QUOTATION: Claiming the Right to Kill

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: Fasting

 There is commandment laid on us to fast. For fasting helps to destroy sin, and to raise the mind to thoughts of the spiritual world. Each man is then bound, by the natural law of the matter, to fast just as much as is necessary to help him in these matters. Which is to say that fasting in general is a matter of natural law. To determine, however, when we shall fast and how, according to what suits and is of use to the Catholic body, is a matter of positive law. To state the positive law is the business of the bishops, and what is thus stated by them is called ecclesiastical fasting, in contradistinction with the natural fasting previously mentioned.

--St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Spiritual Dryness

Never give up prayer, and should you find dryness and difficulty, persevere in it for this very reason. God often desires to see what love your soul has, and love is not tried by ease and satisfaction.

--St. John of the Cross

QUOTATION: Good is Stronger than Evil

Is it not evident that all that are for you are stronger than all that are against you? Is not God stronger than the devil? Is not grace superior to nature? Are not the good angels more powerful than the fallen legions of Satan? Are not the pure and ineffable joys of the soul far more delightful than the gross pleasures of sense and the vain amusements of the world?

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: Religious

The religious life is a grace of excellent and very special honor, which Jesus Christ extends to us. The religious is to Our Lord what the Cardinals are morally to the Sovereign Pontiff. He is a prince of the blood, the intimate companion of Our Lord.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: The Rule of Faith

It always was, and is today, the usual practice of Catholics to test the true faith by two methods; first, by the authority of the divine Canon, and then, by the tradition of the Catholic Church. Not that the Canon is insufficient in itself in each case. But, because more interpreters of the Divine Word make use of their own arbitrary judgment and thus fall into various opinions and errors, the understanding of Holy Scripture must conform to the single rule of Catholic teaching—and this especially in regard to those questions upon which the foundations of all Catholic dogma are laid.

--St. Vincent of Lérins, Commonitory for the Antiquity and Universality of the Catholic Faith

QUOTATION: Wisdom

Divine Wisdom speaks not to the world, but to her own children.

--Blessed John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: The Blessed

They are not called blessed who are esteemed by the world, who are honored and praised, as noble, as learned, as powerful; but they who are spoken ill of by the world, who are persecuted and calumniated; for it is for such that a glorious reward is prepared in heaven, if they only bear all with patience.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Holy Eucharist

QUOTATION: Perfection

To attain perfection, we must endure our imperfection. I say: we must suffer it with patience, not love or cherish it; humility is fortified with suffering.

--St. Francis de Sales, Consoling Thoughts

QUOTATION: Death

The rational soul is of its nature immortal, and therefore death is not natural to man in so far as man has a soul. It is natural to his body, for the body, since it is formed of things contrary to each other in nature, is necessarily liable to corruption, and it is in this respect that death is natural to man. But God who fashioned man is all powerful. And hence, by an advantage conferred on the first man, He took away that necessity of dying which was bound up with the matter of which man was made. This advantage was however withdrawn through the sin of our first parents. Death is then natural, if we consider the matter of which man is made and it is a penalty, inasmuch as it happens through the loss of the privilege whereby man was preserved from dying.

--St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Friendship

A great help to advancement in spiritual life is to have a friend whom you will permit to inform you of your faults.

--St. Ignatius Loyola

QUOTATION: Carrying One's Cross

Carry your cross cheerfully, and you will be filled with divine love; for only in suffering can we dwell in the pure love of Christ.

--St. Louis de Montfort, Letter to the Friends of the Cross

QUOTATION: Gossip

"There are souls with whom I can do nothing. They are souls that are continuously observing others, but know nothing of what is going on within their own selves. They talk about others continually... Poor souls, they do not hear My words; their interior remains empty. They do not look for Me within their own hearts, but in idle talk, where I am never to be found..."

--Jesus to St. Faustina Kowalska

QUOTATION: False Freedom

When freedom, out of a desire to emancipate itself from all forms of tradition and authority, shuts out even the most obvious evidence of an objective and universal truth, which is the foundation of personal and social life, then the person ends up by no longer taking as the sole and indisputable point of reference for his own choices the truth about good and evil, but only his subjective and changeable opinion or, indeed, his selfish interest and whim.

This view of freedom leads to a serious distortion of life in society. If the promotion of the self is understood in terms of absolute autonomy, people inevitably reach the point of rejecting one another. Everyone else is considered an enemy from whom one has to defend oneself. Thus society becomes a mass of individuals placed side by side, but without any mutual bonds.

--Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae

QUOTATION: The Church

It is the peculiar property of the Church that when she is buffeted she is triumphant, when she is assaulted with argument she proves herself in the right, when she is deserted by her supporters she holds the field. It is her wish that all men should remain at her side and in her bosom; if it lay with her, none would become unworthy to abide under the shelter of that august mother, none would be cast out or suffered to depart from her calm retreat. But when heretics desert her or she expels them, the loss she endures, in that she cannot save them, is compensated by an increased assurance that she alone can offer bliss.

--St. Hilary of Poitiers, On the Trinity, 7, 4

QUOTATION: The Religious Life

All the helps afforded by the religious life share in the nobility of its end. All its graces are eminent. Only extraordinary graces are therein received. Everything in it elevates us to uncommon holiness, to eminent sanctity. In it we must be saints under penalty of being altogether unfaithful There is no middle course. Every religious is called to be a great saint, and the graces he receives are m proportion to this sublime vocation.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Vigilance

Since the rule of life which we have proposed includes so many counsels and so many virtues, and since our intelligence is incapable of embracing a multitude of things at one time, it will be well to apply ourselves to the practice of one virtue which, in a measure, comprehends the rest, or supplies for all that may be wanting to them. Such is the virtue of continual vigilance in all our words and actions.

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: The Gospel's Authority

But should you meet with a person not yet believing the Gospel, how would you reply to him were he to say, I do not believe? For my part, I should not believe the Gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.

--St. Augustine, Against the Epistle of Manichaeus Called Fundamental, Chapter 5.

QUOTATION: Protestant Tradition

Protestants, however much they may profess to deduce from Scripture, really do not, but colour their sense of the Scripture text by their own previous views, which they gained by what they learned at School. The present set of teachers have not in fact gained their views from a careful examination of the sacred text, but they teach what they were once taught, and those who taught them were taught by their own catechists, ministers, and school masters in turn, and they again by a former generation, and so back to the Reformation.

I don't mean to say that no individual examines Scripture for himself, but I am speaking of the mass of Protestants -- and even those who do examine to the best of their power cannot escape the bias of those impressions which were made on them by their parents, associates etc when they were young.

Thus, when Scripture says, 'Whoso eateth my flesh etc.' (John vi) they say 'This is a figure of speech etc., All sensible men are agreed on this --' that is to say, all Protestants. Scripture says 'The Church, the pillar and ground of the Truth,' and they say 'This means the Apostles and those who were about them.' Scripture says 'Anoint the sick with oil in the name of the Lord'; they say 'This was a temporary rite.' Who told them all this? they will say, 'It stands to reason' -- that means (in the case of most men,) 'I never heard any other interpretation -- any other seems to me strange;' of course, every thing is strange to those who are not accustomed to it. And so on.

. . . both Catholics and Protestants teach religion by a tradition, tho' Protestants cannot get themselves to acknowledge it . . . His reasonings which he teaches to the child are traditional and 'instilled,' as you truly say.

--Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman, The Letters and Diaries of John Henry Newman, Vol. XXVII, pp. 357-358

QUOTATION: Church Authority

Take away the authority of the Church, and neither Divine Revelation nor natural reason itself is of any use, for each of them may be interpreted by every individual according to his own caprice ... Do they not see that from this accursed liberty of conscience has arisen the immense variety of heretical and atheistic sects? ... I repeat: if you take away obedience to the Church, there is no error which will not be embraced.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: We Become What We Love

The will, on the contrary, when it loves anything above it in dignity goes out to meet the demands of whatever it loves. When the will loves anything that is below it in dignity, it degrades itself. Suppose the dominant love of man was money. Man would degrade himself by loving what is less worthy than himself. In loving it, he becomes like gold. If a man loves only lust, carnality, and the pleasure of the flesh above all things, he degrades his spirit to the sole level of sex. We become like that which we love. If we love what is base, we become base; but if we love what is noble, we become noble.

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

QUOTATION: Suffering with Our Lord

Those who have once been pierced with the thorns of the crown of our Lord, who is our head, can scarcely feel any other thorns.

--St. Francis de Sales, Consoling Thoughts

QUOTATION: Crosses

Carry your cross patiently, and it will be a light in your spiritual darkness, for the one who has never suffered trials is ignorant

--St. Louis de Montfort, Letter to the Friends of the Cross

QUOTATION: Communion

Among the gifts of grace which the soul receives in Holy Communion, there is one that must be counted among the highest; it is that Holy Communion does not permit the soul to remain long in sin, nor to obstinately persevere in it.

--St. Ignatius Loyola, Letter 34

QUOTATION: The Church

When the Church loses its missionary zeal, she goes from being Mother to being a babysitter

– Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Priests

Priests should be lions at the pulpit, and lambs in the confessional.

--St. Jean Vianney, the Curé of Ars

QUOTATION: Our Liberty Does Not Diminish God's Omnipotence

Although God gives us liberty, He does not mean to relinquish His rights over us. We belong to Him, we are His; and should we endeavor to free ourselves by disobedience, which is a true robbery of God's goods, a denial of His rights, we then declare war against God. God has then to declare anew His right to possession, and He does so by chastisement. Would He allow the revolt to go unpunished, He would no longer be God.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: The Consequences of Original Sin

 

If for some wrongdoing a man is deprived of some benefit once given to him, that he should lack that benefit is the punishment of his sin. Now in man s first creation he was divinely endowed with this advantage that, so long as his mind remained subject to God, the lower powers of his soul were subjected to the reason and the body was subjected to the soul. But because by sin man's mind moved away from its subjection to God, it followed that the lower parts of his mind ceased to be wholly subjected to the reason. From this there followed such a rebellion of the bodily inclination against the reason, that the body was no longer wholly subject to the soul. Whence followed death and all the bodily defects. For life and wholeness of body are bound up with this, that the body is wholly subject to the soul, as a thing which can be made perfect is subject to that which makes it perfect. So it comes about that, conversely, there are such things as death, sickness and every other bodily defect, for such misfortunes are bound up with an in complete subjection of body to soul.

--St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Penance

The sin which is not lightened by penance, soon, by its very weight, drags us to further sin.

--Pope St. Gregory the Great