Gift better than Himself God doth not know,Gift better than God no man can see;This gift doth here the giver given bestowGift to this gift let each receiver be;God is my gift, Himself He freely gave me,God’s gift am I, and none but God shall have me.

Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?

I’ve done many things that I thought I would never dare to do because they were sins. But I didn’t realize then that the consequence of sin is that you have to trample on other people.

Reflect carefully on this, for it is so important that I can hardly lay too much stress on it. Fix your eyes on the Crucified and nothing else will be of much importance to you.

At the root of all misery is unfulfilled desire.

If you complain to someone, you assume that it’s someone who really cares about you.

Prayer and comfortable living are incompatible.

I was born and raised Catholic.

The different religions confused me. Which was the right one? I tried to figure it out but had no success. It worried me. The different Gods – Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Mohammedan – seemed very particular in the way in which they expected me to keep on good terms with them. I couldn’t please one without...

Bold courage is paralyzing fear after humble prayer.

The good news is that there is one kind of food you can never have too much of. The best way to fully recover from a food addiction or body-image problem is to fill up on the Lord.

We’re not protecting our daughters if we forbid makeup, eschew fashionable hairstyles, or wear dowdy clothes. The feminine form is beautiful. Sure, we don’t want to hide behind makeup or wear immodest clothes to draw attention to ourselves. But there’s nothing wrong with wanting to accent our femininity.

Sir, I cannot sing. I have no formal training. I do not read music. And I know this is a church – but I play a mean harmonica.

you are not afraid of worldliness. I do not mean that you are worldly. Far from it. But you have a talent for being all things to all men.

The moment we care for anything deeply, the world – that is, all the other miscellaneous interests – becomes our enemy. Christians showed it when they talked of keeping one’s self “unspotted from the world;” but lovers talk of it just as much when they talk of the “world well lost.” Astronomically speaking, I understand...

If the attitude of many non-Catholic modern philosophers toward Catholic thought could be summarized in a single sentence, it would be: It has been tried, it has produced its definitive results, which have been found lacking, and now its time is past

It is not the sanctuary that is in danger; it is civilization. It is not infallibility that may go down; it is personal rights. It is not the Eucharist that may pass away; it is freedom of conscience. It is not divine justice that may evaporate; it is the courts of human justice. It is...

When I think of the Middle Ages I think of castles, Catholicism, and taking your kids to soccer practice.

A lost person or article is still what it is, still valuable in itself, but in the wrong place, disconnected from its purpose and unable to be or do whatever it is intended to be or do.

Since art is considered a noble field, art should be used to promote all that is good and noble, and in a noble fashion.

It is unfortunate that in most cases when the sins of the father fall on the son it is because unlike God, people refuse to forgive and forget and heap past wrongs upon innocent generations.

The devil has not vanished simply because people refuse to believe he exists, no more than God has…

It’s not unpatriotic to denounce an injustice committed on our behalf, perhaps it’s the most patriotic thing we can do.

Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world.

The greatest challenge of the day is: how to bring about a revolution of the heart, a revolution which has to start with each one of us?

Christ asks for a home in your soul, where he can be at rest with you, where he can talk easily to you, where you and he, alone together, can laugh and be silent and be delighted with one another.

Malone had been raised by a lady both Irish and Catholic, in a good bourgeois home in which careless table manners were a sin, much less this storm in his heart.

Unwittingly, the feminists acknowledge the superiority of the male sex by wishing to become like men.

The world in which we now live is a world whose outlook is so distorted that we absolutize what is relative (money-making, power, success) and relativize what is absolute (truth, moral values, and God).

I have dedicated my life to fight against the heinous rottenness of modern capitalism because it robs the laborer of this world’s goods. But blow for blow I shall strike against Communism, because it robs us of the next world’s happiness.

One of my confreres sketched an explanation that attracted me: since the process of digestion is under the control of the brain, its cessation gave repose to the brain, allowed it a vacation.

a criminal sketch of Christon a diner napkin-‘Poet Prophets

A desperate plea to the Trinityis not something you can justapologize for in the morning-Drunk Dialing the Divine

If the Pentateuch be true, religious persecution is a duty. The dungeons of the Inquisition were temples, and the clank of every chain upon the limbs of heresy was music in the ear of God. If the Pentateuch was inspired, every heretic should be destroyed; and every man who advocates a fact inconsistent with the...

In the Code of Canon Law, it states clearly: ‘A person who is conscious of grave sin is not to celebrate Mass or receive the body of the Lord without previous sacramental confession.’ I haven’t attended confession in well over a decade, and that’s less because of dogmatic conflict than it is because of moral...

Love is something worth suffering for…

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, ‘You are mad; you are not like us.

Truth can prevail only in virtue of truth itself.

When we infuse our actions with a focus on God and on the many blessings we receive in even the most mundane moments of our lives, we create sacred rituals that bring a sense of holiness, a sense of wholeness, to what we do and who we are. Like the Eucharistic feast that nourishes our...

If I invite God into my life, I am and always will be good enough.

Perhaps a past of bingeing, restricting, or purging comes back to haunt you from time to time. Maybe you have to fight hard battles against vanity, gluttony, and shame. But with God’s saving power, every new day is a gift, an opportunity to detach yourself from tormenting thoughts about food or how you look and...

That is, I fancy, the true doctrine on the subject of Tales of Terror and such things, which unless a man of letters do well and truly believe, without doubt he will end by blowing his brains out or by writing badly. Man, the central pillar of the world must be upright and straight; around...

Conscience, Christ, and the gift of faith make evil men uneasy in their sin. They feel that if they could drive Christ from the earth, they would be free from “moral inhibitions.” They forget that it is their own nature and conscience which makes them feel that way. Being unable to drive God from the...

By becoming clearly contemplative in a matter of weeks, my prayer had been given a particular and novel cast; and this was matched by the distinctness in the reprecussions my daily sessions of exercises were having on my everyday life, as well as on the many different occupations which a monk is vowed to carry...

God forbid that I should boast of being poor, gentle, and meek. But I am striving to attain these virtues. Every day the exercises, and indeed the whole ascetic discipline of my Yoga, make it easier for the grace of Christ to flow in me. I feel my hunger for God growing, and my thirst...

Outside of Italy, Catholics and churchmen have a very kind of mystical view of the Vatican and especially the conclave,

Every time I think about that girl, my mind commits a sin.

When people have told me that because I am a Catholic, I cannot be an artist, I have had to reply, ruefully, that because I am a Catholic I cannot afford to be less than an artist.

There has to be a cut-off somewhere between the freedom of expression and a graphically explicit free-for-all.

… love for our neighbours does not die the minute we enter heaven, it intensifies.