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.

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

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.

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.

People who give a shit are sexy.

Salvation history reveals sin as literally a broken home.

The family is the key of Christmas.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

Exodus,

Without Christ, the world was a joyless place and any place where he remains unknown and unaccepted is a joyless place. Everything has changed since Christ's birth yet everything remains to be changed as people come to receive the child in faith.

it is God Himself who made this possible, by assuming human flesh in Jesus Christ. In doing so, He humanized His divinity, but He also divinized humanity, and thus He sanctified—made holy—everything that fills up a human life: friendship, meals, family, travel, study, and work.

When I blessed those three … I saw three hundred, three hundred thousand, thirty million, three billion … white, black, yellow, of all the colors, all the combinations that human love can produce.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Paul emphasizes the importance of the doctrine of the Real Presence and sees dire consequences in unbelief: “Any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (1 Cor 11:29).

The prophet Hosea spoke for God, saying, “I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, rather than burnt offerings” (Hos 6:6).

Let that be deemed a proper Eucharist which is administered either by the bishop or by one to whom he has entrusted it.

What makes the new ark holy? The old ark contained the word of God written in stone; Mary contained in her womb the Word of God Who became man and dwelt among us. The ark contained manna; Mary contained the living bread come down from heaven. The ark contained the rod of the high priest Aaron; Mary's womb contained the eternal high priest, Jesus Christ. In the heavenly temple, the Word of God is Jesus, and the ark in whom he resides is Mary, His mother.

«No podemos vivir sin la misa»,

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.

To my friends and colleagues, too—and anyone else I can corner for long enough to deliver a monologue—this idea, that the Mass is “heaven on earth,” arrives as news, very good news.

Yet even more than He made man and woman for the sake of work, He made work for the sake of man and woman— because only through work could they become truly godlike. It's

And on the seventh day God finished His work … and He rested … from all His work which He had done” (Genesis 2:2). Thus, work itself is something divine, something God Himself does. So

Penetration was unnecessary, he explained, because the Church was already there—in Catholics who were busy at their work. He told an interviewer: “I hope the time will come when the phrase ‘the Catholics are penetrating all sectors of society’ will go out of circulation because everyone will have realized that it is a clerical expression…. [They] have no need to ‘penetrate’ the temporal sector for the simple reason that they are ordinary citizens, the same as their fellow citizens, and so they are there already.

Thus, the founder of Opus Dei, though he was a priest, did not seek to gather power to the clergy. In fact, he wanted the Catholic laity to discover their own dignity and assume the responsibilities that came with baptism.

The two-tiered spirituality created an artificial separation between the clergy and the laity—and thus between the Church and the world.

In 1965, in the Council's “Decree on the Ministry and Life of Priests” (Pres-byterorum ordinis, 10), the Church proposed a new institutional form, called the “personal prelature.” Such an institution could accommodate both clergy and lay members cooperating to accomplish specific pastoral tasks.

St. Augustine once defined peace as “tranquility in order “The plan of life is what finally imposed a spiritual order on my ordinary days. And that order was the necessary precondition of peace.

Our identification with Christ is a permanent thing; our communion with Christ is as constant as the state of grace in our souls. You and I are the Church; that is our

Opus Dei's authority extends only to the personal spiritual formation of its members.

St. Josemaria diagnosed this tendency to overwork as a sickness of the spirit. That was before the word “workaholism” was coined. St. Josemaria called the condition “professionalitis”— suggesting a corruption of something good.

Wrong. Christ was not our substitute but our representative, and since His saving passion was representative, it doesn't exempt us from suffering but rather endows our suffering with divine power and redemptive value.

Spreading the love of Jesus Christ is a duty of all Christians. We can't keep our faith unless we give it away.

The second-century Letter to Diognetus put it beautifully: “As the soul is in the body, so Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world…. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible.

One corporate executive faced this spiritual crisis and went on a pilgrimage to Calcutta, India, to seek the advice of Mother Teresa. She spoke sharply with him. She told him to go back home to Wisconsin and be a good CEO so that his company might prosper and keep many people gainfully employed. “Bloom where you're planted,” she told him, so that in Milwaukee the Missionaries of Charity would never find “the poorest of the poor.

Josemaria, in his life and ministry, showed that it is possible for Catholics to have both a priestly soul and a lay mentality. It is possible for both priests and laypeople. He revered the work of religious orders; and their saints, such as St. Ignatius Loyola and St. Therese of Lisieux, had no small influence on his spirituality. For many years his spiritual director was a Jesuit, and the founder trained the first members of Opus Dei with St. Therese's Story of a Soul. We can hear echoes of St. Ignatius's phrase “contemplatives in action” in St. Josemaria's “contemplatives in the middle of the world.” We can hear echoes of St. Therese's “Little Way” in the founder's own emphasis on “little things.” Still, by divine disposition, his ways were distinctively not their ways.

Nevertheless, secularity, like any good thing, can be overdone. In our zeal to laicize our piety, we shouldn't leave people guessing whether we're Christians. That would be every bit as unnatural as wearing a monk's habit over one's work clothes. Our secularity should never lapse into secularism.

the heart of Opus Dei is the Christian experience of divine filiation. God is our Father. We are His children in Christ Jesus, the eternal Son; thus, gathered together around His table, the Church is the family of God on earth, as the Trinity is the Family of God in heaven.

We would have a poor idea of marriage and of human affection if we were to think that love and joy come to an end when faced with such difficulties. It is precisely then that our true sentiments come to the surface. Then the tenderness of a person's gift of himself takes root and shows itself in a true and profound affection that is stronger than death.