All Quotes

"At that time, the Saxons grew strong by virtue of their large number and increased in power in Britain. Hengist having died, however, his son Octha crossed from the northern part of Britain to the kingdom of Kent and from him are descended the kings of Kent. Then Arthur along with the kings of Britain fought against them in those days, but Arthur himself was the military commander [dux bellorum]. His first battle was at the mouth of the river which is called Glein. His second, third, fourth, and fifth battles were above another river which is called Dubglas and is in the region of Linnuis. The sixth battle was above the river which is called Bassas. The seventh battle was in the forest of Celidon, that is Cat Coit Celidon. The eighth battle was at the fortress of Guinnion, in which Arthur carried the image of holy Mary ever virgin on his shoulders; and the pagans were put to flight on that day. And through the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and through the power of the blessed Virgin Mary his mother there was great slaughter among them. The ninth battle was waged in the City of the Legion. The tenth battle was waged on the banks of a river which is called Tribruit. The eleventh battle was fought on the mountain which is called Agnet. The twelfth battle was on Mount Badon in which there fell in one day 960 men from one charge by Arthur; and no one struck them down except Arthur himself, and in all the wars he emerged as victor."

"I, Pope Calixtus III, promise and vow to the Holy Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, to the Ever-Virgin Mother of God, to the Holy Apostles Peter and Paul, and to all the heavenly host, that I will do everything in my power, even, if need be, with the sacrifice of my life, aided by the counsel of my worthy brethren, to reconquer Constantinople, which in punishment for the sin of man has been taken and ruined by Mahomet II, the son of the devil and the enemy of our Crucified Redeemer. Further, I vow to deliver the Christians languishing in slavery, to exalt the true Faith and to extirpate the diabolical sect of the reprobate and faithless Mahomet in the East. For there the light of Faith is almost completely extinguished. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand be forgotten. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I do not remember thee. If I make not Jerusalem the beginning of my joy, God and His holy Gospel help me. Amen."

"93 Q. Having made the sign of the Cross what should you say?"

"I say then, first, that holy virginity is like a divine balm which preserves the body of Mary from corruption, and you will be convinced of it if you meditate attentively on what was the perfection of her virginsl purity...Why, you will never form a just idea of it, you will never comprehend its perfection until you have understood that it wrought in the Virgin Mother a perfect integrity of soul and of body...An extraordinary grace gas diffused over her an abundant heavenly dew which has not tempered, as in the other elect, but quenched the fire of concupiscence, that is, not only evil works, which are as it were the conflagration that concupiscence excites; not only evil desires, which are as it were the flame it thrusts forward, and evil inclinations, which are the intense heat it produces, but even the furnace and the hearth itself. In the words of theology the 'kindling of sin', that is , the deepest root and the most intimate cause of sin. After this, how could the flesh of the holy Virgin have decomposed, that felsh from which virginity of soul and body, and perfect conformity with Jesus Christ has taken away every principle of corruption together with the fire of concupiscence?...Mary was all pure and she ought consequently to be incorruptible."

"There are things which, in your extreme ignorance, you Elvidius had never read, and therefore you neglected the whole range of Scripture and employed your madness in outraging the Virgin, like the man in the story who being unknown to everybody and finding that he could devise no good deed by which to gain renown, burned the temple of Diana: and when no one revealed the sacrilegious act, it is said that he himself went up and down proclaiming that he was the man who had applied the fire. The rulers of Ephesus were curious to know what made him do this thing, whereupon he replied that if he could not have fame for good deeds, all men should give him credits for bad ones. Grecian history relates the incident. But you do worse. You have set on fire the temple of the Lord's body, you have defiled the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit from which you are determined to make a team of four brethren and a heap of sisters come forth. In a word, joyning in the chorus of the Jews you say, "Is not this the carpenter's son?is not his mother called Mary? and his brethren James and Joseph and Simon and Judas? and his sisters, are they not all with us? The word all would not be used if they were not a crowd of them." Pray tell me, who before you appeared, was acquainted with this blasphemy? Who thought the theory worth two-pence? You have gained your desire and have become notorious by crime..."

"Canon 3. If anyone does not in accord with the Holy Fathers acknowledge the holy and ever virgin immaculate Mary as really and truly the Mother of God, inasmuch she, in the fulness of time, and without seed, conceived by the Holy Spirit God the Word Himself, who before all time was born of God the Father, and without loss of integrity brought Him forth, and after His birth preserved her virginity inviolate, let him be condemned."

"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."

"It seems than that Mary rightly enjoys ineffable happiness in both body and soul, in her own Son and with Him and through Him...She ought to live in her entirety, who has given birth to the complete and perfect Life of all. She ought to be with Him Whom she carried in her womb, Whom she bore, warmed and nourished: Mary, the Mother of God, the nurse of God, the servant and the follower of God."

"In vernacular language, it is said that the Precious Blood was shed “for all,” whereas in the Latin text (even the latest revised Latin text) it is said that the Precious Blood is “for many” and not “for all.” [...] The new Offertory prayers do not express the Catholic notion of sacrifice. They simply express the concept of a mere sharing of bread and wine. For example, the Tridentine Mass addresses the prayer to God: “Accept, O holy Father, almighty and eternal God, this Immaculate Victim which your unworthy servant offers to You, my living and true God, in reparation for my countless sins, offenses, and negligence.” The new Mass says: “We offer this bread as the bread of life.” There is no mention of sacrifice or victim. Interviewer: Could you cite a translation that actually contradicts Catholic dogma? Mgr. Lefebvre: Yes. For example, in the Latin text, the Virgin Mary is called Semper Virgo, “Ever Virgin.” In all modern translations, the word “ever” has been removed. This is very serious, because there is a big difference between ‘Virgin’ and “Ever Virgin.” It is very dangerous to tamper with translations of this kind."

"Latin is also important for maintaining the unity of the Church, because when people travel, and people travel more and more abroad nowadays, it is important for them to find the same echo that they heard from a priest at home, whether in the United States, South America, Europe, or anywhere else in the world. They are at home in any (Catholic) church. It is their Catholic Mass that is being celebrated. They have always heard the Latin words since childhood, their parents before them, and their grandparents before them."

"He [Eutyches] did not realize what he was bound to hold on the Incarnation of the Word of God. Nor he was willing to seek the light of understanding through a diligent search of the wide range of the Sacred Scriptures. And yet, he might have listen attentively to that common and universal confession in which the whole body of the faithful acknowledges it's belief in God the Father Almighty, and in Jesus Christ, His only-begotten Son our Lord, who was born of the Holy Ghost and the Virgin Mary. By these three statements, the devices of almost all heretics are overthrown,...Unquestionably, therefore, He was conceived of the Holy Spirit within the womb of His Virgin Mother. She brought Him forth without the loss of virginity, even as she conceived Him without its loss...That birth, so wondrously unique and so uniquely wonderful, must not be understood in such a way that the distinctive properties of His humanity were excluded through this newness of His creation. For while it is true that the Holy Spirit gave fruitfulness to the Virgin, yet the reality of His body was received from her body; and "Wisdom building itself a house" (Prov. 9,11), "the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (Jn. 1:14)-that is, in that flesh which He took from man and which He quickened with the breath of a higher life..."

"[Jesus] was born in time with a rational soul, by virtue of the Holy Spirit, from Mary, ever virgin; he has two births, one eternal from the God the Father, the other in time from his mother."

"O God, the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, we call upon thy holy name, and as suppliants we implore thy clemency, that by the intercession of Mary, ever Virgin Immaculate and our Mother, and of the glorious Archangel St. Michael, thou wouldst deign to help us against Satan and all other unclean spirits, who wander about the world for the injury of the human race and the ruin of souls. Amen."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"Faith in Mary's Assumption is not an exaltation, with impossible images, of a glorious body that we do not know where to place: everything is in the mystery of God, which we cannot enter because he is beyond the veil of the sanctuary that will not open to our eyes until it is torn apart. What matters, instead, is to be able to live in the world a story that repeats the wonders that Mary sings here and which are wonders of salvation in time."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"How shall corruption be able to touch her who has given us Life?"

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

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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"."

"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."

"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."

"Despite what many think, the Vatican may not impose teachings on an unwilling faithful. Through the concept of reception, Catholics have a role to play in the establishment of church law. The popular notion that whatever the pope says on a serious topic is infallible is an exaggeration of the principle of infallibility. While some ultra-conservative groups claim that the teaching on abortion is infallible, it does not in fact meet the definition of an infallible teaching. Since the doctrine of papal infallibility was first declared in 1870, only three teachings have been declared infallible: the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the Assumption of Mary, and the declaration on infallibility itself."

"The opinions and hesitations of some do not stop us from now believing in the bodily Assumption of Mary more resolutely, from affirming it more plainly and from professing it more openly-together with the Church than was done in the first centuries of Christianity. For the Church acquires wisdom through the ages, and she receives and manifests ever increasingly the light of truth, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit Who rules and teaches her."

"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.”"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

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

"Mainstream geology is founded upon enunciated by James Hutton (1726–1797) and Charles Lyell (1797–1875), who argued that, during unlimited expanses of time, the Earth has undergone slow, ceaseless change by processes we can observe in operation. In their view, we cannot call on any powers that are not natural to the globe, admit of any action of which we do not know the principle, nor allege extraordinary events to explain a common appearance. A , originating from outside the Earth, and wreaking change instantaneously. Such a process violates every tenet of uniformitarianism. Largely for this reason, hypotheses of impact origin for craters on the Earth and the moon were vigorously opposed for the better part of the past century. Space-age research now has established beyond doubt the authenticity of impact as a geologic process, but an abundance of evidence exists that a wide chasm still persists between the views of impact specialists and those of terrestrial geologists. A full realization of the ramifications of impact processes may have been delayed by the advent of , which engulfed the geological community in the late 1960s. Revolutionary as it appeared at that time, plate tectonics, which is envisioned as involving gradual changes generated by forces internal to the globe, fully conforms with uniformitarian principles. In contrast, impact processes, which have recently been cited to account for cataclysmic events such as massive tsunami deposits, incinerating wildfires, and global extinctions, carry genuinely revolutionary implications that are fatal to the uniformitarian principle itself."

"In August, 1933, at the in Chicago, was founded with an enrollment of 57 charter members and and as the first President and Secretary-Treasurer, respectively. Within five years, the Society had doubled in size, with members from the U.S.A. and ten other nations. Annual meetings were suspended during World War II (1942 through 1945) and when it reconvened in 1946 the members adopted the name “”. By that time personal and professional antagonisms had arisen that threatened to fragment the Society and led, in 1949, to the resignation of Nininger and his wife. Throughout the 1950s the Society was widely regarded as a small, disorganized and essentially moribund organization. Revitalization of the Society began in the early 1960s after the advent of the when the Society steadily gained members with expertise in , , , and , and impact dynamics."

"I was perversely delighted to see the Catholic Church and the Vatican go after nuns because I think they made a major error. People are quite clear in viewing nuns as the servants and the teachers and the supporters of the poor. You contrast that with the fact that the Vatican did virtually nothing about long-known pedophiles, and it’s just too much. Their stance on abortion is also quite dishonest historically, because as the Jesuits (who always seem to be more honest historians of the Catholic Church) point out, the Church approved of and even regulated abortion well into the mid-1800s. The whole question of ensoulment was determined by the date of baptism. But after the Napoleonic Wars there weren’t enough soldiers anymore and the French were quite sophisticated about contraception. So Napoleon III prevailed on Pope Pius IX to declare abortion a mortal sin, in return for which Pope Pius IX got all the teaching positions in the French schools and support for the doctrine of papal infallibility. … My favorite line belongs to an old Irish woman taxi driver in Boston. Flo Kennedy and I were in the backseat talking about Flo’s book, Abortion Rap (1971), and the driver turned around and said, “Honey, if men could get pregnant, abortion would be a sacrament.” I wish I’d gotten her name so we could attribute it to her."

"My soul is pierced at seeing my Church prostrated under the weight of a most painful agony. Errors leading to the loss of faith are spreading more and more within her; sin seduces the minds and hearts of so many of my children. (15 September 1994)"

"Since the opening of the , images from have enabled us to map the surfaces of all the rocky planets and in the Solar System, thus transforming them from astronomical to geological objects. This progression of geology from being a strictly to one that is planetary-wide has provided us with a wealth of information on the evolutionary histories of other bodies and has supplied valuable new insights on the Earth itself. We have learned, for example, that the , and that the Moon subsequently accreted largely from debris of . The airless, waterless Moon still preserves a record of the impact events that have scarred its surface from the time its crust first formed. The much larger, volcanic Earth underwent a similar bombardment but most of the evidence was lost during the earliest 550 million years or so that elapsed before its first surviving systems of crustal rocks formed. Therefore, we decipher Earth's earliest history by investigating the record on the Moon. Lunar samples collected by the of the USA and the of the former USSR linked the Earth and Moon by their oxygen isotopic compositions and enabled us to construct a timescale of lunar events keyed to dated samples. They also permitted us to identify certain meteorites as fragments of the lunar crust that were projected to the Earth by impacts on the Moon. Similarly, analyses of the Martian surface soils and atmosphere by the and s led to the identification of meteorite fragments ejected by hypervelocity impacts on Mars. Images of Mars displayed land-forms wrought in the past by voluminous floodwaters, similar to those of the long-controversial of Washington State, USA. The record on Mars confirmed catastrophic flooding as a significant geomorphic process on at least one other planet. The first views of the Earth photographed by the crew of gave us the concept of and heightened international concern for protection of the global environment."

"59 Q.Why has God granted to the Pope the gift of infallibility?"

"60 Q. When was it defined that the Pope is infallible?"

"61 Q. In defining that the Pope is infallible, has the Church put forward a new truth of faith?"

"The second means by which Catholics may know that a Church teaching is infallible is by examining the ordinary magisterium. This is the usual, day to day expression of the Church's infallibility. The Canon of St. Vincent of Lorenz declares that any doctrine that has been taught semper ubique obomnibus always, everywhere, and by everyone makes it part of the ordinary and universal Magisterial teaching."