No more doth it hurt to say that the body and blood are not in the sacrament.
Prayer joined to sacrifice constitutes the most powerful force in human history.
There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it.
In the name of the Fathers, and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, here goes-I mean Amen.
In all religions, the quickening spirit has been symbolically represented as a bird. At the baptism, when Jesus' body was in the water, the Spirit of Christ descended into it as a dove.
I lived across from a Catholic church for 15 years that I never went into. And then I got married to my wife and - you know, and now we're going in there every other day baptizing a kid.
Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed. A yellow dressinggown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: ----Introibo ad altare Dei.
As to what pertains to the case of infants: You [Fidus] said that they ought not to be baptized within the second or third day after their birth, that the old law of circumcision must be taken into consideration, and that you did not think that one should be baptized and sanctified within the eighth day after his birth. In our council it seemed to us far otherwise. No one agreed to the course which you thought should be taken. Rather, we all judge that the mercy and grace of God ought to be denied to no man born
I do believe in the power of prayer.
The Eucharist is that love which surpasses all loves in Heaven and on earth
The first, the middle and the last thing to do is to pray.
The Church does not dispense the sacrament of baptism in order to acquire for herself an increase in membership but in order to consecrate a human being to God and to communicate to that person the divine gift of birth from God.
Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."
It is not the man who is responsible for the offerings as they become Christ's Body and Blood; it is Christ Himself who was crucified for us. The standing figure belongs to the priest who speaks these words. The power and the grace belong to God. 'This is My Body,' he says. And these words transform the offerings.
The joining of the whole congregation in prayer has something exceedingly solemn and affecting in it.
Funny you mention my dinner parties when I have just suggested that inviting close friends over to share a meal with candlelight and wine at your table could be a form of religious experience for some people. To me it's a form of sacrament.
If we approach with faith, we too will see Jesus... for the Eucharistic table takes the place of the crib. Here the Body of the Lord is present, wrapped not in swaddling clothes but in the rays of the Holy Spirit.
Anoint, v.: To grease a king or other great functionary already sufficiently slippery.
When Christ at Cana's feast by pow'r divine, Inspir'd cold water, with the warmth of wine, See! cry'd they while, in red'ning tide, it gush'd, The bashful stream hath seen its God and blush'd.
God makes me play well. That is why I always make the sign of a cross when I walk out on to the pitch. I feel I would be betraying him if I didn't.
To this day I always say my prayers on my knees 'cause I think maybe they get there sooner.
It is the Mass that matters.
As God is propitiated by the blood of a hundred bulls, so also is he by the smallest offering of incense. [Lat., Sed tamen ut fuso taurorum sanguine centum, Sic capitur minimo thuris honore deux.]
The Eucharist is a fire that inflames us, that, like lions breathing fire, we may retire from the altar being made terrible to the devil.
I am a spiritual person. I'm a Catholic. I treat my patients, the dead patients, as live patients. I believe there is life after death. And I talk to my patients. I talk to them, not loudly but quietly in my heart when I look at them. Before I do an autopsy, I must have a visual contact with the face.
