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

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...

Suffering often draws us closer to God. Instead of being a sign of God’s punishment or distance, suffering can purify us, lead us into the heart of God, and transform our souls.

What you are is God’s gift to you, what you become is your gift to God.

But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity...

Of course, I’ve told Jesus to suck it, too, which earned me a certain measure of notoriety, because you have to make fun of any religion that would let you have sixteen kids and say...

Sacraments are like hoses. They are the channels of the living water of God’s grace. Our faith is like opening the faucet. We can open it a lot, a little, or not at all.

(Catholic) monks taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked.

The Best ideal is the true and other truth is none. All glory be ascribed to the holy Three in One.

I’ve often wondered why the Protestant Reformation took place in Germany, rather than in Poland. Then I realize that Luther had to nail his 95 theses to the church door, and the Poles didn’t know...

… You can’t be with God and be neutral. / True contemplation is resistance. And poetry, / gazing at clouds is resistance I found out in jail.

This is the secret of life: the self lives only by dying, finds its identity (and its happiness) only by self-forgetfulness, self-giving, self-sacrifice, and agape love.

The human being is single, unique, and unrepeatable, someone thought of and chosen from eternity, someone called and identified by name

Considering he was neither priest nor scholar, the young man gave sensible, thoughtful replies — the more so, perhaps, for being untrained, for he had not learned what he should believe or should not believe....

Communism is the final logic of the dehumanization of man.

Man of an hard heart! Hear me, Proud, Stern, and Cruel! You could have saved me; you could have restored me to happiness and virtue, but would not! You are the destroyer of my Soul;...

Love gives you eyes.

Religious freedom doesn’t include the freedom to disregard the law and restrict another’s freedom to believe and act differently. No one’s forcing Catholic nuns to practice birth control, or priests to wear condoms (good idea...

It became obvious why Catholics had built such beautiful cathedrals and churches throughout the world. Not as gathering or meeting places for Christians. But as a home for Jesus Himself in the Blessed Sacrament. Cathedrals...

To be a child means to owe one’s existence to another, and even in our adult life we never quite reach the point where we no longer have to give thanks for being the person...

From the outset, Protestantism rejected the critical medieval distinction between the ‘sacred’ and ‘secular’ orders. While this position can easily be interpreted as a claim for the desacralization of the sacred, it can equally well...

On the conversion of the European tribes to Christianity the ancient pagan worship was by no means incontinently abandoned. So wholesale had been the conversion of many peoples, whose chiefs or rulers had accepted the...

Most theists are deists most of the time, in practice if not in theory. They practice the absence of God instead of the presence of God.

The university system, a gift of Western civilization to the world, was developed by the Catholic Church.

She was like a landscape you see from the train, and you want to stop just there.