Catherine Doherty Quotes

With God, every moment is the moment of beginning again.

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.

Pain is the kiss of Christ.

God reveals himself to those who wait for that revelation and who don't try to "tear at the hem of a mystery" forcing disclosure.

To be simple is to accept the essence of the message and not try to twist it or adapt it to our own ideas. To be simple we must desire to remain in the image of God. We must not be so complex that we make God into our image! Simplicity is dying to self, an emptying.

Faith sees God's face in every human face.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.