Quotes about Christianity

If human beings had really tried to invent a god, we would never have invented the God of Christianity. He's just too terrifying. Our God is all-powerful, all-knowing, all-holy, and omnipresent. There's no place to run and hide from Him, no place where we might secretly indulge a favorite vice. We can't even retreat into the dark corners of our minds to fantasize about that vice without God knowing it right away.

What the first Christians knew as the "New Testament" was not a book, but the Eucharist. In a cultic setting, at a solemn sacrificial banquet, Jesus made an offering of his "body" and "blood." He used traditional sacrificial language. He spoke of the action as his memorial. He told those who attended to repeat the action they had witnessed: "Do this in remembrance of me" (Luke 22:19).

The Catholic life—the great Christian tradition—is a tremendous inheritance from two millennia of saints in many lands and circumstances.

Driven by petty ambition, we serve only ourselves. St. Josemaria put it well: "Those who are 'ambitious,' with small, personal, miserable ambitions, cannot understand that the friends of God should seek to achieve something through a spirit of service and without such'ambition.' " We should never confuse Christian humility and modesty with a will to underachieve.

Thus, far from thinking that works produced by man's own talent and energy are in opposition to God's power, and that the rational creature exists as a kind of rival to the Creator, Christians are convinced that the triumphs of the human race are a sign of God's grace and the flowering of His own mysterious design.

This promise of resurrection is our hope. It is that on which we stake our life. It is what enables us, as Christians, to face death with courage and joy.

Isn't it true," St. Josemaria once said, "that you have seen the need to become a soul of prayer, to reach an intimacy with God that leads to divinization? Such is the Christian faith as always understood by souls of prayer." And as if to prove the "always" part, he goes on to quote St. Clement of Alexandria, who wrote around the year 203 A.D.: "A man becomes God, because he loves whatever God loves.

In communion with Christ, you and I are members of his body, his Church, together with our fellow Christians

Spreading the love of Jesus Christ is a duty of all Christians. We can't keep our faith unless we give it away.

The second-century Letter to Diognetus put it beautifully: "As the soul is in the body, so Christians are in the world. The soul is dispersed through all the members of the body, and Christians are scattered through all the cities of the world…. The invisible soul is guarded by the visible body, and Christians are known indeed to be in the world, but their godliness remains invisible.

Opus Dei's authority extends only to the personal spiritual formation of its members.

Nevertheless, secularity, like any good thing, can be overdone. In our zeal to laicize our piety, we shouldn't leave people guessing whether we're Christians. That would be every bit as unnatural as wearing a monk's habit over one's work clothes. Our secularity should never lapse into secularism.