Jean Guitton Quotes

Marthe [Marta Robin] era semplice.... Quello che prevaleva in Marthe era la sua capacità di sacrificio, a imitazione di Cristo.... Con parole semplici suscitava in noi una di quelle emozioni rare, improvvise, dolci, un po' malinconiche e tuttavia radiose, che vi rendono consapevoli del vostro destino.

Paul VI told me that the prayer he recited every morning was: “My God, call me back to You, call me back to You, I can't take it anymore”. I believe that all popes recite this prayer, even John Paul II.

Atheism is not only complicated and rare, it is also a recent phenomenon, a peculiarity supported by few and only recently in certain Western intellectual circles.

I believe in God because of encounters. All explanations are useless; I believe in encounters.

Joan of Arc possesses more genius than talent, more heroism than courage, more intuition than intelligence, more immediacy than endurance and, if we may say so, more glory than grace. That is why she seems more angelic than human, a traveller from another world, parachuted into this one. (p. 7)

Discovering herself as the end of history, the Madonna now had the light to interpret the time that had gone before.

Beauty is a kind of supplement to being, a radiance that is added to being.

Beauty is a splendour that must detach itself from those who possess it without them noticing and without returning to them.

In Giovanna, purity was more than a virtue. It was her mark, her reason for existing and her implicit glory, her resemblance to the mother of Christ. Being a country girl, accustomed to seeing life in all its gestures, she probably had very accurate knowledge of purity in the physical sense. In the countryside, ignorance is never what the 19th-century bourgeoisie falsely calls innocence. And when, at the age of thirteen, Joan gave her virginity to God during the angel's first visit, she knew clearly what it meant. (p. 30)

I find that at twent it is easy to be a hero, a saint, an extraordinary man. I believe, however, that at ninety it is very difficult to live up to the moment.

I have always made it a rule to speak in a timeless manner, true today, tomorrow and always.

Generals do not fight with the fear of the troops, they prefer to keep them busy.

Paul VI's intention regarding the liturgy, regarding the vulgarisation of the Mass, was to reform the Catholic liturgy so that it would coincide more or less with the Protestant liturgy... with the Protestant Supper. And further on: "... I repeat that Paul VI did everything in his power to bring the Catholic Mass – beyond the Council of Trent – closer to the Protestant Supper. He was particularly helped by Monsignor Bugnini, who did not always enjoy his confidence on this point. [...] Of course, I did not attend the Calvinist Supper, but I did attend Paul VI's Mass. And Paul VI's Mass presents itself first and foremost as a banquet, does it not? It insists very much on the aspect of participation in a banquet, and much less on the notion of sacrifice, of ritual sacrifice, in the face of God, while the priest shows only his back. So I do not think I am mistaken in saying that the intention of Paul VI and of the new liturgy that bears his name is to ask the faithful for greater participation in the Mass, to give a greater place to Sacred Scripture and a lesser place to everything else in it, some say “magical”, others “consubstantial consecration”, [correcting himself] transubstantiation, which is the Catholic faith. In other words, Paul VI had the ecumenical intention of removing – or at least correcting, attenuating – what was too “Catholic”, in the traditional sense, in the Mass, and of bringing the Catholic Mass – I repeat – closer to the Calvinist Mass.

So today Mass risks resembling a liturgy of the word? A:

Believing in God means believing in an incomprehensible being whose ability to listen is known. That is what kneeling means.