Quotes about Christianity

The first truth is that Christ actually meant prayer to be the great power by which His church should do its work, and that the neglect of prayer is the great reason the church has not greater power over the masses in Christian and in heathen countries.

He has learnt that in putting on the Lord Jesus he has put on the heart of compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and long-suffering. Jesus has taken the place of self, and it is not an impossibility to forgive as Jesus.

And again, alas! for how many Christians there are for whom, when the word is heard, it has but little attraction, because it has never yet been shown to them as a life that is indeed possible, and unutterably blessed.

The weakness of your Christian life is that you want to work it out partly, and to let God help you.

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.

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).

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

Driven by petty ambition, we serve only ourselves. St. Josemaria put it well: "Those who are 'ambitious,' with small, personal, miserable ambitions, cannot understand that the friends of God should seek to achieve something through a spirit of service and without such'ambition.' " We should never confuse Christian humility and modesty with a will to underachieve.

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.

This promise of resurrection is our hope. It is that on which we stake our life. It is what enables us, as Christians, to face death with courage and joy.

Isn't it true," St. Josemaria once said, "that you have seen the need to become a soul of prayer, to reach an intimacy with God that leads to divinization? Such is the Christian faith as always understood by souls of prayer." And as if to prove the "always" part, he goes on to quote St. Clement of Alexandria, who wrote around the year 203 A.D.: "A man becomes God, because he loves whatever God loves.

In communion with Christ, you and I are members of his body, his Church, together with our fellow Christians