Faithful Practice Quotes

If Christ were here now there is one thing he would not be—a Christian.

Christian fasting, at its root, is the hunger of a homesickness for God

How many observe Christ's birthday! How few, His precepts!

I'm a Catholic, raised a Catholic. I was an altar boy. Religion has been a huge part of my life. It helped lead me through a war, leads me today.

I keep on saying, being moderate is fundamental to Islam.

Christmas is a season which almost all Christians observe in one way or another. Some keep it as a religious season. Some keep it as a holiday. But all over the world, wherever there are Christians, in one way or another Christmas is kept.

Nothing so tends to mask the face of God as religion; it can be a substitute for God himself.

When I am at Rome, I fast on a Saturday; when I am at Milan, I do not. Follow the custom of the church where you are.

Especially among Christians in positions of wealth and power, the idea of reading the Gospels and keeping Jesus' commandments as stated therein has been replaced by a curious process of logic. According to this process, people first declare themselves to be followers of Christ, and then they assume that whatever they say or do merits the adjective "Christian".

I as a Muslim want you, as a Christian, to really be a perfect Christian. I want my Jewish friends to be perfect Jews, to live according to the highest principles of what it means to be a Jew, to be a Christian, to be a Muslim.

I smoked, I drank, I did all the kicking my heels up type things, but I went to Mass on Sunday.

Many people profess Christianity. Very few live it-almost none. And when you live it people may think you're crazy. It has been truthfully said that the world is equally shocked by one who repudiates Christianity as by one who practices it.

Read the Bible, read the Bible! Let no religious book take its place. Through all my perplexities and distresses, I seldom read any other book, and I as rarely felt the want of any other.

Both Mum and Dad were converts to Catholicism, and normally if you convert to Catholicism you have thought about it more than someone who just grew up with it, taking it for granted.

The church’s pastoral ministry cannot be obsessed with the transmission of a disjointed multitude of doctrines to be imposed incessantly … We have to find a new balance otherwise even the moral edifice of the church is likely to fall like a house of cards, losing the freshness and the fragrance of the Gospel.

Feelings are great liars. If Christians worshipped only when they felt like it, there would be precious little worship. We think that if we don’t feel something there can be no authenticity in doing it. But the wisdom of God says something different: that we can act ourselves into a new way of feeling much quicker than we can feel ourselves into a new way of acting. Worship is an act that develops feelings for God, not a feeling for God that is expressed in an act of worship.

To open the Bible is to open a window toward Jerusalem, as Daniel did (6:10), no matter where our exile may have taken us.

How do you write? You write, man, you write, that's how, and you do it the way the old English walnut tree puts forth leaf and fruit every year by the thousands. . . . If you practice an art faithfully, it will make you wise, and most writers can use a little wising up.

It has been my custom for many years to read the Bible in its entirety once a year

That clerical celibacy doesn't guarantee asceticism is obvious, any more than attending Mass guarantees prayerfulness (trust me on that one). But it preserves the call even when the system is corrupted.

I encourage our Saints all over the world, wherever possible, to strive to stand more often in holy places.

The experience of prayer when there is no awareness of God and no apparent response from ourselves should not lead us to escape from prayer or give it up.

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?

Prior to the reign of the godly King Josiah, the law of God had been lost in the temple for many years. Has the same thing occurred among us? Has the evangel been lost among evangelicals?

Give up all forms of parrotry. Start practicing whatever you truly feel to be true and justly to be just. Do not make a show of your faith and beliefs. You have not to give up your religion, but to give up clinging to the husk of mere ritual and ceremony. To get to the fundamental core of Truth underlying all religions, reach beyond religion.