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.

[W]hat one has as a born Catholic is something given and accepted before it is experienced. I am only slowly coming to experience things that I have all along accepted. I suppose the fullest writing...

Criticism of others is thus an oblique form of self-commendation. We think we make the picture hang straight on our wall by telling our neighbors that all his pictures are crooked.

only’s” should have no place in the Catholic Church. Accepted as basic and ultimate formulas of Christianity, they do not have to lead a person out of the Catholic Church. . . . They can...

By the way, if you get mad at your Mac laptop and wonder who designed this demonic device, notice the manufacturer’s icon on top: an apple with a bite out of it.

1883. …The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which “a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order,...

Just as our parents’ souls revolted against God, their bodies revolted against their souls, to which they had been subject. And they realized ‘that they were naked.

You know, Catholicism, we believed in the teachings of Cathol, and everything it stood for…

All love tends to become like that which it loves. God loved man; therefore He became man. For nine months her own body was the natural Eucharist, in which God shared communion with human life,...

The Mass is a mystery,” said Lady Mary slowly. “That means that the more you look into it the more you can find in it, and what you find in it is always love, the...

The connection between art and Christ is like the connection between sunlight and the sun. It is, in fact, the connection between Sonlight and the Son.

Let nothing disturb you,Let nothing frighten you,All things are passing away:God never changes.Patience obtains all things.Whoever has God lacks nothing;God alone suffices.

To know much and taste nothing-of what use is that?

Her (Mary’s) Son first had to be the Child of the Father in order then to become man and be capable of taking up on his shoulders the burden of a guilty world.

Sacrament of Penance” (1519), he set forth this meaning of repentance or conversion and developed the glorious thought that the most important part of penitence consists not in private confession (which cannot be found in...

Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.

We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result of a thought of God.

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....

Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.

If you don’t behave as you believe, you will end by believing as you behave.

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

Like apes, we breed, sleep, and die. Yet like God we say, “I am.” We are ontological oxymorons.

The Catholic wisdom of the people… provides reasons for joy and humor even in the midst of a very hard life.

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

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...

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;”...

Then a movement began among the people. They creaked to their feet, shuffled and fumbled up to the front, kneeling on the floor, and she saw little Thomas at the beginning of the row. The...

Protestants believe that the sacraments are like ladders that God gave to us by which we can climb up to Him. Catholics believe that they are like ladders that God gave to Himself by which...

The idea of formulated ‘rights … comes not from John Locke and Thomas Jefferson … but from the canon law of the Catholic Church.

[I]t seemed to me now that a Catholic church was the right companion for all these horrors. Didn’t Catholicism deal with blood and resurrected flesh on a daily basis? Wasn’t it expert in superstition? I...

Mary thus learns that the Most High has ever borne a Son in his bosom, and that this Son has now chosen her bosom as dwelling-place.

The Irish people didn’t get on that well with each other either. They hated the Catholics, was the main issue, as I see. You can’t blame them for that. If I understand correctly, Catholics do...

If you have so many defects, why are you surprised to find defects in others?

It is not brains or intelligence that is needed to cope with the problems with Plato and Aristotle and all of their successors to the present have failed to confront. What is needed is a...

At the bottom of the ladder is Catholicism, and at the top is Science

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished...

Never forget that there are only two philosophies to rule your life: the one of the cross, which starts with the fast and ends with the feast. The other of Satan, which starts with the...

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many...

Those who meet Jesus always experience either joy or its opposites, either foretastes of Heaven or foretastes of Hell. Not everyone who meets Jesus is pleased, and not everyone is happy, but everyone is shocked.

1868. Sin is a personal act. Moreover, we have a responsibility for the sins committed by others when we cooperate in them:by participating directly and voluntarily in them;by ordering, advising, praising, or approving them;by not...

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.