488 Quotes About Catholicism

Trusting yourself is the opposite of trusting God. If you trust God totally (as you must) you must mistrust yourself. If you trust yourself, you are automatically mistrusting God.Faith is not enough, you also need an act of will. The act of will you need is precisely deciding to trust God fully and mistrust yourself.Modern psychology has lost its bearings when they insist that one must trust oneself. That position is un-Christian.

Christianity, unlike any other religion in the world, begins with catastrophe and defeat. Sunshine religions and psychological inspirations collapse in calamity and wither in adversity. But the Life of the Founder of Christianity, having begun with the Cross, ends with the empty tomb and victory.

A fear of state power structured Church thought: the Caesars had killed Peter and Paul, and Jesus. The pope therefore did not have one role, but two. He had to render to God what was God’s, and keep Caesar at bay.

Therein lies the new hope—Justice, after eighteen hundred years of impotent Charity. Ah! in a thousand years from now, when Catholicism will be naught but a very ancient superstition of the past, how amazed men will be to think that their ancestors were able to endure that religion of torture and nihility!

There were plenty of men who had received the Papacy and weren’t worthy of it. There were men such as Stephen VI, Benedict IX, John XII, Clement V, Sixtus IV, Leo X, Alexander VI, and others. These were men who had taken the throne of Saint Peter and turned it into a couch of corruption, greed, dissipation, blood, violence, incest, and heresy.

Only by having a sense of history's trajectory (even if one does not believe in Parousia) can one love earthly reality and believe—with charity—that there is still room for Hope.

If he had given away anything else, he would have been charged with indecent exposure.

The truth is like a lion; you don’t have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself.

Why is it that any time we speak of temptation we always speak of temptation as something that inclines us to wrong. We have more temptations to become good than we do to become bad.