Only God may be adored, because only God is unlimited goodness, truth, and beauty, and thus only God deserves unlimited love.

Much water has flown under Tiber’s bridges, carrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII. The essentials, I know, remain firmly entrenched and I find the post-Conciliar Mass simpler and...

The Pope would have an easier job than the President of the United States in adopting a change of course. He has no Congress alongside him as a legislative body nor a Supreme Court as...

Happiness is not only a hope, but also in some strange manner a memory … we are all kings in exile.

That’s not a lucky thing, Cecil,” said Teresa, “it’s a sacred thing.” “What’s the difference?” Cecil asked. Teresa smiled. “Roughly this,” she said. “A thing is magic if you get what you want through it;...

Our favorite games were killing.Our favorite books were death.It had been beaten into us:God is love.Not the parched face and gnarledcapes across a stick body; jitteringin the nude sky, we couldn’t seetrying to touch usfor...

Churchmen sought to introduce rational trial procedures and sophisticated legal principles in place of the superstition-based trial by ordeal that had characterized the Germanic legal order.

Beware of formulas. If there’s a God, he’s not a God of formulas.

It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.

…we can never attain a maximum love of God with only a minimum knowledge of God

We sinned for no reason but an incomprehensible lack of love, and He saved us for no reason but an incomprehensible excess of love.

It is Jesus that you seek when you dream of happiness; He is waiting for you when nothing else you find satisfies you; He is the beauty to which you are so attracted; it is...

If all the bones of all the victims of the Catholic Church could be gathered together, a monument higher than all the pyramids would rise

An institution is right or it is wrong. One that cannot accept dinosaur bones is one that cannot be trusted on more important matters.

The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler.

When Benedict dies, he will have the pleasure of standing before whatever furious God he believes in, to answer for how it was that he knew for undeniable fact that one — if not dozens...

It is closer to the truth to say that God is crazy than that God is reasonable. I suspect God merely smiles when someone calls him crazy, but shakes His head and frowns when someone...

1951. Law is a rule of conduct enacted by competent authority for the sake of the common good. The moral law presupposes the rational order, established among creatures for their good and to serve their...

You and I are part of the colony of heaven. Right now, we may reside here on earth, but our passport indicates that our citizenship is in heaven. We are on the earth, but not...

Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.

The Reformer is always right about what’s wrong. However, he’s often wrong about what is right.

If we who self-designate ourselves with terms like “Catholic,” “Orthodox,” “Protestant,” “Evangelical,” “Charismatic,” “Pentecostal” and others would fully surrender ourselves to The Holy Spirit, we could stop focusing on the secondary words we use to...

Much of what is called Christianity has more to do with disguising the ego behind the screen of religion and culture than any real movement toward a God beyond the small self, and a new...

It was Francisco de Vitoria, a Catholic priest and professor, who earned the title of father of international law.

I know one thing you don’t. I know the difference between Right and Wrong. They didn’t teach you that at school.’Rose didn’t answer; the woman was quite right: the two words meant nothing to her....

Only the Christian religion, which in its essence is communicated by the eternal child of God, keeps alive in its believers the lifelong awareness of their being children, and therefore of having to ask and...

The language in which we are speaking is his before it is mine. How different are the words HOME, CHRIST, ALE, MASTER, on his lips and on mine! I cannot speak or write these words...

He was alone in his wonderment,amoung creatures incapable of wonder–for them it was enough to exist and go their way.

Perhaps there is nothing greater on earth than the sacrifice of youth and beauty, often of high birth, made by the gentle sex in order to work in hospitals for the relief of human misery,...

Christ-as always, the model-never sat back, crossed his arms, and dismissed the annoying, the troublesome, or the unpromising. He never name-called, never judged, never treated a single person with contempt. Christ talked to everybody, he...

The principle of democracy is a recognition of the sovereign, inalienable rights of man as a gift from God, the Source of law.

It is, after all, far too easy to pinch and kick the bizarre Mormon Church; to say it’s ripe for satire and parody is to say a Catholic schoolgirl is ripe for debauchery. It’s like...

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.

1877. The vocation of humanity is to show forth the image of God and to be transformed into the image of the Father’s only Son. This vocation takes a personal form since each of us...

When you suffer, you are being conformed to the image of Jesus. When you pray, you are being made holy in the image of Jesus. When you quietly serve a person in need, you are...

If you cannot see that divinity includes male and female characteristics and at the same time transcends them, you have bad consequences. Rome and Cardinal O’Connor base the exclusion of women priests on the idea...

Without the family, we are helpless before the State.

The Catholic Church sees voluntary vampirism as a kind of suicide. I tend to agree. Though the Pope also excommunicated all animators, unless we ceased raising the dead. Fine; I became Episcopalian.

Pilate’s skeptical sneer “What is truth?” was addressed to Truth Himself, standing there right in front of his face. The world’s stupidest question was three words; God’s profoundest answer was one Word.

Thirty-five craters on the moon are named for Jesuit scientists and mathematicians.

But you do believe, don’t you,” Rose implored him, “you think it’s true?””Of course it’s true,” the Boy said. “What else could there be?” he went scornfully on. “Why,” he said, “it’s the only thing...

It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own...

—Then, said Cranly, you do not intend to become a protestant?—I said that I had lost the faith, Stephen answered, but not that I had lost self-respect. What kind of liberation would that be to...

God gives us not only the truth but also the ability to believe it; not only the new thing to see but also the new eye to see it with.

…all that is carried alongby the stream’s silvery cascade,rhythmically falling from the mountain,carried by its own current–carried where?

Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There’s no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements...

Many married women who have deliberately spurned the “hour” of childbearing are unhappy and frustrated. They never discovered the joys of marriage because they refused to surrender to the obligation of their state. In saving...

If there is a true measure of a person’s soul, if there is a single gauge of real divinity, of how beautifully a fellow human honors this life, has genuine spiritual fire and is full...

The most total opposite of pleasure is not pain but boredom, for we are willing to risk pain to make a boring life interesting.

The rising influence of lay piety is particularly marked upon the Mariological controversies of the late medieval period. Two rival positions developed: the maculist position, which held that Mary was subject to original sin, in...