Spiritual Counseling Quotes

Hearing nuns' confessions is like being stoned to death with popcorn.

I've been known to preach.

I don't want to preach to people.

A mystic is a hysteric who has met her confessor before her doctor.

I don't ever preach to people.

One great remedy against all manner of temptation, great or small, is to open the heart and lay bare its suggestion, likings, and dislikings before some spiritual adviser; for, . . . the first condition which the Evil One makes with a soul, when he wants to entrap it, is silence.

Seek out your bishop. He will show you how to repent and will help you do it.

By definition, chaplains minister to the spiritual needs of our men and women in armed services, a vital function that an individual without any inclination toward spirituality would not be able to perform.

It's very important to respect the conversation between a priest and the members of their flock.

Keep clear of psychiatrists unless you know that they are also Christians. Otherwise they start with the assumption that your religion is an illusion and try to 'cure' it: and this assumption they make not as professional psychologists but as amateur philosophers.

It is indeed time for the clergyman and the psychotherapist to join forces.

Private confession... was not ordered by Christ and was not used by the apostles.

Go to your confessor; open your heart to him; display to him all the recesses of your soul; take the advice that he will give you with the utmost humility and simplicity. For God, Who has an infinite love for obedience, frequently renders profitable the counsels we take from others, but especially from those who are the guides of our souls.

Every person who has a reading with me has an audiotape.

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book, Max on Life; for many it just never gets published. All I did was collect a few of the questions I've been asked through the years, write up a brief response and put them in this publication.

It is very hard to tell when I started to be a spiritual teacher. There was a time when occasionally somebody would come and ask me questions. One could say at that point I became a spiritual teacher, although the term did not occur to me then.

I'm grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to.

I don't want to preach to anyone, because I'm not.

The times when we need prayers or counsel, we are little like to be in a mood to learn, nor yet to understand.

Suppose you went to your priest and asked for help; he would refer you to the Bible. But if you went the next day to your medical doctor and he referred you to the book of Hippocrates, which was written at about the same time as the Bible, you would think that was old-fashioned.

When the sick person arrives, before being put to bed, he shall confess his sins, if he is strong enough and if there is a confessor, and he shall also receive the Eucharist if the confessor advises it. In no other way shall anyone who is sick be admitted to the hospital.