Conversion Of Saint Paul Quotes

Practicing the presence of God is not on trial. Countless saints have already proved it. Indeed, the spiritual giants of all ages have known it. The results of this effort begin to show clearly in a month. They grow rich after six months, and glorious after ten years. This is the secret of the great saints of all ages. 'Pray without ceasing,' said Paul, 'in everything make your wants known unto God.' 'As many as are led by the spirit of God, these are the sons of God.

The conversion of a soul is the miracle of a moment, the manufacture of a saint is the task of a lifetime.

would like to quote also words by Paul VI, spoke on June 29, 1972, during a Mass at Saint Peter’s Basilica. The pope did not hide his pain and anguish: “Given the situation in the Church today, we have the impression that through some cracks in the wall the smoke of Satan has entered the temple of God: it is doubt, uncertainty, questioning, dissatisfaction, confrontation. There is no confidence in the Church. Instead people put their trust in the first secular prophet who comes along to talk to us about a newspaper editorial or a social movement, and they run after him to ask him whether he has the formula for true life, ignoring the fact that we already have it, that we are the owners of that formula.

I do not know the substance of the considerations and recommendations which Dr. Szilárd proposes to submit to you,” Einstein wrote. “The terms of secrecy under which Dr. Szilárd is working at present do not permit him to give me information about his work; however, I understand that he now is greatly concerned about the lack of adequate contact between scientists who are doing this work and those members of your Cabinet who are responsible for formulating policy.”34 Roosevelt never read the letter. It was found in his office after he died on April 12 and was passed on to Harry Truman, who in turn gave it to his designated secretary of state, James Byrnes. The result was a meeting between Szilárd and Byrnes in South Carolina, but Byrnes was neither moved nor impressed. The atom bomb was dropped, with little high-level debate, on August 6, 1945, on the city of Hiroshima. Einstein was at the cottage he rented that summer on Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks, taking an afternoon nap. Helen Dukas informed him when he came down for tea. “Oh, my God,” is all he said.35 Three days later, the bomb was used again, this time on Nagasaki. The following day, officials in Washington released a long history, compiled by Princeton physics professor Henry DeWolf Smyth, of the secret endeavor to build the weapon. The Smyth report, much to Einstein’s lasting discomfort, assigned great historic weight for the launch of the project to the 1939 letter he had written to Roosevelt. Between the influence imputed to that letter and the underlying relationship between energy and mass that he had formulated forty years earlier, Einstein became associated in the popular imagination with the making of the atom bomb, even though his involvement was marginal. Time put him on its cover, with a portrait showing a mushroom cloud erupting behind him with E=mc2 emblazoned on it. In a story that was overseen by an editor named Whittaker Chambers, the magazine noted with its typical prose flair from the period: Through the incomparable blast and flame that will follow, there will be dimly discernible, to those who are interested in cause & effect in history, the features of a shy, almost saintly, childlike little man with the soft brown eyes, the drooping facial lines of a world-weary hound, and hair like an aurora borealis… Albert Einstein did not work directly on the atom bomb. But Einstein was the father of the bomb in two important ways: 1) it was his initiative which started U.S. bomb research; 2) it was his equation (E = mc2) which made the atomic bomb theoretically possible.36 It was a perception that plagued him. When Newsweek did a cover on him, with the headline “The Man Who Started It All,” Einstein offered a memorable lament. “Had I known that the Germans would not succeed in producing an atomic bomb,” he said, “I never would have lifted a finger.”37 Of course, neither he nor Szilárd nor any of their friends involved with the bomb-building effort, many of them refugees from Hitler’s horrors, could know that the brilliant scientists they had left behind in Berlin, such as Heisenberg, would fail to unlock the secrets. “Perhaps I can be forgiven,” Einstein said a few months before his death in a conversation with Linus Pauling, “because we all felt that there was a high probability that the Germans were working on this problem and they might succeed and use the atomic bomb and become the master race.”38

Today, certainly it is important for us to show that same respect and fidelity to the Word of God, so as not to manipulate it to fit historical, political, or ideological circumstances, for the purpose of pleasing men and acquiring a reputation as a scholar or avant-garde theologian. . . . As Saint Paul says, “We are not like so many [who] practice cunning or. . . tamper with God’s word” (cf. 2 Cor 2:17; 4:2).

Many of the faithful rejoice to hear talk about divine mercy, and they hope that the radical demands of the Gospel can be relaxed even for the benefit of those who by their lives have chosen to break away from the crucified love of Jesus. They do not appreciate the price paid by him on the Cross, which delivered every one of us from the yoke of sin and death. They think that because of the Lord’s infinite goodness everything is possible, while at the same time deciding to change nothing in their lives. Many expect, as something normal, that God should pour out his mercy on them while they remain in sin. . . . But sin destroys me: How can the energies of divine life be grafted onto nothingness? Despite the repeated appeals of Saint Paul, they cannot imagine why light and darkness cannot coexist: “What shall we say then? Are we to continue in sin that grace may abound? By no means! How can we who died to sin still live in it? Do you not know that all of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death?. . . What then? Are we to sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!” (Rom 6:1-3, 15). This

Finally, the great strength of contemporary nihilism comes from a certain political consensus that ceaselessly fosters it. We must not be conformed to this world but allow ourselves to be transformed by renewing our way of thinking, so as to be able to discern God’s will. Often the media present speaking out against the Church’s Magisterium as a form of courage. In reality, no courage is needed for that, because then we can always be sure of the applause of the public. It takes courage, rather, to adhere to the faith of the Church, even if that contradicts the scheme of the modern world. Following Saint Paul, Benedict XVI called for a “mature” faith. This is the faith of the Christians who die every day for Christ in Nigeria, in Pakistan, in the Middle East, and throughout the world. . . .

For a long time the Church has known how to exalt and appreciate the specific genius of women. Saint John Paul II spoke about them as sentinels of the invisible; he was quite right. The Church must not allow herself to be impressed by that ideological feminism that can be seemingly generous in its intentions yet false in its deeper aims. Above all, we must not consider these problems in terms of function. God asks us to place ourselves at the service of the Church. It is not a question of making a career for oneself. Careerism already affects too much of the clergy; therefore we must not spread that virus to women! The

We pray that no one will go to Hell. The Catholic Church actively petitions for the salvation of all humanity. The Catholic must hold, under the threat of anathema, that God desires all to be saved, that he creates no being whom he wishes to be damned. While this saving action is the initiative of God alone, he undertakes this saving action in and through his Church, his body of believers on Earth. Saint Paul argues as much when he says that by his sufferings he is “filling up what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ” (Colossians 1:24). If these premises are true, then the question of Hell always involves the questioner existentially, not simply because it is his eternal destiny that is discussed, but also because these premises make him coresponsible for the eternal destiny of others. A person’s prayers, fastings, and sufferings are effective participations in the cross of Christ. They are the manner in which God has chosen to enact his desire to save all of humanity. One may take this “effective participation” in terms of merit and intercession, as when one prays that a person will not go to Hell, but one may also take this in a more mundane manner. If I get up from writing this article, cross the hall, and begin speaking with a colleague about Jesus, this action may help him reach Heaven. Through that conversation and others, he may develop the courage required to love God rather than reject him. I am, through the practice of charity, “doing the work of Christ,” that is, participating in the salvific plan of God. The question of whether or not souls will suffer eternal torment rebounds upon the questioner, whose free actions join in the divine plan to save all souls from eternal torment. The argument can be summed up as follows: Q: How can a just God allow souls to suffer Hell? A: I don’t know, how can you?

Active recollection is begun by closing your eyes and looking within. You attempt to ignore the outside world, intentionally ignoring your senses. As you do, you look for the King as He resides within the castle of your soul. You look for Him, call to Him, converse with Him, pour out your troubles to Him, love Him, and gaze at Him.

outside of Paul’s work itself, we do not know of any organized Christian missionary work—not just for the first century, but for any century prior to the conversion of most of the empire. As MacMullen has succinctly put it: “After Saint Paul, the Church had no mission.” That may be hard to believe, but in fact, if you were to count every Christian missionary about whom even a single story is told, from the period after the New Testament up through the first four centuries, you would not need all the digits on one hand. We are not talking about armies of volunteers knocking on doors. We know of three, all in a different isolated region. And, as we will see, even the stories told of them are highly legendary.

The seventeenth-century Jesuit Scripture scholar Father Cornelius a Lapide († 1637) observes that the Church annually celebrates the conversion of Saint Paul on January 25 in order to propose the apostle as an example of penitence to all sinners, and to invoke Paul the convert, that “from heaven he may convert sinners, for still, although transported into heaven, he converts very many by his example, his prayers, and his epistles.

IF THERE WAS HOPE FOR SAUL, there is hope for all. That is a large measure of the message Paul sees in his conversion. Saints like to call themselves the greatest of all sinners. Paul’s claim on the title is unusually strong, however. He was, in fact, once a blasphemer and a persecutor and an arrogant man (1 Tm 1:13). Yet Paul also explains that he received mercy because he acted ignorantly in unbelief. This is quite remarkable. Paul’s unbelief was in a real way his gravest sin, the foundation of all the others. Paul studied the Scriptures and awaited the Messiah. As a Pharisee he even believed in the resurrection of the dead. Yet, somehow his heart was closed to Christ the Lord. The ignorance of unbelief, however, is a darkness God alone can illumine. And the Lord spread his merciful light when he blinded Paul with his radiant and living presence. Jesus’ mercy to Paul, in other words, came as the ultimate personal encounter. Paul’s knowledge of the Christ was no longer a matter of mere human learning—in the end more ignorance than knowledge. Mercy came as the voice and vision of the one risen from the dead. – Father Anthony Giambrone,

My children, the world is slipping through our fingers. We cannot lose any time, for the time is short ... I understand Saint Paul very well when he writes to the Corinthians: ‘Tempus breve est!’ How brief is our sojourn upon the earth! For a coherent Christian, these words ought to ring true in the depths of the soul. They are a reproach for our lack of generosity and a constant invitation to loyalty. Truly, we have so little time to love, to give, to do penance.[

Without conversion of heart we cannot serve God on earth. We have naturally neither faith, nor fear, nor love, toward God and His Son Jesus Christ. We have no delight in His Word. We take no pleasure in prayer or communion with Him. We have no enjoyment in His ordinances, His house, His people, or His day. We may have a form of Christianity, and keep up a round of ceremonies and religious performances. But without conversion we have no more heart in our religion than a brick or a stone. Can a dead corpse serve God? We know it cannot. Well, without conversion we are dead toward God. Look round the congregation with which you worship every Sunday. Mark how little interest the great majority of them take in what is going on. Observe how listless, and apathetic, and indifferent, they evidently are about the whole affair. It is clear their hearts are not there! They are thinking of something else, and not of religion. They are thinking of business, or money, or pleasure, or worldly plans, or bonnets, or gowns, or new dresses, or amusements. Their bodies are there, but not their hearts. And what is the reason? What is it they all need? They need conversion. Without it they only come to church for fashion and form’s sake, and go away from church to serve the world or their sins. But this is not all. Without conversion of heart we could not enjoy heaven, if we got there. Heaven is a place where holiness reigns supreme, and sin and the world have no place at all. The company will all be holy; the employments will all be holy; it will be an eternal Sunday. Surely if we go to heaven, we must have a heart in tune and able to enjoy it, or else we shall not be happy. We must have a nature in harmony with the element we live in, and the place where we dwell. Can a fish be happy out of water? We know it cannot. Well, without conversion of heart we could not be happy in heaven. Look round the neighborhood in which you live and the persons with whom you are acquainted. Think what many of them would do if they were cut off for ever from money, and business, and newspapers, and cards, and balls, and races, and hunting, and shopping, and worldly amusements! Would they like it? Think what they would feel if they were shut up forever with Jesus Christ, and saints, and angels! Would they be happy? Would the eternal company of Moses, and David, and St. Paul be pleasant to those who never take the trouble to read what those holy men wrote? Would heaven’s everlasting praise suit the taste of those who can hardly spare a few minutes in a week for private religion, even for prayer? There is but one answer to be given to all these questions. We must be converted before we can enjoy heaven. Heaven would be no heaven to any child of Adam without conversion. Let no man deceive us. There are two things which are of absolute necessity to the salvation of every man and woman on earth. One of them is the mediatorial work of Christ for us, His atonement, satisfaction, and intercession. The other is the converting work of the Spirit in us, His guiding, renewing, and sanctifying grace. We must have both a title and a heart for heaven. Sacraments are only generally necessary to salvation: a man may be saved without them, like the penitent thief. An interest in Christ and conversion are absolutely necessary: without them no one can possibly be saved. All, all alike, high or low, rich or poor, old or young, gentle or simple, churchmen or dissenters, baptized or unbaptized, all must be converted or perish.