Quotes from Robert E. Barron

Essential to the Catholic mind is what I would characterize as a keen sense of the prolongation of the Incarnation throughout space and time, an extension that is made possible through the mystery of the church.

The twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner commented that "God" is the last sound we should make before falling silent, and Saint Augustine, long ago, said, "si comprehendis, non est Deus" (if you understand, that isn't God). All of this formal theologizing is but commentary on that elusive and confounding voice from the burning bush: "I am who am.

It has been suggested that the heart of sin is taking oneself too seriously.

Christianity is not a set of private convictions that we cultivate inwardly or whisper among ourselves. It is the message that the whole world needs to hear. We who have heard it must become agents of subversion and transformation.

Joseph Ratzinger commented that the opening line of the Nicene Creed, Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God), is a subversive statement because it automatically rules out any rival claimant to ultimate concern. To say that one accepts only the God of Israel and Jesus Christ is to say that one rejects as ultimate any human being, any culture, any political party, any artistic form, or any set of ideas.

According to the basic narrative of the Old Testament, God's answer to human dysfunction was the formation of a people after his own heart.

When our lives revolve around Christ we find order and harmony. And by implication, whenever something other than Christ—money, power, pleasure, honor—fills the center, the soul falls into disharmony. The well-ordered soul begins to wobble and go off-kilter.

Therefore in this more biblical way of looking at things joy (beatitude) is the consequence and not the enemy of law. What Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount, therefore, is that new law that would discipline our desires, our minds, and our bodies so as to make real happiness possible.

The shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the most visited religious site in the Christian world, surpassing Lourdes, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and St. Peter's itself. People still go there by the millions every year in order to commune with La Virgen Morena, many journeying to her over many miles on their knees.

Thoughtful Christians must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion. We must continually preach, as John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth. — BISHOP BARRON

If you want to see what Christ looks like, look at those who participate in him in the most dramatic way," he says. "It's the Cross, participation in the Cross. It's conforming to Christ, it's Christ appearing vividly in our midst.

no one in the biblical tradition ever is granted an experience of God without being subsequently sent. Scriptural religion is a religion of mission.

Jesus turned upside down many of the social conventions of his time and place precisely because he was so concerned to place the instantiation of the Kingdom of God first in the minds of his followers.

When at the consecration the priest moves into the mode of first-person quotation, he is not speaking in his own person but in the person of Jesus—and that's why those words change the elements.

The English word sin is derived from the German term Sünde, which carries the connotation of sundering or dividing.

The Emperor Napoleon is said to have confronted Cardinal Consalvi, the secretary of state to Pope Pius VII, saying that he, Napoleon, would destroy the Church—to which the Cardinal deftly responded, "Oh my little man, you think you're going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do?

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments," Ratzinger said, "namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.

Thomas Aquinas was asked, "What must I do to be a saint?" and he said, "Will it." Be a saint, and you'll unleash the power of grace and holiness.

Holy people are those who realize that they participate in something and Someone infinitely greater than themselves, that they are but fragments of Reality," he says. "Far from crushing them, this awareness makes them great, capacious, whole.

if we really want to change the current course of our culture and challenge its guiding ideas, then we need to start with the author of that culture. That means examining man himself.

Balthasar says anything beautiful first arrests you—you're stopped in your tracks by it. Then, Balthasar says, the beautiful elects you. You've been chosen. Not everyone who hears Dylan becomes a fan, but I got elected. Finally, he says, the beautiful always sends you. You're sent on a mission.

one's deepest sense of freedom is coincident with an embrace of the God who is the ground of one's being.

love the life of the mind, and I've spent my whole life studying and reading. Yet because of where we are now, the 'true' and the 'good' are offensive in a culture that is so radically subjective and relativist, and the minute you say, 'Hey, I've got the truth for you,' every defense goes up, and even more if you say, 'I've got what's good for you.

In his 1999 Letter to Artists, John Paul II wrote that "beauty is the visible form of the good, just as the good is the metaphysical condition of beauty." There is "an ethic, even a 'spirituality' of artistic service which contributes [to] the life and renewal of a people," because "every genuine art form, in its own way, is a path to the inmost reality of man and of the world.