Catherine Doherty Quotes

We cannot give the world anything it doesn't already have except God and God's love. But before we can give God to men, we must be one with him ourselves.

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

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

Loving does not necessarily mean liking. But it still is loving, yes — totally, completely, utterly. Take the key of wisdom and unlock your own heart. Then let people in one by one. Listen to them, with full attention, with all your mind, heart, body and soul, unto exhaustion. And look! — the exhaustion will be lifted, and you will be able to listen still more. Yes, love must be communicated person to person; otherwise it will not be effective.

Pain is the kiss of Christ.

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

What you do matters — but not much. What you are matters tremendously.

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

Lord, give me the heart of a child, and the awesome courage to live it out as an adult.

Identification [with the other] is difficult but precious. It involves doing violence to yourself. Yet Scripture says that "heaven is taken by violence" to oneself [Luke 16:16]. To identify oneself with the other is to love him beyond words, a total giving of oneself in truth.

What is the market place? Is it the secular city? Is it the factual market place, that is to say the urban inner city? Is it suburbia where all the supermarkets are? No. The market place is simply the soul of man. It is the place where man trades his soul either to God or to the devil or to the 'in between', with indifference, tepidity and complacency.

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.

Must the Church conform to the world and its modern ideas in order to be understood and heard? Much depends on the clarification of the word "conform." The answer is "yes" if by conform is meant change and adaptation in order to express eternal truths in a way more understandable to modern man.

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.

God gave us two commandments, to love God with our whole heart, mind and soul, and to love our neighbor as ourselves.<p>There is a lot of talk about the neighbor, but few mention the fact that before this we must love ourselves, "Your neighbor as yourself."<p>What about this loving of ourselves? It doesn't take a vast sociological survey to tell us that very few people accept and love themselves in the proper way, love themselves so as to be able to properly love God and their neighbor.