Increasingly, Christian life seems to be nothing more than a particular way of behaving, a code of good conduct. Christianity is increasingly alienated, becoming a social attribute adapted to meet the least worthy of human demands - conformity, sterile conservatism, pusillanimity and timidity; it is adapted to the trivial moralizing which seeks to adorn cowardice and individual security with the funerary decoration of social decorum.

The people who really thirst for life, who stand daily on the brink of every kind of death, who struggle desperately to distinguish some light in the seated mystery of human existence— these are the people to whom the Gospel of salvation is primarily and most especially addressed, and inevitably they all remain far removed from the rationalistically organized social conventionalism of established Christianity.

In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road totheological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of Godand the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...

In the Church, bodily asceticism has always been the supreme road totheological knowledge. It is not possible for man to come to know the truth of life, the truth of God and the truth of his own existence purely through intellectual categories...