Cardinal Francis George Quotes

I expect to die in bed, my successor will die in prison and his successor will die a martyr in the public square. His successor will pick up the shards of a ruined society and slowly help rebuild civilization, as the church has done so often in human history

It is everyone’s responsibility to help others overcome hunger, ill health or loneliness.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10: 25-37), Jesus taught us that every stranger in need is our neighbor. Refugees as well as immigrants command the Church’s care.

A healthy culture is open enough to respect other cultures without being destroyed by them.

Miracles are eternity breaking into time and are evidence of God’s will for our salvation.

The church, if she is faithful to her Lord, will not only proclaim who he is but will act to become herself the womb, the matrix, in which a new world can gestate and be born.

The church has no corner, no monopoly on work for the poor and for the elimination of economic and political injustice. The work of charity is ecumenical and universal both in its scope and its workers.

Racism, whether personal, social, institutional or structural, contradicts the purpose of the incarnation of the Word of God in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Racism contradicts God’s will for our salvation.

Both the Church and the Eucharist have their source and receive their present vitality from the events celebrated in Holy Week: the Last Supper of Jesus with his apostles, his atoning passion and death on Good Friday and his bodily resurrection on Easter Sunday

The Second Vatican Council, much influenced by Newman’s thinking, spoke of the assent of the mind and will to Catholic doctrine, even if all dimensions of a doctrine are not understood. Without such assent, we try to meet God on our terms rather than His. This is futile at best and spiritually destructive at worst.

The danger of modern spirituality, even as exemplified in St. Therese of Lisieux, is that simplicity can slide into sentimentality, a subjective caricature of objective love. Without a sense of history and of God’s self-revelation in time as well as in one’s heart, without the social discipline of the liturgical year and of approved devotions, modern religion degenerates.

It is always amazing to me how anyone who holds the faith can ask what we “get out” of the Mass. What we “get out” is the risen Christ. What he does is explode our tiny ways and small minds to bring them into a dimension of existence that is sometimes resisted because it can be terrifying. The risen Christ is not a “nice man”; he is certainly not the sentimentalized Jesus who never makes demands that bring us beyond our very selves and turn the world inside out.

The purgation of all the effects of sin and our growth in personal holiness, may continue after death until we are ready to live with God forever. A justified soul in purgatory is something like a child playing in the back yard. Her mother calls her to say that she should wash her face and hands because her grandmother is at the front door. The child knows her grandmother loves her and will embrace her; but the child still has to wash up, has to be prepared for that embrace.

Many blacks, Hispanics, Asians and Native Americans are socialized and educated in institutions which devalue the presence of people of color and celebrate only the contributions of whites....Thus, people of color can come to see themselves...primarily through the eyes of that dominant culture....Seeing few men and women from their own culture or class in leadership roles, they begin to apply to themselves the negative stereotypes about their group that the dominant culture chooses to believe.

Almsgiving, fasting and prayer are all ways to empty ourselves, to create a space in our lives where God can do what he wants with us. When we give alms, we not only help the poor; we also create an empty space in our pocketbooks. With less money, we are less free to follow our own designs and more open to search for God’s will for us. When we fast, we create a space in our bodies, a void in our stomachs. Emptying ourselves physically leaves us more attuned to God Spiritually. When we pray, we empty our minds and hearts and give God time and space to fill us with his grace.

Analogies can easily be multiplied, if one wants to push a thesis; but the point is that the greatest threat to world peace and international justice is the nation state gone bad, claiming an absolute power, deciding questions and making ‘laws’ beyond its competence. Few there are, however, who would venture to ask if there might be a better way for humanity to organize itself for the sake of the common good. Few, that is, beyond a prophetic voice like that of Dorothy Day, speaking acerbically about ‘Holy Mother the State,’ or the ecclesiastical voice that calls the world, from generation to generation, to live at peace in the kingdom of God.

The Catholic Church also opposes any effort to make it easier to deport children; last week, the archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis E. George, said he had offered facilities in his diocese to house some of the children, and on Monday, bishops in Dallas and Fort Worth called for lawyers to volunteer to represent the children at immigration proceedings. “We have to put our money where our mouth is in this country,” said Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops. “We tell other countries to protect human rights and accept refugees, but when we get a crisis on our border, we don’t know how to respond.” Republicans have rejected calls by Democrats for $2.7 billion in funds to respond to the crisis, demanding changes in immigration law to make it easier to send children back to Central America. And while President Obama says he is open to some changes, many Democrats have opposed them, and Congress is now deadlocked.

We must love our neighbor, not tolerate but love our neighbor. “As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you. Dwell in my love.” (John 15:7) Love is the response to all injustice, hatred and racism.

For Catholics, all division ceases in the Holy Eucharist. We, who are redeemed by the Blood of Christ, are one body in Christ, his Church. As members of that one body, we are committed to resist complicity with the sin of racism and to take responsibility for correcting the wrongs of the past and of today.

The Church wants us to build bridges across the chasms that still divide us. We are to be the leaven transformed by God’s grace to be agents of dialogue and intercultural collaboration in Church and in society.

United in the dynamics and mutual self-giving of their life as God, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit create out of infinite love the universe and all that fills it.

Though God intended that all creation live in the harmony and love that unites it as one, human beings, exercising their free will, defied the will of God and replaced the divinely planned harmony with division, the divinely willed unity with conflict, the divinely intended community with fragmentation.

Jesus gave us the means to find our way back to his Father, whom he taught us to call our Father. Jesus, the new Adam, went to his death on the sixth day to recreate us by redeeming us from sin and Satan.

Through his preaching and healing, through the pattern of discipleship he called people to follow, through his bodily resurrection from the dead, the Lord Jesus literally embodies for us a new way of life, which conforms to the will and reign of God.

The vision of a community dwelling in God’s unconditional and universal love may sound like an impossible dream, but in God all things are possible (Mark 10:27).

The radical conversion needed to overcome the sin of racism is made possible by the Holy Spirit. Sent by the risen Christ, the Holy Spirit dwells in our hearts and in our midst to empower us to live truly as God’s people.

The indwelling of the Holy Spirit instills within us the desire to continue the mission of Jesus as his disciples.

Everyone shares the fear of violence. Prejudice is evident, however, if it is simply assumed that people of another race must be violent because they are who they are.

Unfortunately, the fears of economic loss and of personal violence can blind people to what their Catholic faith calls them to do—dwell together in love. These fears have to be honestly addressed if we are to live in a genuinely multi-racial and multi-cultural society.

People who assume, consciously or unconsciously, that white people are superior create and sustain institutions that privilege people like themselves and habitually ignore the contributions of other peoples and cultures.

When individuals automatically award superior status to their own cultural group and inferior status to all those outside it, they are acting as racists.

The Gospel compels us to love our neighbor as ourselves, to abandon patterns of seeing those who are racially or culturally different from ourselves as strangers and to recognize them as our brothers and sisters.

Even those who have suffered at the hands of others, individually or collectively, must pray to overcome hostility, forgiving those who have offended them and asking forgiveness from those whom they have offended. We must embrace one another as formerly estranged neighbors now seeking reconciliation.

We meet God in the created, visible, tangible surroundings of the home, the neighborhood and the workplace. We encounter God in and through our spouse, children, brothers and sisters, the family next door, the shopkeeper on the corner, our teachers, the stranger on the street. In short, we meet God in and through people of every color, ethnic background, religion, class and gender. God is active in and through the people, places and circumstances that constitute our ordinary daily life.

Our love of God, expressed in prayer, pilgrimages and other acts of devotion, must be made visible in our practice of the love of neighbor, expressed by establishing patterns of right relationships in our daily lives, in our work and everyday encounters.

Loving and just relationships are the manifestation of our communion with God.

Ethnic, cultural, and racial diversities are gifts from God to the human race.

Narcissism is self-centeredness. Even the church can imagine that she is the center of the world rather than Christ, her Lord. Then the church would become just a professional organization rather than the Body of Christ, as he wants her to be.

Not every love, not every friendship is marital.

We believe the Holy Spirit keeps the church in truth, keeps her from teaching falsehood. The Holy Spirit, I hope, also helps her to govern well, but that’s a little different. We can always resist the Holy Spirit and sin. We have to pray pretty hard that the force of the Holy Spirit will make itself felt through prayer, through discernment.

The most important challenge is to worship the way the Lord wants us to worship and to increase the number of people who are worshipping, to reach out to people who don’t know who Christ is and to help them to discover him in his body, the church. That’s the constant missionary challenge. If you’re internally weakened and you’re externally challenged, then the mission becomes more problematic than it should be.

From your baptism, you belong to Christ. Your parents had you baptized before you even knew about it, and the relationship is real. You can’t unbaptize yourself. You can’t unbirth yourself and be somebody else’s daughter. Those are all real relationships that precede your own self-consciousness.

We are all related in Christ. What we have to keep doing is expand that relationship until finally everybody is within it. That’s the mission of the church, universal communion.

Catholics have to think beyond the confines of their nation state, whatever their citizenship might be.

In the church, we understand ourselves in relationship to God, first of all — God in Christ and Christ in his church. So if you collapse that relationship into the political, then you lose the church.

Living as “simply Catholic” means you have a context that is universal. It is not just your family. It is not just your city or your state, or your race, or your culture. It is universal. Once you are in that context and become used to seeing things from that universal perspective, you begin to understand what it means to be simply Catholic, and not a conservative Catholic or a liberal Catholic or an American Catholic or a Chinese Catholic.

Your love is supposed to extend as far as Christ’s love and his salvific action, which is for everybody. You are brothers and sisters to all those people whether you like it or not, whether you know them personally or not. You are supposed to be concerned about their good, and the ultimate good for everyone is salvation.

We want everybody to live in Christ — if not explicitly here, because many don’t, then certainly in the world to come. The church exists for that purpose.

If you love Christ, then there should be a great desire to talk about him and introduce him to others. You talk about those you love.

God has revealed who he is in history and also in the book of nature, known by reason. People’s internal spiritual experiences also lead them to some sense of God. Knowing who God is as he knows himself depends upon what he decides to tell you, which is revelation.

If God is not a deceiver, if he is true, and if he makes the world rational or reasonable, then you can rely upon your own reason and upon the gift of faith, if you pray for it, to steer you in the right direction. But the gift of faith is a communal gift; you have the authority of the church to help you to know what the true faith is.

How do you love somebody? It is just through living with them, at least intentionally, and working through problems as they arise.

To be integrated and not simply absorbed, a group must have a strong sense of its own identity.

Celebrating anniversaries strengthens our together in Christ and can be the occasion for Christ to shower his people with grace.

How to be an evangelizing church is the basic question of all those who have met Jesus Christ in his word and in the sacraments. The faith has to be shared or its will be lost.

Over 2,000 years, practically everything has happened once, but there is a general thread of understanding that guides a believer who sees that the papacy and its magisterium is part of the mystery of faith that is the church and is more than a simply historical institution.

The life of the Poor Clares is not just a life marked by enclosure. Most especially it is marked by contemplation, to seek and understand what God is saying. In a particular way, the Poor Clares contemplate Christ crucified, to whom they are espoused.In that image of a crucified Lord we find eternal life. Through their life of voluntary poverty, the Poor Clares “clear the mirror” from distractions so they might see Christ crucified all the better.

Spirituality is individual, religion is community. We have to be spiritual but it has to be a spirituality rooted in religion.

In the last analysis people come to church to know Jesus Christ as he wants to be known and loved and to be touched by him through the sacraments which are the actions of the risen Christ in our space and our time. Our future therefore is in Christ’s hands. If the church is a little less a provider of services and a little more a school of discipleship, that will be all to the good.

You are called to the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Among those who are committed to your care and to the world, you are to preach forgiveness and work for peace. You are to govern God’s people, judge the sinners and forgive their sins. … As you step forward, know that Christ loves you with a complete love and that Christ is pleased with you. Know that the church rejoices with you and is grateful to you.

Remember as well that Christ was crucified, as was St. Peter, and that St. Paul was beheaded. A world that resists conversion and rejects witness will push back. If you live with the poor, you may be shot by robbers.

The Church is primarily mission. Mission is the purpose. Ministries are what we do to meet that purpose. But mission is basic to our identities.

The world looks different when you’re not in a power center, but that’s the perspective of the Kingdom of God. The poor are the first citizens. We are part of a kingdom where the poor are the favored sons and daughters.

We can’t depend on institutions to carry the Church. Institutions can become weakened or disappear. But we can always have strong people.

We work with people who are different in language, race, culture and economic development, but, even with different expressions, we have the same faith. To be missionary is to recognize that—if you’re Catholic—the horizon is universal.

Every place is missionary.

What I'd like to do when I retire is go down to the bookstore a couple of times a week and just sit there and be available for people's questions.

Pornography separates flesh from spirit. It destroys the personal modesty that protects human intimacy and that allows men and women to grow in mutual respect. It frees lust from moral scruple and from the control of conscience, and it becomes easily addictive. It isolates those addicted to it. It subverts family life and personal integrity.

In the New Covenant, Jesus uses these same basics of human life to give us life beyond this life. He sets before us the Eucharist, his very body, as the bread of life. He conquers sin and Satan, the enemies of the human race, and sets our entire race free. He makes us members of God’s family through baptism, bringing us into a communion, a family of life and love we call the Church. In the Church, God feeds us; God protects us; God bring us true fulfillment and joy.

If we can't occasionally make fun of ourselves, we're all in dire straits.

Full and actual participation in the Eucharist is the best way of living God’s life, which is also given and shared in the other sacraments. The ordinary actions of daily life are also occasions for grace and not just occasions of sin, as they were thought to be almost exclusively by some spiritual authors.

If we’re made in the image and likeness of God, then what comes first in life is the relationships to God and one another before our own individual autonomy and our own creating a project out of our life. Life is a gift before it’s a project. It is a project. You have to make decisions. You have to plan. But first of all it’s a gift, and therefore a gift that puts us into a relationship with the divine giver and to our family. And those relationships are the parameters within which we then make our choices and do our projects and the rest of it.

Faith is a gift, and we have to pray for it.

Those who gather at his cross and by his empty tomb, no matter their nationality, are on the right side of history. Those who lie about him and persecute or harass his followers in any age might imagine they are bringing something new to history, but they inevitably end up ringing the changes on the old human story of sin and oppression.

Work is part of establishing ourselves as God's creatures, laboring in line with his purpose and establishing goals to achieve what is good for ourselves and others.

Our dignity as persons has its roots in the freedom that images God and is brought to self-consciousness from natural reason and from responding to God's own gracious self-revelation.

Jesus' properly ordered human freedom is not a block to the divine freedom but an icon of it.

Sooner or later, those who are sure they are entirely free to determine their own identity and actions without God will deny his existence.

Much of the life of the church is reading signs.

This is what distinguishes human beings from other living creatures: we can know the truth about God and about ourselves as creatures with inviolable dignity precisely because we are made in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1:26).

We are related to God, who is Creator and Savior and Sanctifier, and then related to everyone God loves; so we must see others, in some sense, as brothers and sisters, as members of the one human family, no matter what other differences there might be.

The family tells us that we’re not the center of the world individually but are rather always someone’s son, someone’s daughter, someone’s brother or sister or cousin or uncle. The family relationships are prior to individual self-consciousness. That is the basis of Catholic social teaching; it is ineluctably a communitarian ethos.

The lesson of American history is that churches and other religious bodies prosper in a nation and in a social order that respects religious freedom and recognizes that civil government should never stand between the consciences and the religious practice of its citizens and Almighty God.

Religious freedom cannot be reduced to freedom of worship or even freedom of private conscience. Religious freedom means that religious groups as well as religious individuals have a right to exercise their influence in the public square.

The diocesan liturgist is called upon to do his or her work with great discernment, particularly pastoral discernment. In two thousand years, everything has been done once. You can always find a precedent. But precedent alone is not sufficient reason for change. Only a true sensitivity to pastoral realities as discerned by the Bishop can serve as a guide in the implementation of the liturgical renewal. This requires a certain humility before the mysteries of our faith, which become real for us in the celebration of the liturgy, and a similar humility before the pastoral realities of our people, who are sanctified by these mysteries. You, as part of diocesan liturgical teams, are called to participate in the Bishop’s charism of uniting people, and that takes a certain amount not just of discernment, but also of humility.

God’s grace is tailored to the needs of each individual, but there is also a pattern to God’s love.

Each of us is on a path of continuous conversion to the Lord in his Body, the Church. Because the soul of the Church is the Holy Spirit, we are one. Because we are one, the actions of each affect the lives of all. One person’s growth in holiness makes the path to holiness easier for all; another person’s descent into sin diminishes all of us spiritually.

Pentecost is a feast of conversion. Our minds are converted to Christ in faith; and our hearts are converted to his mission in charity. Faith and charity are given with the coming of the Holy Spirit. Everything in the Church is a gift.

One can recite the Creed; but without the Spirit, the words of Scripture and liturgy are dead. One can call oneself a Catholic; but without zeal to introduce others to Jesus, the apostolic mission languishes.

One can be baptized and still sin; one can be ordained and still betray the Lord. Nevertheless, both baptism and ordination remain sacramental means of holiness.

The most important gift is the grace that brings us God’s own life and our salvation. Grace is invisible, as are faith and hope and love itself.

First of all, the Church begins with Jesus Christ. He is the Church’s head and the Church is his Body. The Church belongs to him, and all who call themselves Christ’s disciples or followers belong to the Church on his terms.

We do not come together alone. God is always with us when we seek to do his holy will. Let us submit our plans and desires, our purposes and programs to a just God, who loves us beyond our every imagining and who gives us the dignity that demands respect. In the end, all that we are and have is a gift.

Respect means that every person has human dignity and must be treated as a child of God. Respect means that families, in which each of us first learned what it means to be a human being, should not be divided, that husbands should not be separated from wives nor mothers from their children. Respect means that people who have been part of this country’s social and economic fabric for years should not now be treated as if they do not count, as if their contribution can be simply dismissed and they sent away.

We are called to transform the world in Christ by living out our faith in family, neighborhood, workplace and society. We demonstrate our faith in the priorities we work for and in the way we relate to others. Our goal is not simply to change individuals; we want to change the world.

Mission is a way of being church. Our discipleship is rooted in a personal conversion to Jesus Christ. Christ in the Eucharist continually transforms us into witnesses of his own love and mercy.

The nature of life itself, of marriage and of faith cannot be simply subsumed into the language of individual rights.

The Church is called to be holy; for our sanctification, Christ died. The Church has saints, but each saint is a reformed sinner.

Social thinking and social practice inspired by the Gospel must always be marked by special sensitivity towards those most in distress, those who are extremely poor, those suffering from all physical, mental and moral ills that afflict humanity.

In the history of early Israel, God said, "I am the Lord who heals you" (Exodus 15:26). This God who creates and loves also heals and sustains our life. God's creating and healing work comes to fulfillment in Jesus Christ. Jesus' ministry to the sick, his many cures and miracles, expresses the Father's everlasting compassion. In Jesus the healer (Matthew 4:23-25), we see God's loving recognition of the life and dignity of every human being. In the life of the Church, the compassionate healing of the Father and the Son is made available to us through the gift of the Holy Spirit, who strengthens us to be compassionate healers.