Quotes About Church

Padre, se Deus quisesse mostrar mesmo sua capacidade, fazia o 17 dar doze vezes seguidas. Isso é que era um milagre retado. Aí eu chegava e enchia essa igreja toda de flores …

For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.

Facing the couple, Cardinal Fitzroy said, "My dear friends, you have come together in this place so that the Lord may seal and strengthen your love in the presence of the Church's minister and this gathering of friends. Christ abundantly blesses this love. Since it is your intention to enter into marriage, join your hands, and declare your consent.

To become a Christian is to enter into a relationship with a new Father, with little or no emphasis on our relationship with a new set of brothers and sisters. In our typical gospel presentations, we introduce God's family only as a sort of utilitarian afterthought—church is there to help us grow in our newfound faith in Christ.

Paul's point is not simply that God is now my Father and I am now His son. God, in Jesus' great work of redemption, was not establishing a series of isolated personal relationships with His individual followers. He was creating a family of sons and daughters—siblings—who are now "all one in Christ Jesus" (v. 28). The saving work of Christ therefore has a corporate, as well as an individual, dimension. For Paul, the church is a family.

Many people think that the church simply took over a pagan holiday, but that is not so. As Sextus Julius Africanus had shown, there were good reasons for celebrating the feast of Christ's birth on December 25, and sun and light symbolism played a very great role in Christian worship.

An error in the doctrine of God will have inevitable consequences in the sphere of action, of moral behaviour, of the polity of the Church, and of basic culture and social organization. A change in the doctrine of the Trinity in either of these directions cannot help but have political consequences. Farrell, commenting on Nazianzen's connection between Trinity and Holy Monarchy

Origen says: " The Church hath received it as a tradition from the Apostles that infants, too, ought to be baptized." 21

The faithful of to-day should try by a more ardent contrition to make up for the enforced mildness of the Church in the administration of Penance. 43

St. Augustine observes in one of his Sermons: " There were those who said that certain sins must not be forgiven. They were excluded from the Church and became heretics. Our kind Mother the Church never

it would be perfectly proper to regard the Sacraments in the sense of Luther as a kind of acted sermons calculated to sustain the faith (signa paraenetica or con-cionatoria). Quite consistently, therefore, did the Augs burg Confession " condemn those who hold that the Sac raments work justification ex opere operate.

Hence, if one places an obstacle to sacramental grace, 4 he receives the Sacra ment unworthily, but the Sacrament itself is not invalid; it is valid but lacking its proper form (validum et in-forme).

Aquinas teaches: " As God did not bind His power to the Sacraments, so as to be unable to bestow the sacramental effect without conferring the Sacrament; neither did He bind His power to the ministers of the Church, so as to be unable to give angels power to administer the Sacraments.

The Church has always regarded the admin istration of a Sacrament in the state of mortal sin as a sacrilege, and insists on the personal sanc-

tity of her priesthood; 20 but she has never condi tioned the validity of a Sacrament on the moral worthiness of the minister. Her early teaching on the subject is clearly apparent from the writ ings of St. Optatus of Mileve and St. Augustine against the Donatists.

declares: "If anyone saith that in min isters, when they effect and confer the Sacra ments, there is not required the intention at least of doing what the Church does, let him be ana thema/

bishops, and the clergy throughout the world. The holier the Church is in her members (especially the pope and the episcopate), the more agreeable must be her sacrifice in the eyes of God.

St. Thomas, following his master Albert, proves the necessity of a right intention on the part of the minister from the proposition that every free instru mental cause must voluntarily accommodate itself to the principal cause,— in this case Christ, the author and chief administrator of the Sacraments. " There is required on the part of the minister that intention by which he subjects himself to the principal agent, i. e. intends to do what Christ does and the Church.

Christ, in whom godhead and manhood are so inti mately united, is as it were a living Sacrament — the personal and visible embodiment of uncreated grace. Similarly His Church, as the mystical image of the Hypostatic Union, is the visible medium of supernatural life, and therefore preeminently a sacramental institu tion.

Alexander III decided that it would render Bap tism invalid to omit the words : " I baptize thee," and simply to say : " In the name of the Father," etc. 53 As all Three Divine Persons must be expressly mentioned, it would likewise be invalid to baptize " in the name of the Most Holy Trinity.

An indulgence is a remission of the temporal punishments which a penitent, whose sins are forgiven, has yet to undergo, either here or in purgatory; this remission is granted by the Church, through the power of the keys, from the treasury of the superabundant merits of Christ and His saints.

under certain conditions, the place of Baptism by water (baptismus fiuminis) may be supplied by Baptism of desire (baptismus flaminis) or by Baptism of blood (baptismus sanguinis).

In case of necessity, not only a priest or a deacon, but a lay man or woman, nay even a pagan and a heretic, can [validly] baptize, provided only that he observes the form prescribed by the Church and has the intention of doing what the Church does.

Up to the time of the so-called Reformation no one ever questioned the power of the Church to forgive sins. The ancient Montanists merely attempted to limit it un duly, 1 while the Cathari and the Waldensians erred with regard to those who exercise it. 2 It was reserved for the self-styled Protestant Reformers to deny that power in principle. This explains the thoroughness with which the Tridentine Council defined and explained the teaching of the Church on the subject of Penance. 3