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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

And he countered, “What kind of democracy promotes freedom? Ours, if it becomes totally free. What kind of democracy destroys freedom? Ours, if it becomes totally secularized.” A totally secularized society, George said, is one that does three things: first, makes “all truth relative and all religion a matter of personal opinion, not to be imposed on anyone else;” second, creates “a world so free of danger and threat that it becomes a prison for everyone;” and third, reduces “poverty by reducing the number of people, by killing those who are too weak to defend themselves.”61

God’s will is that we be, first of all, faithful disciples of Jesus Christ, gathered into unity in his Body, the Church, by the power of the Holy Spirit.

What does it mean to evangelize? It doesn’t mean beating people over the head with a Bible or a Catechism or our own spiritual experience stridently repeated; but it does mean more than the quiet witness of Gospel living and Christian service.

Repentance is the beginning of conversion to Christ.

Jesus can be reduced to a role model who shows us the way to an ethical Kingdom of peace and love constructed by us on our own insights. But Jesus is much more than a model or a source of personal inspiration: he is our Lord.

The power to surrender is itself a gift from the Holy Spirit. We are people filled with hope precisely because God’s kingdom isn’t ours; it’s Christ’s.

With great respect, the evangelizer will look for opportunities to tell others who Christ is, because it is impossible for us not to speak of someone we love. But we know the appropriate moment for speaking because we have discerning hearts.

This Jesus we love wants us to introduce people to him so that the gifts he left his Church – the Gospel and divine revelation, the Sacraments and other means of sanctification, the pastoral governance which continues the ministry of the Apostles – can be shared universally. Sharing these gifts brings us into the mind and heart of Christ and makes us God’s agents to change a divided and sinful world into something which resembles at least a little bit more the Kingdom of God.

The two greatest commandments that Jesus gives us are “to love the Lord your God with all your heart, and to love your neighbor as yourself.” All Christians are called to reflect the love and unity of the Blessed Trinity.

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.

St. Paul calls all disciples of Jesus Christ strangers in any land that is not the kingdom of heaven.

Respect for human dignity is based in faith, which teaches us to see a human person in every unborn child, in every elderly and ill person, and in every immigrant or refugee.

Our faith also helps us to recognize a neighbor in every member of the human family. People are themselves gifts far greater than the magi’s gold, frankincense and myrrh. From this vision of faith comes the moral obligation to respect, accept and welcome others, especially the strangers among us.

In faith, we are “together on the journey.

Catholic parents have the obligation to raise their children in the Catholic faith. Their own salvation is in jeopardy if they fail to help their children accept and live according to God’s gift of faith.

A human person who lives in falsehood lives less freely than God has made us to live.

It’s supremely important to know if it’s true that God so loves the world that he sent his only-begotten Son, born of a woman, to be our savior (Jn. 3: 16 and Gal. 4:4). Methods for coming to the truth in all these matters can and do vary; but whether one lives in truth or in error determines, finally, whether one lives in freedom or delusion, in hope or despair.

Martyrs are believers who are able to bring their faith into every area of experience: business, politics, the arts, health care, farming and manufacturing, sales and communications. Martyrs are prepared, in the presence of skepticism and power, to account for the hope that is in them (I Peter 3:15). They know their faith and can explain it as they live it. They are aware of the action of God in their lives and in the world and they do their best, with God’s grace, to respond faithfully, each according to his or her own vocation from God.

What, then, is the sin against the Holy Spirit? To lose hope by deliberately denying the truth, because this sin fixes one’s will in evil and makes one a servant of the Father of Lies.

We live in hope because God freely sends the Holy Spirit; but we have the duty to train the young to live in spirit and in truth.

We Shall Overcome.” The song tells us that some day the divisions founded on race prejudice will be overcome, along with other sources of injustice in society. It is a song of hope.

The differences are facts in themselves. The moral question asks what we are to do about them. In some cases (for example, the difference between men and women), the answer is not to overcome but to appreciate the difference. In other cases, hope bids us work to overcome the difference because it is a source of division which can even be sinful.

Since issues of life and death are now so politicized, pressure is building to see that politicians who profess to be Catholic put their faith into action in their law making. Behind this pressure, however, all voters who profess to be Catholic should put their faith into action when they choose their political leaders. The division between faith and life needs to be overcome.

Because faith is a gift, unity in faith is also a gift; we must ask for it.

Jews, Christians and Muslims believe that, in the end, God alone is enough. In God, all differences are to be reconciled. In that hope, we pray now that God will help us overcome those divisions that lead to hatred and violence and bring us to a knowledge of his truth.

Because Christ is risen from the dead, we are never alone. The power of God’s grace makes possible what would otherwise be impossible.

The penitential practices of Lent join to Christ’s passion our own sufferings: voluntary (fasting, acts of penance and charity) and involuntary (sickness, financial loss, family problems, social prejudice and violence).

Christ himself said that he came not to bring peace but the sword, to set family member against family member. In the human family, Christ is the dividing line. He is both loved and hated, represented and misrepresented, as is his Church.

Peter repents, while Judas kills himself. Then and now, there are two possibilities open to sinful Christians, including those whom Jesus has chosen to be his apostles and their successors: repentance or despair.

Every deliberate sin is a form of betrayal. The sinner turns from God, escapes from God, into an isolation which puts self and creatures in place of the Creator at the center of one’s life. In running from God, in trying to free himself from God, the sinner falls into the power of creatures and becomes a slave to earthly possessions, to the flesh, to the devil.

To obey Christ is to become like him who obeyed. To disobey Christ is to betray the Lord who gives us life as his disciples.

Judas could not face his betrayal; Peter did so with enormous anguish of heart. That anguish is ours when we face our own sins; it is ours as well when we face the sins of others in the Church.

Sin is always social, but so is the holiness which comes with the forgiveness of sin.

There are as many forms of betrayal as there are types of sin. Each has to make his or her own examination of conscience. We make this examination with grateful hearts, because Jesus has died for us and for our salvation. We make it with hopeful hearts because, sin overcome, eternal life is now a realistic expectation.

Christ is present to the Church because he is present completely and perfectly in the Eucharist; and the Church can celebrate the Eucharist because she is the Body of Christ, his new creation.

Both the Eucharist and the Church, as gifts from Christ, are one, holy, catholic and apostolic. When the Lord transforms bread and wine into his sacred body and blood, he invites us into a relationship of unity with him through the apostles, to whom he entrusted the Eucharist.

At the Last Supper, Christ gave us in an unbloody manner his self-sacrifice, to be consummated the next day on Calvary. He also gave us the apostolic college to make visible the communion that, with the Eucharist, constitutes the Church. From ecclesial communion in the Eucharist comes the impulse for the Church’s mission. By the grace of the Holy Spirit, the Church announces everywhere the work of the Son, testifying to him, making him truly present in the celebration of the Eucharist in all the languages of the earth. Each time the Eucharist is celebrated, the world changes. The love of God, mediated in the Eucharist, has the power to shape right order and harmony in all other relationships, both personal and social, strengthening them in anticipation of heaven.

For many today, life is short of hope. Some look for hope in all the wrong places, because the disciples of Jesus are not always effective in pointing to him, speaking of him, inviting others to come to know and love him in the Church.

There is no area of a believer’s life separate from his or her faith. A compartmentalized faith is not faith, certainly not Catholic faith, which begins with the proclamation that Jesus is risen from the dead and then works out the implications of that assertion in every area of life.

There is separation of Church and State at the heart of our faith—the king is not a priest—but there can be no separation of faith and life for either king or priest or anyone else who believes that Jesus Christ is risen from the dead.

Freedom of religion cannot be reduced to freedom of self-expression for believers or freedom to worship quietly as long as faith exercises no influence on the public conversation which shapes society.

The message of Christ and his promise of eternal life carries judgements about all dimensions of this life, including cultural and economic and political life.

Some Catholics who would like to transform the Church into a vehicle for their particular preferences are impatient to have the bishops act exactly as they demand.

Issues of basic importance to our faith make for difficult decisions in life. Fortunately for us and for the world, Christ has risen from the dead.

With more silence, the experience of worship is more recollected, the rhythm and tempo of the celebration more conducive to deeper prayer.

For some, distinctions between the ordained priest and the laity are never to be emphasized. Unfortunately, this sociological egalitarianism destroys the sense of the Church as a body, with head and members connected but essentially different in their mode of participation in Christ’s priesthood.

The Eucharist is a cause and a sign of our unity.

During the Easter season, the hymns sing of our joy in Christ’s conquering sin and death. Even in the midst of great sorrow, followers of Christ live in the joy that faith in the resurrection brings.

The foundation of our faith is not a book, although the Bible is an essential and divinely inspired witness to what God has done and desires of us in turn; nor is it a set of laws, although the commands of God show the way to salvation. The foundation of our faith is the one whom God sent, his Son who has a name, Jesus, the Word of life who could be heard, seen and touched (1 John 1,1). Faith is a personal response to this Lord who died to save us.

In Peter’s successor, the Church’s unity in every age has a visible face, a personal face.

In this country, it is hard to be Catholic, for suspicion and even hatred of the Church run deep in our history; outside of this country, it’s hard to be American, for suspicion and resentment of the United States have run deep for many decades. Perhaps this is not so much tragic as it is a reminder that believers have here no lasting city, that we are not supposed to be at home in this world. In the end, Christ will save the Church he makes his own.

The vocation of a warrior calls him or her to recognize who is the enemy and then to make war intelligently and morally. War is never just a military affair, nor a matter of politics and economics. In every war, as in every human action, moral judgments are made about what is right and what is wrong, what is good and what is evil. In its greatest manifestations, especially in the conquest of sin and death by Christ, warfare reaches beyond the merely human, and God battles against Satan.

Christ is our guarantee that God’s forgiveness is always available for us; the harder battle we have to fight is the struggle to cooperate with God’s grace in order to forgive our enemies. That battle can also be won, but we have to pray for the victory.

The Eucharist is a sign of the unity of the faith and strengthens our personal and collective unity in that faith. It should be used for no other purpose. We must use it at least weekly, as believers have done since apostolic times. No one receives the Eucharist on any other terms except those of Christ himself, just as no one is a Catholic on any other terms but Christ’s.

The Eucharist is truly Christ’s body and blood and, analogously but really, so is the Church.

In many periods of history, the Church has been in rough waters, as she is today in our country. The response to mistakes in steering a boat is not to cease steering but to steer correctly.

Grace is what we each receive for the first time at baptism. Grace is God’s life in us. Grace is a gift.

Never broken by sin, saved by being preserved from sin, Mary is the first to benefit from Christ’s conquest of sin, the first after Christ to experience bodily resurrection.

The first man lived in peace with the first woman until they came to consider God their enemy. The so-called “war between the sexes” is the inevitable outcome of humanity’s war with God.

In Jesus and through Mary, peace with God and peace among ourselves becomes possible, not because we deserve it but because it is pure gift, pure grace.

People who understand the primacy of grace pass their days and years with a keen sense of God’s presence in their lives and of their dependence on him. They live with the expectation that God will surprise them. They often turn to God in prayer. They do not resent the fact that they are not the primary agents of their own salvation, for they know their sinfulness and have experienced something of God’s infinite love.

Christians serve Christ and the world by proclaiming and living the Gospel, so that the world may come to the truth and to new life and hope. Christians serve Christ and the world by their work, their various callings and occupations and professions. Christians serve Christ, his Church and the world by raising families. Christians serve the world by charity and justice, by concern especially for those the world might easily overlook: the poor, the hungry, the sick, the imprisoned, those whose lives are threatened both before and after they are born. In the world, we are all servants, sometimes very useful to the Lord and sometimes less so.

For a believer, every decision is made in the light of faith.

Guilt is the complaint of my conscience against my self-satisfied existence. Guilt is as necessary for moral health as is pain for physical well being. Both guilt and pain tell me something has gone wrong. Anyone no longer capable of feeling guilty is spiritually sick.