A Quote from St. Catherine of Siena

I would have you know that every good, whether perfect or imperfect, is acquired and made manifest in me. And it is acquired and made manifest by means of your neighbor. Even simple folk know this, for they often love others with a spiritual love. If you have received my love sincerely without self-interest, you will drink your neighbor’s love sincerely. It is just like a vessel that you fill at the fountain. If you take it out of the fountain to drink, the vessel is soon empty. But if you hold your vessel in the fountain while you drink, it will not get empty: Indeed, it will always be full. So the love of your neighbor, whether spiritual or temporal, is meant to be drunk in me, without any self-interest.  

St. Catherine of Siena (The Dialogue)

Von Balthasar on the Cross

“It is to the Cross that the Christian is challenged to follow his Master: no path of redemption can make a detour around it.” 

― Hans Urs von Balthasar, Unless You Become Like This Child

Archbishop Fulton Sheen: Christ, Priesthood and Victimhood

“If in Christ, Priesthood and victimhood are inseparable, should this not be so in ‘other-Christ’s’? Why have we considered ourselves only as offerers and not as offered, as preachers and not as sin-bearers, as social workers and not as redeemers? The priest is called to be a sin-bearer, as Christ was. This does not mean that he must wear hair shirts. Penance does not require hair shirts today; our neighbors are hair shirts. Victimhood means that we feel the guilt and sin of the world as if it were our own, and by constant union with Christ, seek to reconcile all mankind to Him. Love means identification with others – not only with the sheepfold, but also those who are not in it. If sin were finished, the Priest need only be a Priest; but if Calvary is continuing then the glorified Christ can still ask: why do you persecute me?” Archbishop Fulton Sheen (Those Mysterious Priests)

Wisdom from St. Teresa of Avila: Know Thyself

"I began to think of the soul as if it were a castle made of a single diamond or of very crystal in which there are many rooms just as in Heaven there are many mansions[...]Now if this is so –and it is– there is no point in our fatiguing ourselves in attempting to comprehend the beauty of this castle; for, though it is His creature, and there is therefore as much difference between it and God as between creature and Creator, the very fact that His Majesty says it is made in His image means that we can hardly form any conception of the soul’s great dignity and beauty. It is no small pity, and should cause us no little shame, that, through our own fault, we do not understand ourselves, or know who we are. Would it not be a sign of great ignorance, my daughters, if a person were asked who he was, and could not say, and had no idea who his father or his mother was, or form what he came? Though that is great stupidity, our own is incomparably greater if we make no attempt to discover what we are, and only know that we are living in these bodies, and have a vague idea, because we have heard it and because our Faith tells us, that we possess souls. As to what good qualities there may be in our souls, or Who dwells within them , or how precious they are –those are things which we seldom consider and so we trouble little about carefully preserving the soul’s beauty." St. Theresa's Interior Castle Page 41-42
Hat tip to St. Peter's List!

Thomas Merton on Priesthood

If you are afraid to love, never become a priest, never say Mass.  The Mass will draw you down upon your soul a torrent of interior suffering which has only one function:  to break you wide open and let everybody in the world into your heart.  For when you begin to say Mass, the Spirit of God awakens like a giant inside you and bursts the locks of  your private sanctuary.  If you say Mass, you condemn your soul to the torrent of a love that is so vast and insatiable that you will never be able to bear it alone.  That love is the love of the Heart of Jesus, burning within your own heart and bringing down upon you the huge weight of His compassion for all the sinners of the world.

A Quote from Archbishop Fulton Sheen

“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 feast and ends with the headache.” 

                                   Archbishop Fulton Sheen

G.K. Chesterton on Christmas

"What life and death may be to a turkey is not my business; but the soul of Scrooge and the body of Cratchit are my business." - "Christmas," All Things Considered

Advent's Intention

"Advent is concerned with that very connection between memory and hope which is so necessary to man. Advent’s intention is to awaken the most profound and basic emotional memory within us, namely, the memory of the God who became a child. This is a healing memory; it brings hope. The purpose of the Church’s year is continually to rehearse her great history of memories, to awaken the heart’s memory so that it can discern the star of hope.…

     It is the beautiful task of Advent to awaken in all of us memories of goodness and thus to open doors of hope."

-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger

Scott Hahn on Prayer

"If we do not fill our mind with prayer, it will fill itself with anxieties, worries, temptations, resentments, and unwelcome memories."  
                                               Scott Hahn

G.K. Chesterton on Confession

When people ask me, or indeed anybody else, “Why did you join the Church of Rome?” the first essential answer, if it is partly an elliptical answer, is, “To get rid of my sins.” For there is no other religious system that does really profess to get rid of people’s sins. It is confirmed by the logic, which to many seems startling, by which the Church deduces that sin confessed and adequately repented is actually abolished; and that the sinner does really begin again as if he had never sinned.

And this brought me sharply back to those visions or fancies with which I have dealt in the chapter about childhood. I spoke there of the indescribable and indestructible certitude in the soul, that those first years of innocence were the beginning of something worthy, perhaps more worthy than any of the things that actually followed them: I spoke of the strange daylight, which was something more than the light of common day, that still seems in my memory to shine on those steep roads down from Campden Hill, from which one could see the Crystal Palace from afar.

Well, when a Catholic comes from Confession, he does truly, by definition, step out again into that dawn of his own beginning and look with new eyes across the world to a Crystal Palace that is really of crystal. He believes that in that dim corner, and in that brief ritual, God has really remade him in His own image. He is now a new experiment of the Creator. He is as much a new experiment as he was when he was really only five years old. He stands, as I said, in the white light at the worthy beginning of the life of a man. The accumulations of time can no longer terrify. He may be grey and gouty; but he is only five minutes old.

-G.K. Chesterton (From his Autobiography)

Hat tip to Fr. Z

St. Francis of Assisi on the Humility of Christ

Everyday, Jesus humbles himself just as He did when He came from His heavenly throne into the Virgin’s womb; everyday He comes to us and lets us see Him in abjection, when He descends from the bosom of the Father into the hands of the priest at the altar.
                                  -St. Francis of Assisi 

A Classic GKC Quote

"The Catholic Church is like a thick steak, a glass of red wine, and a good cigar."
                                                 G.K. Chesterton 

Balthasar on Love

"Faith means the fundamental response to the love that has offered itself up for me. It thus becomes clear that faith is ordered primarily to the inconceivability of God’s love, which surpasses us and anticipates us. Love alone is credible; nothing else can be believed, and nothing else ought to be believed. This is the achievement, the ‘work’ of faith: to recognize this absolute prius, which nothing else can surpass; to believe that there is such a thing as love, absolute love, and that there is nothing higher or greater than it." 


                                   Fr. Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Dostoyevsky on Suffering

"I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world's finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, for all the blood that they've shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened."

            Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

On Doing the Will of God

The following comes from the Mark Mallet site:

In reality, holiness consists of one thing only: complete loyalty to God’s will…. You are seeking for secret ways of belonging to God, but there is only one: making use of whatever he offers you…. The great and firm foundation of the spiritual life is the offering of ourselves to God and being subject to His will in all things…. God truly helps us however much we may feel we have lost His support.  

—Fr. Jean-Pierre de Caussade, Abandonment to Divine Providence

St. Francis de Sales on Patience

“Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them—every day begin the task anew.”  

St. Francis de Sales

A Quote from Padre Pio

"Everybody can, and should, propagate the glory of God, and work for the salvation of men, by leading a Christian life, by praying constantly to the Lord: ' Your kingdom come, and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil.' This is what we should do, offering yourself completely and continually to the Lord for this purpose."  Padre Pio

Balthasar on Sin and Expiation

"The believer knows that, on the cross, Jesus 'took away the sins of the world.' Guilt cannot simply be blown away; it must be expiated; it must be dissolved in the pain of sorrow for sin and the confession of guilt. We have an embryonic grasp of this, even if what happens on the cross remains infinitely mysterious and can only be accepted in faith."

Hans Urs von Balthasar (Fulness of the Faith)

Words of St. Therese during her final illness

"I am not dying; I am entering life."

The Last Conversations-

Saint Therese’ of Lisieux

A Classic Quote from Archbishop Sheen

"There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church. Which is, of course, quite a different thing."

                    Archbishop Fulton Sheen