St. Bernadette Soubirous on Loving

I shall spend every moment loving. One who loves does not notice her trials; or perhaps more accurately, she is able to love them. I shall do everything for Heaven, my true home. There I shall find my Mother in all the splendor of her glory. I shall delight with her in the joy of Jesus himself in perfect safety.

St. Bernadette Soubirous

St. Thomas More on Remaining True in the Midst of a Storm

You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds. What you cannot turn to good, you must at least make as little bad as you can.

St. Thomas More (Utopia)

St. Gregory of Nyssa on Holiness

If we truly think of Christ as our source of holiness, we shall refrain from anything wicked or impure in thought or act and thus show ourselves to be worthy bearers of his name. For the quality of holiness is shown not by what we say but by what we do in life.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

St John of the Cross on Silent Love of God

What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God with our appetite and with our tongue, for the language he best hears is silent love.

St John of the Cross

St. Ignatius of Loyola on Submission to God

Take, O Lord, and receive my entire liberty, my memory, my understanding and my whole will. All that I am and all that I possess You have given me. I surrender it all to You to be disposed of according to Your will. Give me only Your love and Your grace; with these I will be rich enough, and will desire nothing more.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

Archbishop Fulton Sheen on Hiding from God

Ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, ‘God is hard to find.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen

St. Padre Pio on Living for Jesus

‎May the Heart of Jesus be the goal of all your aspirations.

St. Padre Pio

Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman on Heaven and Perspective

To the irreligious person heaven would be hell.

Blessed John Henry Cardinal Newman

G.K. Chesterton on Fighting for what is Loved

You cannot love a thing without wanting to fight for it.

G.K. Chesterton

Susan Melkus on Truth, Schism, and Jesus Christ

If you have “your truth” and I have “my truth” and for some reason we disagree, and go start our own ‘churches’ … where exactly does Jesus (The TRUTH) fit into the picture?

Susan Melkus

Saint John Vianney on Forgiveness

The saints had no hatred, no bitterness; they forgive everything and think they deserve much more for their offenses against God.

Saint John Vianney – Sermon on Forgiveness

Mother Teresa on Seeing the Hidden Christ

Unless we believe and see Jesus in the appearance of bread on the altar, we will not be able to see him in the distressing disguise of the poor.

Mother Teresa of Calcutta

Andrew Preslar on Ecclesial Consumerism

An ecclesial consumerist is someone who chooses a church based upon a list of criteria exclusive of the item: “Is this the Church that Christ founded?”

Andrew Preslar – Called to Communion

Brent Stubbs on Christ and the Eucharist

I bend down and whisper into my son’s ear, “That’s Jesus. The entire universe is focused on this one moment.”

Brent Stubbs – Mass 101

St. Josemaria Escriva on Faith and Knowledge

We all must have the faith of children, but the doctrine of theologians.

St. Josemaria Escriva

Catechism of the Catholic Church on God’s Longing for our Prayers

“If you knew the gift of God!”  The wonder of prayer is revealed beside the well where we come seeking water: there, Christ comes to meet every human being. It is he who first seeks us and asks us for a drink. Jesus thirsts; his asking arises from the depths of God’s desire for us. Whether we realize it or not, prayer is the encounter of God’s thirst with ours. God thirsts that we may thirst for him.

Catechism of the Catholic Church – Paragraph 2560

Fr. Vincent Serpa on the Chaos of Protestantism

The Protestant Reformation resulted in the continuous division of churches over the interpretation of Scripture, each new denomination insisting on its own as authentic. But of course, since they all contradict each other, they can’t all be correct. The divisions continue to this day—thousands of them. If this is reformation, I’d hate to see chaos!

Fr. Vincent Serpa – Catholic Answers

Leontius the Hierapolian on the Veneration of Sacred Icons

I sketch and paint Christ and the sufferings of Christ in churches, in homes, in public squares and on icons, on linen cloth, in closets, on clothes, and in every place I paint so that men may see them plainly, may remember them and not forget them… And as thou, when thou makest thy reverence to the Book of the Law, bowest down not to the substance of skins and ink, but to the sayings of God that are found therein, so I do reverence to the image of Christ. Not to the substance of wood and paint — that shall never happen… But, by doing reverence to an inanimate image of Christ, through Him I think to embrace Christ Himself and to do Him reverence… We Christians, by bodily kissing an icon of Christ, or of an apostle or martyr, are in spirit kissing Christ Himself or His martyr.

Leontius the Hierapolian – Sacred Images, Statues and Other Icons

Ross Douthat on Man’s Inability to Destroy the Catholic Church

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: “Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church?” The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: “Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you.”

Ross Douthat – New York Times

St. Isidore of Seville on the Sacrament of Confession

Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin. All hope consists in confession. In confession there is a chance for mercy. Believe it firmly. Do not doubt, do not hesitate, never despair of the mercy of God. Hope and have confidence in confession.

St. Isidore of Seville

Rev. Herbert H. J. Crees on Critical Thinking

You may have heard it said that Catholics are not allowed to think for themselves; you may even believe it. And as long as you can believe things like that you will remain safely out of reach of any appeal which the Catholic Church could make to your reason. But someone ought to warn you that if you are beginning to think for yourself, you won’t be able to believe it much longer. Your mind, becoming more critical with exercise, will reject this along with a number of other quaint superstitions. Another point you should consider seriously is this: you may be the kind of person who, having once begun to think about a subject, continues to do so logically until he arrives at certain definite conclusions. This phenomenon today is comparatively rare; but if you are that kind of person you will probably accept these conclusions, even though they turn your former opinions upside down, and change your whole outlook. Finally you may decide that these conclusions you have formed are so important that you cannot ignore them, and that you must do something about them. This is one of the penalties of real thinking: and it is a penalty that a man or woman is prepared to face who wishes to live a life which is really human and not just vegetable. If ever you get as far as this in thinking about the Catholic Church, then you will be in very real danger of becoming a Catholic.

By Rev. Herbert H. J. Crees B.A. – To Start You Thinking

Pope Benedict XVI on Government vs Redemption

Wherever politics tries to be redemptive, it is promising too much. Where it wishes to do the work of God, it becomes not divine, but demonic.

Pope Benedict XVI

Dr. Douglas Grandon on the Inadequacy of Scripture Alone

Trying to understand what the Apostles taught and what the Church taught in the early centuries simply by reading the Bible is like trying to watch a baseball game through the knothole in the fence…Scripture was not intended to present a full witness to us of all that the Church taught, believed and practiced. (Scripture is) made up of fully authoritative, inspired writings, but incomplete. That’s why God gave Bishops to us, to sort all of this out over time, as different needs arose in the Church.

Dr. Douglas Grandon – The Journey Home

Fr. Al Kimmel on Eucharistic Adoration

It doesn’t matter how vigorously you protest your belief in the eucharistic real presence: if you are not willing and eager to prostrate yourself before the Holy Gifts and adore, worship, and pray to the glorified Lord Jesus Christ, present under the forms of bread and wine, you really do not believe in it.

Fr. Al Kimmel – Pontificator’s Laws

Jimmy Akin on Sola Scriptura and Private Judgment

So let us cast aside the false promise of “Just-me-and-my-Bible” Christianity, let us remove the crushing burden of telling every individual Christian, no matter how poor, uneducated, or illiterate, that he must be his own theologian and that his soul hangs in the balance, let us remove the hypocrisy Protestant pastors are forced into by the doctrine as they permit for themselves a right they prohibit for the members of their congregations, and let us be honest, with the Catholic Church, about the matter: Sola scriptura, and the absolute right of private judgment which it entails, is simply not God’s plan.

Jimmy Akin - Sola Scriptura and Private Judgment

Keith Mathison on “Solo” Scriptura

All appeals to Scripture are appeals to interpretations of Scripture. The only real question is: whose interpretation? People with differing interpretations of Scripture cannot set a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve their differences. In order for the Scripture to function as an authority, it must be read and interpreted by someone. According to “solo” Scriptura, that someone is each individual, so ultimately, there are as many final authorities as there are human interpreters.

Keith Mathison – Solo Scriptura: The Difference a Vowel Makes

St. Maximilian Kolbe on having Mary Immaculate for our Mother

Never be afraid of loving the Blessed Virgin Mary too much. You can never love her more than Jesus did. If anyone does not wish to have Mary Immaculate for his mother, he will not have Christ for his brother.

St. Maximilian Kolbe

St. Irenaeus on Man’s Freedom and God’s Glory

The glory of God is a human being fully alive.

St. Irenaeus

Tim Staples on the Importance of Marian Theology

When we understand that all that we are, we are because of Christ, and all that Mary is, she is because of Christ, and her relation to Christ, being in Him, with Him, and through Him, all of a sudden the blinders fall off, and…this is why Marian theology is so important for us as Catholics to know, because in Mary, we see, re-echoed, all of the most important dogmas of the faith, as Vatican II said.

Tim Staples – Called to Communion

Tim Staples on the Blessed Virgin Mary as our Hope

Mary keeps our theology from becoming an abstraction, because in Mary we see (faith) concretized, lived out through her whole life, and she’s gone before us, perfected, hence she’s our hope. Jesus, of course, is the hope of glory, but Mary is our hope in as much as what Jesus promised has been fulfilled in her and we can look at her and see that God fulfills His promises, and in that sense she becomes our hope, and we also see in her our own dignity.

Tim Staples – Catholic Answers Live