QUOTATION: The New Evangelization

We are evangelizing to a new audience, one that does not know Christ but thinks it does.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Being Religious

One of the penalties of being religious is to be mocked and ridiculed. If Our Lord submitted Himself to the ribald humor of a degenerate Tetrarch, we may be sure that we, His followers, will not escape. The more Divine a religion is, the more the world will ridicule you, for the spirit of the world is the enemy of Christ.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen , Characters of the Passion

QUOTATION: St. Peter

That great man, the disciple of disciples, that master among masters, who wielding the government of the Roman Church possessed the principle authority in faith and in priesthood. Tell us, therefore, we beg of you, Peter, prince of Apostles, tell us how the Churches must believe in God.

--John Cassian

QUOTATION: Victory Over Death

What a sensation it would cause if we were to read one day in the newspapers that the remedy for death was discovered. Ever since man has been on this earth, he has been looking for this remedy.... Yet the Church proclaims that this remedy has in fact been found. Death has been overcome - Jesus Christ has risen and will die no more.... Victory is with the Son, the living Christ. The more perfectly we follow his way, the more complete will be the victory in this world of his saving power over death

--Pope Benedict XVI, Benedictus

QUOTATION: Trials

Let us be convinced of this infallible truth, that in the present state of corrupt nature we cannot be saved unless we pass through the many tribulations with which this life is filled.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Holy Eucharist

QUOTATION: God Has No Body on Earth But Yours

God has no body now on earth but yours; no hands but yours; no feet but yours. Yours are the eyes through which the compassion of Christ must look out on the world. Yours are the feet with which He is to go about doing good. Yours are the hands with which He is to bless His people.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: Chastity

Don't say you have a chaste mind if you have unchaste eyes, because an unchaste eye is the messenger of an unchaste heart.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION:Prayer

Do not distress yourself about prayer. It is not always necessary to employ words, even inwardly. It is enough to raise your heart and let it rest in Our Lord, to look lovingly up toward the Divine Lover of your soul, for between lovers the eyes speak more eloquently than the tongue.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Dogma

The Christian faith proposes many things to be believed, which are so beyond all understanding that it is most difficult to give our consent to them; and yet are we commanded to believe them so firmly that we should be prepared (if necessary) to die a thousand times rather than deny one article of faith. This is a difficult duty, and no wonder so few comply with it. This is the reason why so many go over to Mahometanism and other heresies, because they cannot bear the strictness of faith, but have made the gate very wide, which nevertheless leads, not to life, but to destruction, according to the words of our Lord in St. Matthew: “Wide is the gate, and broad is the way that leadeth to destruction, and many there are who go in thereat.“(chap, vii.13)

--St. Robert Bellarmine, The Eternal Happiness of the Saints

QUOTATION: The Church

The Church is a perpetually defeated thing that always outlives her conquerers.

--Hilaire Belloc

QUOTATION: God's Blessings

We have a tendency to think that if we love God, and He loves us, He's going to bless us with the 'good things of life.' And He does. The problem lies in our definition of the 'good things of life.' Trials are sometimes as much of a good thing as new car or health.

--Mother Angelica

QUOTATION: Jesus' Obedience to His Mother

Since grace enhances our human nature and glory adds a still greater perfection to grace, it is certain that our Lord remains in heaven just as much the Son of Mary as he was on earth. Consequently he has retained the submissiveness and obedience of the most perfect of all children towards the best of all mothers.

--St. Louis de Montfort, True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin, #27

QUOTATION: Mothers

Every mother is like Moses. She does not enter the promised land. She prepares a world she will not see.

--Pope Paul VI

QUOTATION: Gluttony

It is almost certain that excess in eating is the cause of almost all the diseases of the body, but its effects on the soul are even more disastrous.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Politicians

A nation always gets the kind of politicians it deserves. If a time ever comes when the religious Jews, Protestants and Catholics ever have to suffer under a totalitarian state, which would deny to them the right to worship God according to the light of their conscience, it will be because for years they thought it made no difference what kind of people represented them in Congress, and because they abandoned the spiritual in the realm of the temporal.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Speaking Out

We’ve had enough of exhortations to be silent! Cry out with a hundred thousand tongues. I see that the world is rotten because of silence.

--St. Catherine of Siena

QUOTATION: Sense of Humour

A sad nun is a bad nun… I am more afraid of one unhappy sister than a crowd of evil spirits. What would happen if we hid what little sense of humor we had? Let each of us humbly use this to cheer others.

--St. Teresa of Avila

QUOTATION: Unjust Law

Human law is law only by virtue of its accordance with right reason; and thus it is manifest that it flows from the eternal law. And in so far as it deviates from right reason it is called an unjust law; in such case it is no law at all, but rather a species of violence.

--St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae

QUOTATION: Who Would Have Believed ...?

Truly admirable is the doctrine of Christ our teacher, which however is hidden from the "wise" of this world. For who would have believed, unless God had said it, that it is a blessed thing to be poor, but rich in afflictions?

--St. Robert Bellarmine, The Eternal Happiness of the Saints

QUOTATION: The Liberal Double Standard

The drivel of heretics, both priests and laymen, is tolerated; the bishops tacitly acquiesce to the poisoning of the faithful. But they want to silence the faithful believers who take up the cause of orthodoxy.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: The Devil's Shaming

The usual snare with which the devil catches the young is to fill them with shame when they are about to confess their sins. When he pushes them to commit sins, he removes all shame, as if there were nothing wrong with it, but when they are going to confession, he returns that shame magnified and tries to convince them that the priest will be shocked by their sins and will no longer think well of them. Thus the devil tries to drive souls to the brink of eternal damnation. Oh, how many lads does Satan steal from God – sometimes forever – by this trick.

--St. John Bosco

QUOTATION: Elusive Perfection

Very few of us reach perfection because we esteem our opinions and our own judgments so highly.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: The Duty of Bishops

Is the hierarchy perhaps free to teach what they find most to their liking on matters of religion, or what they expect will be most pleasing to the proponents of certain current views opposed to all doctrine? Certainly not! The prime duty of the episcopate is to transmit strictly and faithfully the original message of Christ, the sum total of the truths which He revealed and confided to the Apostles as necessary for salvation.

--Pope Paul VI

QUOTATION: Relativism is the Law of the Jungle

A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen, On Being Human

QUOTATION: The Resurrection

All will rise in the condition of perfect age, which is of thirty-two or thirty-three years. This is because all who were not yet arrived at this age, did not possess this perfect age, and the old had already lost it. Hence, youths and children will be given what they lack, and what the aged once had will be restored to them.

--St. Thomas Aquinas, The Catechetical Instruction of St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Dogma

There are only two kinds of people, those who accept dogmas and know it, and those who accept dogmas and don’t know it.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: God's True Servants

Lord, those are your best servants who wish to shape their life on Your answers rather than to shape Your answers on their wishes.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Holiness

Holiness is not something extraordinary, not something for only a few with brains, with intellectual powers that can reason, that can discuss, that can have long talks and read very wonderful books. Holiness is for every one of us as a simple duty - the acceptance of God with a smile, at all times, anywhere and everywhere.

--Mother Teresa

QUOTATION: A Divided Heart

Poor blind creature, who gives one hand to God and the other to the world, so that he can call both to his aid, and promise his heart to each in turn! He loves God, or rather, he would like to love Him, but he would also like to please the world. Then, weary of wanting to give his allegiance to both, he ends by giving it to the world alone.

--St. Jean Vianney, the Cure of Ars, “The Dreadful State of the Lukewarm Soul,” The Sermons of the Cure of Ars

QUOTATION: Nine Orders of Angels Like Nine Orders of Men

With these nine orders of the angels, correspond on the other hand that multitude of holy men, which no one can number, as we learn from the Apocalypse. This multitude contains also nine "orders ;" for some are patriarchs, some prophets, some apostles, some martyrs and confessors; whilst others are pastors, doctors, priests, Levites, monks, and hermits, holy women, virgins, widows, or married people.

--St. Robert Bellarmine, The Eternal Happiness of the Saints