Reforming the Church

“The soul that has confidence in God’s unconditional love relinquishes everything. Then, the merciful God gives himself to that soul in the precise measure that it has dispossessed itself.”

“[T]he Christian family . . . is the place where anthropology and faith are mediated, the crucial space where the human fitness of the Gospel is verified, the terminal where, in capillary form, the mission of the Church is realized.”

“At every turn, the Confucian tradition says we are not our own: we owe every breath not only to God but to the concrete community of the family that gave us life and nurturing.”

“Disdain for the form in the name of the Spirit’s freedom always leads, intentionally or not, to disdain for the flesh of Christ.”

“In the Eucharist, Christ joins our sufferings to the body he gives and the blood he sheds, and he offers them up for the salvation of the world. Our task is to say ‘yes,’ and thereby co-offer him and ourselves; this, our appropriation of the atonement, is itself a participation in its enactment.”

“[A] polity built on absolute, atheistic freedom restrained only by law can and should be transcended in the name of a polity built on an order of right and freely self-limiting love, which the order of right naturally inspires because it is genuinely lovely.”

“Because I exist by being created, I am first of all receptive.”

“The teaching laid out by the archbishop of Kraków . . . is the teaching of a man who cares for man, of a pastor of souls who knows both the weaknesses of human nature and the means of grace that come to its aid.”

“The more we consent to be ‘poor in Spirit,’ without our own strength, to the point of being incapable of prayer or love, expecting everything from the Father while remaining in the tomb with his Son, the more the Father will draw us to himself and configure us to Christ by the power of his Spirit.”