jesus

"I cannot think such language either right, or becoming, or suitable. ... To call the Virgin Mary the mother of God can only serve to confirm the ignorant in their superstitions."

"I do not doubt that there has been some ignorance in their having reproved this mode of speech, — that the Virgin Mary is the Mother of God … I cannot dissemble that it is found to be a bad practice ordinarily to adopt this title in speaking of this Virgin: and, for my part, I cannot consider such language as good , proper, or suitable… for to say, the Mother of God for the Virgin Mary, can only serve to harden the ignorant in their superstitions."

"God created the world through an active speech. God's Word is not descriptive, it is creative. God speaks the worls is being...God's Word changes, it is effective, makes things happen...What God says, is. If Jesus is just a spiritual teacher among many, one great religious figure, okay, fine. But there are thousands of those. What claims the Church is He is not a human figure amomg many, but He is the Word made flesh. The very embodiement of God [as a] transformative and creative work. The night before he dies, that Jesus took bread, the Pasqual bead, and said: "This is my Body." Taking the goblet with the meal, said: "This is the chalice of my Blood". If that [was said] by a human being, a great hero, a philosopher, a social reformer, okay, we say: "He is using a symbolic talk." But who is saying that? The Word made flesh. The Word whose speech constitutes reality at the deepest level. Just as if God spokes you to be, so Jesus speaks His presence into being, over the appearence of bread and wine...We move into His very identity at that point. We now commence to speak in the first person, saying: "Take this, all of you, and eat it. This is my Body given for you." We speak in persona Christi, we speak in the very Word of Jesus."

"He who wants to live the supernatural life clings to the Mother of Divine Grace. He who wants to convert and sanctify himself must have recourse to the Mother of God, for she is the Mediatrix of all graces. This mystery, that we receive everything through the Immaculate, is still little known. That is why we must propagate it; more, we must conquer the whole world to the Immaculate.<"

"The Christianocategori, or Accusers of Christians, are such and are so called, because those Christians who worship one living and true God praised in Trinity they accused of worshiping as gods, after the manner of the Greeks, the venerable images of our Lord Jesus Christ, of our immaculate lady, the holy Mother of God, of the holy angels, and of His saints.They are furthermore called Iconoclasts, because they have shown deliberate dishonor to all these same holy and venerable images and have consigned them to be broken up and burnt. Likewise, some of those painted on walls they have scraped off, while others they have obliterated with whitewash and black paint. They are also called Thymoleontes, or Lion-hearted, because, taking advantage of their authority, they have with great heart given strength to their heresy and with torment and torture visited vengeance upon those who approve of the images."

"Marriages are not permitted on the eves of Wednesdays and Fridays. During the Great Fast from Dairy Sunday up to the first Tuesday after Pascha. During the Falling Asleep of the Theotokos Fast, which consists of a two week period from August 1-15. During the Holy Apostles’ Fast: Monday after All Saints to June 28. During the Nativity Advent, the period before Christ’s Birth. On Saturday, on the eves of the Twelve Great Feasts, on the day before the Feast of the Beheading of John the Baptist, (August 29th), and the day before the Exaltation of the Cross (Sept. 14th)."

"Why did the Three Wise Men set off for Palestine? They were scholars of astrology and, seeing the comet, they attributed extraordinary significance to it because the doctrine of Zoroaster spoke of “a savior born of a virgin without the touch of a man,” the savior would restore the kingdom of good and evil, and his birth would be signaled by the appearance of a bright star. They therefore followed the path of the star and, knowing the Jews' expectation of a Messiah, set off, illuminated by divine grace."

"I take the suffering of people caused by the events taking place with deep and heartfelt pain. I call on all parties to the conflict to do everything possible to avoid civilian casualties. I appeal to the bishops, pastors, monastics, and laity to provide all possible assistance to all victims, including refugees and people left homeless and without means of livelihood. The Russian and Ukrainian peoples have a common centuries-old history dating back to the Baptism of Rus’ by Prince St. Vladimir the Equal-to-the-Apostles. I believe that this God-given affinity will help overcome the divisions and disagreements that have arisen that have led to the current conflict. I call on the entire fullness of the Russian Orthodox Church to offer a special, fervent prayer for the speedy restoration of peace. May the All-merciful Lord, through the intercession of our Most Pure Lady the Theotokos and all the saints, preserve the Russian, Ukrainian, and other peoples who are spiritually united by our Church!"

"In Persia there is a city called Saba, from which the three kings departed to worship God when he was born. In that city, the three Magi are buried in a beautiful tomb, and they are still there, intact, with their beards and hair: one was named Beltasar, the other Gaspar, and the third Melquior. Mr Marco asked several times in that city about those three kings: no one could tell him anything, except that there were three kings buried there in ancient times."

"The Hindu religion appears … as a cathedral temple, half in ruins, noble in the mass, often fantastic in detail but always fantastic with a significance — crumbling or badly outworn in places, but a cathedral temple in which service is still done to the Unseen and its real presence can be felt by those who enter with the right spirit."

"For you, Mary, Holy Virgin, the Magi, though far away, abandoned vanity, adoring your Only Begotten Son, and became pious forever."

"...it is recognised in England that home drinking is no real pleasure. We pray in a church and booze in a pub: profoundly sacerdotal at heart, we need a host in both places to preside over us. In Catholic churches as in continental bars the host is there all the time. But the Church of England kicked out the Real Presence and the licensing laws gave the landlord a terrible sacramental power. Ted was giving me grace of his own free will, holding back death – which is closing time – making a lordly grant of extra life."

"Where there is Mary, there is Jesus and where there is Jesus there is joy, Mary is not only the Mother of God, she is the Mother of all of us who seek her constant intercession, we entrust our suffering to her."

"To thee, O blessed Joseph, we have recourse in our affliction, and having implored the help of thy thrice holy Spouse, we now, with hearts filled with confidence, earnestly beg thee also to take us under thy protection. By that charity wherewith thou wert united to the Immaculate Virgin Mother of God, and by that fatherly love with which thou didst cherish the Child Jesus, we beseech thee and we humbly pray that thou wilt look down with gracious eye upon that inheritance which Jesus Christ purchased by His blood, and wilt succor us in our need by thy power and strength."

"(To Herod the Great) We have seen a star of great size shining among these stars, and obscuring their light, so that the stars did not appear; and we thus knew that a king has been born to Israel, and we have come to worship him."

"Salvation is Christ’s accomplishment, but had it not been communicated to another person, what good would it have been? Mary is witness that divinization in no longer out of reach. Christ is a divine hypostasis incarnated; Mary is a human hypostatis divinized."

"Thus, after spending three days in this place of fragrance, he descended at the bidding of our Lady the Mother of God as far as her church, the one called Panagia. After spending some days there, he went up again to the summit of Athos and kissed the spot where the Mother of God had appeared to stand in glory. He tearfully sought to see the vision once again, but he did not succeed; for only light and unceasing divine fragrance fell invisibly upon the holy one's senses, as before, and filled him with joy and inexpressible happiness. After going up two or three times from the Panagia and being granted this experience, he then went down from there and, going to Karmelion, found a solitary elder there and told him about his vision."

"Leaving the great and wondrous Lavra, he first set off at full speed on the ascent of Athos, where the tablets of grace were promised by the Mother of God. And thus he reached it, without eating anything, on the seventh [Sunday after Easter]; for that day was the first [Sunday] after the Ascension, the so-called Sunday of the Holy Fathers. After arriving at the summit there and prostrating himself and praying to God, as was his custom every night, he spent the whole night in vigil together with some monks. But when all the monks departed in the morning and no one was left behind, he remained there alone for three entire days and nights without food and wearing only a single garment, in the service of God. And he constantly had the name of the Mother of God on his tongue, in his mind and heart through mental prayer in the Spirit."

"The emergence of the epitaphios from the Late Byzantine era 121 is related to the standardization of the Holy Saturday service (called Lamentations and held by anticipation on the evening of Good Friday) in the fourteenth century. Initially, the epitaphios depicted the amnos (lamb), the dead Christ. By the fourteenth century the epitaphios became the epitaphios threnos (burial lament). Instead of a solitary Christ lying dead as in the early epitaphios, the epitaphios threnos, depicting a funeral gathering of figures, includes the lamentation of the Theotokos over the dead son."

"Christ ... was born of a most undefiled Virgin."

"Peat preserves timber, animals, and such unexpected treasure-troves as hoards of acorns and firkins of beech butter from the forests which preceded the bogs. A whole archaeology may very well lie in peat, and the pollen record may reveal past history. At the base of Irish bogs the ' (the little people), their axes, bridges, butter, and forest life are well preserved. They and their forests were banished, as if by magic, by the ' (the Children of Diana) who now dig the peat. Diana was displaced in turn by Mary, mother of God. But all are mixed in the peat and the tongue of Ireland."

"It is then an integral portion of the Faith fixed by Ecumenical Council, a portion of it which you hold as well as I, that the Blessed Virgin is Theotocos, Deipara, or Mother of God; and this word, when thus used, carries with it no admixture of rhetoric, no taint of extravagant affection,—it has nothing else but a well-weighed, grave, dogmatic sense, which corresponds and is adequate to its sound. It intends to express that God is her Son, as truly as any one of us is the son of his own mother."

"The Divine Will contains the creative strenght. From within God's one single "Fiat" came out billions and billions of stars. From the Fiat Mihi" of the Mother of God, from which Redemption had its origin, came out billions and billions of acts of grace, which communicate themselves to souls. These acts of grace are more beautiful, more resplendent and more varied than billions of stars! The Divine Fiat is full of life, and in fact It is life itself, and alla lives and things come out from within the Fiat. From the Fiat of God, Creation came out, and in each created thing can be seen the imprint of that Fiat. From the "Fiat Mihi" of the Blessed Virgin, pronounced in the Divine Will with the same power of the Fiat of Creation, Redemption came forth. Therefore everything that concerns the Redemption bears the imprint of her "Fiat Mihi".Even the very Humanity of her Son, His steps, works and words, were sealed with Mary's "Fiat Mihi"."

"I esteem immensely the Mother of God, the ever chaste, immaculate Virgin Mary."

"In our world of darkness, we need to turn to Mary, who gave us Jesus, the light of the world. In our culture of death, we need to turn to Mary, the first disciple to hear and proclaim the gospel of life. In our secularist society, we need to turn back to God. Mary, the mother of God, and our mother, will show us the way and lead us back to her son, our Lord. The nation, the world, who forgets the mother, is in danger of forgetting the Son, in danger of losing our way back to God."

"If Mary is full of grace, it is because she is the Mother of God."

"They were people certain that something we might describe as the “signature” of God exists in creation, a signature that man can and must endeavour to discover and decipher."

"Where is He who has been born King of the Jews? For we have seen His star in the East and have come to worship Him."

"Then Herod, when he had secretly called the wise men, determined from them what time the star appeared. And he sent them to Bethlehem and said, “Go and search carefully for the young Child, and when you have found Him, bring back word to me, that I may come and worship Him also.”"

"The wise men followed the star. Through the language of creation, they discovered the God of history. To be sure – the language of creation alone is not enough. Only God’s word, which we encounter in sacred Scripture, was able to mark out their path definitively. Creation and Scripture, reason and faith, must come together, so as to lead us forward to the living God. There has been much discussion over what kind of star it was that the wise men were following. Some suggest a planetary constellation, or a supernova, that is to say one of those stars that is initially quite weak, in which an inner explosion releases a brilliant light for a certain time, or a comet, etc. This debate we may leave to the experts. The great star, the true supernova that leads us on, is Christ himself. He is as it were the explosion of God’s love, which causes the great white light of his heart to shine upon the world. And we may add: the wise men from the East, who feature in today’s Gospel, like all the saints, have themselves gradually become constellations of God that mark out the path. In all these people, being touched by God’s word has, as it were, released an explosion of light, through which God’s radiance shines upon our world and shows us the path."

"'Twas God the Word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it: And what that Word did make it, That I believe and take it."

"If we trivialize Communion, we trivialize everything, and we cannot lose a moment as important as that of receiving Communion, of recognizing the real presence of Christ there, of the God who is the love above all loves, as we sing in a hymn in Spanish."

"A striking image, suggested by a verse from the Canticle of Canticles, evokes the triumph of the risen Mother of God. "Who is that cometh up from the desert, flowing with delights, leaning upon her beloved" (Canticles 8,5). Fathers, exegetes and preachers (cf. Pseudo-Damien, Serm. 40, In Assumpt. B.V.M.; St Bernard, Serm. IV, In Assumpt.; Pierre de Blois, Serm. 33, In Assumpt. B.M.; Cornelius a Lapide, Comment. in Cant., VIII), and with them the liturgy in its most expressive language (cf. J. Linden, Die leibliche Aufnahme Maria in der Himmel", Zeithscr. f. kath. Theologie, t. XXX (1906), pp. 215-221), recognize in this beloved Spouse the Mother of the Son of God mounting to heaven thanks to the omnipotence of her divine Son and Spouse-"She ascends to her Son but only through her Son", says an old writer-shining with glory and completely filled with happiness"."

"Will death take possession of the first fruits of life, and the tomb hold her who by her lifegiving childbirth ought to empty the tombs? Certainly not!"

"The Marian dogmas are, as we know, four in all: perpetual virginity and divine motherhood; then, after almost fifteen centuries of debate and exploration of the mystery, here is the conception without the stain of original sin and the assumption into heaven. Well, these truths have been codified and solemnly protected as dogmas, that is, as basic and indisputable truths of the faith, not so much out of devotion to Mary, but as a defense of faith in Jesus. In fact, if we reflect on their content , we realize that they reaffirm the authentic faith in Christ as true God and true man: two natures in one Person. They then reiterate the fundamental eschatological expectation, indicating in Mary the immortal destiny that awaits us all. And, finally, they secure the faith, now threatened, in a creator God (it is one of the meanings of the more misunderstood truth about Mary's perpetual virginity), a God who can freely intervene even on matter."

"It was necessary that she, who with fixed eyes on her Son hanging on the crosshad her heart transpierced by a sword, gaze upon Him at the right hand of the Father."

"Since she is the Mother of the living God, it is right that living she ascend towards Him."

"Let us enter then into this sepulchre in order to adore; let us acknowledge the new mystery. Raised, carried up to heaven above all the choirs of angels, Mary holds her place beside her Son; for between the Son and the Mother there is no distance."

"The Saviour arose into heaven through His own power as Lord and Creator...Mary arose into heaven lifted up by grace, not through her own power. This is why one is called Ascension and the other Assumption."

"Death will not boast of you, because you have carried Life in your womb; [and the vessel which held It] will not be broken by death, nor will it be enshrouded by the somber folds of darkness."

"She who was conceived without spot and borne without pain, who became mother without loss of virginity, who placed God in the world, who died without suffering, was also preserved from corruption ; and we believe she lives in heaven with her body. It is piously believed."

"The ark which was made of incorruptible timber (Ex. 15:10) was the Savior. The ark symbolized the tabernacle of His body, which was impervious to decay and engendered no sinful corruption...The Lord was sinless, because, in His humanity, He was fashioned out of incorruptible wood, that is, out of the Virgin and the Holy Ghost, lined within and without as with the purest gold of the Word of God."

"If Mary was thus strengthened against every movement of sin by her first sanctification, much more did grace grow in her and much more was concupiscence weakened or even completely uprooted in her, when the Holy Spirit came upon her, according to the angel’s word, to form of her the body of Christ. After she had been made the shrine of the Holy Spirit and the tabernacle of the Son of God, we may not believe that there was ever any inclination to sin in her, or that she ever experienced any pleasurable feeling of carnal concupiscence. And so we must view with revulsion the error of Helvidius who, while admitting that Christ was conceived and born of the Virgin, asserted that she later bore other sons to Joseph."

"We pronounce, declare, and define it to be a divinely revealed dogma: that the Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and soul into heavenly glory."

"Live in hope. And in hope, we are guided to put ourselves on the path which leads us to the goal of following in the footsteps of the Lord and his mother Mary, who is our mother."

"The divine Christ, Who was conceived by this perpetual Virgin through the activity of the Holy Spirit, and was clothed by her with flesh animated by a rational soul, has called her to Himself and in His turn has clothed her with an unequalled glory. He has made her take part in His inheritance; for she is His most holy mother."

"4 Q. Why is it said of Jesus Christ that He ascended, and of His Most Holy Mother that she was assumed, into heaven?"

"There are two methods by which Catholics may know that a teaching of the Church is infallible and therefore must be obeyed by all Catholics in order to remain Catholic. The first of these, of course, is an ex cathedra pronouncement. Popes use this mechanism very infrequently, and then only to address the very fundamentals of Catholic faith. Only once since 1870 has the Pope spoken ex cathedra; on November 1, 1950, when Pope Pius XII declared the doctrine of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Many pro-life theologians have debated the wisdom of having the Church's teachings on birth control and abortion be formally declared infallible, and have decided that this would not be wise in the larger scheme of things. The reason is that such a pronouncement in an area of morals (as opposed to fundamental beliefs) would give the impression that all other moral teachings of the Church were optional. This might lead to a situation where disbelief would run rampant in the areas not specifically addressed ex cathedra, and would lead to more and more demands for such pronouncements in almost every area of Church teaching."

"Since Hw who humbled himself in her was God from the beginning and was life before all ages, it was right that the 'Mother of Life' be associated with Life; her death should be only a sleep, and her removal an awakening."

"Surely we cannot deny that Your Reverence was perfectly justified in rebuking him on the score of Mary's children, and that you had good reason to be horrified at the thought that another birth might issue from the same virginal womb from which Christ was born according to the flesh. For the Lord Jesus would never have chosen to be born of a virgin if he had ever judged that she would be so incontinent as to contaminate with the seed of human intercourse the birthplace of the Lord's body, that court of the Eternal King. To assert such a view is to do nothing less than to accept as a basis that Jewish falsehood which holds that He could not have been born of a virgin. And once the weight of episcopal authority is gained for the view that Mary gave issue to many children, they will strive with even greater zeal to attack the truth of [Christian] faith."