Quotes about Responsibility

But the false serpent persuaded Adam that he must still do something to become like God: he must achieve that likeness by deciding and acting for himself...He wanted instead to unravel the mystery of his being for himself, to make himself what God had already made him. That was the Fall of man.

Nothing can be more cruel than that leniency which abandons others to their sin.

You are called into the community of faith; the call was not meant for you alone. You carry your cross, you struggle, and you pray in the community of faith, the community of those who are called.

Cheap grace is the mortal enemy of the church.

But it is part of the discipline of humility that we must not spare our hand where it can perform a service and that we do not assume that our schedule is our own to manage, but allow it it to be arranged by God.

In the gospels the very first step a man must take is an act which radically affects his whole existence.

The desire we so often hear expressed today for "episcopal figures," "priestly men," "authoritative personalities" springs frequently enough from a spiritually sick need for the admiration of men, for the establishment of visible human authority, because the genuine authority of service appears to be so unimpressive.

If we would answer the question of the existence of the Evil then we would not be sinners, we could make something else responsible.

Talk about one's own guilt can be just as far from the Word of God as talk about one's innocence.

The wish to have everything by one's own power is false pride. Even what one owes to others belongs nevertheless to oneself and is a piece of one's own life, and the desire to calculate what one has 'earned' on one's own and what one owes to others is surely not Christian and is a futile undertaking besides. With what one is in oneself and what one receives, a person is a whole.

I've just come across this in the Imitation of Christ: Custodi diligenter cellam tuam, et custodiet te ('Take good care of your cell, and it will take care of you'). — May God keep us in faith.

As far as infant baptism is concerned, it must be insisted that the sacrament should be administered only where there is a firm faith present which remembers Christ's deed of salvation wrought for us once and for all. That can only happen in a living Christian community. To baptize infants without a Church is not only an abuse of the sacrament, it betokens a disgusting frivolity in dealing with the souls of the children themselves. For baptism can never be repeated.