Hans Urs von Balthasar

“The significance of our deeds flows from silence and contemplation.”

“The freedom of the bound order is greater than the freedom of the lone voice.”

“Being fulfilled by God’s Holy Spirit through renunciation, through making space, through becoming poor, is the only mode in which we can come to know God as he is in truth: the Love that can be thought only as a reciprocal ‘self-giving’ in which nothing is held back.”

“The spirituality of our Holy Father is a unique refutation of the weary resignation of many Christians today who think that the truths of revelation are too old to ‘be true anymore,’ too worn out to influence the world of today and therefore should be transformed from within.”

The Eucharist is the thanksgiving of Christ to the Father in heaven that he has given him the ability to abandon himself for all—up to martyrdom and the descent into hell.

The hope of the world rests on the poor.

"[T]he cosmos as a whole is itself harmony."

“The Church is fully catholic inasmuch as Christ, who suffered for all, Jews and Gentiles, and rose as the paradigmatic new man for all, wills to pour out the fullness of salvation . . . into his Church.”

"The fact that all her world-changing power flowed from unceasing prayer in the midst of the hustle and bustle of life, from a heart that never turned its gaze from God, is what makes her so profoundly relevant today."

“The only act by which a human being can correspond to the God who reveals himself, is the act of unlimited readiness. It is the unity of faith, hope, and love.”

“The universal (catholic) community is not just one among many. Bestowed on us by God, freely given, it is the only one that is unrestricted in scope.”

“Only in virtue of his filial intimacy with the divine Father can Jesus suffer total abandonment by the Father and taste that suffering to the last drop.”

"Mozart serves by making audible the triumphal hymn of a prelapsarian and resurrected creation, in which suffering and guilt are not presented as faint memory, as past, but as conquered, absolved, transfigured present."

The change in the spiritual attitude contained in the transition from the patristic to the modern age can be described as a change from a world- condemning "dying to the world" to a world- affirming "dying to the world."

Mary, under the Cross, does not have to represent the love of the Father, as does the Son, but stands only for the creature, which, together with all other creatures, she is.

"It takes the Incarnation to show us that being born has not just an anthropological, but also a theological, eternal significance."

"Because of her unique structure, the Catholic Church is perhaps humanity's last bulwark of genuine appreciation of the difference between the sexes."

The finally valid answer to pagan wisdom, the answer equal to it in rank, can lie only in the total Christian wisdom.

In the Trinitarian dogma God is one, good, true and beautiful because he is essentially Love, and Love supposes the one, the other and their unity.

The Church of the Apostles was an organism by virtue of the Eucharist and the selection of the Apostles by the Lord, and thus also a hierarchically organized community.

"The word 'person' receives its special dignity in history when it is illuminated by the unique theological meaning."

The mystery of the eucharist to which this issue is devoted is variously referred to by the most recent Council as the "source and climax of the entire life of the Church," as "the source and climax of evangelization," as the sacrament "whose solemnization completes the Church" in a way that "continuously sustains the Church."...

"The community is the bride of Christ, which will take part in the body eucharistically, and has its own fruitfulness only by that body."

"Jesus does not stand opposite sinners as some stranger, as one who is innocent, but in solidarity with sinners he bears (away) the sin of the world."

"Only when Revelation and faith are totally integrated do they, in their unity, meet all human situations and generations."

The Catholic community must overcome the deep-seated anti-Roman attitude while appraising the misgivings about the Church's leadership.

If celibacy is lived as it is meant to be lived, it comprehends all that is human.

"For the glory of God the world was created; through it and for its sake the world is also redeemed."

"The central act of all conversion is the awareness of one's reality, elicited by the encounter with Jesus."