Pope Benedict XVI on the Sun Setting over the Entire World

Alexis de Tocqueville, in his day, observed that democracy in America had become possible and had worked because there existed a fundamental moral consensus which, transcending individual denominations, united everyone. Only if there is such a consensus on the essentials can constitutions and law function. This fundamental consensus derived from the Christian heritage is at risk wherever its place, the place of moral reasoning, is taken by … purely instrumental rationality…. In reality, this makes reason blind to what is essential. To resist this eclipse of reason and to preserve its capacity for seeing the essential, for seeing God and man, for seeing what is good and what is true, is the common interest that must unite all people of good will. The very future of the world is at stake.

Pope Benedict XVI – Christmas 2010 Greetings to the Roman Curia

Fr. Benedict Groeschel on Declaring the Catholic Faith Boldly and with Conviction

And I have found that when we Catholics, in the spirit of love and charity, declare our faith boldly and with conviction, we are more likely to find kindred spirits. This is how we must comport ourselves if we are to fulfill our Lord’s command in the Gospel of John (17:21), Ut unum sint, that all may be one.

Fr. Benedict Groeschel

Fr. Henri J. M. Nouwen on the Freedom of the Beloved of the Lord

But you have to pray. You have to listen to the voice who calls you the beloved, because otherwise you will run around begging for affirmation, for praise, for success. And then you’re not free.

Fr. Henri J. M. Nouwen

C.S. Lewis on Forgiveness of Self

I think that if God forgives us we must forgive ourselves. Otherwise it is almost like setting up ourselves as a higher tribunal than Him.

C.S. Lewis – Anglican, but “Catholike” Author

Archbishop Fulton Sheen on the True Desire of Forgiveness

The forgiveness of God is one thing, but the proof that we want that forgiveness is the energy we expend to make amends for the wrong.

Archbishop Fulton Sheen

Henri de Lubac on Undying Love for the Catholic Church

But she’s still our Mother!

Henri de Lubac – responding to Hans Kung’s complaints of troubles in the Catholic Church at Vatican II

St. Ignatius of Loyola on Unreserved Abandonment to God

Few souls understand what God would accomplish in them if they were to abandon themselves unreservedly to Him and if they were to allow His grace to mold them accordingly.

St. Ignatius of Loyola

Mother Angelica on God Never Tiring of Forgiving

God always forgives when you are totally repentant and you desire to change. He forgives…and He never gets tired of forgiving. Never. You may get tired asking. I hope not. He never, never tires of forgiving. Never.

Mother Agnelica – EWTN Radio

G.K. Chesterton on the Thoughtless Keeping of Christmas

The great majority of people will go on observing forms that cannot be explained; they will keep Christmas Day with Christmas gifts and Christmas benedictions; they will continue to do it; and some day suddenly wake up and discover why.

G.K. Chesterton –  ”On Christmas,” Generally Speaking

Archbishop Paul Cordes on Real Poverty

The absence of God is worse than material poverty because it kills every firm hope and leaves the person alone with his pain.

Archbishop Paul Cordes – The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World

Pope Benedict XVI on his Transition to the Papacy

It was easy to know the doctrine. It’s much harder to help a billion people live it.

Pope Benedict XVI – The Rule of Benedict: Pope Benedict XVI and His Battle with the Modern World

Speak the Truth in Love on Trusting the Catholic Church in the Marian Dogmas

When Catholics talk about Mary they don’t keep repeating that she is the handmaid of the Lord and that everything she offers us is from God through Christ. It is understood and made clear in Catholic theology. But not all the Marian prayers say that explicitly. It is implicit in all of them. That is just a matter of trust. Trusting the church that she is not trying to hook you into some idolatry. Trusting Mary that she really is going to bring you closer to Jesus.

Randy (Speak the Truth in Love) – comment on Called to Communion

Peter Sean Bradley on Poor Catechesis and Lapsed Catholics

When I find lapsed Catholics in other denominations, what strikes me is how ignorant they are of the faith that they rejected. I’ve been involved at times with Protestant groups, and when I have explained what Catholicism teaches, I get told by lapsed Catholics that they never heard any such thing. On the other hand, my experience with Protestant converts to Catholicism is that they are usually incredibly knowledgeable about their own prior tradition before they ever became Catholics. It’s a sad commentary on the status of catechesis after Vatican II.

Peter Sean Bradley – comment on Called to Communion

Taylor Marshall on Mary as Co-Redemptrix

Adam = Peccator
Eve = Co-Peccatrix

Adam was responsible for it all, but Eve sure did play a part in it, didn’t she?

Jesus = Redemptor
Mary = Co-Redemptrix

Jesus was responsible for it all, but Mary sure did play a part in it, didn’t she?

Taylor Marshall – comment on Called to Communion

Catholic convert Joe Palmer on Mary as a stumbling block

Mary was a stumbling block, but the Church’s doctrines/dogmas regarding her were not the major stumbling block. Once I had the separation of Protestants and Catholics narrowed down to the question of authority and the nature of the Church, I had come to the conclusion that “if the Catholic Church’s claims are true, and the Apostles and their successors had authentic sacramental authority granted by Christ, then I would have to submit to that authority regardless of what I thought in order to be authentically Christian” and that Catholicism meant humbling oneself instead of placing one’s opinion of matters on a pedestal, I began to take the approach of reading Church teaching from the eyes of a Catholic, so-to-speak (lending some level of trust to it). Not because I was submitting to the authority of the Church at that time, but only because I realized that unless I tried on the Catholic glasses, I’d never be able to understand it from a Catholic point-of-view. It was only by God’s Grace and by giving the Catholic view a chance, that I began to see how necessary, beautiful, and Christological the Marian doctrines and dogmas are. Also, from a historical standpoint, there is no doubt that these doctrines and dogmas were represented in various devotions, writings, and quotes from the Early Fathers. So, aside from my conclusion on the importance of the authority question that led me to seek an understanding of Marian doctrines, I also came to realize that the anti-Marian Protestant position I had been raised to hold did not gel with historical Christianity at all, but was a rather new development.

Joe Palmer – comment on Called to Communion

Pope Benedict XVI on the Advent liturgy: We cry out with John “Come, Lord Jesus”

While our hearts reach out towards the annual celebration of the birth of Christ, the Church’s liturgy directs our gaze to the final goal: our encounter with the Lord in the splendour of glory. This is why we, in every Eucharist, “announce his death, proclaim his resurrection until he comes again”. We hold vigil in prayer.  The liturgy does not cease to encourage and support us, putting on our lips, in the days of Advent, the cry with which the whole Bible concludes, the last page of the Revelation of Saint John: “Come, Lord Jesus ” (Revelation 22:20).

Pope Benedict XVI - First Vespers of Advent 2010

Mother Teresa on Mercy and the Fruits of the Eucharist

I begin each day with holy Mass, receiving Jesus hidden under the appearance of a simple piece of bread. Then I go out into the streets and I find the same Jesus hidden in the dying destitute, the AIDS patients, the lepers, the abandoned children, the hungry, and the homeless. It’s the same Jesus.

Mother Teresa

Rev. Edward J. Hayes on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

After presenting his little daughter with a crucifix on the occasion of her First Holy Communion, the father asked her if she knew the difference between the figure of Jesus on the cross and the Host which the priest holds up at Mass. “When I look at the cross,” the child said, “I see Jesus and he is not there. When I look at the Host, I do not see Jesus and he is there.”

Rev. Edward J. Hayes – Catholicism & Life: Commandments and Sacraments

Rt Rev Mgr Canon Moyes, D.D. on the Glory of Mary

If the reward which our God has prepared in heaven for even the least soul that enters there is above all that eye hath seen or the heart of man can conceive, it is plain that all that Catholic preachers or writers have ever said or written about the glory with which God (the Son) has crowned His Mother (the Mother of God – Theotokos), so far from being excessive, must ever fall utterly short of that reality.

Rt Rev Mgr Canon Moyes, D.D. – Why Catholics Pray to the Blessed Virgin

Pope John Paul II on “Gay Marriage” as an Attack on the Family and Man

It is legitimate and necessary to ask oneself if this [gay marriage] is not perhaps part of a new ideology of evil, perhaps more insidious and hidden, which attempts to pit human rights against the family and against man.

Pope John Paul II – Memory and Identity

St. Cyprian on the Church being inseperable from the Papacy

There is one God and one Christ, and one Church, and one chair founded on Peter by the word of the Lord. It is not possible to set up another altar or for there to be another priesthood besides that one altar and that one priesthood. Whoever has gathered elsewhere is scattering.

St. Cyprian – Letters 43 (40):5 – A.D. 253

Fulton J Sheen on Prayer

Prayer is helplessness casting itself on Power, infirmity leaning on Strength, misery reaching to Mercy, and a prisoner clamoring for Relief.

Fulton J Sheen

St. Augustine on the Faithful Departed saved through a Certain Purgatorial Fire

That there should be some fire even after this life is not incredible, and it can be inquired into and either be discovered or left hidden whether some of the faithful may be saved, some more slowly and some more quickly in the greater or lesser degree in which they loved the good things that perish, through a certain purgatorial fire.

St. Augustine – Handbook on Faith, Hope, and Charity – c. 421 A.D.

St. Augustine on Purgatory, Prayers for the Departed, & the Sacrifice of the Mass

There is an ecclesiastical discipline, as the faithful know, when the names of the martyrs are read aloud in that place at the altar of God, where prayer is not offered for them. Prayer, however, is offered for other dead who are remembered. It is wrong to pray for a martyr, to whose prayers we ought ourselves be commended. But by the prayers of the Holy Church, and by the salvific sacrifice, and by the alms which are given for their spirits, there is no doubt that the dead are aided, that the Lord might deal more mercifully with them than their sins would deserve. The whole Church observes this practice which was handed down by the Fathers: that it prays for those who have died in the communion of the Body and Blood of Christ, when they are commemorated in their own place in the sacrifice itself; and the sacrifice is offered also in memory of them, on their behalf. If, then, works of mercy are celebrated for the sake of those who are being remembered, who would hesitate to recommend them, on whose behalf prayers to God are not offered in vain? It is not at all to be doubted that such prayers are of profit to the dead; but for such of them as lived before their death in a way that makes it possible for these things to be useful to them after death.

St. Augustine – Sermons – c. 411 A.D.

St. Augustine on Purgatory and Temporal Punishment of Sin

Temporal punishments are suffered by some in this life only, by some after death, by ‘some both here and hereafter, but all of them before that last and strictest judgment. But not all who suffer temporal punishments after death will come to eternal punishments, which are to follow after that judgment.

St. Augustine - City of God – A.D. 419

St. Ignatius of Antioch on the Episcopate and the Catholic Church

Where the Bishop is, there let the multitude of believers be; even as where Jesus is, there is the Catholic Church.

St. Ignatius of Antioch, 1st Century A.D

St. Clement I on Apostolic Succession

The apostles have preached the Gospel to us from the Lord Jesus Christ; Jesus Christ has done so from God. Christ therefore was sent forth by God, and the apostles by Christ. Both these appointments, then, were made in an orderly way, according to the will of God. Having therefore received their orders, and being fully assured by the resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, and established in the word of God, with full assurance of the Holy Ghost, they went forth proclaiming that the kingdom of God was at hand. And thus preaching through countries and cities, they appointed the first-fruits of their labours, having first proved them by the Spirit, to be bishops and deacons of those who should afterwards believe…Our apostles also knew, through our Lord Jesus Christ, and there would be strife on account of the office of the episcopate. For this reason, therefore, inasmuch as they had obtained a perfect fore-knowledge of this, they appointed those presbyters already mentioned, and afterwards gave instructions, that when these should fall asleep, other approved men should succeed them in their ministry.

St. Clement I – First Epistle to the Church at Corinth, Ch 42 & 44, A.D. 96

Anonymous on the Angst of Conversion

The angst gets worse the closer to the head of the line you get, depending on the tradition(s) you were raised in, of course. Just be prepared. There is a spirit that will stop at nothing to keep you from receiving the Eucharist.

Anonymous

Pope Benedict XVI on Communion with Christ and His Church

Communion with Christ is being on a journey, a permanent ascent to the true height of our calling. Journeying together with Jesus is always at the same time a traveling together in the “we” of those who want to follow him. It brings us into this community. Because this journey to true life, to being men conformed to the model of the Son of God Jesus Christ is beyond our powers, this journeying is also always a state of being carried. We find ourselves, so to speak, in a “roped party” with Jesus Christ — together with him in the ascent to the heights of God. He pulls us and supports us. Letting oneself be part of a roped party is part of following Christ; we accept that we cannot do it on our own. The humble act of entering into the “we” of the Church is part of it — holding on to the roped party, the responsibility of communion, not letting go of the rope because of our bullheadedness and conceit.

Humbly believing with the Church, like being bound together in a roped party ascending to God, is an essential condition for following Christ. Not acting as the owners of the Word of God, not chasing after a mistaken idea of emancipation — this is also part of being together in the roped party. The humility of “being-with” is essential to the ascent.

Pope Benedict XVI – Palm Sunday Homily 2010

St. Augustine on Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament

It was in His flesh that Christ walked among us and it is His flesh that He has given us to eat for our salvation; but no one eats of this flesh without having first adored it . . . and not only do we not sin in thus adoring it, but we would be sinning if we did not do so.

St. Augustine – Commentary on Psalm 98