Quotes from Robert Barron

who can stand toe-to-toe with the best and brightest of the secular world, either in person or online, and swell Catholic hearts everywhere by making the faith appear not only plausible but more convincing, more humane, and ultimately more loving than its cultured despisers are. Here's one clear sign of his success: In the English language, after Pope Francis, Barron is the most-followed Catholic figure on social media.

God is not one more intelligible object among many, not a supreme existing thing among other existing things, not simply the highest value alongside other ethical goods. Rather, God is that which is intelligible in itself, that which exists through the power of its own essence, that which is good by its very nature.

Summa theologiae

Take this, all of you, and drink from it: this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.

An aggressive reason that seeks always to grasp on its own terms will never come to know deeper dimensions of reality, including and especially the personal. Such depths can be plumbed only through something like a faith that accepts and receives.

The Church calls people to be not spiritual mediocrities, but great saints, and this is why its moral ideals are so stringent. Yet the Church also mediates the infinite mercy of God to those who fail to live up to that ideal (which means practically everyone). This is why its forgiveness is so generous and so absolute. To grasp both of these extremes is to understand the Catholic approach to morality.

The successful evangelist does not stand aloof from the experience of sinners, passing easy judgment on them, praying for them from a distance; on the contrary, she loves them so much that she joins them and deigns to walk in their shoes and feel the texture of their experience.

The successful evangelist uses the Scriptures in order to disclose the divine patterns and, ultimately, the Pattern who is made flesh in Jesus.

Successful evangelists are persons of the Eucharist. They are immersed in the rhythms of the Mass; they practice Eucharistic adoration; they draw the evangelized to a participation in the Body and Blood of Jesus.

So prospective evangelists, do what Jesus did. Walk with sinners, open the Book, break the Bread.

The central tragedy of the sexual abuse scandal is that those who were ordained to act in the very person of Christ became, in the most dramatic way, obstacles to Christ.

God is a great gathering force, for by his very nature he is love; but the devil's work is to sunder, to set one against the other.

Whenever communities, families, nations, churches are divided, we sniff out the diabolic.

It's easy enough to notice how often dysfunctional families and societies finally collapse into an orgy of mutual blaming. That's satanic work.

Jesus has entrusted to his Church the means to apply this victory—the weapons, if you will, to win the spiritual war. These are the sacraments (especially the Eucharist and confession), the Bible, personal prayer, the rosary, etc. One of the tragedies of our time is that so many Catholics have dropped those weapons

The slightest cooperation with God's grace can provoke a massive spiritual change.

Christ's invitation to the priesthood is an invitation to a way of life that is athletic in its intensity and heroic in its form.

Love is not a sentiment or feeling. Love is actively willing the good of the other.

Begin with the beautiful, which leads you to the good, which leads you to the truth.

Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.

Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization.

Turn your car into a monastery.

The cross is Jesus going into the very lair of death. He goes to meet head-on that which frightens us the most. And what does He do? He battles it. He engages it. And finally he conquers it.

Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes.