QUOTATION: Contraception and Abortion

We need to realize that a society in which contraceptives are widely used is going to have a very difficult time keeping free of abortions since the lifestyles and attitudes that contraception fosters create an alleged 'need' for abortion.

--Janet Smith

QUOTATION: Learning to Become Catholic

Discovering the Church is apt to be a slow procedure but it can only take place if you have a free mind and no vested interest in disbelief.

--Flannery O’Connor

QUOTATION: Faith

But just as a person becomes certain of another’s love without being able to subject it to the methods of scientific experiment, so in the contact between God and Man there is a certainty of a quite different kind from the certainty of objectivizing thought. We live faith, not as a hypothesis, but as the certainty on which our life is based. If two people regard their love merely as a hypothesis that is constantly in need of new verification, they destroy love in that way. It is contradicted in its essence if one tries to make it something one can grasp in one’s hand. By then it has already been destroyed. Perhaps so many relationships break down today because we are aware of the certainty only of the verified hypothesis and do not admit the ultimate validity of anything not scientifically proved. Thus, the essential phenomena of human life escapes us, with their different kind of certainty, which is in truth far higher. God, most of all, cannot be objectified as if he were a thing on a lower level than we are, which we could squeeze into our hand or into our apparatus.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “Faith and Theology”, Address on the occasion of the conferring of an honorary doctorate of theology by the Theological Faculty of Wroclaw/Breslau, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: Sex

God, and not a boundless search for ‘pleasure,’ should always be king of the bedroom.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: The Indissolubility of Marriage

Marital love is not defended primarily by presenting indissolubility as a duty, or by repeating doctrine, but by helping it to grow ever stronger under the impulse of grace.

--Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, 134

QUOTATION: Crosses

That we are generally the carpenters of our own crosses is a truth sadly easier to recognize in others than in ourselves.

--St. Philip Neri

QUOTATION: The Poor

Those who cannot see the face of Christ in the poor are atheists indeed. 

--Dorothy Day

QUOTATION: Conversion

Every conversion starts with a crisis: with a moment or a situation involving some kind of suffering, physical, moral, or spiritual; with a dialectic, a tension, a pull, a duality, or a conflict. This crisis is also accompanied, on the one hand, by a profound sense of one’s own helplessness and, on the other hand, by an equally certain conviction that God alone can supply what the individual lacks.

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

QUOTATION: The Limits of Science

Though unscientific thought may be inferior by scientific standards, science itself can’t prove whether or not there are other standards by which other kinds of thought might be superior.

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist,  2014

QUOTATION: Occasions of Sin

Avoid idleness, dissipated companions, immodest conversations, and, more than all, evil occasions, especially where there is danger of incontinency; and for this reason one cannot be too cautious in keeping one's eyes from dwelling on any dangerous objects. For a person that does not avoid the voluntary occasions of sin, especially those which have frequently proved fatal to his innocence, it is morally impossible to persevere in the grace of God: He that loves the danger shall perish in it.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Way of Salvation and Perfection

QUOTATION: Repent While You Can

Never suffer sin to remain upon you; let it not grow old in you; wipe it off while it is fresh, else it will stain; let it not get ingrained; let it not eat its way in, and rust in you. It is of a consuming nature; it is like a canker; it will eat your flesh. I say, beware, my brethren, of suffering sin in yourselves, and this for a great many reasons. First, if for no other than this, you will forget you have committed it, and never repent of it at all. Repent of it while you know it; let it not be wiped from your memory without being first wiped away from your soul. What may be the state of our souls from the accumulating arrears of the past! Alas! what difficulties we have involved ourselves in, without knowing it.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Transgressions and Infirmities”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5

QUOTATION: Taking Up the Cross

Whoever from deep within her noble and zealous heart wishes to take up the cross through Jesus Christ our savior who died on the field of battle in order to give us life, let her first take up the arms necessary for such battles and especially those which are treated next in order: first is diligence; second, distrust of self; third, confidence in God; fourth, memory of his passion; fifth, memory of one’s own death, sixth, memory of the glory of God; seventh and last, the authority of Holy Scripture as it gives the example of Christ Jesus in the desert.

--St. Catherine of Bologna, The Seven Spiritual Weapons

QUOTATION: Justice and Mercy

Justice without mercy is cruelty. Mercy without justice is the mother of all dissolution.

--St. Thomas Aquinas

QUOTATION: Communion

Make no mistake, my brothers, if anyone joins a schismatic he will not inherit God’s Kingdom. If anyone walks in the way of heresy, he is out of sympathy with the Passion. Be careful, then, to observe a single Eucharist. For there is one flesh of our Lord, Jesus Christ, and one cup of his blood that makes us one, and one altar, just as there is one bishop along with the presbytery and the deacons, my fellow slaves. In that way whatever you do is in line with God’s will.

--St. Ignatius of Antioch

QUOTATION: Christianity

Christianity is not a highly complicated collection of so many dogmas that it is impossible for anyone to know them all; it is not something exclusively for academicians who can study these things, but it is something simple: God exists and God is close in Jesus Christ.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Questions and Answers, 2008

QUOTATION: Private Judgement

Wherefore, let the faithful also be on their guard against the overrated independence of private judgment and that false autonomy of human reason. For it is quite foreign to everyone bearing the name of a Christian to trust his own mental powers with such pride as to agree only with those things which he can examine from their inner nature, and to imagine that the Church, sent by God to teach and guide all nations, is not conversant with present affairs and circumstances; or even that they must obey only in those matters which she has decreed by solemn definition as though her other decisions might be presumed to be false or putting forward insufficient motive for truth and honesty. Quite to the contrary, a characteristic of all true followers of Christ, lettered or unlettered, is to suffer themselves to be guided and led in all things that touch upon faith or morals by the Holy Church of God through its Supreme Pastor the Roman Pontiff, who is himself guided by Jesus Christ Our Lord.

--Pope Pius XI, Casti Connubii, 104

QUOTATION: Love in Marriage

Our teaching on marriage and the family cannot fail to be inspired and transformed by this message of love and tenderness; otherwise, it becomes nothing more than the defence of a dry and lifeless doctrine.

--Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, 59

QUOTATION: Learning to Pray

A most excellent means of learning how to pray? Acknowledge that we are unworthy to pray, and so place our efforts entirely in the hands of the Lord.

--St. Philip Neri

QUOTATION: After Death

We must now recall briefly, first what we have said above on the nature of knowledge in the separated soul; secondly, on particular judgment.

These souls, since they have their bodies no longer, cannot exercise the operations of sense-life. But they do retain and can exercise the superior faculties of intellect and will. They carry with them all their knowledge and all their virtues, theological and moral, but they must exercise these possessions without the support of the imagination.

This preternatural mode of being is accompanied by a preternatural mode of acting. Infused ideas enable them to know the singular in the universal, in particular to know persons remaining on earth with whom they have a special relation.

Further, they see themselves intuitively, as the angels do. Hence they know very clearly their own spirituality, immortality, liberty. In themselves, as in a mirror, they have perfect natural knowledge of God, the author of their nature. And they know one another.

The particular judgment, we have said, comes at the very instant of separation from the body. This instant terminates merit and demerit. The sentence of judgment, in the form of an intellectual illumination, covers their entire terrestrial life, and is therefore definitive.

--Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, Life Everlasting

QUOTATION: Death

Death is God’s necessary gift to a universe in which evil has been let loose.

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

QUOTATION: Science Does Not Disprove the Supernatural

How could science, which validly explores the physical universe and only the physical universe, possibly prove either that there is or that there is not something else real besides the physical universe? It has no data beyond scientific data. It can’t, by its very nature. Saying there are no souls “science sees no souls” is like saying there can be no souls because souls do not leave fossils or emit radiation. It’s a really simple point: How could a fish whose experience is confined to its fishbowl know  whether there’s world outside the fishbowl?

--Peter Kreeft, Letters to an Atheist, 2014

QUOTATION: Occasions of Sin

Avoid idleness, dissipated companions, immodest conversations, and, more than all, evil occasions, especially where there is danger of incontinency; and for this reason one cannot be too cautious in keeping one's eyes from dwelling on any dangerous objects. For a person that does not avoid the voluntary occasions of sin, especially those which have frequently proved fatal to his innocence, it is morally impossible to persevere in the grace of God: He that loves the danger shall perish in it.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Way of Salvation and Perfection

QUOTATION: Hating Sin

The common mode of reasoning adopted by the religion of the day is this: some sins are compatible with true faith, viz. sins of infirmity; therefore, wilful transgression, or what the text calls "departing" from God, is compatible with it also. Men do not, and say they cannot, draw the line; and thus, from putting up with small sins, they go on to a sufferance of greater sins. Well, I would take the reverse way, and begin at the other end. I would force upon men's notice that there are sins which do forfeit grace; and then if, as is objected, that we cannot draw the line between one kind of sin and another, this very circumstance will make us shrink not only from transgressions, but also from infirmities. From hatred and abhorrence of large sins, we shall, please God, go on to hate and abhor the small.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Transgressions and Infirmities”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5

QUOTATION: Doing Too Much

When the enemy sees that he cannot impede the servant of Christ from doing good, he will seek to entice her with doing too much.

--St. Catherine of Bologna, The Seven Spiritual Weapons

QUOTATION: A Child is a Gift

If a child comes into this world in unwanted circumstances, the parents and other members of the family must do everything possible to accept that child as a gift from God and assume the responsibility of accepting him or her with openness and affection.

--Pope Francis, Amoris Laetitia, 166

QUOTATION: Religion

Together with the works of mercy, feeding, clothing, and sheltering our brothers, we must indoctrinate. We must "give reason for the faith that is in us"...otherwise our religion is an opiate, for ourselves alone, for our comfort or for our individual safety or indifferent custom.

--Dorothy Day 

QUOTATION: The Pope

He is insane who rises or acts contrary to the Vicar who holds the Blood of Christ crucified. Even if he was a demon incarnate, I should not raise my head against him, but always grovel and ask for the Blood out of mercy.... God wants neither you nor anyone else to set themselves up as a righter of the wrongs of His ministers.

--St. Catherine of Siena, Letters, Vol. 1, letter #28

QUOTATION: Euthanasia

I have always been mystified how so many libertarians, who do not trust the government to pick up garbage, trust the authorities to create a system in which doctors get to murder their patients.

--Charles Lewis, “Autonomy’s Open Road”, National Catholic Register, June 9th, 2016.

QUOTATION: No Private Religion

Is it consistent to profess our beliefs in church on Sunday, and then during the week to promote business practices or medical procedures contrary to those beliefs? … Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted. Only when their faith permeates every aspect of their lives do Christians become truly open to the transforming power of the Gospel.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Priests

I cannot understand why some priests are so eager to be indistinguishable from other Christians, forgetting or neglecting their specific mission in the Church, that for which they have been ordained. They seem to think that Christians want to see the priest as just another man. That is not so. They want to find in the priest those virtues proper to every Christian man and, indeed, every honorable man: understanding, justice, a life of work -- priestly work in this instance -- and good manners.

--St. Josemaria Escriva, "A Priest Forever", In Love with the Church.