QUOTATION: Love of Men

He has as yet no perfect love, whose disposition towards men depends on what they are like, loving one and despising another for this or that, or sometimes loving, sometimes hating one and the same man. Blessed is the man who can love all men equally.

--St Maximus the Confessor, First Century on Love

QUOTATION: The Eucharist

If the Eucharist is just a meal, then Calvary is just an execution.

--Dr. Scott Hahn

QUOTATION:Guilt

Guilt must not be allowed to fester in the silence of the soul, poisoning it from within. It needs to be confessed. Through confession we bring it into the light, we place it within Christ’s purifying love. In confession, the Lord washes our soiled feet over and over again and prepares us for table fellowship with him.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Sex

The moment sex ceases to be a servant it becomes a tyrant.

--G.K. Chesterton, St. Francis of Assisi 

QUOTATION: Worldliness

At issue here is the question: "To whom do I belong? God or to the world?" Many of my daily preoccupations suggest that I belong more to the world than to God. A little criticism makes me angry, and a little rejection makes me depressed. A little praise raises my spirits, and a little success excites me. It takes very little to raise me up or thrust me down. Often I am like a small boat on the ocean, completely at the mercy of its waves. All the time and energy I spend in keeping some kind of balance and preventing myself from being tipped over and drowning shows that my life is mostly a struggle for survival: not a holy struggle, but an anxious struggle resulting from the mistaken idea that it is the world that defines me.

--Henri Nouwen

QUOTATION: Bearing One's Cross

The whole cross borne in union with His will and following in His footsteps is easier to bear than the splinters against which we rebel.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, The Fifteen Mysteries

QUOTATION: God Doesn't Lose

Remember this and never forget it: even if it should seem at times that everything is collapsing, nothing is collapsing at all, because God doesn’t lose battles.

--St. Josemaria Escriva

QUOTATION: The Lack of Evangelization

A very wise priest once told me that we were facing a situation that is the complete opposite of the Parable of the Lost Sheep.  The shepherd had ninety-nine sheep in his flock and went out to search for the one that was lost; we have one in the flock and ninety-nine that we are not searching for.

--Pope Francis, Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words

QUOTATION: Despairing in Oneself

Beware of despairing about yourself; you are commanded to place your trust in God, and not in yourself.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Eucharistic Adoration

When you come before the Lord, talk to him if you can. If you can’t, just stay there, let yourself be seen. Don’t try too hard to do anything else.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Divine Mercy Created Saints

There are saints who are the work of divine mercy, and who became greater saints by the power of mercy and by the constant homage they afterward rendered to it, than they would have been by innocence and virginity. Witness Saint Peter, far greater, far more devoted after his sin than before, also Saint Paul and Saint Magdalen. Their sanctity was nourished on mercy, their tears were the food of their love.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Prayer

I guarantee you that after you die you will not say 'I spent too much time praying; I wish I had watched more TV instead.

--Peter Kreeft, Prayer for Beginners

QUOTATION: Religion

What people don’t realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross. It is much harder to believe than not to believe.

--Flannery O'Connor

QUOTATION: The Nature of Sin

All these evils in which I see and in which I partake are the fruit of sin. They would not have been, had we not sinned. They are but the first installment of the punishment of sin. They are an imperfect and dim image of what sin is. Sin is infinitely worse than famine, than war, than pestilence. Take the most hideous of diseases, under which the body wastes away and corrupts, the blood is infected; the head, the heart, the lungs, every organ disordered, the nerves unstrung and shattered; pain in every limb, thirst restlessness, delirium — all is nothing compared to that dreadful sickness of the soul which we call sin. They all are the effects of it, they are shadows of it, but nothing more.

--Blessed John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: Conscience

It is well known that our conscience not only decides whether our actions are good or bad but also approves or disapproves of us.  When it disapproves it chastises and torments us with pangs of remorse.  And this is the fundamental temporal punishment within the purifying function willed by God.  Our pangs of conscience are a form of suffering that purifies.  They are more far-reaching in their inward effect than any temporal chastisement; for not only does a man really experience within himself the malice of sin, crime, injustice, injury, but he is also able to set himself free from it again --  an inner liberation but nonetheless a real one.

--Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, (Pope St. John Paul II), Sign of Contradiction, 1977

QUOTATION: Saints

The saint is often a martyr; he is mistaken for a poison because he is an antidote. He will generally be found restoring the world to sanity by exaggerating whatever the world neglects, which is by no means always the same element in every age.

 
--G.K. Chesterton,  St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: The World's Love

As long as I keep running about asking: "Do you love me? Do you really love me?" I give all power to the voices of the world and put myself in bondage because the world is filled with "ifs." The world says: "Yes, I love you if you are good-looking, intelligent, and wealthy. I love you if you have a good education, a good job, and good connections. I love you if you produce much, sell much, and buy much." There are endless "ifs" hidden in the world's love. These "ifs" enslave me, since it is impossible to respond adequately to all of them. The world's love is and always will be conditional. As long as I keep looking for my true self in the world of conditional love, I will remain "hooked" to the world-trying, failing,and trying again. It is a world that fosters addictions because what it offers cannot satisfy the deepest craving of my heart.

-- Henri Nouwen

QUOTATION: Venial Sin

Live, then, in this disposition of enduring everything, of allowing yourself to be despoiled of everything, to be ready to beg your bread barefoot, rather than consent to a venial sin.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Two Types of People in the World

I believe that there are only two classes of people in the world: those who are on the Cross with Christ, and those who are beneath it to harangue Him. Those who are on the Cross, even by sympathy, like His Blessed Mother, are those who suffer. Take, for example, the hungry, a large percentage of the population of the world. They are on the Cross. They may not know it, but that is the way they will be saved. Then there are the others who are beneath it saying…Come down and we will believe.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Crosses

Our Lord never promised that we would be without a cross; He only promised that we would never be overcome by it.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, The Fifteen Mysteries

QUOTATION: Serving God

No one can serve God perfectly who does not try energetically to break the bonds of the world and rise above all earthly cares.

--St. Bonaventure

QUOTATION: Christianity

Christianity does not exist without a Cross. There is no possibility to exit from our sins ourselves.

--Pope Francis, Homily, April 8, 2014

QUOTATION: Suffering

Let us understand that God is a physician, and that suffering is a medicine for salvation, not a punishment for damnation.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Venial Sins

If we have never sinned mortally, God's mercy in pardoning us our venial sins is not less. It is always the fruit of Jesus' blood. And then we renew them so often that God has to exercise it incessantly, while the occasions of mortal sin are rarer. Besides, when we sin venially, we are in His friendship, and we afflict His Heart and His love in the tenderest point.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Obedience Training

If you would acquire a ready obedience to superiors, accustom yourself to yield to your equals, giving way to their opinions where nothing wrong is involved, without arguing or peevishness; and adapt yourself easily to the wishes of your inferiors as far as you reasonably can, and avoid the exercise of stern authority so long as they do well.

--St. Francis de Sales

QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

The medievals loved to say that God wrote two books: nature and Scripture. And since he is the author of both books, and since this Teacher never contradicts himself, these two books never contradict each other. And since this God who never contradicts himself also gave us the two truth detectors, faith and reason, it follows that faith and reason, properly used, never contradict each other. Therefore, all heresies are contrary to reason. Not all the truths of faith can be proved by reason, but all arguments against the truths of faith can be disproved by reason.

--Peter Kreeft, Socrates Meets Jesus: History's Greatest Questioner Confronts the Claims of Christ

QUOTATION: Worthiness

You don’t have to be worthy, you only have to be willing.

--St. Padre Pio

QUOTATION: What God is Like

Without God, we can do nothing. But without us, God will do nothing.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Faith

Many a man likes to be religious in graceful language; he loves religious tales and hymns, yet is never the better Christian for all this. The works of every day, these are the tests of our glorious contemplations, whether or not they shall be available to our salvation; and he who does one deed of obedience for Christ's sake, let him have no imagination and no fine feeling, is a better man, and returns to his home justified rather than the most eloquent speaker, and the most sensitive hearer, of the glory of the Gospel, if such men do not practise up to their knowledge.

--Blessed Cardinal John Henry Newman

QUOTATION: Face-Saving Persecution

We are living in an age in which the whole world proclaims freedom of conscience and religious freedom, and also in an age in which the battle against religion - defined as "the opium of the people" - is being fought in such a way as to avoid, as far as possible, making any new martyrs.  And so the programme for today is one of face-saving persecution: persecution is declared non-existent and full religious freedom is declared assured.  What is more, this programme has succeeded in giving many people the impression that it is on the side of Lazarus against the rich man, that it is therefore  on the same side as Christ, whereas in fact it is above all against Christ.

--Cardinal Karol Wojtyla, (Pope St. John Paul II), Sign of Contradiction, 1977

QUOTATION: Clergy Must Be Ministers of Mercy

The Church has sometimes locked itself up in excessive attention to detail, in small-minded rules. The most important thing is the first proclamation: Jesus Christ has saved you. And the ministers of the Church must be ministers of mercy above all. The confessor, for example, is always in danger of being either too much a rigorist or too lax. Neither are merciful, because neither of these roles really takes responsibility for the person. The rigorist washes his hands and leaves it to the commandment. The lenient minister washes his hands by simply saying ‘This is not a sin’, or something similar. In pastoral ministry we must accompany people, and we must heal their wounds.

--Pope Francis, My Door is Always Open: a Conversation on Faith, Hope and the Church in a Time of Change

QUOTATION: Sexual Morality

All questions of sexual morality come down to one basic question: Is this act an authentic sign of God’s free, total faithful, fruitful love or is it not? Is it is not, then it is a counterfeit to the love we really desire. We must be courageous enough not to settle for counterfeit loves.

--Christopher West,  An Introduction to the Theology of the Body

QUOTATION: The Spiritual Life

A spiritual life without prayer is like the Gospel without Christ.

--Henri Nouwen