gospel

A church that doesn’t provoke any crisis, a gospel that doesn’t unsettle, a word of God that doesn’t get under anyone’s skin, a word of God that doesn’t touch the real sin of the society in which it is being proclaimed – what gospel is that?

--Archbishop Oscar Romero

QUOTATION: Cowards

Cowards are the first people you meet in hell.

--Michael Voris

QUOTATION: Talkativeness

The Holy Spirit does not speak to a soul that is distracted and garrulous. He speaks by His quiet inspirations to a soul that is recollected, to a soul that knows how to keep silence.

--St. Faustina Kowalska

QUOTATION: Uncertainty Cuts Both Ways

Just as we have already recognized that the believer does not live immune to doubt but is always threatened by the plunge into the void, so now we can discern the entangled nature of human destinies and say that the no believer does not lead a sealed-off self-sufficient life, either. However vigorously he may assert that he is a pure positivist who has long left behind him supernatural temptations and weaknesses and now accepts only what is immediately certain, he will never be free of the secret uncertainty about whether positivism really has the last word. Just as the believer is choked by the salt water of doubt constantly washed into his mouth by the ocean of uncertainty, so the non- believer is troubled by doubts about his unbelief, about the real totality of the world he has made up his mind to explain as a self-contained whole. He can never be absolutely certain of the autonomy of what he has seen and interpreted as a whole; he remains threatened by the question of whether belief is not after all the reality it claims to be. Just as the believer knows himself to be constantly threatened by unbelief, which he must experience as a continual temptation, so for the unbeliever faith remains a temptation and a threat to his apparently permanently closed world. In short, there is no escape from the dilemma of being a man. Anyone who makes up his mind to evade the uncertainty of belief will have to experience the uncertainty of unbelief, which can never finally eliminate for certain the possibility that belief may after all be truth. It is not until belief is rejected that its unpredictability becomes evident.

--Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1969

QUOTATION: Gossip

Do not listen to talk about other people's sins. For through such listening the form of these sins is imprinted on you.

--St. Mark the Ascetic

QUOTATION: Vocation

It is important that you choose your career with care, so that you may really follow the vocation that God has destined for you. No day should pass without some prayer to this end. Often repeat with St. Paul: "Lord, what will you have me do?"

--St. John Bosco

QUOTATION: Sex, Love and Procreation

To dissociate the child from love is, for our species, a methodological error: contraception, which is to make love without making a child; artificial (in vitro) fertilization, which is to make a child without making love; abortion, which is to unmake the child; and pornography, which is to unmake love: all these, to varying degrees, are incompatible with natural law.

--Jerome Lejeune

QUOTATION: Stupidity

Stupidity glories in never yielding to the force of truth.

--St. Augustine, City of God

QUOTATION: Perseverance in Prayer

If God does not always give us what we ask, it is to keep us near Him and to give us opportunity to urge Him.

--St Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Female Sacrifice

A woman is capable of more sacrifices than a man. Man is more apt to be a hero, through some great passionate outburst of heroism. But a woman's love makes a thousand small sacrifices, sprinkling them through the days and the months; their very repetition gives them the character of the commonplace. Not only her soul, but her body, has some share in the Calvary of Redemption; furthermore, she comes closer to death than man, whenever she brings forth a child.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Life is Worth Living

QUOTATION: The Tortures of Hell

St. Faustina's vision of Hell from her Diary

I, Sister Faustina Kowalska, by the order of God, have visited the Abysses of Hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence...the devils were full of hatred for me, but they had to obey me at the command of God, What I have written is but a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: That most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell." (Diary 741)


"Today, I was led by an angel to the Chasms of Hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw:

QUOTATION: Expectations

All things upon which you set your trust are yours. Do but expect much of God, and He will do much for you. Expect but little, and He will do little.

--St Bernard of Claivaux

QUOTATION: The Cross

The Cross is the gift God makes for His friends.

--St. Jean Marie Vianney, the Cure of Ars

QUOTATION: Spiritual Poverty

The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice - all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we are in need of a new evangelization - if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works... this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life - he who is the Gospel personified.

- Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Post-Abortive Women

I would now like to say a special word to women who have had an abortion. The Church is aware of the many factors which may have influenced your decision, and she does not doubt that in many cases it was a painful and even shattering decision. The wound in your heart may not yet have healed. Certainly what happened was and remains terribly wrong. But do not give in to discouragement and do not lose hope. Try rather to understand what happened and face it honestly. If you have not already done so, give yourselves over with humility and trust to repentance.

The Father of mercies is ready to give you his forgiveness and his peace in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. You will come to understand that nothing is definitively lost and you will also be able to ask forgiveness from your child, who is now living in the Lord. With the friendly and expert help and advice of other people, and as a result of your own painful experience, you can be among the most eloquent defenders of everyone's right to life. Through your commitment to life, whether by accepting the birth of other children or by welcoming and caring for those most in need of someone to be close to them, you will become promoters of a new way of looking at human life.

--Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, 99

QUOTATION: The Mercy of Jesus

All our tribulations were present to our merciful Saviour at the very first moment of His life and He resolved so firmly, ardently and steadfastly at that time to help us free ourselves from them and He so faithfully preserved this intention in His heart from the first to the last instant of His life, that all the most atrocious cruelties and tortures that wretched men, to whom Christ was so wonderfully good, caused Him to suffer while He was on earth, as well as all His prescience of the ingratitude, outrages and crimes with which we would repay His adorable mercy, were not capable of cooling even slightly the ardor and strength of His will to show mercy to mankind.

--St. John Eudes, The Admirable Heart of Mary

QUOTATION: Making Most of Our Time

Tell me, Beloved Brethren, if instead of preparing-for his approaching death, a person condemned to die were, on his way to the place of execution, to employ the few remaining moments of his life in admiring the beauty of the houses, as he passed along, in thinking of balls and comedies, in uttering immodest words, and detracting his neighbors, would you not say that the unhappy man had either lost his reason, or that he was abandoned by God? And are not you, on the way to death? Why then do you seek only the gratification of the senses? Why do you not think of preparing the accounts which you shall one day, and perhaps very soon, have to render at the tribunal of Jesus Christ? Souls that have faith leave to the fools of this world, the care of realizing a fortune on this Earth; Seek you to make a fortune for the next life, which shall be Eternal (∞). The present life must end, and end very soon.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Wisdom

True wisdom is not to be found in the things of this world nor in the souls of those who live in comfort. He has fixed his abode in the Cross so firmly that you will not find him anywhere in this world save in the Cross. He has so truly incorporated and united himself with the Cross that in all truth we can say: Wisdom is the Cross, and the Cross is Wisdom.

--St. Louis de Montfort.

QUOTATION: A Talkative Soul

A talkative soul is empty inside. It lacks both the essential virtues and intimacy with God. A deeper interior life, one of gentle peace and of that silence where the Lord dwells, is quite out of the question.

--St. Faustina Kowalska

QUOTATION: The Ten Commandments

The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: One's True Country

I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death; I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

QUOTATION: Sinners

The worse sinners are nice people who, by denying sin, make the cure of sin impossible. Sin is very serious, but it is more serious to deny sin. That is why those who very often deny sin become scandal mongers, tale bearers because they have to project their real guilt outside of themselves to others. And this gives them, also, a great illusion of goodness. It will be found generally true that the increase of fault finding is in direct proportion to the denial of sin.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Church Administration

The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is. It is my opinion that we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels in the Church.

--Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Orthodoxy

In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Sin

Every sin produces blindness; and as sin increases, so does the blindness increase. God is our light; as much, therefore, as the soul withdraws from God, so much the more blind does she become.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Prayer

The prayer of a Christian is never a monologue.

--Josemaria Escriva, The Way, 114

QUOTATION: Discouragement

Discouragement itself is a form of pride.

--St. Therese of Lisieux

QUOTATION: God in Scripture

Why is God never represented as shouting in Revealed Scripture? It is because He is so near He has no need to shout.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Conversion

Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God.

--St. Frances Cabrini

QUOTATION: Being Church

Be the Church - that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God's passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes...

--George Weigel

QUOTATION: Being Loved by God

God loves us; we need only to summon up the humility to allow ourselves to be loved.

--Pope Benedict XVI