Penance should be but the means to increase virtue according to the needs of the individual, and according to what the soul sees she can do in the measure of her own possibility.
God cannot leave us. It is just that our soul is so vast, we do not always feel His lips upon the veil.
It is impossible to fulfill the law concerning love for Me, God eternal, apart from the law concerning love for your neighbors.
Hope comes from love, because people always trust in those they love.
The soul is in God and God in the soul, just as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish.
Heaven is along the way.
It is surely justice to share our natural gifts with those who share our nature.
Turn over the rudder in God’s name, and sail with the wind heaven sends us.
These tiny ants have proceeded from His thought just as much as I, it caused Him just as much trouble to create the angels as these animals and the flowers on the trees.
You know that every evil is founded in self-love, and that self-love is a cloud that takes away the light of reason, which reason holds in itself the light of faith, and one is not lost without the other.
Be who you were created to be, and you will set the world on fire.
Be strong and kill yourself with the sword of hate and love, then you will not hear the insults and abuse which the enemies of the Church throw at you. Your eyes will not see anything which seems impossible, or the sufferings which may follow, but only the light of faith, and in that light everything is possible; and remember God never lays greater burdens on us than we can bear.
Take my heart and squeeze it out over the face of Your Bride, the Church.
Otherwise you fall into contempt of your neighbor, if you judge his evil will towards you, instead of My will acting in him.
The sign that you have this virtue is patience, and impatience the sign that you have it not, and you will find that this is indeed so, when I speak to you further concerning this virtue.
So you see that the eye of the intellect has received supernatural light, infused by grace, by which the doctors and saints knew light in darkness, and of darkness made light.
See then how He returns, not in actual flesh and blood, but, as I have said, building the road of His doctrine, with His power, which road cannot be destroyed or taken away from him who wishes to follow it, because it is firm and stable, and proceeds from Me, who am immovable.
Remain with Him in thy chamber, for thou shalt not elsewhere find so great peace.
Oh, Most Holy Father, this is the sword which I beg you to take into your hand. Now is the time to draw it from its sheath, and to hate vice in yourself, in your children, and in the Holy Church. I say ‘yourself’, because in this life none dare say that he is free from sin, and love should begin with oneself.
St. Catherine of Genoa’s life combined the noblest forms of Christian service with the highest levels of contemplative prayer. May her life and her doctrine help us, too, to live out our Christian discipleship, inspired by the love of God she taught and exemplified.