catholic

... what you think is right isn't the same as knowing what is right.

When we infuse our actions with a focus on God and on the many blessings we receive in even the most mundane moments of our lives, we create sacred rituals that bring a sense of holiness, a sense of wholeness, to what we do and who we are. Like the Eucharistic feast that nourishes our heart and soul, every meal we eat with mindfulness[,] each bite we take with gratitude, has the power to transform us inside and out, for all time.

Prayer and comfortable living are incompatible.

For Mercier, it was the ceremony of the mass that eased his soul: the sweetish smoke trailing from the censer, the ringing of the bell, the Latin incantations of the priest. In Warsaw, he attended early mass, at a small church near the apartment, once or twice a month, confessing to his vocational sins _ duplicity, for example _ in the oblique forms provided by Catholic protocol. He__ grown up an untroubled believer, but the war had put an end to that. What God could permit such misery and slaughter? But, in time, he had found consolation in a God beyond understanding and prayed for those he__ lost, for those he loved, and for an end to evil in the world._ _ Alan Furst, The Spies of Warsaw

Reflect carefully on this, for it is so important that I can hardly lay too much stress on it. Fix your eyes on the Crucified and nothing else will be of much importance to you.

To bring people closer to God, competency and clarity are important, but they are not enough. Of themselves they do not touch hearts deeply. Personal sanctity and goodness do. It is the saints who light fires. There is a direct correlation between the beauty of holiness and the fruitfulness of our work and interpersonal relationships.

He was an indecent man, I told myself - prayerfully - and then I prayed for him to become decent.

In moments when fever, agony, and pain make it hard to pray, the suggestion of prayer that comes from merely holding the rosary - or better still, from caressing the Crucifix at the end of it - is tremendous!

Good Lord didn't mean for us to hate ourself. He made us to love ourself like He do, with wide open arms.

We are always hungry and never satisfied because we don__ trust and won__ risk. Can we reach a place where we are satisfied with just enough? You are enough. You have enough. Do not worry about tomorrow. God will provide in our lives just as God provides in the Eucharist.

If a man cannot serve two masters, neither can Christianity, or several thousand of them as the case may be.

He does not call those who are worthy, but those whom He will.

It is unfortunate that in most cases when the sins of the father fall on the son it is because unlike God, people refuse to forgive and forget and heap past wrongs upon innocent generations.

Gift better than Himself God doth not know,Gift better than God no man can see;This gift doth here the giver given bestowGift to this gift let each receiver be;God is my gift, Himself He freely gave me,God's gift am I, and none but God shall have me.

If Christ is God, He cannot sin, and if suffering was a sin in and by itself, He could not have suffered and died for us. However, since He took the most horrific death to redeem us, He showed us in fact that suffering and pain have great power.

Satan is too hard a master. He would never command as did the Other with divine simplicity: 'Do likewise.' The devil will have no victims resemble him. He permits only a rough caricature, impotent, abject, which has to serve as food for eternal irony, the mordant irony of the depths.

Only when we cease to rely on our own strength can we discover that God's strength is always there for us.

One thing is certain: When the time has come, nothing which is man made will subsist. One day, all human accomplishments will be reduced to a pile of ashes. But every single child to whom a woman has given birth will live forever, for he has been given an immortal soul made to God's image and likeness. In this light, the assertion of de Beauvoir that 'women produce nothing' becomes particularly ludicrous.