Catherine Doherty

Purity of heart is love for the weak who constantly fall.

Lord, give bread to the hungry, and hunger for you to those who have bread.

Faith allows us to enter peacefully into the dark night which faces everyone of us at one time or another.

The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don’t just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child.... There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done. And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.

We do not go to mission lands to 'bring Jesus Christ' as much as to uncover him where he already is.

Arise, go! Sell all you possess. Give it directly, personally to the poor. Take up My cross (their cross) and follow Me, going to the poor, being poor, being one with them, one with Me.<p>Little, be always little, simple, poor, childlike.<p>Preach the Gospel with your life, without compromise. Listen to the Spirit; He will lead you.<p>Do little things exceedingly well for love of Me.<p>Love, love, love, never counting the cost.<p>Go into the market place and stay with Me. Pray, fast. Pray always: fast.<p>Be hidden. Be a light to your neighbor's feet. Go without fears into the depth of men's hearts. I shall be with you.<p>Pray always. I will be your rest.

To pass through the door that leads to God's kingdom, we must go down on our knees.

On the other hand, the Church cannot conform to the world as understood by Christ in his parables. To this world there can be neither conformity nor can we compromise with it. On the contrary, toward this world the Church and every Christian must be prophetic. We must cry out loudly the word of God, ready even to be stoned as were all the prophets sent by the Lord.

The Lord said, "Love your neighbor as yourself." Which means we must love ourselves first, for we are, in a manner of speaking, our first neighbor.

Faith sees God's face in every human face.

True silence is the speech of lovers. For only love knows its beauty, completeness and utter joy.

Here I want to reiterate very clearly that this Little Mandate did not come to me dictated, or as a whole, but as I am telling it now. Get the picture: it could happen any place, any time, in the midst of a group, in my office, at lunch in a cafeteria. Suddenly a little light, a little added word would come to me. I used to write them down on scraps of paper, on the back of old envelopes, in some diary, maybe lost or forgotten now; though some of them are still here. It was a patchy thing.

Real zeal is standing still and letting God be a bonfire in you.

When we reach the silver sands and plunge into the great sea of God's silence, we begin to understand that he alone is God — Lover, Friend, the totality of gentleness, peace and rest. He calls us and we cannot resist that call. We have to be alone with him. It is a necessity, it is a hunger. It has been said that prayer is a hunger. But this Christ walks with loneliness and rejection, and so must we.

Yes, of course, the Christian has dogmas he must believe in order to be a Christian, but all those dogmas concern love which is the essence. God is love. Where love is, God is. Dogmas and tenets of the Christian faith without love are dead letters, not even worth spelling out.