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)

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

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. 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

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. Jerome on the primacy of Peter

The Church was founded upon Peter: although elsewhere the same is attributed to all the Apostles, and they all receive the keys of the kingdom of heaven, the strength of the Church depends upon them all alike, yet one among the twelve is chosen so that when a head has been appointed, there may be no occasion for schism.

St. Jerome

Optatus of Mileis in Africa on unity under the Bishop of Rome

But you cannot deny that you know that the episcopal seat was established first in the city of Rome by Peter and that in it sat Peter, the head of all the apostles, wherefore he is called Cephas, the one chair in which unity is maintained by all. Neither do other Apostles proceed individually on their own; and anyone who would set up another chair in opposition to that single chair would, by that very fact, be a schismatic and a sinner. It was Peter, then, who first occupied that chair, the foremost of his endowed gifts …. I but ask you to recall the origins of your chair, you who wish to claim for yourselves the title of holy Church.

Optatus of Mileis

Philip Schaff on Sects and the Church

Sects then owe it to themselves, as soon as they have fulfilled their historical vocation, to fall back again to the general Church communion from which they have seceded, as in no other way can their spiritual acquisitions be either completed or secured, and they must themselves otherwise stiffen into monumental petrifacations, never to be revisited with the warm life pulse of the one universal Church.

Principle of Protestantism by Philip Schaff