St. Alphonsus Liguori on Speaking with God as if Alone with Him

Acquire the habit of speaking to God as if you were alone with Him, familiarly and with confidence and love, as to the dearest and most loving of friends. Speak to Him often of your business, your plans, your troubles, your fears — of everything that concerns you. Converse with Him confidently and frankly; for God is not wont to speak to a soul that does not speak to Him.

St. Alphonsus Liguori

St. Augustine of Hippo on Loving God Late

Late have I loved You. O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things which you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would have not been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.

– St. Augustine of Hippo

St. Augustine on Confession and Reconciliation

Whoever confesses his sins . . . is already working with God. God indicts your sins; if you also indict them, you are joined with God. Man and sinner are, so to speak, two realities: when you hear “man” – this is what God has made; when you hear “sinner” – this is what man himself has made. Destroy what you have made, so that God may save what he has made. . . . When you begin to abhor what you have made, it is then that your good works are beginning, since you are accusing yourself of your evil works. The beginning of good works is the confession of evil works. You do the truth and come to the light.

St. Augustine – referenced in CCC Paragraph 1458

St. Augustine on Christ Giving His Body to His Disciples

Christ held Himself in His hands when He gave His Body to His disciples.

St. Augustine – 405 A.D.

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

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

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

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

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

St. Augustine on Baptismal Regeneration

It is this one Spirit who makes it possible for an infant to be regenerated . . . when that infant is brought to baptism; and it is through this one Spirit that the infant so presented is reborn. For it is not written, ‘Unless a man be born again by the will of his parents’ or ‘by the faith of those presenting him or ministering to him,’ but, ‘Unless a man be born again of water and the Holy Spirit.’ The water, therefore, manifesting exteriorly the sacrament of grace, and the Spirit effecting interiorly the benefit of grace, both regenerate in one Christ that man who was generated in Adam.

Letters 98:2 [A.D. 412] – St. Augustine

St. Augustine on Believing the Gospel because of the Catholic Church

Such then in number and importance are the precious ties belonging to the Christian name which keep a believer in the Catholic Church, as it is right they should … With you, where there is none of these things to attract or keep me… No one shall move me from the faith which binds my mind with ties so many and so strong to the Christian religion… For my part, I should not believe the gospel except as moved by the authority of the Catholic Church.

St. Augustine (354–430): Against the Epistle of Manichaeus called Fundamental, chapter 4: Proofs of the Catholic Faith

St. Augustine on the sects wishing to be called Catholic

And so, lastly, does the very name of “Catholic”, which, not without reason, amid so many heresies, the Church has thus retained; so that, though all heretics wish to be called Catholics, yet when a stranger asks where the Catholic Church meets, no heretic will venture to point to his own chapel or house.

St. Augustine (354–430): Against the Epistle of Manichaeus called Fundamental, chapter 4: Proofs of the Catholic Faith

St. Augustine on the Papacy and Apostolic Succession

In the Catholic Church, there are many other things which most justly keep me in her bosom. The consent of peoples and nations keeps me in the Church; so does her authority, inaugurated by miracles, nourished by hope, enlarged by love, established by age. The succession of priests keeps me, beginning from the very seat of the Apostle Peter, to whom the Lord, after His resurrection, gave it in charge to feed His sheep (Jn 21:15-19), down to the present episcopate.

St. Augustine (354–430): Against the Epistle of Manichaeus called Fundamental, chapter 4: Proofs of the Catholic Faith

St. Augustine on unity with the Catholic Church

There is nothing more serious than the sacrilege of schism because there is no just cause for severing the unity of the Church.

St. Augustine

St. Augustine on the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist

What you see is the bread and the chalice; that is what your own eyes report to you. But what your faith obliges you to accept is that the bread is the body of Christ and the chalice is the blood of Christ. This has been said very briefly, which may perhaps be sufficient for faith; yet faith does not desire instruction

St. Augustine – Sermons 272, A.D. 411

Mortimer Adler on Religion, Superstition, Science and Philosophy

I suggest that the men and women who have given up religion because of the impact on their minds of modern science and philosophy were never truly religious in the first place, but only superstitious. The prevalence and predominance of science in our culture has cured a great many of the superstitious beliefs that constituted their false religiosity. The increase of secularism and irreligion in our society does not reflect a decrease in the number of persons who are truly religious, but a decrease in the number of those who are falsely religious; that is, merely superstitious. There is no question but that science is the cure for superstition, and, if given half the chance with education, it will reduce the amount that exists. The truths of religion must be compatible with the truths of science and the truths of philosophy. As scientific knowledge advances, and as philosophical analysis improves, religion is progressively purified of the superstitions that accidentally attach themselves to it as parasites. That being so, it is easier in fact to be more truly religious today than ever before, precisely because of the advances that have been made in science and philosophy. That is to say, it is easier for those who will make the effort to think clearly in and about religion, not for those whose addiction to religion is nothing more than a slavish adherence to inherited superstition. Throughout the whole of the past, only a small number of men were ever truly religious. The vast majority who gave their epochs and their societies the appearance of being religious were primarily and essentially superstitious.

Mortimer Adler