Penance does not require hair shirts today; our neighbors are hair shirts.
It is a curious psychological fact that those who make their personal love public, and “dear” one another with saccharine epithets, are very often those who when alone quarrel and fight.
In vain will the world seek for equality until it has seen all men through the eyes of faith. Faith teaches that all men, however poor, or ignorant, or crippled, however maimed, ugly, or degraded they may be, all bear within themselves the image of God, and have been bought by the precious blood of Jesus Christ. As this truth is forgotten, men are valued only because of what they can do, not because of what they are.
It is possible to love more than we know. A simple person in good faith may have a greater love of God than a theologian and, as a result, a keener understanding of the ways of God with the heart than psychologists have.
Weak men in high positions surround themselves with little men, in order that they may seem great by comparison.
The pure in heart shall see God, because they always do His will. Purity does not begin in the body but in the will. From there it flows outward, cleansing thought, imagination, and, finally, the body. Bodily purity is a repercussion or echo of the will. Life is impure only when the will is impure.
The essence of obscenity is the turning of the inner mystery into a jest.
What the new morality resolves itself into is this: You are wrong if you do a thing you do not feel like doing; and you are right if you do a thing you feel like doing. Such a morality is based not only on “fastidiousness,” but on “facetiousness.” The standard of morality then becomes the individual feeling of what is beautiful, instead of the rational estimate of what is right.
These four effects of love are: unity, mutual indwelling, ecstasy, and zeal.
Politics has become so all-possessive of life, that by impertinence it thinks the only philosophy a person can hold is the right or the left. This question puts out all the lights of religion so they can call all the cats gray. It assumes that man lives on a purely horizontal plane, and can move only to the right or the left. Had we eyes less material, we would see that there are two other directions where a man with a soul may look: the vertical directions of “up” or “down.
Celibacy is like poetry keeping the idea ever in mind like a dream; but marriage uses chisel and brush, concentrating more on marble and canvas. Celibacy jumps to a conclusion like an intuition; marriage, like reason, labors through ebb and flow, step by step.
One would not generally put garbage into the stomach, but too often one will put garbage into the mind.
Our blessed Lord was hopeful about humanity. He always saw men the way He originally designed them. He saw through the surface, grime, and dirt to the real man underneath. He never identified a person with sin. He saw sin as something alien and foreign which did not belong to man. Sin had mastered man but he could be freed from it to be his real self. Just as every mother sees her own image and likeness on her child’s face, so God always saw the divine image and likeness beneath us.
We live in days of assassins’ – where evil is sought in lives more than good to justify a world with a bad conscience.
Let no one think he can be totally indifferent to God in this life and suddenly develop a capacity for Him at the moment of death.
The mystery of the Incarnation is very simply that of God’s asking a woman freely to give Him a human nature.
By teaching the young, she remained young. Virtue does more to preserve youthfulness than all the pomades in Elizabeth Arden’s.
Like train announcers, they know all the stations, but never travel. Head knowledge is worthless, unless accompanied by submission of the will and right action.
In divorce cases, this is called “mental torture” or “domination.” Really, it is egocentricity, in which one ego loves itself in the other ego. The I is projected into the Thou and is loved in the Thou. The Thou is not really loved as a person; it is only used as a means to the pleasure of the I. As soon as the other ceases to exhilarate, the so-called love ceases.
As love comes from knowledge, so hatred comes from want of knowledge. Bigotry is the fruit of ignorance.
Christian love bears evil, but it does not tolerate it. It does penance for the sins of others, but it is not broadminded about sin. Real love involves real hatred: whoever has lost the power of moral indignation and the urge to drive the sellers from the temples has also lost a living, fervent love of Truth.