QUOTATION: It's Not Just a Personal Relationship with Jesus

Christian faith is never just spiritual and inward, never just a subjective or a personal and private relationship with Christ and his word, but is entirely concrete and ecclesial.

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

QUOTATION: Atheism

Once God is denied as the Source of rights, the State sets itself up as an absolute.

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Address to the Plenary Session of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, November 10, 1979

QUOTATION: God's Friendship

God continually loves the universe into existence. Thus, God’s fundamental stance toward all finite things is one of friendship.

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

QUOTATION: Abolishing Abortion

Many friends ask me, “What is our first spiritual duty regarding the abortion issue?” They think I am going to answer, “prayer.”  But actually, the answer is repentance. The first step in abolishing abortion is to examine our own hearts and to repent of the role we each have played in allowing this holocaust to happen.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion

QUOTATION: Prayer

Without prolonged moments of adoration, of prayerful encounter with the word, of sincere conversation with the Lord, our work easily becomes meaningless; we lose energy as a result of weariness and difficulties, and our fervour dies out. The Church urgently needs the deep breath of prayer, and to my great joy groups devoted to prayer and intercession, the prayerful reading of God’s word and the perpetual adoration of the Eucharist are growing at every level of ecclesial life. Even so, “we must reject the temptation to offer a privatized and individualistic spirituality which ill accords with the demands of charity, to say nothing of the implications of the incarnation”. There is always the risk that some moments of prayer can become an excuse for not offering one’s life in mission; a privatized lifestyle can lead Christians to take refuge in some false forms of spirituality.

--Pope Francis Evangelii Gaudium #262, November 24, 2013.

QUOTATION: Revelation

God wants to come to men through men.

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

QUOTATION: Atheism

If you do not worship God, you worship something, and nine times out of ten it will be yourself.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: To Jesus Through Mary

In going to Jesus through Mary, we are really paying honour to our Lord, for we are showing that, because of our sins, we are unworthy to approach his infinite holiness directly on our own. We are showing that we need Mary, his holy Mother, to be our advocate and mediatrix with him who is our Mediator. We are going to Jesus as Mediator and Brother, and at the same time humbling ourselves before him who is our God and our Judge. In short, we are practising humility, something which always gladdens the heart of God.

--St. Louis de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, 36.

QUOTATION: Self-Hatred

No man, then, hates himself. On this point, indeed, no question was ever raised by any sect. But neither does any man hate his own body. For the apostle says truly, "No man ever yet hated his own flesh." And when some people say that they would rather be without a body altogether, they entirely deceive themselves. For it is not their body, but its corruptions and its heaviness, that they hate. And so it is not no body, but an uncorrupted and very light body, that they want.

--St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book I, Chapter 24

QUOTATION: The Collapse of Christianity

When Christianity collapses into purely this-worldly preoccupations—as it has, sadly, in much of Europe—it rapidly dries up.

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

QUOTATION: Human Rights

Human rights are not granted by political systems. They are “pre-political.” They exist before government and, in fact, must be honored, served, and secured by government, not because the leaders of government say so, but because to fail to do so undermines the very purpose of government.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion

QUOTATION: The Immortality of the Soul

A spiritual soul cannot be corrupted, since it possesses no matter; it cannot be disintegrated, since it has no substantial parts; it cannot lose its individual unity, since it is self-subsisting, nor its internal energy, since it contains within itself all the sources of its energies. The human soul cannot die. Once it exists, it cannot disappear; it will necessarily exist forever, endure without end. Thus philosophic reason is able to prove the immortality of the human soul in a demonstrative manner.

--Jacques Maritain

QUOTATION: Our Relationship With the Lord

This relationship with the Lord is not intended as a duty or an imposition. It is a bond that comes from within. It is a relationship lived with the heart: it is our friendship with God, granted to us by Jesus, a friendship that changes our life and fills us with passion, with joy. Thus, the gift of piety stirs in us above all gratitude and praise. This is, in fact, the reason and the most authentic meaning of our worship and our adoration. When the Holy Spirit allows us to perceive the presence of the Lord and all his love for us, it warms the heart and moves us quite naturally to prayer and celebration.

--Pope Francis, General Audience, June 4, 2014

QUOTATION: Atheist Self-Ownership

Nowhere that the human being makes himself the one lord of the world and owner of himself can justice exist.

--Pope Benedict XVI, Opening Mass, Synod of Bishops, October 2, 2005

QUOTATION: Education

Parents have to respect their children’s freedom, because there is no real education without personal responsibility, and there is no responsibility without freedom.

--St. Josemaria Escriva

QUOTATION: A Message of Hope

Be not cast down because the persecutors of religion, having laid the Church, like its Founder, in the tomb, utter the boast: ‘Behold the place where we laid it.’ The law of progress of the Church is the reverse of the law of progress of the world. We are most progressive when we are most hated. It is only because the fires of its Truth are blinding evil eyes and convicting them of sin and judgement, that the world vainly tried to put them out. And though the world is tearing up all the photographs and blueprints of a society and a family based on the moral law of God, be not disheartened. The Church has kept the negatives.

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Lenten & Easter Inspirations

QUOTATION: Purgatory

The fire of Purgatory is the same as the fire of Hell; the difference between them is that the fire of Purgatory is not everlasting.

--St. Jean Vianney, Sermons

QUOTATION: Devotion to Mary

This does not mean that one who has discovered Mary through a genuine devotion is exempt from crosses and sufferings. Far from it! One is tried even more than others, because Mary, as Mother of the living, gives to all her children splinters of the tree of life, which is the Cross of Jesus. But while meting out crosses to them she gives the grace to bear them with patience, and even with joy. In this way, the crosses she sends to those who trust themselves to her are rather like sweetmeats, i.e. "sweetened" crosses rather than "bitter" ones. If from time to time they do taste the bitterness of the chalice from which we must drink to become proven friends of God, the consolation and joy which their Mother sends in the wake of their sorrows creates in them a strong desire to carry even heavier and still more bitter crosses.

--St. Louis de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, 22.

QUOTATION: What Mary Suffered

While other martyrs suffered by sacrificing their own lives, the Blessed Virgin suffered by sacrificing her Son's life—a life that she loved far more than her own. So she not only suffered in her soul all that her Son endured in his body. In addition, the sight of her Son's torments brought more grief to her heart than if she had endured them all in her own person. No one can doubt that Mary suffered in her heart all the outrages that she saw inflicted on her beloved Jesus. Anyone can understand that the sufferings of children are also those of their mothers who witness them.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, A Year with Mary

QUOTATION: Martyrs

The martyrs were bound, imprisoned, scourged, racked, burned, torn apart, butchered--and they multiplied.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Ignorant Atheism

I have found that, in practically every instance, the scientists who declare their disbelief in God have no idea what serious religious people mean by the word “God.” Almost without exception, they think of God as some supreme worldly nature, an item within the universe for which they have found no “evidence,” a gap within the ordinary nexus of causal relations, etc. I would deny such a reality as vigorously as they do.

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

QUOTATION: Protecting Innocent Life

Just as we cannot justify killing our neighbor with the excuse, “I did not believe he had a soul,” so we cannot justify the killing of the child in the womb with the same rationale. The goal of the pro-life movement is not to impose our beliefs on anyone, but rather to protect the innocent from those who believe they can be killed.

--Fr. Frank Pavone, Abolishing Abortion

QUOTATION: Acting Morally

The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.

--Jacques Maritain, Range of Reason

QUOTATION: Christ Crucified

The heart of God’s salvation is his Son who took upon himself our sins, our pride, our self reliance, our vanity, our desire to be like God. A Christian who is not able to glory in Christ Crucified has not understood what it means to be Christian. Our wounds, those which sin leaves in us, are healed only through the Lord’s wounds, through the wounds of God made man who humbled himself, who emptied himself. This is the mystery of the Cross. It is not only an ornament that we always put in churches, on the altar; it is not only a symbol that should distinguish us from others. The Cross is a mystery: the mystery of the love of God who humbles himself, who empties himself” to save us from our sins.

--Pope Francis, Morning Meditation, April 8, 2014.

QUOTATION: The Incarnation

The Incarnation of the Word means that God does not merely want to come to the spirit of man, through the Spirit, but that he is seeking him through and in the material world, that he also in fact wants to encounter him as a social and historical being.

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

QUOTATION: Life is a Mystery

Life itself is mysterious, and those who fail to come to grips with mystery are either very naïve or very angry or end up being both. Many of the attacks on religion, which as we mentioned, are in the popular press at the present time, are ultimately based on a refusal to come to grips with mystery.

--Benedict J. Groeschel, The Tears of God, 2009.

QUOTATION: Heresy

Redemption is conditioned on orthodoxy, as is the correct conception of eternal life: orthodoxy is not just a theory about God, but a matter of God’s personal relationship with me. For that reason, heresy always affects that personal relationship, because it separates God who is truth from the revelation of that same truth.

--Cardinal Gerhard Müller

QUOTATION: Loss of Faith

In many cases those who lost the faith never did so for a reason. They left it for a thing. Souls generally do not fall away from Christ because of the Creed; they first have difficulty with the Commandments. The Creed, later on, becomes the handy tool of their rationalization: ‘I no longer believe in confession.’

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Charity for All

All of our religion is but a false religion and all our virtues are mere illusions and we ourselves are only hypocrites in the sight of God if we have not that universal charity for everyone, for the good and for the bad, for the poor people as well as for the rich, for all those who do us harm as much as for those who do us good.

--St. Jean Vianney, Sermons.

QUOTATION: The Holy Spirit and The Blessed Mother

The Holy Spirit espoused Mary and produced his greatest work, the incarnate Word, in her, by her and through her. He has never disowned her and so he continues to produce every day, in a mysterious but very real manner, the souls of the elect in her and through her.

--St. Louis de Montfort, The Secret of Mary, 13.

QUOTATION: It is Difficult to Repent at Death

It is necessary to die hating sin and loving God beyond all things ; but how can he hate forbidden pleasures, who, until that time, has loved them, so much? and how can he love God beyond all things, who, until that time, has loved the creature more than God ?

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for Death