QUOTATION: Communism

A bishop can attach himself to communism only at the expense of his own cause.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty

QUOTATION: Hell

If there were such a thing as a loneliness that could no longer be penetrated and transformed by the word of another; if a state of abandonment were to arise that was so deep that no "You" could reach into it any more, then we should have real, total loneliness and dreadfulness, what theology calls "hell".

--Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1968

QUOTATION: Final Impenitence

A very probable position, upheld by many theologians, is that God will not let die in sin those who have committed only one mortal sin, especially if there is a question of a sin of frailty. Final impenitence would thus be restricted to inveterate sinners. 

 --Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting

QUOTATION: Inequality of the Sexes?

People talk with a quite astonishing gravity about the inequality or equality of the sexes; as if there could possibly be any inequality between a lock and a key…A woman is only inferior to man in the matter of being not so manly; she is inferior in nothing else. Man is inferior to woman in so far as he is not a woman; there is no other reason.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: The Unborn Jesus

Even from the womb of Mary, Jesus Christ accepted obediently the sacrifice which his Father had desired him to make, even his Passion and death : Becoming obedient unto death. So that even from the womb of Mary he foresaw the scourges and presented to them his flesh; he foresaw the thorns, and presented to them his head; he foresaw the blows, and presented to them his cheeks; he foresaw the nails, and presented to them his hands and his feet ; he foresaw the cross, and offered his life. Hence it is true that even from his earliest infancy our blessed Redeemer every moment of his life suffered a continual martyrdom ; and he offered it every moment for us to his eternal Father.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ

QUOTATION: Prayer

If you want to pray better, you must pray more.

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, No Greater Love

QUOTATION: Why Dread the Cross?

Why, then, do you dread to take His Cross, since it is the very way to the kingdom of heaven, and there is no other way? In the Cross is health, in the Cross is life; in the Cross is the fullness of heavenly sweetness; in the Cross is strength of mind, joy of spirit, height of virtue, full perfection of all holiness, and there is no help for the soul, or hope of everlasting life, save through the virtue of the Cross.

--Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ

QUOTATION: How Prayer Can Solve Your Doubt

I will give, for the sake of illustration, some instances in detail of one particular fault of mind, which among others a habit of prayer is calculated to cure.

For instance; many a man seems to have no grasp at all of doctrinal truth. He cannot get himself to think it of importance what a man believes, and what not. He tries to do so; for a time he does; he does for a time think that a certain faith is necessary for salvation, that certain doctrines are to be put forth and maintained in charity to the souls of men. Yet though he thinks so one day, he changes the next; he holds the truth, and then lets it go again. He is filled with doubts; suddenly the question crosses him, "Is it possible that such and such a doctrine is necessary?" and he relapses into an uncomfortable sceptical state, out of which there is no outlet. Reasonings do not convince him; he cannot be convinced; he has no grasp of truth. Why? Because the next world is not a reality to him; it only exists in his mind in the form of certain conclusions from certain reasonings. It is but an inference; and never can be more, never can be present to his mind, until he acts, instead of arguing. Let him but act as if the next world were before him; let him but give himself to such devotional exercises as we ought to observe in the presence of an Almighty, All-holy, and All-merciful God, and it will be a rare case indeed if his difficulties do not vanish.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Moral Effects of Communion with God”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 4

QUOTATION: The Child About to Be Aborted

Every child that isn't born, but is unjustly condemned to be aborted, has the face of Jesus Christ, has the face of the Lord.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: The People Who Crucified Our Lord

And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His death, were converts drawn from thieves and prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community—the worldly, prosperous people, the men of big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the “civic minded” individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such men as these opposed Him and sent Him to his death. Why did they hate Him? Because, all during His life, He had been tearing the masks of false goodness from nice people, exposing the evil of men and women who lived in accordance with the conventional standards of His time. Finally a time came when the accused could no longer tolerate His reproaches of what they were. Our Lord was crucified by the nice people who held that religion was alright in its place, so long as its place was not here, where it might demand of them a change of heart. The cross of Calvary stands at the crossroads of three prosperous civilizations as eloquent testimony to the uncomfortable truth that the successful people, the social leaders, the people who are labeled nice are the ones most capable of crucifying the Divine Truth and the Eternal Love.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: The World Won't Let You Win

It is true, Philothea, that if we consent to laugh, play, or dance with the world in order to be agreeable, the world will be scandalized at us. If we do not, it will accuse us of hypocrisy or melancholy. If we dress well, the world will attribute it to some design; if we neglect our dress, it will impute it to meanness of heart. Our good humour will be termed a dissoluteness and our mortification sullenness. The world thus looks upon us with an evil eye, and we can never be agreeable to it. It exaggerates our imperfections and proclaims that they are sins, turns our venial sins into mortal and our sins of weakness into sins of malice.

--St. Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life

QUOTATION: An Example of Christ's Patience and Humility

To accomplish the Will of His heavenly Father, the Infant Christ, with the full use of every faculty, consented to be enclosed for nine months in the dark prison of His Mother's womb. Other infants feel not this privation as they have not the use of reason, but Christ had the use of reason and must have dreaded the confinement in the narrow womb, even of her whom He had chosen to be His Mother. Through obedience to His Father, and from the love He bore to man, He overcame this dread, and the Church says: "When Thou didst take upon Thee to deliver Man, Thou didst not abhor the Virgin's womb." Again, our dear Lord needed no small amount of patience and humility, to assume the manners and the weaknesses of a child, when He was not only wiser than Solomon, but was the Man " in Whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge."

--St. Robert Bellarmine, The Seven Words on the Cross

QUOTATION: Communism

In every social class there are compassionate people who take the side of the poor and the suffering and who desire a just social order. Such people often become unwittingly the henchmen of the Communists. Their cooperation yields propagandistic gains for the Marxist movement. Often such sympathizer are won over by Communism's empty promises of equality,  the elimination of all earthly misery, the welfare state, and a happy, classless society in a free world. But the Communist ideology can achieve lasting effects only where the religious foundations of a nation have been undermined so that reason, faith in God, and morality do not offer sufficient resistence to such ideas.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Memoirs, 1974

QUOTATION: Overcoming Existential Fear

When a child has to walk through the woods in the dark, he feels frightened however convincingly he has been shown that there is no reason at all to be frightened. As soon as he is alone in the darkness, and thus has the experience of utter loneliness, fear arises, the fear peculiar to man, which is not fear of anything in particular but simply fear in itself. Fear of a particular thing is basically harmless; it can be removed by taking away the thing concerned. For example, if someone is afraid of a vicious dog, the matter can be swiftly settled by putting the dog on a chain. Here we come up against something much deeper, namely, the fact that where man falls into extreme loneliness he is not afraid of anything definite that could be explained away; on the contrary, he experiences the fear of loneliness, the uneasiness and vulnerability of his own nature, something that cannot be overcome by rational means. Let us take another example. If someone has to keep watch alone in a room with a dead person, he will always feel his position to be somehow or other eerie, even if  he is unwilling to admit it to himself and is capable of explaining to himself rationally the groundlessness of his fear. He knows perfectly well in his own mind that the corpse can do him no harm and that his position might be more dangerous if the person concerned were still alive. What arises here is a completely different kind of fear, not fear of anything in particular, but, in being alone with death, the eerieness of loneliness in itself, the exposed nature of existence. How then, we must ask, can such fear be overcome if proof of its groundlessness has no effect? Well, the child will lose his fear the moment there is a hand there to take him and lead him and a voice to talk to him; at the moment therefore at which he experiences the fellowship of a loving human being. Similarly, he who is alone with the corpse will feel the bout of fear recede when there is a human being with him, when he experiences the nearness of a "you". This conquest of fear reveals at the same time once again the nature of the fear; that it is the fear of loneliness, the anxiety of a being that can only live with a fellow being. The fear peculiar to man cannot be overcome by reason but only by the presence of someone who loves him.

--Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1968

QUOTATION: Humility

Not by humiliations alone will you obtain humility; but above all by prayer and by attaining to self-knowledge.

--St. Mary Euphrasia Pelletier, Conferences and Instructions

QUOTATION: Prayer

Perfect prayer does not consist in many words, but in the fervour of the desire which raises the heart to Jesus.

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, No Greater Love

QUOTATION: On the Meaning of the Name 'Judas'

Judas means 'confessor.' Luke the Evangelist numbers both “Judas the son of James and Judas Iscariot” among the twelve apostles. Since two of Christ’s disciples were given this same name and since there can be no meaningless symbol in the Christian mystery, I am convinced that the two Judases represent two distinct types of confessing Christians. The first, symbolized by Judas the son of James, perseveres in remaining faithful to Christ. The second type, however, after once believing and professing faith in Christ, then abandons him out of greed. He defects to the heretics and to the false priests of the Jews, that is, to counterfeit Christians, and (insofar as he is able) delivers Christ, the 'Word of truth,' over to them to be crucified and destroyed. This type of Christian is represented by Judas Iscariot, who 'went out to the chief priests' and agreed on a price for betraying Christ.

--Origen

QUOTATION: God Knows What's Good for Us

It is certain that God desires that which is most advantageous to us much more than we desire it ourselves. He knows better than we by what means that which is best for us must arrive. The choice of means is entirely in His hands, since it is He who disposes and regulates all things in the world. With perfect trust in God, let us say: "Thy will be done!"

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: The Church is Indestructible

Many forces have tried, and still do, to destroy the Church, from without as well as within, but they themselves are destroyed and the Church remains alive and fruitful.

--Pope Francis, Homily, June 29, 2015

QUOTATION: Our Lord's Indignation

Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were saved for those who had sinned and had not been found out. That was why He said to the woman taken in sin, “he that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her” (John 8:7). Only innocence has a right to condemn. He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traders. They were everybody’s target and everybody knew that they were wrong.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: How to Have Enough

There are two ways to get enough. One is to continue to accumulate more and more. The other is to desire less.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: The Eucharist

Those who feed on Christ in the Eucharist need not wait until the hereafter to receive eternal life: they already possess it on earth, as the first-fruits of a future fullness which will embrace man in his totality.

--Pope St. John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 18

QUOTATION: Excessive Self-Criticism by Catholics

The excesses of modern "self-criticism" often serve only the interests of our bitter enemies.

--Cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, Memoirs, 1974

QUOTATION: Sacrifice

Christian sacrifice does not consist in a giving of what God would not have without us but in our becoming totally receptive and letting ourselves be completely taken over him. Letting God act on us-- that is Christian sacrifice.

--Cardinal Josef Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Introduction to Christianity, 1968

QUOTATION: Contrition at Death

Just souls surprised by death, for example, during sleep, or at a moment when they do not have sufficient control of reason, were not able at the last moment to make an act of contrition, a meritorious act which would have obtained the remission of venial sins. Such sins are remitted to them by the act of charity and contrition which they make immediately after death, at the moment of the particular judgment. This act indeed is no longer meritorious. But it is an act of charity and contrition which suffices to remit venial sins, though the soul must still endure the suffering due to these faults. Such is the teaching of St. Thomas, admitted also by Suarez, and by the generality of theologians.

This doctrine is very probable. Nothing prevents the separated soul from making at once an act of repentance. It is no longer hindered by the passions. General contrition would suffice for the remission of these sins. But, under the light of the particular judgment, the soul sees all its sins singly and consequently repents of each singly. This is a wonderful complement of the act of contrition made on earth, although that complement is not meritorious. Certainly it is better to make this act of contrition before death. To sacrifice life in union with the Masses celebrated at the moment of death would have been meritorious. But, while it is not now meritorious, it obtains the remission of venial sins. Such a soul is a saint, because all its venial sins are at once remitted, and it can no longer sin. This is truly a beautiful doctrine.

--Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting

QUOTATION: Error

Error, indeed is never set forth in its naked deformity, lest, being thus exposed, it should at once be detected. But it is craftily decked out in an attractive dress, so as, by its outward form, to make it appear to the inexperienced more true than truth itself.

--St. Irenaeus

QUOTATION: Jesus' Life of Humility

Jesus Christ, by choosing for himself so humble a birth, so despicable a life, and so ignominious a death, has ennobled and taken away all bitterness from contempt and opprobrium. It is for this that the saints in this world were always so fond and even desirous of being despised; they seemed not to be able to desire or seek for anything but to be despised and trodden underfoot for the love of Jesus Christ.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Incarnation, Birth and Infancy of Jesus Christ 

QUOTATION: Sharing the Faith

A Hindu gentleman once asked me, very big high official: "Aren't you anxious to convert us all?" And I said, "Naturally, the treasure that I have, Jesus, naturally, I want to share it with you, but conversion has to come from Him. Mine is to help you do works of love, and then through these works of love naturally you come face to face with God, and it is between you that that treasure, His love, is exchanged. And then you are either converted, you accept God in your life, or you don't.

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Where There is Love, There is God, Brian Kolodiejchuk, M.C., Ed.

QUOTATION: The Intercession of the Blessed Virgin Mary

Remember that we sometimes obtain help by invoking the name of the Virgin Mother sooner than if we had invoked the Name of the Lord Jesus, her only Son, and this not because she is greater or more powerful than He, nor because He is great and powerful through her, but she is so through Him. How is it then that we obtain assistance sooner by invoking her than by invoking her Son? I say that I think this is so, and my reason is that her Son is the Lord and Judge of all, and is able to discern the merits of each.

Consequently when His Name is invoked by any one, He may justly turn a deaf ear to the entreaty, but if the name of His Mother is invoked, even supposing that the merits of the supplicant do not entitle him to be heard, still the merits of the Mother of God are such that her Son cannot refuse to listen to her prayer.

--St. Anselm of Canterbury.

QUOTATION: Generosity

We have a nation of go-getters. I want a nation of go-givers.

--Peter Maurin

QUOTATION: No Closed-In Churches!

Whenever Christians are enclosed in their groups, parishes, and movements. If a Christian goes to the streets, or to the outskirts, he or she may risk the same thing that can happen to anyone out there: an accident. How often we have seen accidents on the road! But I am telling you: I would prefer a thousand times over a bruised Church to an ill Church! A Church, a catechist, with the courage to risk going out, and not a catechist who is studious, who knows everything but is always closed—such a person is not well.

--Pope Francis, Address to the Participants at the International Congress on Catechesis, September 27, 2013.

QUOTATION: The Unforgivable Sin

The really unforgivable sin is the denial of sin, because, by its nature, there is now nothing to be forgiven.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949