Scott Hahn Quotes

If we do not fill our mind with prayer, it will fill itself with anxieties, worries, temptations, resentments, and unwelcome memories.

We...sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.

At the root of all misery is unfulfilled desire.

If you complain to someone, you assume that it's someone who really cares about you.

Love is something worth suffering for...

Only when we cease to rely on our own strength can we discover that God's strength is always there for us.

As we grow detached from things, we come (with God's help) to master our desires, and we give the mastery over to God. Discipline and divine grace heal the intellect and the will of the effects of concupiscence. We can begin to see things clearly.

[God] disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.

We are created for the sake of love. When we experience love in family life, it is heavenly, but it is still only an image of the greater glory we hope to behold in heaven.

He gave our pain and struggles a holy significance, a redemptive power, which makes it a privilege for us to suffer with Christ.

Down through the centuries, the Church has carefully preserved, protected, and defended its Marian teachings, because to give them up would be to give up the gospel.

Salvation history reveals sin as literally a broken home.

The family is the key of Christmas.

People who give a shit are sexy.

The Church is the Body of Christ, and as such it is both heavenly and earthly. The Church is the communion of saints, and it includes as members both angels and shepherds - cherubim and seraphim, and you, and me.

Marriage and family life give us constant opportunities to deny ourselves for the sake of others. And yet self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving and self-fulfillment. Sin is not wanting too much, but settling for too little. It's settling for self-gratification rather than self-fulfillment.

the laws of God, like the law of gravity, do not depend upon how I feel about them.

To deny the force of divine judgment, then, is to make God less than God, and to make us less than His children. For every father must discipline His children, and paternal discipline is itself a mercy, a fatherly expression of love.

If God welcomed newborns into Israel by means of ritual circumcision for two thousand years, why would He suddenly close the kingdom to babies because they could not understand ritual baptism?

Judgment, then, is not an impersonal, legalistic process. It is a matter of love, and it is something we choose for ourselves. Nor is punishment a vindictive act. God's "curses" are not expressions of hatred, but of fatherly love and discipline. Like medicinal ointment, they hurt in order to heal. They impose suffering that is remedial, restorative, and redemptive. God's wrath is an expression of His love for His wayward children.

Prayer doesn't change GOD. He is unchanging and unchangeable. But it does change us, making us more like Him, and thus more able to accept His will, whatever it may be. Prayer makes us radiate goodness.

Do not be downhearted because of scandals in the Church. Jesus Himself warned that scandals would come, and that the wicked would be judged and punished. We should rest in His promise. We should rest in His one true Church, even if within the Church we find much unrest.

If Catholics would simply live the Sacrament of Matrimony for one generation, we would witness a transformation of society and have a Christian culture.

A covenant differs from a contract almost as much as marriage differs from prostitution.

you wives, be submissive to your husbands, so that some, though they do not obey the

Redemptive suffering is an essential part of our master story. This is what it means for us to bear the image and likeness of God. By the power of the Holy Spirit, our suffering refines our charity, just as our charity transforms our suffering into a living sacrifice that allows God to have his way into our lives.

10 Then the disciples came and said to him, "Why do you speak to them in parables?" 11And he answered them, "To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.

history of salvation is not a small event, on a poor planet, in the immensity of the universe. It is not a minimal thing which happens by chance on a lost planet. It is the motive for everything, the motive for creation. Everything is created so that this story can exist, the encounter between God and his creature. —Pope Benedict XVI, address at the opening of the 12th Ordinary General Assembly of the Synod of Bishops, October 6, 2008

The family is the key to Christmas. The family is the key to Christianity. Pope Saint John Paul II noted that everything good—history, humanity, salvation—“passes by way of the family.”1 When God came to save us, he made salvation inseparable from family life, manifest in family life. Since the family is the ordinary setting of human life, he came to share it, redeem it, and perfect it. He made it an image and sacrament of a divine mystery. Salvation itself finds meaning only in familial relations.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.

God gave us the Scriptures not just to inform or motivate us; more than anything he wants to save us.

The belief is that Jesus is made present to his people in word and sacrament, both in the inspired accounts of the evangelists and in the consecrated elements of the Eucharist.

proclaim when we evangelize, and it’s what makes our efforts at evangelization fruitful.

The problem of corrupt clergy haunts God’s family in every age. Priests who misuse and abuse their authority inflict untold damage upon the people of God.

Saint Augustine said that the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New.

The Catholic life—the great Christian tradition—is a tremendous inheritance from two millennia of saints in many lands and circumstances.

In order that Christ’s body might be shown to be a real body, He was born of a woman. In order that His Godhead might be made clear, He was born of a virgin.

the groundbreakers in many sciences were devout believers. Witness the accomplishments of Nicolaus Copernicus (a priest) in astronomy, Blaise Pascal (a lay apologist) in mathematics, Gregor Mendel (a monk) in genetics, Louis Pasteur in biology, Antoine Lavoisier in chemistry, John von Neumann in computer science, and Enrico Fermi and Erwin Schrodinger in physics. That’s a short list, and it includes only Roman Catholics; a long list could continue for pages. A roster that included other believers—Protestants, Jews, and unconventional theists like Albert Einstein, Fred Hoyle, and Paul Davies—could fill a book.

If human beings had really tried to invent a god, we would never have invented the God of Christianity. He’s just too terrifying. Our God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-holy, and omnipresent. There’s no place to run and hide from Him, no place where we might secretly indulge a favorite vice. We can’t even retreat into the dark corners of our minds to fantasize about that vice without God knowing it right away.

In the Book of Genesis, God creates the world in six days and seals his covenant with humanity on the seventh. Because of this, the Hebrew verb used for swearing a covenant oath is, literally translated, “to seven oneself.

Dogma is by definition nothing other than an interpretation of Scripture." The defined dogmas of our faith, then, encapsulate the Church's infallible interpretation of Scripture, and theology is a further reflection upon that work.

The fact is, there can be no true evangelization without the Eucharist. It’s not simply that the Eucharist is the context in which evangelization unfolds or even the goal of evangelization. It’s the content of evangelization. It’s what we

shouting from the rooftops tells us that many people sitting in church on Sunday don’t know why they’re there or what’s taking place. They’ve received the sacraments, but they’ve never encountered Jesus Christ in a meaningful and personal way.

Christ has no body now but yours, No hands, no feet on earth but yours, Yours are the eyes with which He looks Compassion on this world, Yours are the feet with which He walks to do good, Yours are the hands, with which He blesses all the world.

Thus, I repeat, anti-Semitism and anti-Judaism are spiritually destructive and stupid. In the words of Pope Pius XI: “Spiritually, we are Semites.” You cannot be a good Catholic until you've fallen in love with the religion and people of Israel. WALK

Loving difficult people will refine us. Perhaps only in heaven will our love be so perfected that we can actually like these people, too. St. Augustine spoke of a man who, on earth, had chronic gas problems; in heaven, his flatulence became perfect music.

Faith and reason are indeed complementary faculties that we use to think about the truth. When any winged creature (or mechanism) tries to fly on just one wing, it falls to the ground. In a similar way, when we human beings try to wing it with just one faculty, we crash.

Si queremos experimentar el amor, la alegría, la paz del cielo desde ahora, debemos hacerlo en Cristo. Eso no significa que se nos evitará el dolor. San Pablo identifica sus sufrimientos con una crucifixión que acepta de buen grado. Si ni Jesús ni Pablo quedaron eximidos de sufrimientos, nadie debería esperar quedar eximido.

What the first Christians knew as the “New Testament” was not a book, but the Eucharist. In a cultic setting, at a solemn sacrificial banquet, Jesus made an offering of his “body” and “blood.” He used traditional sacrificial language. He spoke of the action as his memorial. He told those who attended to repeat the action they had witnessed: “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19).

Diotrephes and Demetrius 9 I have written something to the Church; but Diot'rephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge my authority. 10So if I come, I will bring up what he is doing, accusing me falsely with evil words. And not content with that, he refuses himself to welcome the brethren, and also stops those who want to welcome them and puts them out of the Church. 11 Beloved, do not

Mary is God’s masterpiece. Have you ever walked into a museum where an artist was displaying his work? Can you imagine his being offended if you were viewing what he considered to be his masterpiece? Would he resent your looking at that instead of at him? ‘Hey, you should be looking at me!’ Rather, the artist would receive honor because of the attention you were giving his work. And Mary is God’s work, from beginning to end.

The first Christians were eucharistic by nature: they gathered for “the breaking of the bread and the prayers.” They were formed by the Word of God, the “apostles’ teaching.” When they met as a Church, their worship culminated in “fellowship”—the Greek word is koinonia, communion. The Mass was the center of life for the disciples of Jesus, and so it has ever been. Even today, the Mass is where we experience the apostolic teaching and communion, the breaking of the bread and the prayers.

A pesar de los grandes milagros de Dios para Israel, su pueblo le abandona a las primeras punzadas de hambre acudiendo a ídolos. Filón de Alejandría dijo que Israel no había entendido la Pascua. Dios instituyó el Séder para que llevasen vida virtuosa, en la que sus temores y deseos estuvieran ordenados y todo subordinado a la voluntad divina. El pan pascual debería haberles enseñado a rechazar la levadura del orgullo. Las hierbas amargas a ser indiferentes ante la comodidad y el placer. Era de esperar que el Séder les enseñase a disciplinar sus cuerpos y su voluntad.

San Agustín explica que el sufrimiento es la herencia desde que Adán mezcló nuestra copa de dolor y fatigas. A nadie se le dispensa de ese cáliz, el llanto del recién nacido da fe de ello. Nuestra naturaleza se resiste a él. Jesús responde ante el dolor aceptándolo y sometiéndose a él. Jesús no está libre de temores pero están ordenados. En Getsemaní teme lo que va a suceder pero es mayor su temor a desobedecer la voluntad del Padre. Jesús enseña que hay cosas por encima de la vida física. Hay un cielo que no es algo lejano en el espacio ni en el tiempo. Empieza con nosotros en el Bautismo y crece cada vez que bebemos la Copa Eucarística.

A scientist must put faith in the experimental data reported by other scientists, and in the institutions that sponsored those scientists, and in the standards by which those scientists received their credentials. A scientist must put faith in the authority of the journals that publish the results of various studies. Finally, but perhaps most fundamentally, a scientist must trust that empirical reality is indeed perceptible and measurable, and that the laws of cause and effect will apply universally. No scientific endeavor can proceed if the experimenter subjects every phenomenon to radical doubt, disqualifying his own observations as well as those of his peers. Polanyi concluded that science proceeds from a trust that is “fiduciary”—a word that derives from the Latin root meaning “faith-based.” Such faith is well placed and well founded, and it enables science to proceed apace; but, nonetheless, it is a species of faith, not an absolutely certain knowledge. “We must now recognize belief once more as the source of all knowledge,…” Polanyi said. “No intelligence, however critical or original, can operate outside such a fiduciary framework.” Secularism’s attempts to replace the authority of religion with a supposed “authority of experience and reason” has proven, in Polanyi’s words, “farcically inadequate

Each of us faces a choice every moment of every day. When we choose God—his laws, his wills, and his way—we choose life. And when we choose ourselves—our laws, our wills, our way—we choose death.

God tests us by putting us in situations that invite us to trust him (Gen 22:1).

The aim defines the method.

Whatever the philosophical variety, the authority of exegesis will reside, not in the political sovereign, but in the enlightened philosophy that informs exegesis. Each in turn will provide yet another variation of Spinoza's hermeneutic of condescension. But this is also a hermeneutic of self-divinization. Therefore, each will invest his philosophy with all the religious certainty and zeal originally invested by Spinoza in his particular philosophy, and each will exhibit the same unshakeable faith and enthusiasm in the spread of its gospel and the progressive divinization of humanity. The divinization soon enough focuses on the process rather than the goal.

Ever since the Reformation, over twenty-five thousand different Protestant denominations have come into existence, and experts say there are presently five new ones being formed every week. Every single one of them claims to be following the Holy Spirit and the plain meaning of Scripture. God knows we must need something more.

former Evangelical anti-Catholics—Gerry Hoffman, Bob and Julie Swenson, Scott and Kimberly Hahn, Thomas Howard, John Henry Newman, and others—to show me

Jesus é a única Pessoa a quem você tem de prestar contas. Quando você tem Jesus diante de si, o que é que consegue lhe dizer com a consciência tranquila?

Pouco antes da licenciatura, dei-me conta de que não sabia se Scott desejava ou não ter uma família numerosa. Eu sempre desejara ter pelo menos quatro ou cinco filhos. Por isso, como por acaso, puxei o tema: – Você quer ter filhos, não quer? – Bom, não filhos demais. Ah, não! – pensei eu – Agora acontece que é um partidário do “crescimento zero” da população! Procurando manter o tom indiferente, perguntei-lhe: – Quantos seriam demais? – Não sei... – disse ele – Acho que nos devemos limitar a uns cinco ou seis. Mal podia acreditar no que ouvia.

Pouco antes da licenciatura, dei-me conta de que não sabia se Scott desejava ou não ter uma família numerosa. Eu sempre desejara ter pelo menos quatro ou cinco filhos. Por isso, como por acaso, puxei o tema: – Você quer ter filhos, não quer? – Bom, não filhos demais. Ah, não! – pensei eu – Agora acontece que é um partidário do “crescimento zero” da população! Procurando manter o tom indiferente, perguntei-lhe: – Quantos seriam demais? – Não sei... – disse ele – Acho que nos devemos limitar a uns cinco ou seis. Mal podia acreditar no que ouvia. – Pois é, temos que ser moderados – disse eu, com um sorriso.

and in the process he brought terrifying judgments on the king and his country. But even the Lord’s judgments can have a saving and restorative purpose. The Lord often has to humble the proud through suffering before the proud are ready to humble themselves before the Lord. Divine hardening means that God sets the strong and boastful of the world on a path toward painful humiliation, with the aim that they will come to seek forgiveness. Whether Pharaoh reached this point of repentance is simply unknown to us. The point is that even

here I was, eager for Learning and intellectual companionship—maybe even a disputation or two.

expiation: A sacrifice that wipes away sin. • The expression is used multiple times in the Greek OT for the mercy seat, or golden lid that covered the Ark of the Covenant (Ex 25:17; Heb 9:5). The high priest of Israel sprinkled blood on the mercy seat once a year on the Day of Atonement to expiate the sins of the people and restore them to fellowship with Yahweh (Lev 16:1-34). For Paul, the mercy seat typifies Christ as the living seat of God's presence and the place where atonement is made with sacrificial blood (CCC 433). • Christ, who became an expiation by blood, teaches us to follow his example by the mortification of our members (St. Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection). Back

God's fatherhood does not lessen the severity of His wrath or lower the standard of His justice. On the contrary, a loving father requires more from his children than judges demand from defendants. Yet a good father also shows greater mercy.

One of the most important roles the family plays is as the first place where young people grow accustomed to considering the needs of other individuals and the community ahead of themselves.

All human societies eventually take on the form and structure of the families that comprise them. A disintegrating culture of marriage will lead to a disintegrating society. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Just look around.

Nisbet recognized that communities that serve important social functions in our lives, such as families and parishes and social clubs, give structure to our day-to-day living, and thus contribute to our identity. But when the functions of these communities fade or are replaced, such as by the government, their strength as identity-forming institutions fades as well.

The consummation of the marriage is, in a real and radical way, a new beginning—the creation of a new family that is a reflection of the original creation of all humanity, except this time we participate with God. Whether or not God blesses the union with children, the couple has created something new that has never been before or will be again. This participation in God’s creative power is the foundation of human society.

Jews commonly used apokalypsis to describe part of their week-long wedding festivities. The apokalypsis was the lifting of the veil of a virgin bride, which took place immediately before the marriage was consummated in sexual union.

Revelation unveils that bride. The climax of the Apocalypse, then, is the communion of the Church and Christ: the marriage supper of the Lamb

Remember that Israel's tradition always had men worshiping in imitation of angels. Now, as Revelation shows, both heaven and earth participate together in a single act of loving worship.

Moreover, we cannot ascend to heaven if we flee the battle. God has destined us, the Church, to be the Bride of the Lamb. Yet we cannot rule if we do not first conquer the forces that oppose us, the powers who are pretenders to our throne.

In his classic work, The Spiritual Combat, Dom Lorenzo Scupoli wrote: “This war is unavoidable, and you must either fight or die. The obstinacy of your enemies is so fierce that peace and arbitration with them is utterly impossible.

So we must continue to ransom the time, to restore all things in Christ.

The Mass, it seems, is like the Normandy invasion in the spiritual realm.

When we begin to see that heaven awaits us in the Mass, we begin already to bring our home to heaven. And we begin already to bring heaven home with us.

Inerrancy is our guarantee that the words and deeds of God found in the Bible are unified and true, declaring with one voice the wonders of his saving love.

The New Testament did not, therefore, abolish the Old. Rather, the New fulfilled the Old, and in doing so, it lifted the veil that kept hidden the face of the Lord's bride.

Spiritual exegesis is not an unrestrained flight of the imagination. Rather, it is a sacred science that proceeds according to certain principles and stands accountable to sacred tradition, the Magisterium, and the wider community of biblical interpreters (both living and deceased).

Both Christ and Scripture, says the Second Vatican Council, are given "for the sake of our salvation" (Dei Verbum 11), and both give us God's definitive revelation of himself. We cannot, therefore, conceive of one without the other: the Bible without Jesus, or Jesus without the Bible.

The principle of biblical inerrancy follows logically from this principle of divine authorship. After all, God cannot lie, and he cannot make mistakes. Since the Bible is divinely inspired, it must be without error in everything that its divine and human authors affirm to be true. This means that biblical inerrancy is a mystery even broader in scope than infallibility, which guarantees for us that the Church will always teach the truth concerning faith and morals.

To be a father means above all to be at the service of life and growth

Our airborne weapons can level buildings and render large areas uninhabitable. Our ground-based weapon systems are designed to repel an air attack. Neither is effective against a small group of unarmed soldiers, unless those soldiers are launched through the air somehow. We weren’t prepared for the Hahn to simply walk over and physically attack us man to man. In a sense, the war has grown too civilized for that.

I’m ashamed to admit that my first instinct was to run, not for cover, but to the kitchen, where I feel like I know what I’m doing. Several of the brutes pursued and cornered me, though luckily it was near the meat carving station. The Hahn didn’t know the mistake they’d made. Most military outposts, like most households, rely entirely on bulkfabs for their sustenance. Only the wealthy, the lucky, or their servants, have ever seen an actual kitchen full of kitchen tools, and these men were none of those things. Please thank Barsparse for encouraging me to work on my knife skills. Ghastly as that sounds, they saved my life.

Properly understood, the marital sacrament is an encumbrance that paradoxically yields freedom. The wife is free to grow old and wrinkled without fear of divorce, while the husband is likewise free to become bald and potbellied without fear of his wife’s abandonment. Covenants

good. A society that gets marriage wrong will not remain free for long: the family is the training ground for the virtues that make free societies possible. Consider especially the necessity of trust in economic relationships.

As I described in chapter 1, it was only when I began attending Mass that the many parts of this puzzling book suddenly began to fall into place. Before long, I could see the sense in Revelation's altar (Rev 8:3), its robed clergymen (4:4), candles (1:12), incense (5:8), manna (2:17), chalices (ch. 16), Sunday worship (1:10), the prominence it gives to the Blessed Virgin Mary (12:1–6), the “Holy, Holy, Holy” (4:8), the Gloria (15:3–4), the Sign of the Cross (14:1), the Alleluia (19:1, 3, 6), the readings from Scripture (ch. 2–3), and the “Lamb of God” (many, many times). These are not interruptions in the narrative or incidental details; they are the very stuff of the Apocalypse.

New Evangelization is the work of the whole Church — lay, ordained, and consecrated. It’s about friends, family, and co-workers reaching out to one another and proclaiming the truth of Christ using all available means — conversation, personal witness, media, and the vast array of intellectual and spiritual riches the Church has built up in her two-thousand-year history. It’s about simple acts of kindness, simple challenges issued in love, and simple questions asked with sincerity. More fundamentally, the New Evangelization is more for the baptized than the unbaptized. It’s for those who’ve been inadequately catechized but all too adequately secularized, and it’s for those who’ve been de-Christianized in the very process of being sacramentalized.

Our Father GOD is the measure by which we know the shortcomings of earthly dads and earthly clergy; for their vocation is to be His image on earth. GOD allows them to fail so that we might seek perfect fatherhood in Him.

We follow the Eucharistic Prayer with the Our Father, the prayer that Jesus taught us. We find it in the ancient liturgies, and it should have richer meaning for us in the context of the Mass-and especially in the context of the Mass as heaven on earth. We have renewed our baptism as children of God, Whom we can call "Our Father." We are now in heaven with Him, having lifted up our hearts. We have hallowed His name by praying the Mass. By uniting our sacrifice with Jesus' eternal sacrifice, we have seen God's will done "on earth as it is in heaven." We have before us Jesus, our "daily bread," and this bread will "forgive us our trespasses," because Holy Communion wipes away all venial sins. We have known mercy, then, and so we show mercy, forgiving "those who trespass against us." And through Holy Communion we will know new strength over temptations and evil. The Mass fulfills the Lord's Prayer, perfectly, word for word.

As the Messiah, Jesus Christ is priest, prophet and king. He is the new Adam. He is the seed of Abraham. He is the new Moses. He is the Son of David. He is the Son of God. He is the Lamb of God. Jesus had to be all these things and more in order to fulfill all of the promises made by his Father. And he did.

When God saw that Abraham had not withheld his only son, he swore to bless all nations through Abraham’s seed (see Gn 22:15-22). Since the blessing of a father is reserved for his family, this oath is nothing less than God’s pledge to restore the human race as his own worldwide family. That is why the establishment of the Catholic Church must be attributed to God’s faithfulness and power. It represents nothing less than the historic fulfillment of God’s sworn covenant to Abraham.

Norman Geisler, R. C. Sproul, and Francis Schaeffer

Sometimes suffering is what’s best for us, if only because it keeps us from sinning or tempting others to sin.

Thus, for Aquinas, the New Law goes beyond the Sermon on the Mount and the other teachings of Jesus. It is nothing less than divine grace—divine life and power. Grace is the New Law that enables us to keep the commandments in a way that we as children of Adam couldn’t on our own.

We are transformed from slaves to sons and daughters, from followers of God’s law to members of his faithful family, from people who fear to children who love.