QUOTATION: The Awesome Eucharist

Awe is a fundamental condition for celebrating the Eucharist correctly, and the very fact that God becomes so small, so humble, puts himself at our mercy, and puts himself into our hands should magnify our awe and ought not to tempt us to thoughtlessness and vainglory.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “Eucharist and Mission”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: God's Judgement

The main reason why the just themselves will fear while awaiting the Last Judgment is that we will have to give an account not only of the idle words we have spoken, as Jesus Christ says in the Gospel, but even of the good works we have performed, according to what God declares through the Royal Prophet: I will judge justices, meaning all the good that we have accomplished during our life. He will probe it to see if it was truly good and whether anything defective can be found in it. Who of us, then, will not fear God’s judgment?

--St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle, Meditations 

QUOTATION: Life with God

Life with God is not immunity from difficulties, but Peace in difficulties.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Inner Peace

True peace is born of the tranquility of order, wherein the senses are subject to the reason, the reason to faith, and the whole personality to the Will of God. The true peace that follows conversion is deepened, not disturbed, by the crosses, checks, and disquietudes of the world, for they are welcomed as coming from the hands of the Loving Father. This true peace can never come from adjustment to the world, for if the world is wicked, adjustments to wickedness make us worse. IT comes only from identification of one’s own will with the Will of God.

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

QUOTATION: Faith and Reason

Faith is not fearful of reason; on the contrary, it seeks and trusts reason, since “the light of reason and the light of faith both come from God” and cannot contradict each other.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Religious Extremism

To push piety to the point of superstition is to destroy it. To push orthodoxy to the point of religious purism is also to destroy it.

--Henri de Lubac

QUOTATION: To Surrender Oneself to God

To surrender oneself is more than to devote oneself, more than to give oneself, it is even something more than to abandon oneself to God. In a word, to surrender oneself is to die to everything and to self, to be no longer concerned with self except to keep it continually turned toward God.

--St. Marie-Victoire Couderc

QUOTATION: Communion

If you are sinful, repent so that you can communicate often. If you are imperfect, go often to Communion that you may amend your faults.

--St. Claude de la Colombiere

QUOTATION: Preparation of Death

The Lord does not say that we must prepare ourselves when death comes upon us, but that death, when it comes, must find us prepared.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death 

QUOTATION: Enemies of Religious Freedom

The worst enemies of religious freedom aren’t 'out there' among the critics who hate Christ or the Gospel or the Church, or all three. The worst enemies are in here, with us — all of us, clergy, religious and lay — when we live our faith with tepidness, cheap compromises, fear, routine, and hypocrisy.

--Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: Raising the Abortion Issue

When we try to raise the [abortion] issue and press for resolution, we find obstacles at every turn:

• When we speak about abortion in church, we’re told it’s too political.
• When we speak about it in the political arena, we’re told it’s too religious.
• When we try to raise the issue in the media, we’re told it is too disturbing.
• When we dare speak of it in the world of business, we are told it is too distracting.
• When we try to introduce it in a classroom, we are told it’s too controversial.
• When we take our message to the streets, we are told it is too disruptive.

So if abortion is wrong, where do we go to say so? We go where the opposition does not want us to: into the churches, into politics, into the media, into the business world, into education, and into the streets!

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion 

QUOTATION: No Mary, No Jesus

Without Mary, we shall not find Jesus, for she possesses Him in her heart. There He takes His delight, and they who wish to know His inmost virtues, His sacred and privileged love, must seek them in the heart of Mary. They who love that good Mother will find Jesus in her pure heart.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard, Month of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament

QUOTATION: Self-Definition

Man’s promethean attempts to break out of his limitations himself, to build with his own capacities the tower by which he may mount up to divinity, always necessarily end in collapse and disappointment – indeed, in despair.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “Eucharist and Mission”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: The Role of Angels

The holy Guardian Angels are not satisfied with illuminating the mind of those under their guidance with the light needed to know God’s will for them and to be saved. They also inspire their charges and procure for them the means to do the good that is proper to them. God uses the angels not only to deliver those entrusted to them from the powers of darkness and make them grow in the knowledge of God but also to help them lead a life worthy of God, so that they will be pleasing to him in every way and produce good works of every sort. The angels are zealous for the good of those in their care, because of the commission they have received from God, the Father of light and of all good. They contribute, as far as they are able, to make those in their care worthy to share the lot of the saints. You share in the ministry of the Guardian Angels by making known to children the truths of the Gospel, which you have been chosen by God to announce. You must teach them how to put these truths into practice, and you must have very great zeal to procure their accomplishment of this practice.

--St. John Baptist de La Salle, Meditations for the Time of Retreat

QUOTATION: Contemplation

As it is better to give than to receive, so it is better to share the fruit of one’s contemplation than merely to contemplate.

--St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica,  

QUOTATION: Conscience

Before conversion, conscience seemed to be a restraining, coercive power; God was a hostile and exacting judge; the commandments were prohibitions: and the Church was an inhibition. Responsibilities were identified with obligation; duty was seen as opposed to desire; the morally right was identified with the physically unpleasant; and love was opposed to morality. But after conversion the conscience no longer accuses; it never seems to command, or order, or inhibit, because there are no longer two wills in opposition. The will of the convert is the will of God. There is no need for a conscience to tell him what “ought to be done.” Conscience is swallowed up in love, and there is no duty or “must” between lovers.

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

QUOTATION: Mysticism

A religion without mystics is a philosophy.

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Liturgical Music

All social change is preceded by musical revolution. The same goes for liturgy. We are what and how we sing.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Death

Nothing is more certain that death, nothing is more uncertain that its hour.

--St. Anselm, Meditations, 7.

QUOTATION: The relation of the Father to the Son

God is therefore truly the Father, inasmuch as He is Father of truth; He does not create the Son from outside Himself, but generates Him from His own substance. That is to say, being wise, He generates Wisdom, being just, Justice, being eternal, the Eternal, being immortal, the Immortal, being invisible, the Invisible. Because He is Light, He generates Brightness, and because He is Mind, the Word.

--Rufinus, Commentary on the Apostles’ Creed, 4.

QUOTATION: Sin and Death

What is it that renders death terrible? Sin. We must therefore fear sin, not death.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori

QUOTATION: Temptation

The devil’s snare does not catch you, unless you are first caught by the devil’s bait.

--St. Ambrose, Explanation of Psalm 118, 14:37

QUOTATION: Pro-Abortion Censorship

The opposition tries to keep those who are pro-life out of the public square precisely for this reason: they know that if they let us in, they lose.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion, 2015.

QUOTATION: The Epitaph of St. Francis of Assisi

Dead before death, alive after death.

--Epitaph of St. Francis of Assisi

QUOTATION: The Blessed Mother and the Eucharist

Because we make profession of especially honoring the Holy Eucharist, it does not follow that we should have less devotion to the Blessed Virgin. Far from it! He would be guilty of blasphemy who would say: "As for me, the Blessed Sacrament suffices. I have no need of Mary." Where shall we find Jesus on earth if not in Mary's arms? Did she not give us the Eucharist? Was it not her consent to the Incarnation of the Word in her pure womb that inaugurated the great mystery of reparation to God and union with us, which Jesus accomplished by His mortal life, and that He continues in the Eucharist?

--St. Peter Julian Eymard, Month of Our Lady of the Blessed Sacrament

QUOTATION: The Magisterium

The teaching office of the apostles’ successors does not represent a second authority alongside Scripture but is inwardly a part of it. This viva vox is not there to restrict the authority of Scripture or to limit it or even replace it by the existence of another – on the contrary, it is its task to ensure that Scripture is not disposable, cannot be manipulated, to preserve its proper perspicuitas, its clear meaning, from the conflict of hypotheses.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “The Holy Spirit as Communion”, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: How the Religiously Insincere Act with God

You sometimes say of a man, "he is friendly, or courteous, or respectful, or considerate, or communicative; but, after all, there is something, perhaps without his knowing it, in the background. He professes to be agreed with me; he almost displays his agreement; he says he pursues the same objects as I; but still I do not know him, I do not make progress with him, I have no confidence in him, I do not know him better than the first time I saw him." Such is the way in which the double-minded approach the Most High,—they have a something private, a hidden self at bottom. They look on themselves, as it were, as independent parties, treating with Almighty God as one of their fellows. Hence, so far from seeking God, they hardly like to be sought by Him. They would rather keep their position and stand where they are,—on earth, and so make terms with God in heaven; whereas, "he that doeth truth, cometh to the light, that his deeds may be made manifest that they are wrought in God." [John iii. 21.]

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “Sincerity and Hypocrisy”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Volume 5.

QUOTATION: Silence

Silence is God’s first language.

--St. John of the Cross

QUOTATION: Reason

To disparage the dictate of reason is equivalent to contemning the command of God.

--St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1a-2ae, xix. 5, ad 2

QUOTATION: Spiritual Change

Most men are intuitively aware that no change except a spiritual change will be enough: the extreme sensitiveness and ready anger of those who urge revolutions against society and morality as their remedy are a proof of the insecurity of their position. The violence of their opposition to all criticism is a sure sign of the defenselessness of their own position; even they suspect that mankind stands less in need of revolution than redemption.

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

QUOTATION: Society Cannot Exist Without God

If God exists, and deserves the name, He is to every human good what electricity is to an appliance, and religion is the plug. The decline in happiness, in morality, and in longevity is inevitable: religious death, or supernatural death, or spiritual death always leads to some kind of natural or cultural death. No nonreligious, anti-religious society has ever existed. One reason is that religion has always been the strongest ground for morality and no society can survive without morality, in fact without some kind of natural law morality, since the prevailing morality of our experts is not morality at all, only psychology.

--Peter Kreeft, quoted in "What I shall do with atheism is to refute it” California Catholic Daily, August 4, 2016