#catholic

The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#birth #catholicism #christianity #faith #god

Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today! We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all. ↗

— J. Gresham Machen

#church-catholic #church-unity #protestantism #roman-catholic #theological-liberalism

This is the story of how Dad lived with his lung cancer. But it is much more. Through his illness and the miracles we experienced, I came to see that Dad's was not just a journey. It was a journey home. Home to God. ↗

— Joseph M. Hanneman

#catholic #faith #inspiration #miracles #faith

Unless you are willing to do the ridiculous, God will not do the miraculous. When you have God, you don’t have to know everything about it; you just do it. ↗

— Mother Angelica

#faith #faith

It would be unjust toward children to introduce them to Christian teaching and existence only as little pagans and catechumens, in order to leave it up to them to choose the Faith on their own responsibility at a point in time difficult to determine. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#catholicism #christianity #faith #infant-baptism #theology

He loved the darkness and the mystery of the Catholic service--the tall priest strutting like a carrion crow and pronouncing magic in a dead language, the immediate magic of the Eucharist bringing the dead back to life so that the faithful could devour Him and become of Him, the smell of incense and the mystical chanting. ↗

— Dan Simmons

#christianity #jesus #language #magic #mysticism

His faith demanded his hopefulness, and his hope underpinned his work. He worked to give others the opportunity to hope - that was his abiding ambition. ↗

— Mark K. Shriver

#faith #faith

Galileo got into trouble because he maintained that since the new discoveries seemed to contradict scripture, those passages of scripture should be reinterpreted in a metaphorical way. He did not seek to oppose the Church nor to doubt the inspiration of scripture. The problem is that he abandoned science and started talking theology and so attracted the notice of the Roman Inquisition. If he had left theology out of his writings and discussions he would probably never have had problems. And he remained a faithful and devout Catholic to the end of his life. ↗

— Michael Coren

#galileo #faith

The egocentric is always frustrated, simply because the condition of self-perfection is self-surrender. There must be a willingness to die to the lower part of self, before there can be a birth to the nobler. ↗

— Fulton J. Sheen

#christianity #egocentrism #philosophy #self-perfection #self-surrender

Catholicism is an obsessive-compulsive faith. ↗

— Ann Patchett

#catholicism #obsessive-compulsive-disorder #run #faith