“The scattering of the evil one leaves us as a legion of isolated individuals all longing for the true communion which our sins have led us to spurn”

“has Satan found a way to stop so many good people by having them focus on their differences in beliefs, rather than on the good of being Christ in the world? Has he sown choking briars in the rich soil of modern communication, levels of education, and capacity to live a flourishing life?”

“Lord, let me follow you. Help me overcome the mud and choose the Breath of God.”

“It is not easy to follow Jesus’ laws—in fact, it is impossible unless we share his Spirit”

“Some of my prayer this week led me to consider: who has hurt me deeply, that I might want to be my neighbor in heaven?”

“In these hard times we are in, which are likely to get harder, there will be a great need for acts of mercy and kindness. We can rise to this, because Christ has given us mercy. He has poured out His life in giving us life.”

“Forgiveness stops the power of sin in the person who sins AND in those who are affected by the sin. It replaces the power of evil with the power of Truth, Compassion, and Fidelity.”

“Jesus invites us to welcome the lost who repent back into their proper place in the kingdom of God’s grace. We must pray ‘forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us’. The goodies must welcome the repentant baddies, or they will not be goodies at all.”

“No one will enter heaven without acknowledging and renouncing every sin they have ever committed. This is necessarily the case, because attachment to sin is attachment to that which is not-God and not-love. And no one in heaven will be or can be still attached to not-God and not-love.”

“This parable is told only in Luke. It’s logical message to the man is: you are distressed about something that is not all that important. Abundance belongs to God—and life belongs to God.”

“It is often said that Acts is the story of the Church, which is not wrong. But from beginning (Acts 1:4) to the end (Acts 28:31) Acts is about the kingdom, of which the visible Church is the earthly manifestation.”

“As the Passover was the meal that marked the transition from slavery to Egypt to the freedom of the Exodus, so the Eucharist is the meal that marks the transition from slavery to sin to the glorious freedom of the children of God”

“the incarnation was also a “marriage” of human and divine nature which seemed to be “divorced” by the death of Christ, only to be quickly restored and resumed by the Resurrection. So Easter is the re-affirmation of God’s uniting of his nature to ours in the mystical marriage of the hypostatic union.”

“Sin is its own punishment and virtue is its own reward. At the end of the day, nothing feels better than virtue and nothing feels worse than sin.”

“Where is God taking possession of you and creating something new in you?”

“Since salvation is by definition an “exodus” or freedom from sin, we cannot be “saved” while we are still “sinning.” Sin is what we are saved from.”

“The wise heart is one that knows what is worth spending time on, and what is a waste of time”

“The cause of Christ is not served by one’s rejecting other ways to God than one’s own”

“It is too be regretted that there is so little emphasis these days on the need to make sacrifices for the sake of avoiding sin”

“Ultimately the moral law is the guide to relationship of mutual love between God and his people”

“Beginning with our own self-examination, we can work together to change our economic choices and systems to reflect the equal dignity of all persons as created in God’s image”

“Sin, if it is serious, can stamp out love, but all sin, naughty or wicked, distorts us. It involves a kind of growing addiction.”

“However deeply we dig ourselves into a hole, the Lord is there to release us into freedom and restore us to life. But Christian freedom is not a private possession that I can grasp for myself and deny to another. We are only truly free with and for each other and for God.”

“Others have their pet sins; we, too, often have ours. When others confront us with our sin, let us not have a hard heart like Israel did in the wilderness. That would lead us to “forty years of wandering” in a spiritual desert.”

“Everyone is a sinner living among sinners. If we demand too much, condemn too quickly, or break off from others too easily simply because of their weaknesses, then we may find ourselves also doomed and living in perpetual loneliness.”

“Sin is, ultimately, its own punishment, because to sin is to choose separation from God. Jesus came to save us from our addiction to choosing what is not God.”

“Yes the devil does not come dressed in red cape and pointy horns. He disguises himself in everything we desire.”

“We don’t have to worry about being the best warrior, only a faithful one. For victory is promised and eternal redemption assured to anyone who would fight sin, carry their cross, and follow Jesus.”

“There is no shortcut to holiness than obeying God’s Law, appreciating it as God’s gift of love for our salvation”

“God’s mercy empowers us to leave a life of sin and walk in God’s ways, which are pleasant, wholesome, and just. God’s law provides us the parameters and instructions for entering into and maintaining a relationship of intimacy with him.”

“Jesus will not return back to ‘Jericho’ to meet Zacchaeus again. He got the chance and he used it. Let us not postpone our own hour of meeting with the Lord. It could be our last opportunity.”

“Zacchaeus is saved not by his wealth, nor by any earthly commodity, but through being loved by Christ and by his love for others. These bring a peace and lasting joy that no earthly fortune can obtain.”

“I would venture to guess that 98% of us hearing that story spontaneously nurse this feeling: “Thank God, I’m not like that Pharisee!” And, in doing that, we are him! Exactly like him, we’re brimming over with our own sense of virtue and, because of that, begin judging others.”

“Charity is charity when it becomes sacrificial. It makes meaning when it goes beyond the boundary of our families and people of same rank with us to affect the lives of strangers.”

“Jesus takes the place of the lowliest servant and washes the disciples’ feet. Not because they are worthy, but because they are dirty”

“Jesus shows us, that there is no judgment without mercy. Mercy is not an optional part of justice, rather it is its central part. A judgment which does not consider mercy is not just.”

“How does the one God deal with evil-doers? He brings them to life. For sin is deadly, and evil kills us. God, who is rich in mercy, makes us alive in Christ.”

“We’ve simply got to be open to Christ, open to the people He places in our lives, people that are doing His work, performing the healing we most desperately need. Resist the temptation to turn away from Him, to turn away from those people He puts in our lives.”

“All human beings can understand and can talk about right and wrong, about good and evil...But to talk of sin is to identify a further depth to wrong and to evil, based on an explicit involvement with God and a turning away from him.”

“Were it not for His Grace, this world would be even worse. It may be hard to see that. But for every evil that is done in this world, God performs infinitely more good.”

“Surely we can all look back on our life or the lives of those around us and see similar experiences where something we felt was so bad or horrible at the time resulted in a blessing”

“the Apostles were still surprised when they themselves encountered Christ. And we are like them. We have learned the basics of faith but are still surprised when we our own eyes are opened in personal experience.”

“the cross doesn’t just show sin for what it is. It also definitively shows God’s response...God’s incompressible response to sin is love.”

“The first step towards conversion is becoming conscious of our inordinate desires for transient and perishable things that draw us away from God”

“The real leprosy is not external but internal. What keeps us separate from communion with God and others is not something outside of ourselves.”

“We cannot fight sin with violence, but instead with mercy, compassion, and love”

“Just think for a moment what our world would be like if people saw each other as places where the Spirit of God dwells. If we saw others as gifts from God and that God dwells in them”

“Our Lenten efforts are not effective by themselves. They are only effective when we unite our small, token efforts with the work of Jesus. His redemption infuses our humble efforts with meaning, value, and effectiveness.”

“Virtue is indeed its own reward, and that’s good. However, feeling righteous can soon enough turn into feeling self-righteous. Nothing feels better than virtue; but self-righteousness feels pretty good too.”

“We were not born without sin. But Christ can make us “full of grace,” too.”

“I want to be more like the man who knows who Jesus is. That through the trials and tribulations of life and all the uncertainty, knows his faults, and admits that he has made mistakes, but who also knows that the pain is temporary, and that this man next to him is truly the Son of God, the King of the Universe.”

“Sin is a reality in our lives. We see its presence everywhere in the world. The mistake is in thinking that it is not really our concern, that we can remain detached from human suffering or injustice at home or abroad.”

“our penances should train us to shun vice and to increase in virtue; they should deal a mortal blow to our sinful habits and enable us to die to ourselves and our self-centred sinful desires”

“Even when something bad happens, we can choose how we react. It’s all in the choices we make. But we must look to do so in the grace of God”

“This should be a bit of a warning to us, that it is ok to strive to overcome our mortal sins, but don’t become overly scrupulous over perfection”

“The scriptures for Mass today make it pretty clear that in order to genuinely love another person, we are required to talk to them about their serious sins, and pray for their conversion”

“God is very merciful with people who are truly sorry for the things they have done that are wrong, and so is Jesus Christ. Why do so many of us beat ourselves up for such a long time after we have committed a sin?”

“whilst our salvation is entirely the work of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, the way that God chose to work out this salvation in history was to involve human beings”

“The Pharisees’ identification of purity as a sign of holiness brought them to separate themselves from others and from the world. In contrast, Jesus' understanding of holiness was based on a foundational relationship with God that orients our nature to all persons and things that are around us.”

“The feast we are invited to is the Father’s heavenly banquet, where Jesus is the ‘Fatted Calf, of the parable, now in reality the lamb of sacrifice offered for the sins of humanity, once and for all, at the Last Supper and on the Cross of Calvary.”

“It is a beautiful thought to think that we were created in joy, by God’s loving hand”

“Lent is an invitation for us to grow in this silence in the heart of Jesus. To not rush to condemnation, to not reach for easy answers or to excuse ourselves from responsibility.”

“This is one of the most beautiful stories in the bible because of how Christ converted hatred into love, sin into forgiveness. Slavery to guilt, into freedom from sin.”

“Sin renders us blind and insensitive; sin stops us from being truly free. When sin gets into the system, when our whole way of thinking is touched by it, we can find ourselves almost sleepwalking into sin, shoring up the patterns of sin.”

“Jesus does not come to reform but to renew. He’s not commanding a few adjustments in the legal niceties of marriage law. No, he is offering men and women a radical new beginning.”

“If we truly believe we are precious children of God and that God has forgiven us, then we naturally stop our foolish sinning because we no longer need such crutches and diversions”

“In cutting out the causes of sin, we shouldn’t start with other people – we should start with ourselves.”

“Sin genuinely affects our ability to do good. Grace on the other hand actually heals and elevates our wounded natures and without it, we remain stuck in sin with all the consequences which that entails.”

“But perhaps those who are really against God are those Christians who have ended up making themselves an ‘enemy within’, a scandal or a stumbling-block to the faith of others”

“Here we see not a group of individuals but a community baptised into Christ and through the gift Holy Spirit reflecting the image of God’s son. They testify to the Resurrection not just by words but by what they do. They share what they have. Their possessions become a symbol of their resurrection faith.”

“It is only in the light of our friendship with God that we can properly understand that we are sinners and that we are forgiven. When we are friends with God sin is never in the centre of that relationship. It is God’s mercy and forgiveness that always precedes it.”

“We do not create the Church. We are drawn, called and sought into unity by the Trinity working through and in us. We have to shift away from any views of superiority in what is acceptable for those who are in the process of coming to God’s Church.”

“Indeed the regular confession of our venial sins helps us to form our conscience, fight against evil tendencies, let ourselves be healed by Christ and progress in the life of the Spirit”

“The perfect human life of the Son of God has become the source of our healing from the spiritual sickness of sin: our lives can be healed through his cross”

“One of the greatest antidotes to many of our sins is a sense of humour, the readiness not to take ourselves too seriously”

“His time in the wilderness was not an exploration, but a triumphant march through the territory of the enemy, sweeping away the bonds of our slavery to sin”

“What Jesus can do is shown most clearly in his mother, who depended on the Spirit for her freedom from sin, and in the Spirit was attuned to God’s Word, her Son.”

“In God’s mercy, and through Jesus seeking us, we can re-enter the heritage given to us and we can look to the future in hope”

“God wishes to gather us from exile into our home. If we wish to accept his invitation, then we must dare to join the accused woman at the centre of the circle, because that is where Jesus is to be found.”

“On Calvary sin and death seemed to come to the brink of defeating Christ. Yet, in reality, Christ’s obedience in love to the Father cancelled out the disobedience of sin, and by his death Christ exhausted death, pouring forth new life in the Resurrection.”

“What is precious to God, precious to Jesus, must be precious to us too, or we will never be holy”

“when forgiveness is asked for, nothing is gained by refusing, and a lot can be achieved, namely justice in the sense of good order in human relationships”

“We are sinners and we are loved in spite of it. To admit sin sets us free to receive love under the only condition it can be truly offered. To acknowledge that we are loved, in spite of sin, sets us free from false guilt and self-hatred.”

“it is the sin of lying to oneself until one becomes so warped that one believes one’s own lie. Falsehood becomes truth. The reason this sin cannot be forgiven is not that God does not want to forgive it, but rather that the person no longer sees the need for forgiveness.”

“God knows the stones to which we cling, and yet God does not attack us because of our foolishness. God does not shake us trying to move us out of our stubbornness. God gives us time to think.”

“God knows the stones to which we cling, and yet God does not attack us because of our foolishness. God does not shake us trying to move us out of our stubbornness. God gives us time to think.”