Quotes from Scott Hahn

One corporate executive faced this spiritual crisis and went on a pilgrimage to Calcutta, India, to seek the advice of Mother Teresa. She spoke sharply with him. She told him to go back home to Wisconsin and be a good CEO so that his company might prosper and keep many people gainfully employed. "Bloom where you're planted," she told him, so that in Milwaukee the Missionaries of Charity would never find "the poorest of the poor.

Jesus looked at them and said to them, With men this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.

Our identification with Christ is a permanent thing; our communion with Christ is as constant as the state of grace in our souls. You and I are the Church; that is our

God tests us by putting us in situations that invite us to trust him (Gen 22:1).

Jews commonly used apokalypsis to describe part of their week-long wedding festivities. The apokalypsis was the lifting of the veil of a virgin bride, which took place immediately before the marriage was consummated in sexual union.

Revelation unveils that bride. The climax of the Apocalypse, then, is the communion of the Church and Christ: the marriage supper of the Lamb

Remember that Israel's tradition always had men worshiping in imitation of angels. Now, as Revelation shows, both heaven and earth participate together in a single act of loving worship.

Norman Geisler, R. C. Sproul, and Francis Schaeffer

Moreover, we cannot ascend to heaven if we flee the battle. God has destined us, the Church, to be the Bride of the Lamb. Yet we cannot rule if we do not first conquer the forces that oppose us, the powers who are pretenders to our throne.

In his classic work, The Spiritual Combat, Dom Lorenzo Scupoli wrote: "This war is unavoidable, and you must either fight or die. The obstinacy of your enemies is so fierce that peace and arbitration with them is utterly impossible.

So we must continue to ransom the time, to restore all things in Christ.

Opus Dei's authority extends only to the personal spiritual formation of its members.

Allegorically (St. Cyril of Alexandria, Catena of the Greek Fathers): the setting of Christ's birth points us to the Eucharist. Since through sin man becomes like the beasts, Christ lies in the trough where animals feed, offering them, not hay, but his own body as life-giving bread.

Sometimes suffering is what's best for us, if only because it keeps us from sinning or tempting others to sin.

here I was, eager for Learning and intellectual companionship—maybe even a disputation or two.

Saint Paul (whom I had thought of as the first Luther) taught in Romans, Galatians and elsewhere that justification was more than a legal decree; it established us in Christ as God's children by grace alone. In fact, I discovered that nowhere did Saint Paul ever teach that we were justified by faith alone! Sola fide was unscriptural!

The Mass, it seems, is like the Normandy invasion in the spiritual realm.

As the Messiah, Jesus Christ is priest, prophet and king. He is the new Adam. He is the seed of Abraham. He is the new Moses. He is the Son of David. He is the Son of God. He is the Lamb of God. Jesus had to be all these things and more in order to fulfill all of the promises made by his Father. And he did.

Thus, the founder of Opus Dei, though he was a priest, did not seek to gather power to the clergy. In fact, he wanted the Catholic laity to discover their own dignity and assume the responsibilities that came with baptism.

Paul emphasizes the importance of the doctrine of the Real Presence and sees dire consequences in unbelief: "Any one who eats and drinks without discerning the body eats and drinks judgment upon himself" (1 Cor 11:29).

The two-tiered spirituality created an artificial separation between the clergy and the laity—and thus between the Church and the world.

When I blessed those three … I saw three hundred, three hundred thousand, thirty million, three billion … white, black, yellow, of all the colors, all the combinations that human love can produce.

Nevertheless, secularity, like any good thing, can be overdone. In our zeal to laicize our piety, we shouldn't leave people guessing whether we're Christians. That would be every bit as unnatural as wearing a monk's habit over one's work clothes. Our secularity should never lapse into secularism.

They knew that their story wasn't over when their life was over—that their bodies, somehow, someway, were destined to be a part of that story, and so it mattered where and how those bodies were buried. When the day came to go to the "city" God had "prepared for them," they wanted to walk into that city together, as a family.