Welcome to the Mission Moment, a resource of inspirational quotes! The Mission Moment began on World Mission Sunday, October 21, 2001 with the simple idea of sending a weekly quote that would inspire, encourage, and challenge its readers to live life in the Presence of God. It's since expanded into a ministry of teaching, speaking, and writing on topics of faith and life for the New Evangelization. To learn more about Bill's work or to book him for a speaking event, please click here: The Theology of the Body Institute
After 12 years of sending a weekly quote, the Mission Moments have been gathered together and placed below. Find inspiration from the saints, scholars, poets and prophets! Search for just the right quotation by hitting ''control + f'' on your keyboard. Type in a keyword to find a quote; for example, hope... trust... St. Francis... heaven.... Van Morrison ;)
Mission Moment
October 22, 2001
God has created me to do him some definite service; he has committed some work to me which he has not committed to another. I have my mission - I may never know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next... I have a part in a great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons...
- Cardinal John Henry Newman
Mission Moment
October 29, 2001
The secret of the missionary is...I am His, and He is carrying out His work through me.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
November 5, 2001
The disciple simply burns his boats and goes ahead. He is called out... The old life is left behind, and completely surrendered. The disciple is dragged out of his relative security into a life of absolute insecurity... out of the realm of the finite...into the realm of infinite possibilities.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mission Moment
November 12, 2001
....We must carry Jesus in our hearts to wherever He wants to go, and there are many places to which He may never go unless we take Him to them. None of us knows when the loveliest hour of our life is striking. It may be when we take Christ for the first time to that grey office in the city where we work, to the wretched lodging of that poor man who is an outcast, to the nursery of that pampered child, to that battleship, airfield, or camp...
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
November 19, 2001
I must keep alive in myself the desire for my true country, which I shall not find till after death;
I must never let it get snowed under or turned aside; I must make it the main object of life
to press on to that other country and to help others to do the same.
- C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
Mission Moment
November 26, 2001
Joy is a net of love by which we catch souls.
- Mother Teresa
Mission Moments
December 3, 2001
For a stalk to grow or a flower to open there must be time that cannot be forced; nine months must go by for the birth of a human child; to write a book or compose music often years must be dedicated to patient research ...To find the mystery there must be patience, interior purification, silence, waiting....
-Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
December 10, 2001
Until one is committed there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back.... Concerning all acts of initiative and creation there is one elementary truth, the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issue from the decision raising in one's favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way. Whatever you can do or dream, you can begin it. Boldness has genius, power and magic in it.
- Goethe's 'Faust'
Mission Moment
December 17, 2001
The fact remains that we are invited to forget ourselves on purpose,
cast our awful solemnity to the wind, and join in the general Dance.
-Thomas Merton
Mission Moment
December 24, 2001
The way to begin healing the wounds of the world is to treasure the Infant Christ in us;
to be not the castle but the cradle of Christ; and, in rocking that cradle to the rhythm of love,
to swing the whole world back into the beat of the Music of Eternal Life.
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
December 31, 2001
There is still time for endurance, time for patience, time for healing, time for change. Have you slipped? Rise up. Have you sinned? Cease. Do not stand among sinners, but leap aside.
- St Basil
Mission Moment
January7, 2002
By waiting and by calm you shall be saved,
in quiet and in trust your strength lies.
- Isaiah 30:15
Mission Moment
January 14, 2002
Give me the old familiar world, post-office and all, with this ever new self,
with this infinite expectation and faith, which does not know when it is beaten.
- Henry David Thoreau
Mission Moment
January 21, 2002
We are uncertain of the next step, but we are certain of God. Immediately we abandon to God, and do the duty that lies nearest, and He packs our life with surprises all the time.... Leave the whole thing to Him, it is gloriously uncertain how He will come in, but He will come.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
January 28, 2002
Talking no longer impresses anyone, especially now with the explosion of information; everyone talks about everything. We must give WITNESS and only in this way will we be able to propagate the Gospel.
- Joseph Ti Kary of Taiwan
Mission Moment
February 4, 2002
There is one and only one possible road to joy: selfless love.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
February 11, 2002
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth:
the Blessed Sacrament ... There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity,
and the true way of all your loves on earth...
- JRR Tolkien
Mission Moment
February 18, 2002
Unfurl the sails, and let God steer us where He will.
- St. Bede
Mission Moment
February 25, 2002
Jesus, help me to simplify my life by learning what you want me to be and becoming that person.
- Saint Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
March 4, 2002
It is within my power either to serve God or not to serve Him. Serving Him, I add to my own good
and the good of the whole world. Not serving Him, I forfeit my own good and
deprive the world of that good, which was in my power to create.
- Leo Tolstoy
Mission Moment
March 11, 2002
There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization--these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub and exploit - immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.
- C.S. Lewis
To see the miraculous within the ordinary is the mark of highest wisdom.
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
Mission Moment
March 18, 2002
Go up to the mountain, go up to the glen,
where silence will touch you, and heartbreak will mend.
- Van Morrison
Mission Moment
Holy Week, March 25, 2002
So the divine love is sacrificial love. Love does not mean to have and to own and to possess.
It means to be had and to be owned and to be possessed. It is not a circle circumscribed by self,
it is arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.
- Bishop Sheen
Mission Moment
Easter Week, April 1, 2002
Make no mistake: if He rose at all
it was as His body;
if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle,
the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers,
each soft Spring recurrent;
it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles;
it was as His flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes,
the same valved heart
that - pierced - died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might
new strength to enclose.
Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping, transcendence;
making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages:
let us walk through the door.
The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache,
not a stone in a story,
but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us
the wide light of day.
And if we will have an angel at the tomb,
make it a real angel,
weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen
spun on a definite loom.
Let us not seek to make it less monstrous,
for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty,
lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are
embarrassed by the miracle,
and crushed by remonstrance.
- John Updike
Mission Moment
April 8, 2002
See the Face of God in everyone.
- St.Catherine L’aboure
Mission Moment
April 15, 2002
Unless in the first waking moments of the day you learn to fling the door wide back and let God in, you will work on the wrong level all day; but swing the door wide open and pray to your Father in secret, and every public thing will be stamped with the presence of God.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
April 22, 2002
Maintain a spirit of peace and you will save a thousand souls.
- St. Seraphim of Sarov
Mission Moment
April 29, 2002
God waits patiently for me to wake up, grow up, come to the awareness that
great works take time, that nothing truly worthwhile can be rushed...
How difficult it is not to interfere, to try to take over, to go it alone. But God cannot succeed without me. God needs my whole-hearted cooperation in this work.
- Jean Royer
Mission Moment
May 6, 2002
Preach the Gospel always, and when necessary, use words.
- St. Francis of Assisi
Mission Moment
May 13, 2002
...There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods
with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
- Gerard Manley Hopkins
Mission Moment
May 20, 2002
If you are what you should be, you will set the whole world ablaze!
- Saint Catherine of Siena
Mission Moment
May 27, 2002
If you think you don't have any time for prayer, and can't find any time, then ask God to forgive you... The Pope isn't too busy for his daily rosary; if you're busier than the Pope, you're too busy.
- Fr. James Peterson
Mission Moment
June 3, 2002
It is always the time of hope, confidence and love. Everything passes; love remains. We will not be disappointed.
- Cardinal Carlo Maria Martin
Mission Moment
June 10, 2002
We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way, an opportunity for the Lord's grace to enter and do the rest.
- Oscar Romero
Mission Moment
June 17, 2002
It’s in our blind trust that love will find us, just like it has before.
- Emily Saliers
Mission Moment
June 24, 2002
Be obedient to what is important, not to what is urgent.
- Fr. Steve Dougherty
Mission Moment
July 1, 2002
The most generous choices, especially the persevering, are the fruit of profound and prolonged union with God in prayerful silence.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
July 8, 2002
Think of the enormous leisure of God! He is never in a hurry. We are always in such a frantic hurry. In the light of the glory of the vision we go forth to do things, but the vision is not real in us yet; and God has to take us into the valley, and put us through fires and floods to batter us into shape, until we get to the place where He can trust us.... Let Him put you on His wheel and whirl you as He likes, and as sure as God is God and you are you, you will turn out exactly in accordance with the vision. Don't lose heart in the process.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
July 15, 2002
Love sometimes gets tired of speaking sweetly and wants to rip to shreds
all your erroneous notions of the truth that make you fight within yourself, dear one, and with others,
causing the world to weep on too many fine days... The Beloved sometimes wants to do us a great favor:
Hold us upside down and shake all the nonsense out.
- Hafiz
Mission Moment
July 22, 2002
Do everything calmly and peacefully. Do as much as you can as well as you can. Strive to see God in all things without exception, and consent to His will joyously. Do everything for God, uniting yourself to him in word and deed. Walk very simply with the Cross of the Lord and be at peace with yourself.
- St. Francis de Sales
Mission Moment
July 29, 2002
Being a Christian is more like having your soul possessed by a spirit than having your mind clothed with new beliefs... It is like being haunted by the Holy Ghost.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
August 5, 2002
"In prison the Catholic prisoners divided the New Testament, which they had hidden and taken with them, into little sheets; they distributed them and learned them by heart. Since the ground was earth or sand, when the guards' steps were heard, the Word of God was hidden under earth. In the afternoon, at sundown, each one took turns reciting the part he knew; it was impressive and moving to hear the Word of God in the silence and darkness, the presence of Jesus, the 'living Gospel,' recited with all the soul's strength, the priestly prayer, the Passion of Christ....I wonder...how would it be possible to have a change of mentality, a constant re-evangelization of life, to effect a real conversion?"
- Archbishop Nguyên Van Thuân. Because of his Catholic faith,
he was held for 13 years in Vietnamese prisons. He spent 9 of these in solitary confinement.
Mission Moment
August 12, 2002
In order to find oneself, you must first lose yourself in the service of others.
- Ghandi
Mission Moment
August 19, 2002
God is waiting for the response of our freedom. Our own choice, our own creativity, is essential to the drama, and this makes the world a drama fraught with real peril.
- Stratford Caldecott
Mission Moment
August 26, 2002
If I could turn down the noise of my own will and choice
I could hear the truth of my life in a clear voice.
I will bow down my head to the wisdom of my heart...
- Carrie Newcomer
Mission Moment
September 2, 2002
I assure you, my children, that when a Christian carries out with love the most insignificant everyday action, that action overflows with the transcendence of God. That is why I have told you so often, and hammered away at it, that the Christian vocation consists in making heroic verse out of the prose of each day. Heaven and earth seem to merge, my children, on the horizon. But where they really meet is in your hearts, when you sanctify your everyday lives...
- Blessed Josemaria Escriva
Mission Moment
September 9, 2002
For we are like olives....only when we are crushed do we yield what is best in us.
- Talmud
Mission Moment
September 16, 2002
If the Holy Father sees a bright future, then I'm not worried.
- Grandma Donaghy
Mission Moment
September 23, 2002
Pray, hope, and don't worry.
- St. Pio of Pietrelcina
Mission Moment
September 30, 2002
God speaks in the silence of the heart, and we listen. And then we speak to God from the fullness of our heart, and God listens. And this listening and this speaking is what prayer is meant to be....
- Mother Teresa
Mission Moment
October 7, 2002
My Lord God, I have no idea where I am going. I do not see the road ahead of me. I cannot know for certain where it will end. Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think that I am following Your Will does not mean that I am actually doing so. But I believe that the desire to please You does in fact please You. And I hope I have that desire in all that I am doing...
- Thomas Merton
Mission Moment
October 14, 2002
Get into the habit of saying, ''Speak, Lord,'' and life will become a romance.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
October 21, 2002
Nothing is more practical than finding God, that is, than falling in love in a quite absolute, final way......What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything....
Fall in love, stay in love, and it will decide everything.
- Fr. Pedro Arrupe, S.J.
Mission Moment
October 28, 2002
Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses.
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
November 4, 2002
If a tiny spark of God's love already burns within you, do not expose it to the wind, for it may get blown out.... Stay quiet with God. Do not spend your time in useless chatter.... Do not give yourself to others so completely that you have nothing left for yourself.
- St. Charles Borromeo
Mission Moment
November 11, 2002
Fight to the death for Truth, and the Lord God will do battle for you.
- Sirach 4:33
Mission Moment
November 18, 2002
With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
- Cardinal John Henry Newman
Mission Moment
November 25, 2002
We are only syllables of the perfect Word.
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
December 2, 2002
God gives us the vision, then He takes us down to the valley to batter us into the shape of the vision, and it is in the valley that so many of us faint and give way. Every vision will be made real if we will have patience.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
December 9, 2002
No one has ever laughed at a pun who did not see in the one word a twofold meaning. To materialists this world is opaque like a curtain; nothing can be seen through it. A mountain is just a mountain, a sunset just a sunset; but to poets, artists, and saints, the world is transparent like a window pane - it tells of something beyond....a mountain tells of the Power of God, the sunset of His Beauty, and the snowflake of His Purity.
- Bishop Sheen
Mission Moment
December 15, 2002
Holidays and vacations can help to balance activity with contemplation, haste with more natural rhythms, noise with the heralding silence of peace.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
December 23, 2002
We are God's creative works in process. God alone knows what we shall become. What might He have in store in the fullness of our time? In the beginning, God created Light. In Mary, God became flesh. What will God become in us this Advent?
- Thomas Hoffman
Mission Moment
December 30, 2002
Entrances to holiness are everywhere. The possibility of ascent is all the time.
Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places.
- Bamidbar Rabba
Mission Moment
January 6, 2003
The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always Itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
January 13, 2003
If you are silent, be silent out of love. If you speak, speak out of love.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
January 20, 2003
Silence is something more than just a pause; it is that enchanted place where space is cleared and time is stayed and the horizon itself expands. In silence, we often say, we can hear ourselves think; but what is truer to say is that in silence we can hear ourselves not think....In silence, we might better say, we can hear someone else think.
- Pico Iyer
Mission Moment
January 27, 2003
God's plan remains God's plan despite our sin.
- Christopher West
Mission Moment
February 3, 2003
It is my deepest belief that only by giving our lives do we find life. I am convinced that the truest act of courage, the strongest act of manliness is to sacrifice ourselves for others in totally nonviolent struggle for justice. To be a man is to suffer for others. God help us to be men!
-Cesar Chavez
Mission Moment
February 10, 2003
The greatest barrier to evangelization today is bad example....Our strategy of evangelization must be based upon sanctity, upon our enthusiastic response to Christ's universal call to holiness.
- Archbishop John Foley
Mission Moment
February 17, 2003
Let us be servants in order to be leaders.
- Dostoyevsky
Mission Moment
February 24, 2003
In the end, it is conscience that will have the last word, stronger than all strategies, all ideologies and also all religions.... Peace is still possible...
- Cardinal Etchegaray
Mission Moment
March 3, 2003
Ours is the Spirit of the Eucharist, the total Gift of Self.
- St. Katharine Drexel
Mission Moment
March 10, 2003
I will give you a new heart and place a new spirit within you, taking from your bodies your stony hearts and giving you natural hearts.
- Ezekiel 36:26
Mission Moment
March 17, 2003
And there I saw in the night the vision of a man....coming as it were from Ireland, with countless letters. And he gave me one of them, and I read the opening words of the letter, which were, ''The voice of the Irish''...and as I read the beginning of the letter I thought that at the same moment I heard their voice - they were those beside the Wood of Voclut, which is near the Western Sea - and thus did they cry out as with one mouth:
''We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more.''
- St. Patrick
Mission Moment
March 24, 2003
...Now it is our turn; and all ministering spirits keep silence and look on. O let not your foot slip, or your eye be false, or your ear dull, or your attention flagging! Be not dispirited; be not afraid; keep a good heart; be bold; draw not back; you will be carried through...O children of a heavenly Father, be not afraid!
- John Henry Cardinal Newman
Mission Moment
March 31, 2003
If ever we are going to be made into wine, we will have to be crushed; you cannot drink grapes. Grapes become wine only when they have been squeezed. I wonder what kind of finger and thumb God has been using to squeeze you, and you have been like a marble and escaped?
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
April 7, 2003
What the soul is in the body, let Christians be in the world.
- St. John Chrysostom
Mission Moment
April 14, 2003
Be the Church - that is, be an evangelical movement that tells the world of God's passionate love for humanity. That, not institutional maintenance, is what the Church is for. When the Church is that, and does that, it flourishes...
- George Weigel
Mission Moment
April 21, 2003
At present we are on the outside of the world, the wrong side of the door. We discern the freshness and purity of morning, but they do not make us fresh and pure. We cannot mingle with the splendours we see. But all the leaves of the New Testament are rustling with the rumour that it will not always be so. Some day, God willing, we shall get in. When human souls have become as perfect in voluntary odedience as the inanimate creation is in its lifeless obedience, then they will put on its glory, or rather that greater glory of which Nature is only the first sketch.
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
April 28, 2003
Know that My Heart is mercy itself. From this sea of mercy graces flow out upon the world....I desire that your heart be an abiding place of My mercy. I desire that this mercy flow out upon the whole world through your heart.
- from the diary of St. Faustina Kowalska
Mission Moment
May 5, 2003
Take nothing seriously, except for God; and even then remember, He has a sense of humor too.
- Deacon Kevin McGoldrick
Mission Moment
May 12, 2003
Boredom...has a remedy. It is to recognize and engage the drama which already surges beneath the routine of our daily existence. It is to throw ourselves into life with all our heart and soul...
- Carter Griffin
Mission Moment
May 19, 2003
Christ has no body now but mine. He prays in me, works in me, looks through my eyes, speaks through my words, works through my hands, walks with my feet and loves with my heart.
- St. Theresa of Avila
Mission Moment
May 26, 2003
The more administrative machinery we construct, be it the most modern, the less place there is for the Spirit, the less place there is for the Lord, and the less freedom there is. It is my opinion that we ought to begin an unsparing examination of conscience on this point at all levels in the Church.
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Mission Moment
June 2, 2003
The world calls for and expects from us simplicity of life, the spirit of prayer, charity towards all, especially towards the lowly and the poor, obedience and humility... Without this mark of holiness, our word will have difficulty in touching the heart of modern man. It risks being vain and sterile.
- Pope Paul VI
Mission Moment
June 9, 2003
This is a beautiful time, this last age, the age of the Holy Spirit... He is crying to every soul that is walled: Open to Me, My spouse, My sister. And once inside, He is calling again: Come to Me here in this secret place. Oh, hear Him tonight crying all over the world a last desperate summons of love to a dying race.
- Jessica Powers
Mission Moment
June 16, 2003
In the heart of Jesus, which was pierced, the kingdom of heaven and the land of earth are bound together. Here is for us the source of life. This heart is the heart of the Triune Divinity, and the center of all human hearts... It draws us to itself with secret power, it conceals us in itself in the Father's bosom and floods us with the Holy Spirit. This heart, it beats for us in a small tabernacle where it remains mysteriously hidden in that still, white host.
- St. Edith Stein
Mission Moment
June 23, 2003
It is pleasant to spend time with Him, to lie close to His breast like the Beloved Disciple and to feel the infinite love present in His Heart....how can we not feel a renewed need to spend time in spiritual converse, in silent adoration, in heartfelt love before Christ present in the Most Holy Sacrament?
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
June 30, 2003
You go to Church on Sunday so you can bring Christ to work on Monday.
- Dr. Chapp
Mission Moment
July 7, 2003
We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us, like an ignorant child who wants to go on making mud pies in a slum because he cannot imagine what is meant by the offer of a holiday at the sea. We are far too easily pleased.
-C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
July 14, 2003
I suspect that it is a trick of the Devil to divert good people from the task of Evangelization by embroiling them in endless controversial issues to the neglect of the Church's essential role, which is mission.
- Basil Cardinal Hume
Mission Moment
July 21, 2003
For me to believe is to fling myself into the darkness of the night, following a star I once saw though I do not know where it will take me... to believe is to trust God and place my hope in him.
- unattributed
Mission Moment
July 28, 2003
The frenetic pace of modern life can lead to an obscuring or even a loss of what is truly human... Perhaps more than in other periods of history, our time is in need of that genius which belongs to women, and which can ensure sensitivity for human beings in every circumstance.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
August 4, 2003
"The times are bad! The times are troublesome!" This is what humans say. But we are our times. Let us live well and our times will be good. Such as we are, such are our times.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
August 11, 2003
Let your door stand open to receive Him, unlock your soul to Him, offer Him a welcome in your mind, and then you will see the riches of simplicity, the treasures of peace, the joy of grace. Throw wide the gate of your heart, stand before the sun of the everlasting light...
- St. Ambrose
Mission Moment
August 18, 2003
At first we feel called by God and attracted by him. We grow in our vocation and get the impression that God has gripped us and will never let us go. We want to withdraw from him in order to escape his grasp. But he loves us too much to allow us to fall. He holds us fast, challenges us.
- Benedictine Father Notker Wolf
Mission Moment
August 25, 2003
Be humble and you will never be disturbed. It is very difficult in practice because we all want to see the result of our work. Leave it to Jesus.
- Mother Teresa
Mission Moment
September 1, 2003
We tend to set up success in Christian work as our purpose, but our purpose should be to display the glory of God in human life, to live a life "hidden with Christ in God" in our everyday human conditions.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
September 8, 2003
The Rosary mystically transports us to Mary's side as she is busy watching over the human growth of Christ in the home of Nazareth. This enables her to train us and to mold us with the same care, until Christ is ''fully formed'' in us... Why should we not once more have recourse to the Rosary, with the same faith as those who have gone before us?
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
September 15, 2003
Did a Magdalene, a Paul, a Constantine, an Augustine become mountains of ice after their conversion? Quite the contrary. We should never have had these prodigies of conversion and marvelous holiness if they had not changed the flames of human passion into volcanoes of immense love of God.
- St. Frances Cabrini
Mission Moment
September 22, 2003
He must increase, I must decrease.
- St. John the Baptist
Mission Moment
September 29, 2003
Do you realize that Jesus is there in the tabernacle expressly for you - for you alone? He burns with the desire to come into your heart... The guest of our soul knows our misery; He comes to find an empty tent within us - that is all He asks.
- St. Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
October 6, 2003
This morning outside I stood
And saw a little red-winged bird
Shining like a burning bush
Singing like a scripture verse
It made me want to bow my head...
'Cause everything is holy now
Everything is holy now...
- Peter Mayer
Mission Moment
October 13, 2003
Love is shown more in deeds than in words.
- St. Ignatius of Loyola
Mission Moment
October 20, 2003
Do you really know the living Jesus - not from books but from being with Him in your heart? Have you heard the loving words He speaks to you?... The devil may try to use the hurts of life, and sometimes our own mistakes - to make you feel it is impossible that Jesus really loves you, is really cleaving to you. This is a danger for all of us. And so sad, because it is completely the opposite of what Jesus is really wanting, waiting to tell you. Not only that He loves you, but even more - He longs for you.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
October 27, 2003
The biggest disease in North America is busyness.
- Thomas Merton
Mission Moment
November 3, 2003
To awaken a new longing for holiness: this is the great pastoral challenge that we have before us, if we want to be faithful to God's plan and also to respond to the yearnings and hopes of the peoples of America and of all peoples on earth...
- Cardinal Crescenzio Sepe
Mission Moment
November 10, 2003
Are you debating whether you should take a step of faith in Jesus, or whether you should wait until you can clearly see how to do what He has asked? Simply obey Him with unrestrained joy. When He tells you something and you begin to debate, it is because you have a misunderstanding of what honors Him and what doesn't. Are you faithful to Jesus, or faithful to your ideas about Him?
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
November 17, 2003
Fear not! Stand your ground... the Lord himself will fight for you; you have only to keep still.
- Moses
Mission Moment
November 24, 2003
God wants to reach out to others through your hands. He wants to speak to others through your lips, and God wants others to look into your eyes and see Him... give God permission.
- John Cardinal O'Connor
Mission Moment
December 1, 2003
Sometimes you just close your eyes and jump... you don't think too long or maybe you just won't. Sometimes you just follow your heart, don't analyze too long, or maybe it might just be gone.
- Carrie Newcomer
Mission Moment
December 8, 2003
By his own will Christ was dependent on Mary during Advent: he was absolutely helpless; he could go nowhere but where she chose to take him; he could not speak; her breathing was his breath; his heart beat in the beating of her heart.... In the seasons of our Advent - waking, working, eating, sleeping, being - each breath is a breathing of Christ into the world.
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
December 15, 2003
We are not the sum of our weaknesses and failures, we are the sum of the Father's love for us and our real capacity to become the image of His Son Jesus.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
December 22, 2003
No one, whether shepherd or wise man, can approach God here below except by kneeling before the manger at Bethlehem and adoring him hidden in the weakness of a new-born child.
- Catholic Catechism, 563
Mission Moment
December 29, 2003
There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tor high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty forever beyond its reach.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
January 12, 2004
Do not lose your inner peace for anything whatsoever, not even if your whole world seems upset. If you find that you have wandered away from the shelter of God, lead your heart back to Him quietly and simply.
- St. Francis de Sales
Mission Moment
January 19, 2004
Remember not the events of the past, the things of long ago consider not; See, I am doing something new! Now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? In the desert I make a way, in the wasteland, rivers.
- Isaiah 43:18
Mission Moment
January 26, 2004
Do not be depressed. Do not let your weakness make you impatient. Instead, let the serenity of your spirit shine through your face. Let the joy of your mind burst forth.
- St. Peter Damian
Mission Moment
February 2, 2004
I am not going to wait. I will live each present moment, filling it to the brim with love.
- Monsignor John Walsh
Mission Moment
February 9, 2004
I want eternity. I was born for greater things...
- St. Stanislaus Kostka
Mission Moment
February 16, 2004
Today it takes no great stretch of the imagination to envisage the earth as an interconnected globe humming with electronic transmissions - a chattering planet nestled in the provident silence of space. The ethical question is whether this is contributing to authentic human development and helping individuals and peoples to be true to their transcendent destiny.
- Archbishop John Foley
Mission Moment
February 23, 2004
God passionately desires and ardently yearns for our salvation...
Nothing is greater than this: that the blood of God was poured out for us.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
March 1, 2004
We too are called to withdraw at certain intervals into deeper silence and aloneness with God....
not with our books, thoughts, and memories but completely stripped of everything,
to dwell lovingly in God's presence - silent, empty, expectant, and motionless.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
March 8, 2004
Don't get upset with your imperfections. It's a great mistake because it leads nowhere - to get angry because you are angry, upset at being upset, depressed at being depressed, disappointed because you are disappointed. So don't fool yourself. Simply surrender to the Power of God's Love, which is always greater than our weakness.
- St. Francis De Sales
Mission Moment
March 15, 2004
The reason we have a life is so that we may lay it down for others.
- Dr. Janet Haggerty
Mission Moment
March 22, 2004
The mountains and the dawns and aesthetic affinities, those are for moments of inspiration.... We are built for the valley, for the ordinary stuff we are in, and that is where we have to prove our mettle.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
March 29, 2004
The Church therefore has one inescapable task: To lift up Christ. When she seeks to lift herself up she becomes weak, but when she acknowledges her own weakness and proclaims her Lord, she is strong.
- Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J.
Mission Moment
April 5, 2004
Evil labors with vast power and perpetual success - in vain:
preparing always only the soil for unexpected good to sprout in.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
April 12, 2004
The bridal chamber is adorned, the banquet is ready, the eternal dwelling places are prepared,
the treasure houses of all good things lie open. The kingdom of heaven has been prepared for you from all eternity...
- from an ancient homily for Holy Saturday
Mission Moment
April 19, 2004
It is impossible for us not to speak about what we have seen and heard.
- St. Peter
Mission Moment
April 26, 2004
Faced with the sacredness of life and of the human person,
and before the marvels of the universe, wonder is the only appropriate attitude.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
May 3, 2004
Be attentive to the voice of grace.
- St. Elizabeth Ann Seton
Mission Moment
May 10, 2004
Do I dare believe and let Love lead my life?
Could I not believe and leave that Love behind?
- Dave Wilcox
Mission Moment
May 17, 2004
Look to Him that you may be radiant with joy, and your faces may not blush with shame.
- Psalm 34
Mission Moment
May 24, 2004
The greatest mistake is in not being aware that others are Christ.
There are very many people who will not discover it until their last day.
- Archbishop Van Thuân
Mission Moment
May 31, 2004
God must be allowed the right to speak unpredictably....
We must find him in our enemy, or we may lose him even in our friend.
We must find him in the pagan or we will lose him in our own selves,
substituting for his living presence an empty abstraction.
- Thomas Merton
Mission Moment
June 7, 2004
Yield thou not to adversity, but press on the more bravely.
- Virgil
Mission Moment
June 14, 2004
What is needed to attain happiness is not a comfortable life,
but a heart in love, such as Christ's.
- Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos
Mission Moment
June 21, 2004
I know now one thing only matters in these days... true love... love and love alone.
- James Taylor
Mission Moment
June 28, 2004
Men go abroad to wonder at the heights of mountains, at the huge waves of the sea,
at the long courses of the rivers, at the vast compass of the ocean, at the circular motions of the stars,
and they pass by themselves without wondering.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
July 5, 2004
We must open our eyes to admire God who hides and at the same time reveals himself in things
and introduces us into the realms of mystery... we must be pure and simple like children,
capable of admiring, being astonished, of marveling, and being enchanted by the divine gestures
of love and closeness we witness.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
July 12, 2004
Let us listen to what all the faithful say, because in every one of them the Spirit of God breathes.
- St. Paulinus of Nola
Mission Moment
July 19, 2004
You have given it all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will.
Give me only your love and grace. That is enough for me.
- St. Ignatius of Loyola
Mission Moment
July 26, 2004
In this oasis of quiet, before the wonderful spectacle of nature, one easily experiences
how profitable silence is, a good that today is ever more rare... In reality, only in silence does man
succeed in hearing in the depth of his conscience the voice of God, which really makes him free.
And vacations can help to rediscover and cultivate this indispensable interior dimension of human life.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
August 2, 2004
Only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.
- Josef Pieper
Mission Moment
August 9, 2004
Love alone allows man to forget himself... it alone can still redeem even the darkest hours of the past
since it alone finds the courage to believe in the mercy of the holy God.
- Fr. Karl Rahner
Mission Moment
August 16, 2004
We may never be faced with the big decision for or against Christ,
but we are faced fifty times a day with the little decisions for or against Him.
- Dr. Kevin Hughes
Mission Moment
August 23, 2004
It is seldom we have the heart to throw ourselves, if I may so speak, on the Divine Arm;
we dare not trust ourselves on the waters, though Christ bids us. We have not St. Peter's love to ask leave
to come to him upon the sea. When we once are filled with that heavenly charity, we can do all things,
because we attempt all things - for to attempt is to do.
- Venerable John Henry Newman
Mission Moment
August 30, 2004
Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophetic utterances. Test everything; retain what is good.
- St. Paul
Mission Moment
September 6, 2004
Words that do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
September 13, 2004
I will go anywhere and do anything in order to communicate the love of Jesus
to those who do not know Him or have forgotten Him.
- St. Frances Cabrini
Mission Moment
September 20, 2004
Seek by reading and you will find by meditating.
Knock by praying, and it will be opened to you in contemplation.
- St. John of the Cross
Mission Moment
September 27, 2004
Nothing's written in stone, except the Ten Commandments, of course.
- Christine Hart
Mission Moment
October 4, 2004
Where there is hatred, let me sow love. Where there is injury, pardon. Where there is doubt, faith.
- Saint Francis of Assisi
Mission Moment
October 11, 2004
The greatest love story of all time is contained in a tiny white host.
- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
Mission Moment
October 18, 2004
We've been invited to come and believe the Unbelievable, receive the Inconceivable, and see beyond our wildest imaginations... Lord, we come with great expectations.
- Steven Curtis Chapman
Mission Moment
October 25, 2004
Whoever is near us and needing us must be our ''neighbor''; it does not matter whether he is
related to us or not, whether he is morally worthy of our help or not. The love of Christ knows no limits.
It never ends; it does not shrink from ugliness and filth.
- St. Edith Stein
Mission Moment
November 1, 2004
O Jesus, come back into our society, our family life, our souls and reign there
as our peaceful Sovereign. Enlighten with the splendor of faith and the charity of Your tender heart
the souls of those who work for the good of the people, for Your poor. Impart to them Your own spirit,
a spirit of discipline, order and gentleness, preserving the flame of enthusiasm ever alight in their hearts...
May that day come very soon, when we shall see You restored to the center of civic life,
borne on the shoulders of Your joyful people.
- Pope John XXIII
Mission Moment
November 8, 2004
Let your religion be less of a theory and more of a love affair.
- Gilbert K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
November 15, 2004
If you see things as in eternity, you are less a prey to the pain of their passing, and so you can learn the
more easily not to clutch at them as they pass... you learn to be reverent and not proudly possessive.
- Father Gerald Vann
Mission Moment
November 22, 2004
Holiness is not first a matter of doing anything. It is first and foremost a matter of letting it be done.
Holiness is to conceive the love of God within and to bring it forth to the world.
- Christopher West
Mission Moment
November 29, 2004
What good is it if the Eucharistic table is overloaded with golden chalices when your brother is
dying of hunger. Start by satisfying his hunger and then with what is left you may adorn the altar as well.
- Saint John Chrysostom
Mission Moment
December 6, 2004
Solitude is the place of purification.
- Martin Buber
Mission Moment
December 13, 2004
It is part of God's plan for us that Christ shall come to us in everyone;
it is in their particular role that we must come to know him. He may come as a little child,
making enormous demands, giving enormous consolation. He may come as a stranger,
so that we must give the hospitality to a stranger that we should like to give to Christ...
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
December 20, 2004
Let your gentleness be known to everyone. The Lord is near. Do not worry about anything,
but in everything by prayer and supplication with thanksgiving let your requests be made known to God.
- St. Paul, Philippians 4:5-6
Mission Moment
December 27, 2004
The first thing that a person finds in life and the last to which he holds out his hand,
and the most precious that he possess, even if he does not realize it, is family life.
- Blessed Adolph Kolping
Mission Moment
January 3, 2005
God is constantly knocking at the gate of my heart to invite me to go beyond the state I have reached,
because my whole life should be a journey on the way to Love.
- Charles Cardinal Journet
Mission Moment
January 10, 2005
To clasp the hands in prayer is the beginning of an uprising against the disorder of the world.
- Karl Barth
Mission Moment
January 17, 2005
The needs of the times will teach you what to do.
- Blessed Adolph Kolping
Mission Moment
January 24, 2005
This is what helps to advance God's kingdom: by giving Him absolute mastery over us,
we become apostles without being aware of it...
- Mother Marie des Douleurs
Mission Moment
January 31, 2005
If you practice the holy exercise of Spiritual Communion a good many times each day,
within a month you will see yourself completely changed.
- St. Leonard of Port Maurice
Mission Moment
February 7, 2005
Happy is the soul that knows how to find Jesus in the Eucharist,
and in the Eucharist all things!
- Saint Peter Julian Eymard
Mission Moment
February 14, 2005
The eternal God asks a favor of his bride: "Hold me close to your heart,
close as locket or bracelet fits." No matter whether we walk or stand still, eat or drink,
we should at all times wear the golden locket "Jesus" upon our heart.
- Blessed Henry Suso
Mission Moment
February 21, 2005
Few souls understand what God would effect in them if they should give themselves
entirely into his hands and allow his grace to act.
- St. Ignatius of Loyola
Mission Moment
February 28, 2005
Your soul must hold fast to Him, you must follow after Him in your thoughts,
you must tread His ways by faith, not in outward show.
- St. Ambrose
Mission Moment
March 7, 2005
It is a lesson we all need - to let alone the things that do not concern us.
He has other ways for others to follow Him; all do not go by the same path.
It is for each of us to learn the path by which He requires us to follow Him,
and to follow Him in that path.
- St. Katharine Drexel
Mission Moment
March 14, 2005
No one, however weak, is denied a share in the victory of the cross.
No one is beyond the help of the prayer of Christ.
- St. Leo the Great
Mission Moment
March 21, 2005
In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God's own heart is opened up -
here we see who God is and what he is like. Heaven is no longer locked up.
God has stepped out of his hiddenness
- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Mission Moment
March 28, 2005
The glory of God is man fully alive.
- St. Irenaeus
Mission Moment
April 4, 2005
Be not afraid.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
April 11, 2005
There are efficient people who are not at all effective, and there are inefficient people,
as the Pope was in his suffering, who are extraordinarily effective.
- Archbishop Comastri
Mission Moment
April 18, 2005
Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful and kindle in them the fire of Your love.
Send forth your Spirit, and they shall be created and You shall renew the face of the earth.
Mission Moment
April 25, 2005
If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life
free, beautiful, and great. No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide.
Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
May 2, 2005
Every ordinary thing in your life is a word of God's love: your home, your work,
the clothes you wear, the air you breathe, the food you eat.... the flowers under your feet
are the courtesy of God's heart flung down on You! All these things say one thing only:
"See how I love you."
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
May 9, 2005
To watch the corn grow, and the blossoms set; to draw hard breath over ploughshare or spade;
to read, to think, to love, to hope, to pray - these are the things that make us happy...
The world's prosperity or adversity depends upon our knowing and teaching these few things...
- John Ruskin
Mission Moment
May 16, 2005
He pours light into our minds, arouses our desire and gives us strength...
As the soul is the life of the body, so the Holy Spirit is the life of our souls.
- St. Peter Damian
Mission Moment
May 23, 2005
Batter my heart, three-personed God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise, and stand, o'erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new...
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.
- John Donne
Mission Moment
May 30, 2005
The Eucharist compels us to move outward: into our neighborhood,
into our country, and into the world. The Eucharist draws us together only
to send us out - again and again, like breathing.
- Father Joe Veneroso
Mission Moment
June 6, 2005
God wastes nothing - not even sin. The soul that has struggled and come through is
enriched by it's experiences, and Grace does not merely blot out the evil past
but in the most literal sense "makes it good."
- Dorothy Sayers
Mission Moment
June 13, 2005
A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.
- G. K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
June 20, 2005
A saint realizes that it is God who engineers his circumstances;
consequently there are no complaints, only unrestrained surrender to Jesus.
- Oswald Chambers
Mission Moment
June 27, 2005
Do not be troubled if you do not immediately receive from God what you ask Him;
for He desires to do something even greater for you, while you cling to Him in prayer.
- Evagrius Ponticus
Mission Moment
July 4, 2005
We are not some casual and meaningless product of evolution. Each of us is the result
of a thought of God. Each of us is willed, each of us is loved, each of us is necessary.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
July 11, 2005
Encourage each other daily while it is still today.
- Hebrews 3:13
Mission Moment
July 18, 2005
God speaks silently, God speaks in your heart; if your heart is noisy, chattering, you will not hear.
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
July 25, 2005
There are very few people who realise what God would make of them
if they abandoned themselves into his hands, and let themselves be formed by his grace.
- St. Ignatius of Loyola
Mission Moment
August 1, 2005
You gotta fight every day to keep mediocrity at bay...
- Van Morrison
Mission Moment
August 8, 2005
The more we have received in silence, the more we give in action.
- Ernest Hello
Mission Moment
August 15, 2005
We need to make our own the ancient pastoral wisdom which...
encouraged Pastors to listen more widely to the entire People of God.
Significant is Saint Benedict's reminder to the Abbot of a monastery,
inviting him to consult even the youngest members of the community:
"By the Lord's inspiration, it is often a younger person who knows what is best".
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
August 22, 2005
Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all.
And faith means believing the incredible, or it is no virtue at all.
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
August 29, 2005
Discouragement itself is a form of pride.
- St. Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
September 5, 2005
We shall steer safely through every storm so long as our heart is right,
our intention fervent, our courage steadfast, and our trust fixed on God.
- St. Francis de Sales
Mission Moment
September 12, 2005
Remember who you are and whose you are.
- Sister Thea Bowman
Mission Moment
September 19, 2005
He that breaks a thing to find out what it is has left the path of wisdom.
- J.R.R.Tolkien
Mission Moment
September 26, 2005
With thy very wounds, I will heal thee.
- Talmud
Mission Moment
October 3, 2005
God gave Himself to you: give yourself to God.
- Blessed Robert Southwell
Mission Moment
October 10, 2005
The happiness you have a right to enjoy has a name and a face:
it is Jesus of Nazareth, hidden in the Eucharist.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
October 17, 2005
Christianity is God's marriage proposal to the soul.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
October 24, 2005
Keep me away from the wisdom which does not cry, the philosophy which does not laugh,
and the greatness which does not bow before children.
- Kahlil Gibran
Mission Moment
October 31, 2005
To make the sign of the cross is to pronounce a visible and public yes to him
who died for us and who is risen, to the God who in the humility and weakness
of his love is omnipotent, stronger than all the power and intelligence of the world.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
November 7, 2005
Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence.
- Max Ehrmann
Mission Moment
November 14, 2005
Do everything as if He were dwelling in us. Thus we shall be His temples
and He will be within us as our God - as He actually is.
- St. Ignatius of Antioch
Mission Moment
November 21, 2005
We do not exist for ourselves.
- Thomas Merton
Mission Moment
November 28, 2005
Holy Communion is the shortest and safest way to Heaven.
- Pope St. Pius X
Mission Moment
December 5, 2005
If I have achieved anything in my life, it is because
I have not been embarrassed to talk about God.
- Dorothy Day
Mission Moment
December 12, 2005
Let not your heart be disturbed... Am I not here, who is your Mother?
Are you not under my protection? Am I not your health? Are you not happily within my fold?
What else do you wish? Do not grieve nor be disturbed by anything.
- words of the Virgin to Juan Diego
Mission Moment
December 19, 2005
You can call happy those who saw Him... But, come to the altar and you will see Him,
you will touch Him, you will give to Him holy kisses, you will wash Him with your tears,
you will carry Him within you like Mary Most Holy.
- St. John Chrysostom
Mission Moment
December 26, 2005
You can reach heaven from any place on earth.
- St. Samthann
Mission Moment
January 2, 2006
And if the years vanish in their course, they are still only successions of days
that pass right through us as we pass through them in order to seek constantly
what You have to show us... to remain constantly in Your embrace,
just as the whole of time remains in the embrace of eternity.
- Adrienne von Speyr
Mission Moment
January 9, 2006
If angels could be jealous of men, they would be so for one reason: Holy Communion.
- St. Maximilian Kolbe
Mission Moment
January 16, 2006
I submit to you that if a man hasn't discovered something he will die for, he isn't fit to live.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Mission Moment
January 23, 2006
Our body is a cenacle, a monstrance: through its crystal the world should see God.
- St. Gianna Molla
Mission Moment
January 30, 2006
I strongly suspect that if we saw all the difference even the tiniest of our prayers to God make, and all the people those little prayers were destined to affect, and all the consequences of those effects down through the centuries, we would be so paralyzed with awe at the power of prayer that we would be unable to get up off our knees for the rest of our lives.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
February 6, 2006
A Christian knows when it is time to speak of God and when it is better to say nothing
and to let love alone speak. He knows that God is love and that God's presence is felt
at the very time when the only thing we do is to love.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
February 13, 2006
The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us;
so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers.
- 1 John 3:16
Mission Moment
February 20, 2006
To work is simple enough; but to rest, there is the difficulty.
- Ernest Hello
Mission Moment
February 27, 2006
May God protect me from gloomy saints!
- Saint Teresa of Avila
Mission Moment
March 6, 2006
Lent stimulates us to let the Word of God penetrate our life
and in this way to know the fundamental truth: who we are, where we come from,
where we must go, what path we must take in life...
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
March 13, 2006
This, rather, is the fasting that I wish: releasing those bound unjustly... Sharing your bread with the hungry, sheltering the oppressed and the homeless... and not turning your back on your own. Then your light shall break forth like the dawn, and your wound shall quickly be healed.
- Isaiah 58: 6-8
Mission Moment
March 20, 2006
The history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family...
The family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil,
between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
March 27, 2006
The proper effect of the Eucharist is the transformation of man into God.
- St. Thomas Aquinas
Mission Moment
April 3, 2006
We are united to Him, we are one, and it is when His Passion becomes real to us,
through experience and love, that we grow aware of His presence in us.
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
April 10, 2006
The piercing nail has become a key to unlock the door, that I may see the good will of the Lord. And what can I see as I look through the hole? Both the nail and the wound cry out that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself… Through these sacred wounds we can see the secret of his heart, the great mystery of love…
- St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Mission Moment
April 16, 2006
Faith in the resurrection of Jesus says that there is a future for every human being;
the cry for unending life which is a part of the person is indeed answered...
God exists: that is the real message of Easter. Anyone who even begins to grasp
what this means also knows what it means to be redeemed.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
April 24, 2006
Do not wander far and wide but return into yourself. Deep within man there dwells the truth.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
May 1, 2006
Where there is humility, there is wisdom.
- Proverbs 11:2
Mission Moment
May 8, 2006
Just to be is a blessing. Just to live is holy.
- Abraham Heschel
Mission Moment
May 15, 2006
We are in the age of the media and the media are more interested in novelty than in truth.
Let us concentrate on the mystery that we are celebrating...."To fix one's gaze on the pierced side of Christ..."
- Father Cantalamessa
Mission Moment
May 22, 2006
In the context of the "great mystery" of Christ and of the Church, all are called to respond - as a bride - with the gift of their lives to the inexpressible gift of the love of Christ, who alone, as the Redeemer of the world, is the Church’s Bridegroom.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
May 29, 2006
The goal of our spiritual life is to become a new person in Christ. It is not enough just to be a ''good person'' or to be ''nice.'' We are called to be saints.
- Father James Farfaglia
Mission Moment
June 5, 2006
The Spirit comes gently and makes himself known by his fragrance. He is not felt as a burden, for he is light, very light. Rays of light and knowledge stream before him as he approaches. The Spirit comes with the tenderness of a true friend and protector to save, to heal, to teach, to counsel, to strengthen, to console.
- St. Cyril of Jerusalem
Mission Moment
June 12, 2006
Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart a desire to know the truth—in a word, to know himself—so that, by knowing and loving God, men and women may also come to the fullness of truth about themselves.
- Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio
Mission Moment
June 19, 2006
In the world in which we live, it is almost a necessity to be able to regain one's strength of body and spirit, especially for those who live in the city, where the conditions of life, often feverish, leave little room for silence, reflection and relaxed contact with nature.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
June 26, 2006
Grace flows through wounds.
- Christopher West
Mission Moment
July 3, 2006
The call for a sincere gift of self is the fullest way to realize our personal freedom.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
July 10, 2006
Before you speak, ask yourself: Is it kind, is it necessary, is it true? Does it improve on the silence?
- Shirdi Sai Baba
Mission Moment
July 17, 2006
The world needs more than just itself. Amid the dreariness, people do not need a distraction that will in the end become dreary itself; they are asking for mystery, even if they do not realize this themselves. They need the sign of the wholly Other, the living Word of God, entering into this our age in unadulterated trustworthiness and dynamism.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
July 24, 2006
Love begins with listening.
- Mister Rogers
Mission Moment
July 31, 2006
There is only one tragedy in the end, not to have been a saint.
- Leon Bloy
Mission Moment
August 7, 2006
For too long already we have talked about man; let us finally talk about God again.
- Vladimir Maximov
Mission Moment
August 14, 2006
"Not my will, but Yours be done"....
By obeying we raise ourselves beyond our littleness and we can act in conformity
with an infinite wisdom... Through obedience we become infinitely powerful.
- St. Maximilian Kolbe
Mission Moment
August 21, 2006
Vacation time offers the unique opportunity to pause before the thought-provoking spectacles
of nature, a wonderful "book" within reach of everyone, adults and children. In contact with
nature, a person rediscovers his correct dimension, rediscovers himself as a creature, small but
at the same time unique, with a "capacity for God" because interiorly he is open to the Infinite.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
August 28, 2006
You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness.
You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness.
You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you.
I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
September 4, 2006
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen,
not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
September 11, 2006
Believers know that the presence of evil is always accompanied
by the presence of good, by grace... Where evil grows, there the hope for good also grows...
In the love that pours forth from the heart of Christ, we find hope for the future of the world.
Christ has redeemed the world: "By his wounds we are healed." (Isaiah 53:5)
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
September 18, 2006
We need a new apologetic, geared to the needs of today, which keeps in mind that our task is not to win arguments but to win souls... Such an apologetic will need to breathe a spirit of humanity, that humility and compassion which understand the anxieties and questions of people.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
September 25, 2006
Let go into the mystery. Let yourself go. And when you open up your heart,
you get everything you need. Baby there's a way and a mystic road. You've got to have
some faith to carry on, you've got to open up your heart to the Son.
- Van Morrison
Mission Moment
October 2, 2006
Above the clouds the sky is always blue.
- St. Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
October 9, 2006
If I were a physician, and if I were allowed to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the modern world, I would prescribe silence. For even if the Word of God were proclaimed in the modern world,
how could one hear it with so much noise? Therefore, create silence.
- Soren Kierkegaard
Mission Moment
October 16, 2006
We are born with a lingering hunger
We are born to be unsatisfied
We are strangers who can't help but wander
And dream about the other side....
- Nichole Nordeman
Mission Moment
October 23, 2006
This is what it means to live: in everything to say "yes" to the One who is among us.
Our life in this "yes" becomes His glory, the reverberation of His presence within reality.
- Fr. Stefano Alberto
Mission Moment
October 30, 2006
Strange is our situation here upon the earth. Each of us comes for a short visit not knowing why.
Yet sometimes seeming to a Divine Purpose. From the standpoint of daily life however,
there is one thing we do know...that we are here for the sake of others....
- Albert Einstein
Mission Moment
November 6, 2006
There is nothing so great or ideally beautiful as the action of God in the human soul.
If we knew how to discern it in ourselves, our lives would be transformed. If we could see it
in others we would love even more him who is always in our midst, who acts in us, and who
works marvels - these spiritual renewals that we shall understand only in eternity.
- Elisabeth Leseur
Mission Moment
November 13, 2006
The Eucharist is the lifeline thrown from eternity into time. We should hold onto it firmly
and not give ourselves over to the false promises of the world...
- Fr. Albert Paretsky, O.P.
Mission Moment
November 20, 2006
Do not let a day go by without some spiritual reading.
- St. John Bosco
Mission Moment
November 27, 2006
Love, and He will draw near; love, and He will dwell within you.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
December 4, 2006
It is a time of darkness, of faith. We shall not see Christ's radiance in our lives yet;
it is still hidden in our darkness; nevertheless, we must believe that He is growing
in our lives; we must believe it so firmly that we cannot help relating everything,
literally everything, to this almost incredible reality.
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
December11, 2006
We are not heading for an eternal void and an eternal silence
but we are on our way to an encounter, an encounter with Him who created us
and loves us more than mother and father.
- Father Cantalamessa
Mission Moment
December 18, 2006
You can't always get what you want. No, you can't always get what you want.
But if you try sometimes you just might find, you can get what you need.
- Mick Jagger
Mission Moment
December 25, 2006
It is done. Once again the Fire has penetrated the earth, not with the sudden crash of thunderbolt,
riving the mountain tops: does the Master break down doors to enter His own home?
Without earthquake, or thunderclap: the flame has lit up the whole world from within.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
Mission Moment
January 1, 2007
Which direction do we take? The one prompted by the passions or the one indicated by the star
which shines in your conscience? The Magi heard the answer: "In Bethlehem of Judea; for so it is
written by the prophet"... enlightened by these words, they chose to press forward to the very end.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
January 7, 2007
The Magi are filled with awe by what they see; heaven on earth and earth in heaven; man in God and God in man; they see enclosed in a tiny body the One whom the entire world cannot contain.
- St. Peter Chrysologus
Mission Moment
January 15, 2007
I believe in the rest of the story. I believe there's still ink in the pen....
and someday all that's hazy through a clouded glass will be clear at last.
- Nichole Nordeman
Mission Moment
January 22, 2007
The human person is a unique composite - a unity of spirit and matter,
soul and body, fashioned in the image of God and destined to live forever.
Every human life is sacred, because every human person is sacred.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
January 29, 2007
Ever since the days of Adam, man has been hiding from God and saying, "God is hard to find."
- Bishop Fulton Sheen
Mission Moment
February 5, 2007
On Christmas Eve I went to St. Patrick’s Cathedral... It had dawned on me before, but it really sank in: the Christmas story... Love needs to find form, intimacy needs to be whispered. To me, it makes sense. It’s actually logical... Love has to become an action or something concrete. It would have to happen... There must be an incarnation. Love must be made flesh.
- Bono
Mission Moment
February 12, 2007
Love looks to the eternal. Love is indeed "ecstasy," not in the sense of a moment of intoxication,
but rather as a journey, an on-going exodus out of the closed inward-looking self toward its
liberation through self-giving... toward authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God...
- Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 6
Mission Moment
February 19, 2007
When you say Yes to God unconditionally, you have no idea how far this Yes is going to take you.
Certainly farther than you can guess and calculate beforehand... but just how far and in what form?
At the same time, this Yes is the sole, non-negotiable prerequisite of all Christian understanding,
of all theology and ecclesial wisdom.
- Fr. Hans Urs Von Balthasar
Mission Moment
February 26, 2007
Throughout history there have been many men and women who have chosen to imitate Jesus as he withdraws into the desert... To pass time in the desert means to create a little emptiness and silence around us, to rediscover the road to our heart, to remove ourselves from the noise and external distractions, to enter into contact with the deepest source of our being and our faith.
- Fr. Cantalamessa
Mission Moment
March 5, 2007
Christianity, if false, is of no importance; and if true, of infinite importance.
The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.
- C. S. Lewis
Mission Moment
March 12, 2007
Love is never defeated, and I could add, the history of Ireland proves it.
- Pope John Paul II
(in a speech to the people of Galway in 1979)
Mission Moment
March 19, 2007
One solitary God-centered, God-intoxicated man can do more to keep God's love alive and His presence felt in the world than a thousand half-hearted, talkative busy men living frightened, fragmented "lives of quiet desperation."
- Fr. McNamara
Mission Moment
March 26, 2007
Each morning we must hold out the chalice of our being to receive, to carry, and give back.
It must be held out empty - for the past must only be reflected in its polish, its shape, its capacity.
- Dag Hammarskjöld
Mission Moment
April 2, 2007
At the judgment, in response to our questions, the Lord will show us his wounds, and we will understand. In the meantime, however, he simply expects us to stand by him and to believe what these wounds tell us, even though we cannot work right through the logic of this world.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
April 9, 2007
Only from God does true revolution come... the definitive way to change the world.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
April 16, 2007
What is this life if, full of care, we have no time to stand and stare.
- W.H. Davies
Mission Moment
April 23, 2007
Our own evil inclinations are far more dangerous than any external enemies.
- St. Ambrose
Mission Moment
April 30, 2007
All the troubles of the Church, all the evils in the world, flow from this source:
that men do not by clear and sound knowledge and serious consideration
penetrate into the truths of Sacred Scripture.
- St. Teresa of Avila
Mission Moment
May 7, 2007
It has always been one of my unclerical sermons to myself, that that remark which Peter made on seeing the vision of a single hour, ought to be made by us all, in contemplating every panoramic change in the long Vision we call life... "It is good for us to be here - it is good for us to be here", repeating itself eternally.
- G. K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
May 14, 2007
Creation is a book proclaiming the Creator. It is a book of beauty that our intellect reads,
but through the passageways of our five senses.
- Fr. Thomas Dubay, S.M.
Mission Moment
May 21, 2007
The world needs transparent lives, clear souls, pure minds that refuse to be perceived as mere objects of pleasure.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
May 28, 2007
The cross means there is no shipwreck without hope; there is no dark without dawn; nor storm without haven.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
June 4, 2007
Eternal Trinity... mystery deep as the sea, You could give me no greater gift than the gift of Yourself. For You are a fire
ever burning and never consumed, which itself consumes all the selfish love that fills my being...
- Saint Catherine of Siena
Mission Moment
June 11, 2007
What wonderful majesty! What stupendous condescension! O sublime humility!
That the Lord of the whole universe, God and the Son of God, should humble Himself like this
under the form of a little bread, for our salvation.
- St. Francis of Assisi
Mission Moment
June 18, 2007
For from the greatness and the beauty of created things their original Author, by analogy, is seen.
- Wisdom 13:5
Mission Moment
June 25, 2007
Holy is the dish and drain, the soap and sink, and the cup and plate
and the warm wool socks, and the cold white tile, showerheads and good dry towels
and frying eggs sound like psalms, with bits of salt measured in my palm.
It’s all a part of a sacrament, as holy as a day is spent...
- Carrie Newcomer
Mission Moment
July 2, 2007
These are the times that try men's souls.... but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly...
- Thomas Paine
Mission Moment
July 9, 2007
If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
July 16, 2007
If you want to build a ship, don't herd people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Mission Moment
July 23, 2007
Don't just talk... do.
- Grandma Donaghy
Mission Moment
July 30, 2007
It's not just by coincidence
That lives are made of accidents
And doesn't it make perfect sense
That life turns on a point in time
And I know that this is mine.
- Dave Wilcox
Mission Moment
August 6, 2007
Everything is a grace, everything is the direct effect of our Father's love - difficulties, contradictions, humiliations, all the soul's miseries, her burdens, her needs - everything, because through them, she learns humility, realizes her weakness. Everything is a grace because everything is God's gift. Whatever be the character of life or its unexpected events - to the heart that loves, all is well.
- St. Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
August 13, 2007
The brilliance of contemplated beauty opens the spirit to the mystery of God.
- Cardinal Angelo Sodano
Mission Moment
August 20, 2007
Between the probable and proved there yawns a gap. Afraid to jump, we stand absurd, then see behind us sink the ground and, worse, our very standpoint crumbling. Desperate dawns our only hope: to leap into the Word that opens up the shuttered universe.
- Sheldon Vanauken
Mission Moment
August 27, 2007
Each time we look upon the poor, on the farmworkers who harvest the coffee, the sugarcane, or the cotton... remember, there is the face of Christ.
- Archbishop Oscar Romero
Mission Moment
September 3, 2007
If God causes you to suffer much it is a sign that He has great designs for you and that He certainly intends to make you a saint. And if you wish to become a great saint, entreat Him yourself to give you much opportunity for suffering; for there is no wood better to kindle the fire of holy love than the wood of the cross, which Christ used for His own great sacrifice of boundless charity.
- St. Ignatius of Loyola
Mission Moment
September 10, 2007
To love is to be transformed into what we love. To love God is therefore to be transformed into God.
- St. John of the Cross
Mission Moment
September 17, 2007
The highest things, the things that really matter, we cannot achieve on our own;
we have to accept them as gifts and enter in to the dynamic of the gift, so to speak.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
September 24, 2007
After the wind there was an earthquake - but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire--but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. A voice said to him, "Elijah, why are you here?"
- 1 Kings 19:11-13
Mission Moment
October 1, 2007
Our Lord needs from us neither great deeds nor profound thoughts. Neither intelligence nor talents. He cherishes simplicity.
- Saint Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
October 8, 2007
The rosary is the book of the blind, where souls see and there enact the greatest drama of love the world has ever known; it is the book of the simple, which initiates them into mysteries and knowledge more satisfying that the education of other men; it is the book of the aged, whose eyes close upon the shadow of this world, and open on the substance of the next. The power of the rosary is beyond description.
- Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
Mission Moment
October 15, 2007
The Holy Spirit lovingly penetrates those areas of our personality that would hold us captive. He opens up the mysteries of God's love, sets us free and enables us to experience the new life we have in Christ.
- Mary Healy
Mission Moment
October 22, 2007
There's a hole in my heart
That can only be filled by you
And this hole in my heart
Can't be filled with the things I do
- Extreme
Mission Moment
October 29, 2007
The Holy Spirit knows what a particular age's most pressing need is far better than men with their "programs."
- Hans Urs von Balthasar
Mission Moment
November 5, 2007
For in this world, marked by sin, the gravitational pull of our lives is weighted by the chains of the "I" and the "self." These chains must be broken to free us for a new love that places us in another gravitational field where we can enter new l ife.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
November 12, 2007
If I ever become a Saint - I will surely be one of "darkness." I will continually be absent from heaven -
to light the light of those in darkness on earth.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
November 19, 2007
Love can wait to give. Lust can't wait to get.
- Jason Evert
Mission Moment
November 26, 2007
The block of marble is not the sculptor, and doesn't see that he's about to become a masterpiece...
We're the block of marble and God is the sculptor, and the chisel is.... everything.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
December 3, 2007
Holiness is irresistible. If even 10% of the world's population had it
the whole world would be converted and happy before the year's end.
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
December 10, 2007
In an age that has thrown off all tradition, the only rebellion possible is orthodoxy.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
December 17, 2007
If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.
- Saint John of the Cross
Mission Moment
December 24, 2007
Sick, our nature demanded to be healed; fallen, to be raised up; dead, to rise again...
Closed in the darkness, it was necessary to bring us the light; captives, we awaited a Savior...
Are these things minor or insignificant? Did they not move God to descend to human nature and visit it,
since humanity was in so miserable and unhappy a state?
- St. Gregory of Nyssa
Mission Moment
December 31, 2007
... But certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy earth. We all long for it, and we are constantly glimpsing it: our whole nature at its best and least corrupted, its gentlest and most humane,
is still soaked with the sense of 'exile.'
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
January 7, 2008
If we approach with faith, we too will see Jesus... for the Eucharistic table takes the place of the crib.
Here the Body of the Lord is present, wrapped not in swaddling clothes but in the rays of the Holy Spirit.
- St. John Chrysostom
Mission Moment
January 14, 2008
We must have such great love for the truth that our words will take on the character of oaths.
- St. Paulinus
Mission Moment
January 21, 2008
Yes, the civilization of love is possible; it is not a utopia. But it is only possible by a constant and ready reference to the "Father from whom all fatherhood [and motherhood] on earth is named," from whom every human family comes.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
January 28, 2008
My television is the tabernacle.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
February 4, 2008
Moses does not encounter the living God at the mall. He finds Him (or is found by Him)
somewhere out in the deserts of Sinai, a long way from the comforts of Egypt... Where did
the great prophet Elijah go to recover his strength? To the wild. As did John the Baptist,
and his cousin, Jesus, Who is led by the Spirit into the wilderness.
- John Eldredge
Mission Moment
February 11, 2008
Let us rise above the things that pass away. Up above, the air is so pure.
Jesus can hide Himself but we will find Him there.
- St. Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
February 18, 2008
The Gospel is not merely a communication of things that can be known - it is one that makes things happen and is life-changing. The dark door of time, of the future, has been thrown open. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted the gift of a new life.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
February 25, 2008
There are strange things happening every day.
I hear music up above my head
Fill me up with Your wonder
Give me my rapture today.
Won’t You guide me through the dark night of the soul
That I may better understand Your way...
Let me purify my thoughts and words and deeds
That I may be a vehicle for Thee...
Give me my rapture today.
- Van Morrison
Mission Moment
March 3, 2008
Oh, how great is the goodness of God, greater than we can understand. There are moments and there are mysteries of the divine mercy over which the heavens are astounded. Let our judgment of souls cease, for God's mercy upon them is extraordinary.
- St. Faustina Kowalska
Mission Moment
March 10, 2008
To the servant of God... every place is the right place, and every time is the right time.
- St. Catherine of Siena
Mission Moment
March 17, 2008
But he was pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins,
Upon him was the chastisement that makes us whole, by his stripes we were healed.
- Isaiah 53:5
Mission Moment
March 24, 2008
The Spirit and the bride say, "Come." Let the hearer say, "Come." Let the one who thirsts come forward,
and the one who wants it receive the gift of life-giving water.
- Revelation 22:17
Mission Moment
March 31, 2008
It is not fitting, when one is in God's service, to have a gloomy face or a chilling look.
- St. Francis of Assisi
Mission Moment
April 7, 2008
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it,
but because by it I see everything else.
- C. S. Lewis
Mission Moment
April 14, 2008
You ask me whether I am in good spirits. How could I not be so? As long as Faith gives me strength I will always be joyful. Sadness ought to be banished from Catholic souls... the purpose for which we have been created shows us the path; even if strewn with many thorns, it is not a sad path. It is joyful even in the face of sorrow.
- Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati
Mission Moment
April 21, 2008
Sometimes we are looked upon as people who speak only of prohibitions. Nothing could be further from the truth! Authentic Christian discipleship is marked by a sense of wonder. We stand before the God we know and love as a friend, the vastness of his creation, and the beauty of our Christian faith.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
April 28, 2008
Singing is a lover's thing.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
May 5, 2008
The proof of love is in the works. Where love exists, it works great things.
But when it ceases to act, it ceases to exist.
- Pope St. Gregory the Great
Mission Moment
May 12, 2008
The field of earth and of our human nature is now no longer barren but full of the seed of divine life. But it takes time for the seed to grow, for the Kingdom to come, and we are commanded to pray and work for that coming, that growth, even if we do not yet see the fruits, or even the blossoms, or even the leaves....
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
May 19, 2008
Our first experience of God is so important, we either experience Him as
the police guard that wants to punish or as Creative Love that awaits.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
May 26, 2008
Can man, the finite and sinful one, cooperate with God, the Infinite and Holy One? Yes, he can, precisely because God Himself has become man, become body, and here (in the liturgy), again and again, he comes through his body to us who live in the body.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
June 2, 2008
Believe the incredible and you can do the impossible.
- Bishop Fulton Sheen
Mission Moment
June 9, 2008
It is better to say one Our Father fervently and devoutly
than a thousand with no devotion and full of distraction.
- St. Edmund
Mission Moment
June 16, 2008
The heart is our hidden center, beyond the grasp of our reason and of others; only the Spirit of God
can fathom the human heart and know it fully. The heart is the place of decision, deeper than our psychic drives. It is the place of truth, where we choose life or death. It is the place of encounter...
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
June 23, 2008
To keep a lamp burning we have to keep putting oil in it.
- Mother Teresa
Mission Moment
June 30, 2008
“If you have walked all these days with closed ears and mind asleep, wake up now!”
- Gandalf
Mission Moment
July 7, 2008
The music is all around us. All you have to do is listen.
- August Rush
Mission Moment
July 14, 2008
There is no need to be dismayed if love sometimes follows torturous ways.
Grace has the power to make straight the paths of human love.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
July 21, 2008
God calls us, just as he called Abraham, away from the security we knew, out of our old, familiar, little room, down the ladder of faith and into his arms. Jesus called his disciples that way - just as a lover elopes with his beloved.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
July 28, 2008
Remember that the Christian life is one of action, not speech and daydreams.
Let there be few words and many deeds, and let them be done well.
- St. Vincent Pallotti
Mission Moment
August 4, 2008
When we are before the Blessed Sacrament, let us open our heart;
our good God will open His. We shall go to him; He will come to us...
It will be like a breath from one to the Other.
- St. John Vianney
Mission Moment
August 11, 2008
Man must reconcile himself to his natural greatness.... he must not forget that he is a person.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
August 18, 2008
Before His gaze all falsehood melts away. This encounter with Him, as it burns us, transforms and frees us, allowing us to become truly ourselves... His gaze, the touch of His heart heals us through an undeniably painful transformation “as through fire”. But it is a blessed pain, in which the holy power of His love sears through us like a flame, enabling us to become totally ourselves and thus totally of God.
- Pope Benedict XVI, Spe Salvi
Mission Moment
August 25, 2008
Every blade of grass is a blade of grace, a grace note in God's single Song. Nature is not blind and dumb.
Nature is eloquent. Human science is blind and dumb if it does not hear this eloquence.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
September 1, 2008
I believe that in a certain way this is proof of the truth of Christianity:
Heart and reason encounter one another, beauty and truth converge,
and the more that we ourselves succeed in living in the beauty of truth,
the more that faith will be able to return to being creative in our time too,
and to express itself in a convincing form of art.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
September 8, 2008
For as Eve was seduced by the word of an angel to flee from God, having rebelled against His Word, so Mary by the word of an angel received the glad tidings that she would bear God by obeying his Word. The former was seduced to disobey God, but the latter was persuaded to obey God, so that the Virgin Mary might become the advocate of the virgin Eve. As the human race was subjected to death through [the act of] a virgin, so it was saved by a virgin.
- St. Irenaeus, A.D. 180
Mission Moment
September 15, 2008
When I think of that dear rugged cross where the dear Saviour gave his all...
When I feel like I'm on my last go round, see me through.
- Van Morrison
Mission Moment
Septeber 22, 2008
All that we call human history - money, poverty, ambition, war, prostitution, classes, empires, slavery - [is] the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
September 29, 2008
The reason angels can fly is because they take themselves lightly.
~ G. K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
October 6, 2008
The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
October 13, 2008
If you are really a product of a materialistic universe, how is it you don't feel at home there? Do fish complain of the sea for being wet? Or if they did, would that fact itself not strongly suggest that they had not always been, or would not always be, purely aquatic creatures? Notice how we are perpetually surprised at Time. ("How time flies... I can hardly believe it!") In heaven's name, why? Unless, indeed, there is something in us which is not temporal... If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world.
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
October 20, 2008
Desire to see God, be fearful of losing Him, and find joy in everything that can lead to Him.
If you act in this way, you will always live in great peace.
- St. Theresa of Avila
Mission Moment
October 27, 2008
Your heart is like an infinitely large hole, and only God is big enough to fill it.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
November 3, 2008
I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse.
Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live...
- Deuteronomy 30:19-20
Mission Moment
November 10, 2008
Silence exists so that we might speak to God. And it is in silence that God communicates His graces to us.
- St. Vincent de Paul
Mission Moment
November 17, 2008
Meditate daily on the words of your Creator. Learn the Heart of God in the words of God,
that your soul may be enkindled with greater longings for heavenly joys.
- St. Gregory the Great
Mission Moment
November 24, 2008
Enrich your soul in the great goodness of God: The Father is your table, the Son is your food,
and the Holy Spirit waits on you and then makes His dwelling in you.
- St. Catherine of Siena
Mission Moment
December 1, 2008
War must be, while we defend our lives against a destroyer who would devour all; but I do not love the bright sword for its sharpness, nor the arrow for its swiftness, nor the warrior for his glory. I love only that which they defend...
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
December 8, 2008
"Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it done unto me according to your word."
- Luke 1:38
“The most Blessed Virgin Mary, in the first instant of her conception, by a singular grace and privilege granted by almighty God, in view of the merits of Jesus Christ, the savior of the human race, was preserved free from all stain of original sin.”
- Pope Pius IX
Mission Moment
December 15, 2008
Christ used the flesh and blood of Mary for his life on earth, the Word of love was uttered in her heartbeat. Christ used his own body to utter his love on earth; his perfectly real body, with bone and sinew and blood and tears; Christ uses our bodies to express his love on earth, our humanity. A Christian life is a sacramental life, it is not a life lived only in the mind, only by the soul... Our humanity is the substance of the sacramental life of Christ in us, like the wheat for the host, like the grape for the chalice.
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
December 22, 2008
We consider Christmas as the encounter, the great encounter, the historical encounter, the decisive encounter, between God and mankind. He who has faith knows this truly; let him rejoice...
- Pope Paul VI
Mission Moment
December 29. 2008
As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
January 5, 2009
The deepest lessons the heart has to deliver to us become accessible only when it is ruptured. It is anguish that makes the heart an open book because the wound it causes pierces all the way through to the core. These are terrible lessons, the kind that fill one with nausea. We like to think our lives would be happier if we could find a way to avoid learning them; but the only way to do that is to close one's heart and keep it closed, so that nothing gets in or out of it - to make oneself a heart of stone. It is terrible to put into words the one real alternative to this avoidance. But I see no way to get around what seems to be the harshest, the most merciless truth about the human heart - I mean the fact that, to keep it open, once it has been pierced, one must allow it to be an open wound.
- Jerome Miller
Mission Moment
January 12, 2009
For just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down
and do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful,
giving seed to the one who sows and bread to the one who eats,
so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; my word shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.
- Isaiah 55
Mission Moment
January 19, 2009
Peace begins in the womb.
- Feminists for Life
Mission Moment
January 26, 2009
Believers do not surrender. They can continue on their way to the truth because they are certain
that God has created them "explorers", whose mission is to leave no stone unturned, though the temptation to doubt is always there. Leaning on God, they continue to reach out, always and everywhere, for all that is beautiful, good, and true.
- Pope John Paul II, Fides et Ratio, 21
Mission Moment
February 2, 2009
Violence against even one human being is violence against all.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
February 9, 2009
The Pro-Life cause is the preeminent cause of our time, and this struggle between
the gospel of life and the culture of death will determine the destiny of mankind.
- Peter Garrett
February 16, 2009
Mission Moment
One with a spirit of joy preaches without preaching.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
February 23, 2009
Christ said, "I am the Truth"; he did not say "I am the custom."
- St. Toribio Alfonso Mogrovejo
Mission Moment
March 2, 2009
Utilitarianism is a civilization of production and of use, a civilization of “things” and not of “persons,” a civilization in which persons are used in the same way as things are used. In the context of a civilization of use, woman can become an object for man, children a hindrance to parents, the family an institution obstructing the freedom of its members.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
March 9, 2009
The entire life of a good Christian is in fact an exercise of holy desire. You do not yet see what you long for, but the very act of desiring prepares you, so that when he comes you may see and be utterly satisfied.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
March 16, 2009
God no longer simply stands before us as the One who is totally Other. He is within us, and we are in him. His dynamic enters into us and then seeks to spread outward to others until it fills the world, so that his love can truly become the dominant measure of the world.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
March 23, 2009
Not 100 in the United States hate the Roman Catholic Church,
but millions hate what they mistakenly think the Roman Catholic Church is.
- Bishop Fulton Sheen
Mission Moment
March 30, 2009
Who except God can give you peace? Has the world ever been able to satisfy the heart?
- St. Gerard Majella
Mission Moment
April 6, 2009
My daughter, I see more Pharisees among Christians than there were around Pilate.
- St. Margaret of Cortona
Mission Moment
April 13, 2009
Jesus, I trust in You.
- St. Faustina
Mission Moment
April 20, 2009
To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness. But in that casket- safe, dark, motionless, airless - it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable.
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
April 27, 2009
Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life...
- John 6:27
Mission Moment
May 4, 2009
Let us allow ourselves to be 'infected' by St. Joseph's silence! We need it greatly, in a world that is
often too noisy, that does not favor meditation or listening to the voice of God.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
May 11, 2009
Kindness has converted more people than zeal, science, or eloquence.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
May 18, 2009
Let go into the Mystery, let yourself go. You've got to open up your heart, that's all I know.
Trust what I say and do what you're told, and baby, all your dirt will turn into gold.
- Van Morrison
Mission Moment
May 25, 2009
The world promises you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
June 1, 2009
Oh, hear Him within you speaking this infinite love,
moving like some divine and audible leaven,
lifting the sky of the soul with expansions of light,
shaping new heights and new depths,
and, at your stir of assent,
spreading the mountains with flame, filling the hollows with Heaven.
- Sister Miriam of the Holy Spirit (Jessica Powers)
Mission Moment
June 8, 2009
The “name” of the Most Holy Trinity is in a certain way impressed upon everything that exists, because everything that exists, down to the least particle, is a being in relation, and thus God-relation shines forth, ultimately creative Love shines forth. All comes from love, tends toward love, and is moved by love, naturally, according to different grades of consciousness and freedom... The strongest proof that we are made in the image of the Trinity is this: only love makes us happy, because we live in relation, and we live to love and be loved.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
June 15, 2009
Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution.
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
June 22, 2009
With the Eucharist, therefore, heaven comes down to earth, the tomorrow of God descends into
the present and it is as if time remains embraced by divine eternity.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
June 29, 2009
If you love, you will suffer. The only way to protect yourself against suffering
is to protect yourself against love - and that is the greatest suffering of all, loneliness.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
July 6, 2009
I say, we need less ingestion and more digestion. We need less information and more meditation, reflection, and contemplation.
- Art Carey
Mission Moment
July 13, 2009
The family is the great catechism God has given the world. The work of our lifetime is to learn how to read it and then study it prayerfully.
- Mike Aquilina
Mission Moment
July 20, 2009
We can say with infallible certainty that Mary is in Heaven.
- Cardinal Bevilacqua
Mission Moment
July 27, 2009
Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags.
The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world.
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
August 3, 2009
The sun penetrates crystal and makes it more dazzling. In the same way, the sanctifying Spirit indwells in souls and makes them more radiant. They become like so many powerhouses beaming grace and love around them.
- St. Basil
Mission Moment
August 10, 2009
Place your mind before the mirror of eternity! Place your soul in the brilliance of glory!
And transform your entire being into the image of the Godhead Itself through contemplation.
- St. Clare of Assisi
Mission Moment
August 17, 2009
The simple sense of wonder at the shapes of things, and at their exuberant independence
of our intellectual standards and our trivial definitions, is the basis of spirituality.
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
August 24, 2009
Bad times make good people, as mountainous pressures make diamonds or as fire tempers steel.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
August 31, 2009
When a society closes the door to the Infinite, to transcendence, hope is exiled.
- Bishop Wenski
Mission Moment
September 7, 2009
Only if there is love, if hearts are opened, can one person truly know the other.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
September 14, 2009
It is much easier to conquer a country than to conquer ourselves.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
September 21, 2009
Humanity, its dignity and its balance, will depend at every moment and on every place on the globe,
on who man is for woman and who woman is for man.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
September 28, 2009
Our life is a gymnasium of desire.... When Christians say "God,"
what do we wish to express? This word is all that we yearn for."
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
October 5, 2009
It is not enough to long for a person as a good for oneself, one must also, and above all, long for that person's good.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
October 12, 2009
The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.
- Albert Einstein
Mission Moment
October 19, 2009
Without God the economy is only economy, nature is nothing more than a deposit of material, the family only a contract, life nothing more than a laboratory product, love only chemistry, and development nothing more than a form of growth.
- Archbishop Crepaldi
Mission Moment
October 26, 2009
Do you remember the time darlin' when everything made more sense in the world?
Oh I remember, I remember... when life made more sense... Take me back, take me back,
take me way back... to when life made more sense.
- Van Morrison
Mission Moment
November 2, 2009
How will the Tower of Babel be undone? How will we understand each other in Heaven?
Will we all speak English or Dutch or Latin? No, we will speak music.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
November 9, 2009
Music, great music, distends the spirit, arouses profound emotions and almost naturally invites us to raise our minds and hearts to God in all situations of human existence, the joyful and the sad. Music can become prayer.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
November 16, 2009
A world that is "beyond good and evil," in which nothing is either genuinely good or genuinely bad, and no truth, goodness, or beauty are revealed, is a world in which nothing is either intrinsically desirable or detestable. Such a world affords no possibility of seeing and using things as holy, which means to some degree letting them be, because in such a world there can be no holy things. Boredom is therefore the defining condition of a people uniquely in danger of losing their capacity to love, that is, a people uniquely in danger of failing to grasp "the mystery of [its] own being" and losing its very humanity.
- Michael Hanby
Mission Moment
November 23, 2009
From the point of view of the Christian faith, man comes in the profoundest sense to himself not through what he does but through what he accepts. He must wait for the gift of love, and love can only be received as a gift… One must wait for it, let it be given to one. And one cannot become wholly man in any other way than by being loved, by letting oneself be loved… If he declines to let himself be presented with the gift, then he destroys himself.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
November 30, 2009
Silence…leads us to make a gift of self rather than a selfishness that has been gift-wrapped …Silence does not mean running away but rather recollecting ourselves in the open space of God.
- Madeleine Delbrêl
Mission Moment
December 7, 2009
Love alone makes us happy, because we live in relation, and we live to love and to be loved.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
December 14, 2009
When we leave the holy banquet of Communion, we are as happy as the wise men would have been if they could have carried away the Infant Jesus.
- St. John Vianney
Mission Moment
December 21, 2009
Cast aside regret and fear... do the deed at hand.
- Gandalf
Mission Moment
December 28, 2009
We live our lives by philosophies, amid worldly affairs and occupations that totally absorb us and are a great distance from the manger. In all kinds of ways, God has to prod us and reach out to us again and again, so that we can manage to escape from the muddle of our thoughts and activities and discover the way that leads to him. But a path exists for all of us. The Lord provides everyone with tailor-made signals.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
January 4, 2010
“Women and men are not mistaken when they regard themselves as superior to mere bodily creatures and as more than mere particles of nature or nameless units in modern society. For by their power to know themselves in the depths of their being they rise above the entire universe of mere objects.... Endowed with wisdom, women and men are led through visible realities to those which are invisible”
- Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 14–15
Mission Moment
January 11, 2010
To the family is entrusted the task of striving, first and foremost, to unleash the forces of good...
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
January 18, 2010
God and the devil are fighting... and the battlefield is the heart of man.
- Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Mission Moment
January 25, 2010
The love of husband and wife is the force that welds society together.
- St. John Chrysostom
Mission Moment
February 1, 2010
No matter how deep our darkness, he is deeper still.
- Corrie ten Boom
Mission Moment
February 8, 2010
Seeing the sun, the moon and the stars, I said to myself, ‘Who could be the Master of these beautiful things?' I felt a great desire to see him, to know him and to pay him homage.
- Saint Josephine Bakhita
Mission Moment
February 15, 2010
Leave sadness to those in the world. We who work for God should be lighthearted.
- St. Leonard of Port Maurice
Mission Moment
February 22, 2010
God seeks us where we are, not so that we stay there, but so that we may come to be where He is, so that we may get beyond ourselves.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
March 1, 2010
I'm suffering very much, but am I suffering very well? That's the point!
- St. Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
March 8, 2010
He won me over entirely by giving Himself entirely to me.
- St. Bernard of Clairvaux
Mission Moment
March 15, 2010
All about us, in earth and air, wherever the eye or ear can reach, there is a power ever breathing itself forth in signs, now in daisy, now in a wind-waft, a cloud, a sunset; a power that holds constant and sweetest relation with the dark and silent world within us. The same God who is in us, and upon whose tree we are the buds, if not yet the flowers, also is all about us- inside, the Spirit; outside, the Word. And the two are ever trying to meet in us...
- George MacDonald
Mission Moment
March 22, 2010
God loves us; we need only to summon up the humility to allow ourselves to be loved.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
March 29, 2010
No man can attain to the knowledge of God but by humility. The way to mount high is to descend.
- Blessed Giles of Assisi
Mission Moment
April 5, 2010
"It means that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still that she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and darkness before Time began, she would have read there a different incantation. She would have known that when a willing victim who had committed no treachery was killed in a traitor's stead, the Table would crack and death itself would work backwards."
- C.S. Lewis, Chronicles of Narnia
Mission Moment
April 12, 2010
Mad with the love of a wife for her husband... sing for the Most High sing for no other.
We are all notes in this eternal song. God plays His flute and we all dance along.
- Trevor Hall
Mission Moment
April 19, 2010
The history of mankind, the history of salvation, passes by way of the family... I have tried to show how the family is placed at the center of the great struggle between good and evil, between life and death, between love and all that is opposed to love. To the family is entrusted the task of striving, first and foremost, to unleash the forces of good...
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
April 26, 2010
The big, blazing truth about man is that he has a heaven-sized hole in his heart, and nothing else can fill it. We pass our lives trying to fill the Grand Canyon with marbles. As Augustine said: "Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee."
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
May 3, 2010
The great method of prayer is to have none. If in going to prayer one can form in oneself a pure capacity for receiving the spirit of God, that will suffice for all method.
- St. Jane Frances de Chantal
Mission Moment
May 10, 2010
[In] spite of great scientific and technological advances, man has not the faintest idea of who he is or what he is doing.
- Walker Percy
Mission Moment
May 17, 2010
The place God calls you to is the place where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet.
- Frederick Buechner
Mission Moment
May 24, 2010
"What if everything that happened here, happened for a reason?"
- John Locke
Mission Moment
May 31, 2010
Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor.
- St. Paul, Romans 12:9
Mission Moment
June 7, 2010
What we need most in order to make progress is to be silent before this great God with our appetite
and with our tongue, for the language He best hears is silent love.
- St. John of the Cross
Mission Moment - June 14, 2010
It is not so essential to think much as to love much.
St Teresa of Jesus, OCD
Mission Moment - June 21, 2010
"Forgiveness... breaks the cycle of evil, of tit-for-tat revenge which serves only to increase the problem... It is the equivalent of taking the sword out of the enemies' hands and breaking it, leaving them defenseless."
- Frances Hogan
Mission Moment - June 28, 2010
The voice comes in the middle of the night or the early hours of the morning, when our hearts are most unedited and vulnerable... There is something missing... You were made for something more. You know it.
- Brent Curtis
Mission Moment - July 5, 2010
"For freedom Christ has set us free; stand fast therefore, and do not submit again to a yoke of slavery... For you were called to freedom... only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for the flesh, but through love be servants of one another."
- St. Paul, Galatians 5:1, 13
Mission Moment - July 12, 2010
"We live in a society in which it seems that every space, every moment must be 'filled' with initiatives, activity, sound; often there is not even time to listen and dialogue... Let us not be afraid to be silent outside and inside ourselves, so that we are able not only to perceive God's voice, but also the voice of the person next to us, the voices of others."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment - July 19, 2010
Earth’s crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees takes off his shoes,
The rest sit around and pluck blackberries.
- Elizabeth Barrett Browning
Mission Moment - July 26, 2010
In the life of husband and wife together, fatherhood and motherhood represent such a sublime "novelty" and richness as can only be approached "on one's knees".
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment - August 2, 2010
Creating the human race in His own image and continually keeping it in being, God inscribed in the humanity of man and woman the vocation... of love and communion. Love is therefore the fundamental and innate vocation of every human being.
- Pope John Paul II, Famliiaris Consortio, 11
Mission Moment - August 9, 2010
Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.
- Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 10
Mission Moment - August 16, 2010
How can it be that the most wonderous and sacred human space - the womb - has become a place of unutterable violence?
Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment - August 23, 2010
Reconciliation always brings a springtime to the soul.
- Brother Roger of Taize
Mission Moment - August 30, 2010
God came into the world to reawaken the thirst for great things in us.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment - September 6, 2010
Holiness grows so fast where there is kindness. The world is lost for want of sweetness and kindness. Do not forget we need each other.
- Mother Teresa
Mission Moment - September 13, 2010
There are very few real teachers. Teaching is not a job; it is a vocation. To be a great one many qualities must be combined: love of truth, knowledge, reverence, loving concern for one's students, clarity and patience.
- Alice von Hildebrand
Mission Moment - September 20 (Double Shot)
“What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?
The usual approach of science of constructing a mathematical model cannot answer
the question of why there should be a universe for the model to describe.”
- Stephen Hawking
"The modern world, a world which has experienced marvelous achievements
but which seems to have lost its sense of ultimate realities and of existence itself."
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
September 27, 2010
To some extent, this urge to break out of the ordinary is present in every generation. Part of being young is desiring something beyond everyday life and a secure job, a yearning for something really truly greater. Is this simply an empty dream that fades away as we become older? No! Men and women were created for something great, for infinity. Nothing else will ever be enough.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
October 4, 2010
A man will not roll in the snow for a stream of tendency by which all things fulfill the law of their being. He will not go without food in the name of something, not ourselves, that makes for righteousness. He will do things like this, or pretty nearly like this, under quite a different impulse. He will do these things when he is in love.
- G.K. Chesterton, on St. Francis of Assisi
Mission Moment
October 11, 2010
When I am completely united to You, there will be no more sorrow or trials; entirely full of You, my life will be complete.
- St. Augustine
Mission Moment
October 18, 2010
To fall in love with God is the greatest romance; to seek Him the greatest adventure; to find Him, the greatest human achievement."
- Saint Augustine
Mission Moment
October 25, 2010
In the depths of the human soul... the desire to give meaning to one's own life is joined
by the fleeting vision of beauty and of the mysterious unity of things.
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
November 1, 2010
A saint is Christ’s bride, totally attached, faithful, dependent. A saint is also totally independent, detached from idols and from other husbands... A saint is higher than anyone else in the world. A saint is the real mountain climber. A saint is also lower than anyone else in the world. As with water, he flows to the lowest places - like Calcutta.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
November 8, 2010
Understand this well: there is something holy, something divine hidden in the most ordinary situations,
and it is up to each one of you to discover it.
- St. Josemaria Escriva
Mission Moment
November 15, 2010
All of history is a kind of broken marriage and God puts it back together again.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
November 22, 2010
Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks, for this is the will of God for you in Christ Jesus.
- St. Paul, 1 Thessalonians 5
Mission Moment
November 29, 2010
If we are Christians, we must look like Christ - this is my deep conviction.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
December 6, 2010
... You must realise now, more clearly than ever, that God is calling you to serve Him in and from the ordinary, secular and civil activities of human life. He waits for us everyday, in the laboratory, in the operating theatre, in the army barracks, in the university chair, in the factory, in the workshop, in the fileds, in the home and in all the immense panorama of work.
- St. Josemaria Escriva
Mission Moment
December 13, 2010
There are two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as if everything is.
- Albert Einstein
Mission Moment
December 20, 2010
Did the walls of the barn start to tremble
With a glory they could not contain?
Did anyone wake with the feeling
Of peace that they could not explain?
Oh the love must have been overwhelming
As it warmed everyone in it's flow
For all of the earth is still telling
of 2000 Decembers ago.
- Joy Williams
Mission Moment
December 27, 2010
"For by his incarnation the Son of God united himself in a certain way with every man.
He labored with human hands... and loved with a human heart.
Born of Mary the Virgin, he truly became one of us..."
- Pope John Paul II
Mission Moment
January 3, 2011
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
- President Dwight Eisenhower
Mission Moment
January 10, 2011
Well "I do" are the two most famous last words. The beginning of the end. But to lose your life for another I've heard is a good place to begin.
- Andrew Peterson
Mission Moment
January 17, 2011
Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it.
Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.
- Martin Luther King Jr.
Mission Moment
January 24, 2011
God continuously comes into the world in two places - at the altar and in the womb.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
January 31, 2011
An “impersonal God”– well and good. A subjective God of beauty, truth and goodness, inside our own heads - better still. A formless life-force surging through us, a vast power which we can tap — best of all. But God Himself, alive, pulling at the other end of the cord, perhaps, approaching an infinite speed, the hunter, king, husband — that is quite another matter. There comes a moment when the children who have been playing at burglars hush suddenly: was that a real footstep in the hall? There comes a moment when people who have been dabbling in religion (“Man’s search for God!”) suddenly draw back. Supposing we really found Him? We never meant it to come to that! Worse still, supposing He had found us?”
– C. S. Lewis
Mission Moment
February 7, 2011
It is time in the West to defend not so much human rights as human obligations.
- Alexander Solzhenitsyn
Mission Moment
February 14, 2011
There is truth in little corners of our lives. There are hints of it in songs and children's eyes.
It's familiar, like an ancient lullaby; What do I live for? If we've eyes to see... If we've ears to hear...
To find it in our hearts and mouths the word that saves is near. Shed that shallow skin...
Come and live again... Leave all you were before... To believe is to begin.
- Brooke Fraser, from the song Hosea's Wife
Mission Moment
February 21, 2011
"The Christian of the future will be a mystic or he will not exist at all."
- Karl Rahner
Mission Moment
February 28, 2011
Empty, yet full of power, it seems as nothing, but envelops everything. Silence; the roar of it deafens, shatters upon the soul in waves. One is not able to stand in its mystery... The world tries to silence the silence. But a few allow it to strip them, to let it reveal to them the beauty of its majesty.
- anonymous
Mission Moment
March 7, 2011
"Wonder or radical amazement is the chief characteristic
of the religious man's attitude toward history and nature."
- Abraham J. Heschel
Mission Moment
March 14, 2011
"No place of grace for those who avoid the Face. No time to rejoice for
those who walk among noise and deny the Voice."
- T.S. Eliot
Mission Moment
March 21, 2011
"May this Body immolated and this Blood sacrificed for Mankind nourish us also,
that we may give our body and our blood over to suffering and pain, like Christ - not for self,
but to give harvests of peace and justice to our People."
- Archbishop Oscar Romero
(spoken at Mass as he prepared to consecrate the Eucharist, just seconds before he was assassinated)
Mission Moment
March 28, 2011
The gifts of grace increase as the sorrows increase.
- St. Rose of Lima
Mission Moment
April 4, 2011
“A society is in decay, final or transitional, when common sense really becomes uncommon.”
- G.K Chesterton
Mission Moment
April 11, 2011
"Sacrifice is always the raw material God uses to convert man to love."
- Fr. Brian Bransfield
Mission Moment
April 18, 2011
"Ultimately, in the battle against lies and violence, truth and love
have no other weapon than the witness of suffering."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
April 25, 2011
"It is true that not even Christ is seen, but he exists; he is risen, he is alive, he is close to us, more truly than the most enamored husband is close to his wife. Here is the crucial point: to think of Christ not as a person of the past, but as the risen and living Lord, with whom I can speak, whom I can even kiss if I so wish, certain that my kiss does not end on the paper or on the wood of a crucifix, but on a face and on the lips of living flesh (even though spiritualized), happy to receive my kiss."
- Fr. Cantalamessa
Mission Moment
May 2, 2011
"Mankind will not have peace until it turns with trust to My mercy."
- revealed in prayer to St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, Diary, Divine Mercy in My Soul
This Mission Moment was sent one day after a collision of incredible events; the Feast of Divine Mercy Sunday, the Beatification of Blessed John Paul II, and the feast of St. Joseph the Worker. On this day as well, US forces killed Osama bin Laden.
Mission Moment
May 9, 2011
Love is the very process of passing over, of transformation, of stepping outside the limitations
of fallen humanity - in which we are all separated from one another and ultimately impenetrable
to one another - into an infinite otherness.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
May 16, 2011
Love is the answer at least for most of the questions in my heart, like Why are we here?
And where do we go? And how come it's so hard? It's not always easy and sometimes life can be deceiving, I'll tell you one thing, it's so much better when we're together.
- Jack Johnson
Mission Moment
May 23, 2011
Our soul, like Mary’s body, is to receive God Himself if only we, like her, believe, consent and receive;
if only we speak her truly magic word fiat, “let it be.” It is the creative word,
the word God used to create the universe.
- Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
May 30, 2011
Fairy Tales are more than true; not because they tell us that dragons exist,
but because they tell us that dragons can be beaten.”
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
June 6, 2011
The body in its masculinity and femininity has been called “from the beginning” to become the manifestation of the spirit. The body, in fact, and only the body, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine.
- Blessed John Paul II
Mission Moment
June 13, 2011
"I am very far from practicing what I understand."
- St. Therese of Lisieux
Mission Moment
June 20, 2011
"The Glory of God is always found in movements of love, in communication of life, never in static routine, cramped piety, thoughtless repetition of official acts, conventional observance, external religious acts that could easily become the letter that kills, the continuing tyranny of the old, sinful self. The Spirit by contrast, is wind, fire, light, water, Glory: the unexpected, the transforming, the self-communicating, the self-outpouring Power that shapes by embracing and not letting go."
- Brother Simeon, a Cistercian monk of Saint Josephs Abbey, Spencer, MA
Mission Moment
June 27, 2011
"Man's heart away from nature becomes hard; [The Lakota] knew that lack of respect for growing, living things soon led to a lack of respect for humans too."
- Standing Bear
Mission Moment
July 4, 2011
When freedom does not have a purpose, when it does not wish to know anything about the rule of law engraved in the hearts of men and women, when it does not listen to the voice of conscience, it turns against humanity and society.
- Blessed John Paul II
Mission Moment
July 11, 2011
"Listen and attend with the ear of your heart."
- St. Benedict of Nursia
Mission Moment
July 18, 2011
"Without the supernatural the natural degenerates into the unnatural."
- Bishop Brian Noble
Mission Moment
July 25, 2011
"Are we not perhaps all afraid in some way? If we let Christ enter fully into our lives, if we open ourselves totally to him, are we not afraid that He might take something away from us? ...No! If we let Christ into our lives, we lose nothing, nothing, absolutely nothing of what makes life free, beautiful and great.... No! Only in this friendship are the doors of life opened wide. Only in this friendship is the great potential of human existence truly revealed."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
August 1, 2011
"Know also that you will probably gain more by praying fifteen minutes before the Blessed Sacrament than by all the other spiritual exercises of the day. True, Our Lord hears our prayers anywhere, for He has made the promise, 'Ask, and you shall receive,' but He has revealed to His servants that those who visit Him in the Blessed Sacrament will obtain a more abundant measure of grace."
- St. Alphonsus Liguori
Mission Moment
August 8. 2011
"What is capable of restoring enthusiasm and confidence, what can encourage the human spirit to rediscover its path, to raise its eyes to the horizon, to dream of a life worthy of its vocation – if not beauty?"
- Pope Benedict XVI, Address to Artists 2009
Mission Moment
August 15, 2011
"All my own perception of beauty both in majesty and simplicity is founded upon Our Lady."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
August 22, 2011
For every person is a gaping space waiting to be filled with God.
- Olivier Clement
Mission Moment
August 29, 2011
"Doing nothing is sometimes one of the highest of the duties of man."
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
September 5, 2011
We can never talk of a new evangelization without emphasizing marriage and family life...
- Bishop Jean Laffitte
Mission Moment
September 12, 2011
"Violence sometimes may have cleared away obstructions quickly, but it never has proved itself creative."
- Albert Einstein
Mission Moment
September 19, 2011
"Prayer is the oxygen of the soul."
- St. Padre Pio
Mission Moment
September 26, 2011
"A thirst for the infinite is indelibly present in human beings.
Man was created to have a relationship with God; we need him."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
October 3, 2011
“It is no use walking anywhere to preach unless our walking is our preaching.”
- St. Francis of Assisi
Mission Moment
October 10, 2011
"Love is a constant challenge, thrown to us by God."
- Blessed John Paul II
Mission Moment
October 17, 2011
He who died in place of us is the one object of my quest. He who rose for our sakes is my one desire.
- St. Ignatius of Antioch
Mission Moment
October 24, 2011
"I am part of the Fellowship of the Unashamed...
My past is redeemed, my present makes sense, and my future is in God's hands...
I am a disciple of Jesus. I must go till he comes, give until I drop,
speak out until all know, and work until he stops me."
- Patrick Madrid
Mission Moment
October 31, 2011
"Have patience with all things, but chiefly have patience with yourself. Do not lose courage in considering your own imperfections but instantly set about remedying them - every day begin the task anew."
- St. Francis de Sales
Mission Moment
November 7, 2011
“Virtue is not the absence of vices or the avoidance of moral dangers;
virtue is a vivid and separate thing ... Chastity [therefore] does not mean
abstention from sexual wrong; it means something flaming, like Joan of Arc."
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
November 14, 2011
"You and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found
to wake us from the evil enchantment of worldliness."
- C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory
Mission Moment
November 21, 2011
"God Himself teaches us to go forward with our hand in His by means of the Church's liturgy."
- St. Edith Stein
Mission Moment
November 28, 2011
"Christ subjected himself to the law of the seed in the earth, to the law of rest and growth. He was "one of the children of the year," growing through rest, secret in his mothers womb, receiving the warmth of the sun through her, living the life of dependence, helplessness, littleness, darkness, and silence which, by a mystery of the Eternal Law, is the life of natural growth."
- Caryll Houselander
Mission Moment
December 5, 2011
We must rapidly begin the shift from a "thing-oriented" society to a "person-oriented" society.
- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Mission Moment
December 12, 2011
No half-heartedness and no worldly fear must turn us aside from following the light unflinchingly.
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
December 19, 2011
The deepest poverty is the inability of joy, the tediousness of a life considered absurd and contradictory. This poverty is widespread today, in very different forms in the materially rich as well as the poor countries. The inability of joy presupposes and produces the inability to love, produces jealousy, avarice - all defects that devastate the life of individuals and of the world. This is why we are in need of a new evangelization - if the art of living remains an unknown, nothing else works... this art can only be communicated by [one] who has life - he who is the Gospel personified.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
December 26, 2011
The immense wealth of doctrine and institutions can become a handicap if we are trying to present all of that to a person who has lost all contact with the Church and no longer knows who Jesus is. That would be like clothing a baby with one of those enormous, heavy brocaded copes that priests and bishops used to wear. Instead, it is necessary to help this person establish a relationship with Jesus.
- Fr. Cantalamessa
Mission Moment
January 2, 2012
"What good does it do me if Christ was born in Bethlehem once
if he is not born again in my heart through faith?"
- Origen
Mission Moment
January 9, 2012
"There is no good trying to be more spiritual than God. God never meant man to purely spiritual creature. That is why He uses material things like bread and wine to put the new life into us. We may think this rather crude and unspiritual. God does not: He invented eating. He likes matter. He invented it."
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
January 16, 2012
"I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality."
- Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mission Moment
January 23, 2012
Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love, but to use any violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.
- Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
Mission Moment
January 30, 2012
In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth... Deeper reflection helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected... For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of 'eco-system' that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
February 6, 2012
"When we concentrate too much on something that isn't right, and make it our main topic of conversation, we end up giving evil more substance than it has. Deploring evil sometimes only strengthens it ... We do more to help others experience conversion and make progress by encouraging them in the positive aspects of their lives than by condemning their errors. Good is more real than evil, and it overcomes evil."
- Fr. Jacque Philippe
Mission Moment
February 13, 2012
"The Internet causes billions of images to appear on millions of computer monitors around the planet. From this galaxy of sight and sound will the face of Christ emerge and the voice of Christ be heard? For it is only when his face is seen and his voice heard that the world will know the glad tidings of our redemption. This is the purpose of evangelization. And this is what will make the Internet a genuinely human space, for if there is no room for Christ, there is no room for man."
- Blessed John Paul II, 36th World Communications Day
Mission Moment
February 20, 2012
"...I know that the Lord is always on the side of the right. But it is my constant anxiety and prayer that I and this nation should be on the Lord's side."
- Abraham Lincoln
Mission Moment
February 27, 2012
Laypeople are a kind of nuclear energy in the Church on a spiritual level. A layperson caught up with the gospel and living next to other people can "contaminate" two others, and these two, four others, etc. Since lay Christians number not only tens of thousands like the clergy but hundreds of millions, they can truly play a decisive role in spreading the beneficial light of the gospel in the world.
- Fr. Cantalamessa
Mission Moment
March 5, 2012
The desire for God is written in the human heart, because man is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw man to himself. Only in God will he find the truth and happiness he never stops searching for...
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, #27
Mission Moment
March 12. 2012
"There is need for a crusade of manliness and purity to counteract and nullify the savage work of those who think man is a beast. And that crusade is your work."
- St. Josemaria Escriva
Mission Moment
March 19, 2012
"The nation doesn’t simply need what we have. It needs what we are."
- St. Edith Stein
Mission Moment
March 26, 2012
"Sometimes the only way the Good Lord can get into some hearts is to break them."
- Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
Mission Moment
April 2, 2012
"Christ assigns as a duty to every man the dignity of every woman: and simultaneously...
He also assigns to every woman the dignity of every man."
- Blessed John Paul II
Mission Moment
April 9, 2012
It just takes the faith of a little seed to make a way through what might to be impossibility, and the ability will match the occasion. The outcome will defy explanation. The liberation will not be televised when it arrives like lightning in the skies.
- Josh Garrels
Mission Moment
April 16, 2012
Eternity is not an unending succession of days in the calendar, but something more like the supreme moment of satisfaction, in which totality embraces us and we embrace totality.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
April 23, 2012
Make yourself a "capacity" and I will make myself a "torrent."
- St. Catherine of Siena
Mission Moment
April 30, 2012
The days in which we live now require heroic Catholicism, not casual Catholicism. We can no longer be Catholics by accident, but instead Catholics by conviction.
- Bishop Jenky
Mission Moment
May 7, 2012
Our culture has filled our heads but emptied our hearts, stuffed our wallets but starved our wonder. It has fed our thirst for facts but not for meaning or mystery. It produces "nice" people, not heroes. Beauty, and the love and wonder and fascination it elicits, is an essential human need. It is not an ornament.
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
May 14, 2012
"The deeper that sorrow carves into your being the more joy you can contain.
Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?"
- Kahlil Gibran
Mission Moment
May 21, 2012
Men and women cannot rest content with a superficial and unquestioning exchange of skeptical opinions and experiences of life - all of us are in search of truth and we share this profound yearning today more than ever...
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
May 28, 2012
And if the Son has set us free
Then we must be, free indeed
Let the chains fall away, starting today.
Everything has changed
I'm finally free...
- Nichole Nordeman
Mission Moment
June 4, 2012
What great profit you gain from God when you are generous!
You give a coin and receive a kingdom; you give bread from wheat and receive
the Bread of Life; you give a transitory good and receive an everlasting one.
You will receive it back, a hundred times more than you offered.
- St. Thomas of Villanova
Mission Moment
June 11, 2012
On the last day, when the general examination takes place, there will be no question at all on the text of Aristotle, the aphorisms of Hippocrates, or the paragraphs of Justinian. Charity will be the whole syllabus.
- St. Robert Bellarmine
Mission Moment
June 18, 2012
"The sacraments infuse holiness into the terrain of man’s humanity: they penetrate the soul and body, the femininity and masculinity of the personal subject, with the power of holiness.”
- Blessed John Paul II, Theology of the Body, 117b:2
Mission Moment
June 25, 2012
“Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts.”
- Dr. Peter Kreeft
Mission Moment
July 2, 2012
"Freedom is in danger of degenerating into mere arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness. That is why I recommend that the Statue of Liberty on the East Coast be supplemented by a Statue of Responsibility on the West Coast."
- Viktor E. Frankl
Mission Moment
July 9, 2012
"One must throw truth across the path of lies. One must throw truth into the eye of a lie... One must catch hearts to kindle them, furrow hearts as with a plough, and root up the weeds... one must erect love; at the foundations, low in the ground, it will take root even in a wilderness, will build, uplift, and transform all things."
- Blessed John Paul II, from his early play "Jeremiah"
Mission Moment
July 16, 2012
Don't sow your desires in someone else's garden; just cultivate your own as best you can; don't long to be other than what you are, but desire to be thoroughly what you are. Direct your thoughts to being very good at that and to bearing the crosses, little or great, that you will find there. Believe me, this is the most important and least understood point to the spiritual life. We all love according to what is our taste; few people like what is according to their duty or to God’s liking. What is the use of building castles in Spain when we have to live in France?
- St. Francis de Sales
Mission Moment
July 23, 2012
"In a word, the consumer of mass culture is lonely, not only lonely, but spiritually impoverished."
- Walker Percy
Mission Moment
August 6, 2012
“There are no real personalities apart from God. Until you have given up your self to Him you will not have a real self. Sameness is to be found most among the most 'natural' men, not among those who surrender to Christ. How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerers have been; how gloriously different are the saints. But there must be a real giving up of the self. You must throw it away 'blindly' so to speak. Christ will indeed give you a real personality; but you must not go to Him for the sake of that. As long as your own personality is what you are bothering about you are not going to Him at all. The very first step is to try to forget about the self altogether. Your real, new self (which is Christ's and also yours, and yours just because it is His) will not come as long as you are looking for it. It will come when you are looking for Him...Keep back nothing. Nothing that you have not given away will be really yours. Nothing in you that has not died will ever be raised from the dead. Look for yourself, and you will find in the long run only hatred, loneliness, despair, rage, ruin, and decay. But look for Christ, and you will find Him, and with Him everything else thrown in.”
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
August 13, 2012
"Only wonder can comprehend His incomprehensible power."
- St. Maximus the Confessor
Mission Moment
August 20, 2012
All men are children, and of one family. The same tale sends them all to bed,
and wakes them in the morning.
- Henry David Thoreau
Mission Moment
August 27, 2012
"You have read very good books, I am sure; there is an excellent book however, that never grows old; it is the one that God has written on every plant, on every grain of sand, in yourself; it is the book of Divine love. Give, therefore, your preference to that beautiful book and add to it a few pages of admiration and gratefulness. Read and understand all other books in the light of this one..."
- St. Peter Julian Eymard
Mission Moment
September 3, 2012
"No one comes unless they're drawn by the voice of desire that leads em' along,
to the redemption of what went wrong by the blood that covers the Innocent One..."
- Josh Garrels, Beyond the Blue
Mission Moment
September 10, 2012
The “door of faith” (Acts 14:27) is always open for us, ushering us into the life of communion with God and offering entry into his Church. It is possible to cross that threshold when the word of God is proclaimed and the heart allows itself to be shaped by transforming grace. To enter through that door is to set out on a journey that lasts a lifetime.
- Pope Benedict XVI, Porta Fidei
Mission Moment
September 17, 2012
Beauty is a key to the mystery and a call to transcendence. It is an invitation to savor life and to dream of the future. That is why the beauty of created things can never fully satisfy. It stirs that hidden nostalgia for God which a lover of beauty like Saint Augustine could express in incomparable terms: 'Late have I loved you, beauty so old and so new: late have I loved you!'."
- Blessed John Paul II, Letter to Artists
Mission Moment
September 24, 2012
And you have your choices
And these are what make man great
His ladder to the stars
But you are not alone in this
And you are not alone in this
As brothers we will stand and we'll hold your hand
Hold your hand...
- Mumford & Sons, Timshel
Mission Moment
October 1, 2012
A novice was grieving about her numerous distractions during prayer: "I too, have many," replied St. Therese of the Child Jesus, "but I accept all for love of the good God, even the most extravagant thoughts that come into my head."
Mission Moment
October 8, 2012
"My dearest Brethren, till the earth well and work hard, so that you may have a sufficiency
of food and drink and clothing. For, where there is sufficiency among the servants of God,
then there will be stability, and when there is stability in service, then there will
be the religious life. And the end of religious life is life eternal!"
- St. Molua
Mission Moment
October 15, 2012
Who gave you the ability to contemplate the beauty of the skies, the course of the sun, the round moon, the millions of stars, the harmony and rhythm that issue from the world as from a lyre, the return of the seasons, the alternation of the months, the demarcation of day and night, the fruits of the earth, the vastness of the air, the ceaseless motion of the waves, the sound of the wind?
- Gregory Nazianzen
Mission Moment
October 22, 2012
"Art can lead you to God. I think that's the purpose of everything. If it's not doing that, what's it doing? It's leading you the other way. It's certainly not leading you nowhere."
- Bob Dylan
Mission Moment
October 29, 2012
“Everyone works in the service of man. We doctors work directly on man himself… The great mystery of man is Jesus: ‘He who visits a sick person, helps me,’ Jesus said… Just as the priest can touch Jesus, so do we touch Jesus in the bodies of our patients… We have opportunities to do good that the priest doesn’t have. Our mission is not finished when medicines are no longer of use. We must bring the soul to God; our word has some authority… Catholic doctors are so necessary!”
- St. (and doctor) Gianna Molla
Mission Moment
November 5, 2012
"If you must choose between me and the baby, no hesitation;
choose - and I demand it - the baby. Save her!"
- Saint (and doctor) Gianna Molla
Mission Moment
November 12, 2012
"I am a Christian, and indeed a Roman Catholic, so that I do not expect 'history' to be anything but a 'long defeat' - though it contains (and in a legend may contain more clearly and movingly) some samples or glimpses of final victory."
- J.R.R. Tolkien
Mission Moment
November 19, 2012
If we judged by realities we should give honor not to the rich for the fine clothes they wear
but to the poor who are the makers of such things.
- St. Odo
Mission Moment
November 26, 2012
The world keeps turnin'
It gets merry like a merry go 'round
It gets cold like a frozen winter
Well I change like summer fall
But I know love is all in all
Seeds we're always sowing
The grace is always blowing
We've just got to lift the sail
And we're bound to hit the shore
We'll finally calm this storm.
- Trevor Hall
Mission Moment
December 3, 2012
"In every man's heart there is a secret nerve that answers to the vibrations of beauty."
- Christopher Morley
Mission Moment
December 10, 2012
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most… The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…
to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
- C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Mission Moment
December 17, 2012
"Love one another."
- Jesus
Mission Moment
December 24, 2012
"We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God."
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Mission Moment
December 31, 2012
God is writing an original script with each of our lives. He's not writing a remake or adaptation of someone else's life, but something never before written. Through each of us, God wants to open up countless possibilities of saying yes for all who come after us. Never underestimate the power and fruitfulness of your "yes" to God!
- Katrina Zeno
Mission Moment
January 7, 2013
"My father says the whole world is asleep. Everybody you see, everybody you talk to... He says there are only a handful of people who are truly awake, and they live in a state of constant, total amazement."
- Joe versus the Volcano, film
Mission Moment
January 14, 2013
“Unless souls are saved, nothing is saved; there can be no world peace without soul peace.”
- Bishop Fulton Sheen
Mission Moment
January 21, 2013
"Life's most persistent and urgent question is: what are you doing for others?"
- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.
Mission Moment
January 28, 2013
"You made us for yourself, Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." In this creative restlessness beats and pulsates what is most deeply human - the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good, hunger for freedom, nostalgia for the beautiful, and the voice of conscience.
- Blessed John Paul II, Redeemer of Man, 18
Mission Moment
February 4, 2013
God uses broken things. It takes broken soil to produce a crop, broken clouds to give rain, broken grain to give bread, broken bread to give strength. It is the broken alabaster box that gives forth perfume.
- Vance Havner
Mission Moment
February 11, 2013
Everything is a gift from God: it is only by recognizing this crucial dependence on the Creator that we will find freedom and peace.
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
February 18, 2013
"The Church is a perpetual construction site."
- Cardinal Henri de Lubac
Mission Moment
February 25, 2013
"... Believing is nothing other than, in the darkness of the world, touching the hand of God,
and in this way, in silence, hearing the Word, seeing love."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
March 4, 2013
“I go to him as a baby goes to his mother so that he can fill me and invade all and take me in his arms."
- St. Elisabeth of the Trinity
Mission Moment
March 11, 2013
"Creation is a song that God freely desires to sing into the vast spaces of the universe."
- St. Bonaventure
Mission Moment
March 18, 2013
"Grace, lavished upon us by God and communicated through the Mystery of the Incarnate Word, is an absolutely free gift with which nature is healed, strengthened and assisted in pursuing the innate desire for happiness in the heart of every man and of every woman."
- Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
March 25, 2013
Without the joy of beauty, truth becomes cold and even ruthless and proud, as we see happening in the discourse of many bitter fundamentalists. It seems that they chew on ashes instead of savoring the sweetness of the glory of Christ's truth, which illuminates all reality with gentle light, taking it just as it is every day. Without the joy of beauty, work for the good becomes a gloomy focus on efficiency, as we see happening in the work of many overwhelmed activists. It seems that they clothe reality in statistical mourning rather than anointing it with the interior oil of joy that transforms hearts, one by one, from the inside." (April 22, 2011)
- Pope Francis
Mission Moment
April 1, 2013
"The Christian truth is attractive and persuasive because it responds to humanity's deepest needs."
- Pope Francis
Mission Moment
April 8, 2013
"In Christ, man who made himself God encounters God who made himself man.
Unrivaled self-importance and pride encounters unrivaled self-emptying and humility."
- Christopher West
Mission Moment
April 15, 2013
"Be human in this most inhuman of ages; guard the image of man for it is the image of God."
- Thomas Merton
Mission Moment
April 22, 2013
The primordial model of the family is to be sought in God himself, in the Trinitarian mystery of his life. The divine "We" is the eternal pattern of the human "we", especially of that "we" formed by the man and the woman created in the divine image and likeness… Man is created "from the very beginning" as male and female: the life of all humanity - whether of small communities or of society as a whole - is marked by this primordial duality.
- Blessed John Paul II, Letter to Families, # 6
Mission Moment
April 29, 2013
"We, the women and men of the Church, we are in the middle of a love story: each of us is a link in this chain of love. And if we do not understand this, we have understood nothing of what the Church is...."
- Pope Francis
Mission Moment
May 6, 2013
“It's really a wonder that I haven't dropped all my ideals, because they seem so absurd and impossible to carry out. Yet I keep them, because in spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart.”
- Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Mission Moment
May 13, 2013
Live simply that others may simply live.
- Anonymous
Mission Moment
May 20, 2013
You may dazzle the mind with a thousand brilliant discoveries of natural science; you may open new worlds of knowledge which were never dreamed of before; yet, if you have not developed in the soul of the pupil strong habits of virtue which will sustain her in the struggle of life, you have not educated her, but only put in her hand a powerful instrument of self-destruction.
- St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
Mission Moment
May 27, 2013
Work is love made visible. And if you cannot work with love but only with distaste, it is better that you should leave your work and sit at the gate of the temple and take alms of those who work with joy.
- Kahlil Gibran
Mission Moment
June 3, 2013
Creation is more than an accident of dead matter. It's a romance.
It has purpose. It sings of the Living God. It bears his signature.
- Archbishop Charles Chaput
Mission Moment
June 10, 2013
The idea of private property universal but private, the idea of families free but still families, of domesticity democratic but still domestic, of one man one house - this remains the real vision and magnet of mankind. The world may accept something more official and general, less human and intimate. But the world will be like a broken-hearted woman who makes a humdrum marriage because she may not make a happy one; Socialism may be the world's deliverance, but it is not the world's desire.
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
June 17, 2013
There's nothing hippie about my picture of Christ. The Gospels paint a picture of a very demanding, sometimes divisive love, but love it is. I accept the Old Testament as more of an action movie: blood, car chases, evacuations, a lot of special effects, seas dividing, mass murder, adultery. The children of God are running amok, wayward. Maybe that's why they're so relatable. But the way we would see it, those of us who are trying to figure out our Christian conundrum, is that the God of the Old Testament is like the journey from stern father to friend. When you're a child, you need clear directions and some strict rules. But with Christ, we have access in a one-to-one relationship, for, as in the Old Testament, it was more one of worship and awe, a vertical relationship. The New Testament, on the other hand, we look across at a Jesus who looks familiar, horizontal. The combination is what makes the Cross.
- Bono, U2
Mission Moment
June 24, 2013
"The Eternal Being, who knows everything and who created the whole universe, became not only a man but (before that) a baby, and before that a fetus in a woman's body."
- C.S. Lewis
Mission Moment
July 1, 2013
"The deposit of the faith is one thing... the way it is expressed is another".
- Pope John XXIII
Mission Moment
July 1, 2013
"Mere administration" can no longer be enough. Throughout the world,
let us be "permanently in a state of mission".
- Pope Francis, Gospel of Joy, 25
Mission Moment
July 8, 2013
God's word is unpredictable in its power... The Church has to accept this unruly freedom of the word,
which accomplishes what it wills in ways that surpass our calculations and ways of thinking.
- Pope Francis, Gospel of Joy, 21-22
Mission Moment
July 15, 2013
For just as some people want a purely spiritual Christ, without flesh and without the cross, they also want their interpersonal relationships provided by sophisticated equipment, by screens and systems which can be turned on and off on command. Meanwhile, the Gospel tells us constantly to run the risk of a face-to-face encounter with others, with their physical presence which challenges us, with their pain and their pleas, with their joy which infects us in our close and continuous interaction.
- Pope Francis, Gospel of Joy, 88
Mission Moment
July 22, 2013
Instead of seeming to impose new obligations, they should appear as people who wish to share their joy, who point to a horizon of beauty and who invite others to a delicious banquet. It is not by proselytizing that the Church grows, but "by attraction".
- Pope Francis, Gospel of Joy, 15
Mission Moment
July 29, 2013
“It is important always to know that the first word, the true initiative, the true activity comes from God and only by inserting ourselves into the divine initiative, only begging for this divine initiative, shall we too be able to become - with him and in him - evangelizers.”
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
August 5, 2013
"Being a disciple means being constantly ready to bring the love of Jesus to others, and this can happen unexpectedly and in any place: on the street, in a city square, during work, on a journey."
- Pope Francis, Gospel of Joy, 127
Mission Moment
August 12, 2013
"From silly devotions, and sour-faced saints, good Lord, deliver us."
-St. Teresa of Avila
Mission Moment
August 19, 2013
"We are not masochists - the cross is not an end in itself; it is for glory. We Christians are not looking for suffering, but for joy. God, living in joy, wanted to communicate it to all people. This is why he sent it down into our misery, nailing it to the cross. At that point, the cross became the way toward joy. Christianity is not at all morality and prohibitions - first and foremost it is wonder before things."
- Fabrice Hadjadj
Mission Moment
August 26, 2013
"The Church does not engage in proselytism. Instead, she grows by “attraction”: just as Christ “draws all to himself” by the power of his love, culminating in the sacrifice of the Cross, so the Church fulfills her mission..."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
September 2, 2013
"All pagan religions, all burnt offerings and sacrifices, are humanity's futile attempt to give back the gift given by God that was rejected in the beginning. The pagan virgin's forced sacrifice should have been our own free gift of self in love."
- me
Mission Moment
September 9, 2013
"It might reasonably be maintained that the true object of all human life is play. Earth is a task garden; heaven is a playground. To be at last in such secure innocence that one can juggle with the universe and the stars, to be so good that one can treat everything as a joke - that may be, perhaps, the real end and final holiday of human souls."
- G.K. Chesterton
Mission Moment
September 16, 2013
"Beauty is the arrowhead of evangelization, the point with which the evangelist pierces the minds and hearts of those he evangelizes."
- Fr. Robert Barron
Mission Moment
September 23, 2013
"All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone."
- Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Mission Moment
September 30, 2013
"Each one of us needs time and space for recollection, meditation and calmness.... Thanks be to God that this is so! In fact, this need tells us that we are not made for work alone, but also to think, to reflect or even simply to follow with our minds and our hearts a tale, a story in which to immerse ourselves, in a certain sense “to lose ourselves” to find ourselves subsequently enriched."
- Pope Benedict XVI
Mission Moment
October 7, 2013
"This world in which we live needs beauty in order not to sink into despair. It is beauty, like truth, which brings joy to the heart of man and is that precious fruit which resists the year and tear of time, which unites generations and makes them share things in admiration."
- Pope Paul VI
Mission Moment
October 14, 2013
"In the sacrifice which Jesus Christ makes of Himself on the Cross for His bride, the Church... there is entirely revealed that plan which God has imprinted on the humanity of man and woman since their creation."
- Blessed John Paul II, FC, 13
Mission Moment
December 23, 2013
"God could not keep, as it were, the secret of His love, and the telling of it was creation."
- Venerable Fulton Sheen
Mission Moment
January 13, 2014
The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life
by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility.
- St. John Paul II, Homily, World Youth Day, Toronto, July 28, 2002
"I do like children who do not know how to read, I say very simply to God what I wish to say, without composing beautiful sentences, and He always understands me. For me, prayer is an aspiration of the heart, it is a simple glance directed to heaven, it is a cry of gratitude and love in the midst of trial as well as joy; finally it is something great, supernatural, which expands my soul and unites me to Jesus."
(From St. Therese's autobiography ~Story of a Soul)
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