… a true friend has your best interests at heart and the pluck to tell you what you need to hear.

Even as a man just recovering from illness walks only so far as he is obliged to go, with a slow and weary step, so the converted sinner journeys along as far as God commands...

What our closest friends do for us is to teach us true selflessness. We learn that while it might be safer for them if we keep them out, true friendship means letting them in. We...

I went to a school run by Catholic nuns. They were really strict.

Turn over the rudder in God’s name, and sail with the wind heaven sends us.

The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with...

Why, observe the thing; turn it over; hold it up to the window; count the beads, long, oval, like some seaweed bulbs, each an amulet. See the tint; it’s very old; like clots of sunshine,...

We are always hungry and never satisfied because we don’t trust and won’t risk. Can we reach a place where we are satisfied with just enough? You are enough. You have enough. Do not worry...

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.

. . .fasting gives me singularly happy afternoons.

… what you think is right isn’t the same as knowing what is right.

The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church.

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...

The intellectual climate of the 1970s, for which the 1950s had already paved the way, contributed to this. A theory was even finally developed at that time that pedophilia should be viewed as something positive....

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....

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...

That’s it. Love makes us all strong.

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

I have always thought of myself as a Czechoslovak 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...

Confucians, along with Hebrew, Islamic, and Catholic scholastics, as well as Protestant fundamentalists, are like tourists who study guidebooks and maps instead of wandering freely and looking at the view. Speech and writing are undoubtedly...

But protest that priests are ‘no worse’ than other groups or than men in general is a dire indictment of the profession. It is surprising that this attitude is championed by the Church authorities. Although...

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...

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...

Faith and reason are indeed complementary faculties that we use to think about the truth. When any winged creature (or mechanism) tries to fly on just one wing, it falls to the ground. In a...

In the afternoon the digestion of the meal deprives me of the incomparable lightness which characterizes the fast days.

If you boil it down, just because someone else does the wrong thing we are not exempt from doing what’s right.

{Wells discussing his experiences with Christianity}I realised as if for the first time, the menace of these queer shaven men in lace and petticoats who had been intoning, responding, and going through ritual gestures at...

creature of God” within us, concealed under a human complex, bruised and torn by original sin, should flower and open out in its full beauty and wealth of talent. Any ascetic discipline that works towards...

The world offers you comfort. But you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness

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...

The sense of the joy in anything is the sense of Christ.

Evil influence is like a nicotine patch, you cannot help but absorb what sticks to you.

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...

When a politician spends a million on himself, we rally and call him a thief. But when a cardinal spends the same amount on his attire, we kneel down and kiss his hand.

The fact is, the great intellectuals of the western religious tradition from Augustine to Aquinas and Peter Abelard became philosophically dominant. The intellectual tradition was preserved. The great intellectuals of the Islamic tradition like Averroes...

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...

mistake.’ That’s insulting. I’m not a mistake.

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;”...

body and soul” connection into the light

Only when we cease to rely on our own strength can we discover that God’s strength is always there for us.

When I walk in the forest just before the meal, while reciting the scriptural phrase that I “meditate” for that day, spiritual joy comes over me as if by appointment.

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.

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

This is the story of how Dad lived with his lung cancer. But it is much more. Through his illness and the miracles we experienced, I came to see that Dad’s was not just a...

Bold courage is paralyzing fear after humble prayer.

The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us; to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the...

What shall a man gain if he has the whole world and lose his soul,” (Matt. 16: v. 26) – but for a notorious name, the ethereal shadow of a career, and a brief life...

Unless there is a Good Friday in your life, there can be no Easter Sunday.

Evidence is of no longer consequence when hope enters the fray, and this is where faith is born—a seemingly abundant commodity certain powerful organizations feed on fervently, if not lavishly.