Quotes from Jean-Baptiste Chautard

Bossuet has a sentence which is beyond the comprehension of an apostle who does not realize what must be the soul of his apostolate. It runs: "When God desires a work to be wholly from His hand, he reduces all to impotence and nothingness, and then He acts." Nothing wounds God so much as pride.

Believe me," St. Vincent de Paul said to his priests, "we will never be any use in doing God's work until we become thoroughly convinced that, of ourselves, we are better fitted to ruin everything than to make a success of it.

A man can suffer like a pagan, like the damned, or like a saint. If he wishes to suffer with Christ, he must try to suffer like a saint. For then, suffering is of benefit to our own souls, and applies the merits of the Passion to those of others: "I fill up those things that are wanting of the sufferings of Christ, in my flesh, for His Body, which is the Church."10

Those whose job it is to teach too often seem to see nothing in the act of faith but an act of the intellect; but as a matter of fact the will also has a large part in it. They forget that belief is a supernatural gift, and that there is a deep gulf between merely seeing the motives of credibility and making a definite act of faith.

The end of human creatures is union with God; and in this their happiness consists.

Have confidence, dear friend. You have preserved all your priestly integrity, and your thousands of sermons will argue in your behalf before God, to excuse this lack of inner life of which you speak." "My sermons!" cried the dying man, "Oh what a light I see them in now! My sermons! If Our Lord is not the first in bringing up the subject of them, you can be sure that I won't mention it!