QUOTATION: Lying is Not Useful

Now every man who lies commits an injustice; and if any man thinks that a lie is ever useful, he must think that injustice is sometimes useful. For no liar keeps faith in the matter about which he lies. He wishes, of course, that the man to whom he lies should place confidence in him; and yet he betrays his confidence by lying to him. Now every man who breaks faith is unjust. Either, then, injustice is sometimes useful (which is impossible), or a lie is never useful

--St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I, Chapter 36

QUOTATION: Atheism and Human Value

For the past two hundred years, atheists have been loudly asserting that the dismissal of God will lead to human liberation. I would strenuously argue precisely the contrary. Once the human being is untethered from God, he becomes, in very short order, an object among objects, and hence susceptible to the grossest manipulation by the powerful and the self-interested.

--Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

QUOTATION: Life, the Most Fundamental Freedom

To be free, a person must first be alive. To deprive a person of life is to deprive that person of liberty. It stands to reason, literally, that the very right to life has to be respected and protected. Life is an even more fundamental right than freedom.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion

QUOTATION: The Blessed Virgin Mary in Her Mother's Womb

Mary was born with all personal greatness. She was enriched with God's gifts. But that is little, for on the day of her birth she was already rich with her own merits. She had already acquired treasures of merits during the nine months of silent and uninterrupted adoration passed in the bosom of her mother. She was, even before her birth, penetrated with the divine light, and she had given herself entirely to God, whom she loved with a love of which we can form no just idea. She was born with the treasures that she had won, with the riches that she had acquired.

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

QUOTATION: Be Doers, Not Talkers

Let us ask ourselves if we are parlour Christians, who love to chat about how things are going in the Church and the world, or apostles on the go, who confess Jesus with their lives because they hold him in their hearts. Those who confess Jesus know that they are not simply to offer opinions but to offer their very lives. 

--Pope Francis, Homily, June 29, 2017

QUOTATION: The Priest

The priest is, like John the Baptist, purely a forerunner, a servant of the word. It is not he who matters, but the other.

--Pope Benedict XVI, “The Ministry and Life of Priests”,  Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith

QUOTATION: Obedience

Those who obey their superiors with the conviction that they are obeying God elevate their obedience by this view of faith, so that it becomes one of the most eminent acts of the virtue of religion that we can elicit in this world, because it is addressed directly to God hidden under the veil of a person frail and mortal but endowed with divine authority.

--St. Jean Baptiste de la Salle, Meditations 

QUOTATION: Fighting Sin

You don't dispel Satan using Satan's ways.

-- Padre Pio

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 obligations; 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: Virtue

If a person has true virtue, nothing whatever can change him; he is like a rock in the midst of a tempestuous sea. If anyone scorns you, or calumniates you, if someone mocks at you or calls you a hypocrite or a sanctimonious fraud, none of this will have the least effect upon your peace of soul. You will love him just as much as you loved him when he was saying good things about you. You will not fail to do him a good turn and to help him, even if he speaks badly of your assistance. You will say your prayers, go to Confession, to Holy Communion, you will go to Mass, all according to your general custom.

--St. Jean Vianney, Sermons.

QUOTATION: Love

Often we speak about love as if it is a feeling. But if we wait for a feeling of love before loving, we may never learn to love well.

--Henri Nouwen

QUOTATION: Temptation

When temptation comes, remember the three things:

1. I don’t want it. The devil cannot touch you. You are safe.
2. Be busy—as long as you know and say, “I don’t want it,” you are all right.
3. Turn to Mary. This is something very precious for her to give to Jesus.

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, A Call to Mercy

QUOTATION: Mary, Mother of the Church

Since Mary produced the head of the elect, Jesus Christ, she must also produce the members of that head, that is, all true Christians. A mother does not conceive a head without members, nor members without a head. If anyone, then, wishes to become a member of Jesus Christ, and consequently be filled with grace and truth , he must be formed in Mary through the grace of Jesus Christ, which she possesses with a fullness enabling her to communicate it abundantly to true members of Jesus Christ, her true children.

--St. Louis de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, 12.

QUOTATION: God's Existence is the Real Issue

The denial of God—or the blithe bracketing of the question of God—is not a harmless parlor game. Rather, it carries with it the gravest implications. If there is no God, then our lives do indeed belong to us, and we can do with them what we want. If there is no God, our lives have no ultimate meaning or transcendent purpose, and they become simply artifacts of our own designing. Accordingly, when they become too painful or too shallow or just too boring, we ought to have the prerogative to end them. We can argue the legality and even the morality of assisted suicide until the cows come home, but the real issue that has to be engaged is that of God’s existence.

--Bishop Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

QUOTATION: Desire for Death

It is a sign that we love God but little, if we have no desire soon to go to see Him, feeling certain that we shall never be able to love Him more. For the meantime, let us love God as much as we can in this life. For this alone should we live to increase in our love to Him ; the measure of love to God in which death will find us, will be the measure of our love to God in a blessed eternity.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death

QUOTATION: Bad Hermeneutics

But as men are prone to estimate sins, not by reference to their inherent sinfulness, but rather by reference to their own customs, it frequently happens that a man will think nothing blameable except what the men of his own country and time are accustomed to condemn, and nothing worthy of praise or approval except what is sanctioned by the custom of his companions; and thus it comes to pass, that if Scripture either enjoins what is opposed to the customs of the hearers, or condemns what is not so opposed, and if at the same time the authority of the word has a hold upon their minds, they think that the expression is figurative.

--St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book III, Chapter 10

QUOTATION: Religious Liberty

The Church does not defend religious liberty based on the idea that all religions are equal. The Church defends religious liberty based on the idea that all people are equal. We are all icons of God. The divinely instilled dignity that we all share requires each of us to embrace the truth freely, without coercion—just as God acts without coercion in perfect freedom.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion 

QUOTATION: Sacrifice

A sacrifice foreseen makes us reason, and reasoning diminishes its value. But those that we make generously, without premeditation and without deliberation, are of more value.

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

QUOTATION: Judgement in Christianity

Anyone who wants Christianity to be just a joyful message in which there can be no threat of the judgement is distorting it.

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

QUOTATION: Dissent

There is no less danger in contradicting the moral teachings of Jesus Christ than in rejecting his doctrine, for usually what causes the loss of faith is disorder in moral behavior.

--St. Jean Baptiste de la Sale, Meditations

QUOTATION: Faith

Dear God, I don't want to have invented my faith to satisfy my weakness. I don't want to have created God to my own image.

--Flannery O'Connor, My Dear God: A Young Writer's Prayers

QUOTATION: Faith

Philosophy gives a proof for the existence of God; the science of apologetics gives the motives for believing in Christ, the Son of God; but all the incontrovertible proofs they offer fall short of the certitude that actually comes to a convert through the gift of Faith. Imagine a young man whose father has been lost for years. A friend, returned from a trip, assures him that he has certain evidence that his father really exists on another continent. But the young man is not fully satisfied with the evidence, however convincing it is; until he is restored to his father’s actual presence, he will not have peace. So it is with conversion: before, one knows about God; afterward, one knows God. The first knowledge the mind has is notional and abstract; the second is real, concrete, and it becomes bound up with all one’s sentiments, emotions, passions, and habits.

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

QUOTATION: Growth

No one can grow if he does not accept his smallness.

―Pope Francis

QUOTATION: The Ambitious Man

The ambitious man is always fearful, always under tension lest he say or do anything which might make him displeasing in the eyes of men. He pretends humility, feigns honesty, displays affability, shows off his kindness, is accommodating, is compliant, honors everyone and bows to everybody, frequents courts, visits important people, rises and embraces, claps his hands and fawns. A famous quotation describes him well: “If there’s no dust he’ll still brush it off.” He is prompt and eager where he knows he will please, hesitant and lukewarm where he thinks he will not. He condemns evil and detests iniquity, but what he praises and blames varies with the person, so long as he will be thought competent and be deemed welcome by one and all. But see how he must keep up a grave battle in himself, and a very hard conflict it is, with Iniquity hammering at his soul and Ambition leading him by the hand; for what the one suggests he do, the other will not permit. And yet Iniquity and Ambition, mother and daughter, plot for one another: the mother lives in the open and the daughter, kept in hiding, never resists—one claims a public and the other a secret domain.

--Pope Innocent III, The Misery of the Human Condition

QUOTATION: Happiness of the Soul

I say, then, that the happiness of the soul consists in the exercise of the affections; not in sensual pleasures, not in activity, not in excitement, not in self esteem, not in the consciousness of power, not in knowledge; in none of these things lies our happiness, but in our affections being elicited, employed, supplied. As hunger and thirst, as taste, sound, and smell, are the channels through which this bodily frame receives pleasure, so the affections are the instruments by which the soul has pleasure. When they are exercised duly, it is happy; when they are undeveloped, restrained, or thwarted, it is not happy. This is our real and true bliss, not to know, or to affect, or to pursue; but to love, to hope, to joy, to admire, to revere, to adore. Our real and true bliss lies in the possession of those objects on which our hearts may rest and be satisfied.

--Blessed John Henry Newman, “The Thought of God, the Stay of the Soul”, Parochial and Plain Sermons, Vol. 5

QUOTATION: Moral Relativism is a Threat to the Economy

A market economy enjoys real legitimacy if and only if it is set in the context of a vibrant moral culture that forms its people in the virtues of fairness, justice, respect for the integrity of the other, and religion. Indeed, what good are contracts—fundamental to the functioning of a market economy—if people are indifferent to justice? What good is private property if people don’t see that stealing is wicked? Won’t wealth destroy the rich man who doesn’t appreciate the value of generosity or fails to develop sensitivity to the suffering of the poor? Won’t the drive for profit lead to the destruction of nature unless people realize that the earth is a gift of a gracious God and is meant to be enjoyed by all? This is precisely why the moral relativism and indifferentism that holds sway in many parts of the West—fostered by the breakdown of the family and the attenuating of religious practice—poses such a threat to the economy.

--Bishop Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

QUOTATION: Dead Before Death

Dead before death, alive after death.

--Epitaph of St. Francis of Assisi

QUOTATION: How the Saints Die

It seems in the sight of the unwise that the servants of God die with sorrow, and unwillingly, even as the worldly do ; but no, for God knows well how to comfort His children when they are dying ; and amidst the pains of their death, He makes them feel a certain incomparable sweetness, as a foretaste of that Paradise, which within a short time He will bestow upon them. Like those who die in sin, who even upon their death-bed experience certain foretastes of hell, such as remorse, fear, and despair; so on the contrary do the saints, by the acts of love which at that time they often make towards God, by the desire and by the hope that is in them, of very soon enjoying God, begin even before death to feel that peace which they will afterwards fully enjoy in heaven. Death to the saints is not a punishment, but a reward.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death

QUOTATION: Mush Doesn't Feed Heroes

If men and women are really made for heroism and glory, made to stand in the presence of the living God, they can never be satisfied with bourgeois, mediocre, feel-good religion. They’ll never be fed by ugly worship and shallow moralizing. But that’s what we too often give them.

 --Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

QUOTATION: No Rest for Pro-Lifers

The champions of abortion do not rest. Neither can we. The battle to defend the children in the womb—that one segment of humanity whose rights are most cruelly denied—is a battle for humanity itself. And it is worth everything.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion 

QUOTATION: To Jesus Through Mary

We must never separate Jesus from Mary. We can go to Him only through her. I even maintain that the more we love the Eucharist, the more we ought to love Mary. We love all that our friend loves. Now, is there a creature better loved by God, a mother more tenderly thought of by her son, than was Mary by Jesus?

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