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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. 2For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, 4treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5holding the form of religion but denying the power of it. Avoid such people. 6For among them

9And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10so that you may approve what is excellent, and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11filled with the fruits of righteousness which come through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

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.

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.

Mary is the only possible witness to Jesus’s conception and birth. And Luke is a credible witness to Mary’s “pondering.

The primary witnesses to Christmas are the accounts of Matthew and Luke. They were written as history, though for two different audiences, each with its own culture and conventions for preserving history. Matthew, the early records tell us, wrote originally in Hebrew for a Jewish-Christian audience. Luke wrote for Greek-speaking Gentiles and Jews.

Resist the devil and he will flee from you. 8Draw near to God and he will draw near to you. Cleanse

If the end of human law is the promotion of the common good among men, the divine law has for its purpose nothing less than our friendship with God.

15And he said to them, "Take heed, and beware of all covetousness; for a man's life does not consist in the abundance of his possessions.

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

It would be more accurate to say that human fatherhood is metaphorical, a temporal sign of an eternal reality. God's fatherhood is true fatherhood in the truest sense.

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.

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.

[In Baptism] [W]e didn't really die. We weren't really buried. We weren't really crucified and raised again. We imitated these symbolically - yet our salvation was a reality!

Why has God done the things that he has done in history? One word: Love.

As Catholics, we are free to cultivate a rich life of piety, drawing from the treasures of many lands and many ages.

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

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that water has been a natural sacrament since the dawn of creation. In the age of nature—from Adam through the patriarchs—water refreshed and cleansed humankind.

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

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.

What's wrong with the world? It's easy to probe the ills of the nation, the Church, and the planet and come up with a grave diagnosis... But it takes all the strength we can muster to stand at Mass and honestly say, 'I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do..." Sin is not out there; it's deep inside you and me... What's wrong with the world? I am, because I sin, and my sins well up from the darkness in my own heart.

What we could never become by strength, stamina, and a will of steel—which we lack anyway—we become by the grace of God.

March 4   CHARITY is being rescued by the LORD   I love you just as the Father loves me. ~ John 15:9   Someone asked an old chief “Why’re you always talking about Jesus?”   The chief didn’t say anything.  Instead, he collected some dry grass and twigs and put them into a circle.   Next he caught a caterpillar, feeding on a nearby clump of weeds.  He placed it inside the circle.  Then, he took a match and set fire to the dry grass and the twigs.  As the fire blazed up, the caterpillar began to search for an escape.   At this point the old chief extended his finger to the caterpillar.  Instantly, it climbed on to it.   He said, “That’s what Jesus did for me.  I was like the caterpillar, without hope.  Then Jesus rescued me.  How can I not talk about my Savior’s love and mercy?” ~ Mark Link, S.J.   How grateful are you for what Jesus did for us?  How do you show it concretely?   It wasn’t the nails that held Jesus on the cross but his love for us. ~ Author unknown

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.

cada persona humana tiene un ángel custodio, lo mismo tienen las naciones (cf. Dn 10, 13; 10, 20, y 12, 1), y las iglesias (cf. Apoc 2, 1. 8. 12, por ejemplo).

5 "And when you pray, you must not be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, that they may be seen by men. Truly, I say to you, they have their reward. 6But when you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

God instituted sacrifice not for His own sake but for our sake. The sacrificial law is a means to God's glorious end: it disciplines His people, focusing their attention on worship, gratitude, sorrow for sin, the need for purity, and the necessity of renouncing everything in order to cling to God.

Through Malachi, God chastises them for “thinking that the Lord's table may be despised” (Malachi 1:7). That's strong language, but it rings true. A man who insists that he loves his wife while he lavishes the finest gifts upon his mistress does not truly love his wife.

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.

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. 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.

The little things we do are the building blocks of the big things God has planned, in our lives, in history, and in the spinning out of the cosmos. Indeed, little things matter so much to us because they matter so much to God. That is the plain meaning of Jesus's parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14—31)—a parable of ambition. Twice in that parable Jesus portrays the master (representing God) as saying, “Well done, good and faithful servant; you have been faithful over a little, I will set you over much; enter into the joy of your master.

Thus, far from thinking that works produced by man's own talent and energy are in opposition to God's power, and that the rational creature exists as a kind of rival to the Creator, Christians are convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God's grace and the flowering of His own mysterious design.

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

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