Top 15 Jean Guitton Quotes

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

Before the Council, Mass was Mass. Obviously, in Latin, we didn't understand anything, but we had the impression (impression???) that it was Mass. Now, however, we have the feeling that it is the translation of a Protestant service. From my point of view, the liturgical reform as desired by the Council (Vatican II) was good; certainly it did not want the Mass, the Eucharist, to be sacrificed, nor above all reduced to what Protestants do during their ceremony, which we call supper. For example, when it was decided that the priest should not say Mass facing the altar, with his back to the faithful, but facing them, a decisive reform was carried out that truly disturbed many Christians. With good reason (With good reason???) — so that the faithful could understand — it was decided to celebrate the liturgy in the common language, but without any desire to abolish the sacred. Today, in practice, the Eucharist no longer has the sacred, serious and divine character it had in the past. (p. 103)

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.

If the Church has sometimes been against science, the cause lies in its misreading of the Bible.

For a Christian, what we call life is a preparation for what we call the “afterlife”, the other life.

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.

The atheist confirms faith. And like a guinea pig that confirms my thesis or my faith in God.

The Pope is unique. A man who, because of his position, is obliged to remain attached to “the ceiling”, to see things “from the ceiling's point of view”.

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

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

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

Every segment of time shines, even if it is finite. It takes death, conversion, or interruption for us to understand any fragment of our lives.

It is not enough for the past to be past. It must also be truly overcome – it must have lost all causal connection with the present – so that only the spiritual connection remains, which is the connection between image and reality, between figure and fulfilment.

Jewish thought was oriented towards the future. In the history of the past, it sought the image of what did not yet exist.

Teresa of Lisieux will give new splendour to the word. What she says, she does. And her words are oracles. I said “words”; I distinguish them from “phrases”. Teresa's phrases, in truth, are imperfect. Imperfect because of the weakness of men, who have given her a very mediocre language.