Quotes from Robert E. Barron

The liturgical person discovers who he is in the context of a community that listens to and explains the Bible and acts in accord with it. In this, he stands opposed to those whose identity is shaped by the heroes, ideals, and norms of the environing secular culture and to those whose sense of self is formed by the texts and practices of other religions.

No country, leader, political party, culture, civilization, moral ideal, or rival god can compete with the one God.

It is fascinating to note how often in the history of Christianity the teaching concerning Jesus's presence in the Eucharist

The Catholic Church's job is to call people to sanctity and to equip them for living saintly lives. Its mission is not to produce nice people, or people with hearts of gold, or people with good intentions; its mission is to produce saints, people of heroic virtue… To dial down the demands because they are hard, and most people have a hard time realizing them, is to compromise the very meaning and purpose of the Church.

noncompetitively

Meek—free from the addiction to ordinary power—you can become a conduit of true divine power to the world.

But as the last week of his life unfolded, Jesus did not contrive to confront these powers in the conventional manner. Rather he allowed them to spend themselves on him; he permitted the darkness of the world to envelop him. In the densely textured passion narratives of the Gospels we see all forms of human dysfunction on display. Jesus was met by betrayal, denial,

Catholicism consistently celebrates the coming together of contraries, not in the manner of a bland compromise, but rather in such a way that the full energy of the opposing elements remains in place.

seems so thoroughly thought through, so comprehensively intentional. Certainly,

the principle of subsidiarity, which stipulates that in matters political and economic there ought always to be a preferential option for the most local level of authority and operation.

The simple fact of the matter is that on account of the mysterious curvature of the will that we call original sin, we deviate from the very actions and attitudes that will make us happy. In

In their bitter words and their even more bitter tears, I would sense both a deep love for the Church and a practically bottomless disillusionment with it.

One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor.

clear implication is that the failure to accept, protect, and love a child—or, what is worse, the active harming of a child—would preclude real contact with Jesus.

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.

In one of the most dramatic scenes in the Bible, God speaks out of the desert whirlwind. "Who is this that obscures divine plans with words of ignorance? Gird up your loins now, like a man; I will question you, and you tell me the answers!" (Job 38:2–

as he made Job, and though Job has probably never in his life even considered Behemoth and Leviathan, they are as ingredient in the complex weave of God's providence as is Job. The overall point of God's speech seems to be this: the suffering of any one person must be seen within the context of the infinitely subtle working out of God's purposes throughout the whole of space and time.

And this is why he prohibited Adam and Eve from grasping at the uniquely divine prerogative of knowing good and evil: not because he wanted them to be less alive but because he wanted them to be fully alive.

result, he's firmly persuaded that the Catholic Church must always speak its truths to the surrounding culture, without adjusting those teachings to make them more palatable.

In his first letter Saint John says, "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we looked upon and touched with our hands concerns the Word of life—for the life was made visible; we have seen it and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life that was with the Father" (1 Jn 1:1–2).

I believe baseball and the Church are deeply kindred spirits—both feature obscure rules that make sense only to initiates, both have communions of saints, both reward patience, and in both, casual fans can dip in and out, but for serious devotees the liturgy is a daily affair.

The twentieth-century philosopher of religion Rudolf Otto famously characterized the transcendent God as the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, the mystery that fascinates us even as it causes us to tremble with fear—

the term diabalein (to throw apart). If God is a great gathering force, then sin is a scattering power.

Do you think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth? I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man 'against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law' " (Mt 10:34–36).