Scott Hahn Quotes

Down through the centuries, the Church has carefully preserved, protected, and defended its Marian teachings, because to give them up would be to give up the gospel.

If God welcomed newborns into Israel by means of ritual circumcision for two thousand years, why would He suddenly close the kingdom to babies because they could not understand ritual baptism?

Redemptive suffering is an essential part of our master story. This is what it means for us to bear the image and likeness of God. By the power of the Holy Spirit, our suffering refines our charity, just as our charity transforms our suffering into a living sacrifice that allows God to have his way into our lives.

You wives, be submissive to your husbands, so that some, though they do not obey the

Saint Augustine said that the New Testament is concealed in the Old, and the Old is revealed in the New.

Prayer doesn't change GOD. He is unchanging and unchangeable. But it does change us, making us more like Him, and thus more able to accept His will, whatever it may be. Prayer makes us radiate goodness.

Salvation history reveals sin as literally a broken home.

We are created for the sake of love. When we experience love in family life, it is heavenly, but it is still only an image of the greater glory we hope to behold in heaven.

The Church is the Body of Christ, and as such it is both heavenly and earthly. The Church is the communion of saints, and it includes as members both angels and shepherds - cherubim and seraphim, and you, and me.

Marriage and family life give us constant opportunities to deny ourselves for the sake of others. And yet self-denial is not a mask for self-contempt, but the necessary means for achieving self-mastery; for self-mastery makes possible our self-giving and self-fulfillment. Sin is not wanting too much, but settling for too little. It's settling for self-gratification rather than self-fulfillment.

Our Father GOD is the measure by which we know the shortcomings of earthly dads and earthly clergy; for their vocation is to be His image on earth. GOD allows them to fail so that we might seek perfect fatherhood in Him.

If the end of human law is the promotion of the common good among men, the divine law has for its purpose nothing less than our friendship with God.

At the root of all misery is unfulfilled desire.

If you complain to someone, you assume that it's someone who really cares about you.

I was steeped in the understanding that if 'something is Roman [Catholic], it must be wrong.

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.

The first Christians were eucharistic by nature: they gathered for "the breaking of the bread and the prayers." They were formed by the Word of God, the "apostles' teaching." When they met as a Church, their worship culminated in "fellowship" - the Greek word is koinonia, communion. The Mass was the center of life for the disciples of Jesus, and so it has ever been. Even today, the Mass is where we experience the apostolic teaching and communion, the breaking of the bread and the prayers.

To deny the force of divine judgment, then, is to make God less than God, and to make us less than His children. For every father must discipline His children, and paternal discipline is itself a mercy, a fatherly expression of love.

St. Thomas Aquinas taught that water has been a natural sacrament since the dawn of creation. In the age of nature - from Adam through the patriarchs - water refreshed and cleansed humankind.

28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a base mind and to improper conduct. 29They were filled with all manner of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malignity, they are gossips, 30slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, 31foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless.

As Catholics, we are free to cultivate a rich life of piety, drawing from the treasures of many lands and many ages.

A covenant differs from a contract almost as much as marriage differs from prostitution.

9And it is my prayer that your love may abound more and more, with knowledge and all discernment, 10so that you may approve what is excellent, and may be pure and blameless for the day of Christ, 11filled with the fruits of righteousness which come through Jesus Christ, to the glory and praise of God.

IF THE LORD IS OUR JOY, OUR JOY CANNOT BE TAKEN AWAY. IT CANNOT BE LOST ... JOY HAD COME TO THE WORLD, AND IT HAD COME TO STAY.

We ... sin not because we want what is evil, but because we want what isn't good enough.

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).

Love is something worth suffering for...

Mary is God's masterpiece. Have you ever walked into a museum where an artist was displaying his work? Can you imagine him being offended if you were viewing what he considered to be his masterpiece? Would he resent your looking at that instead of at him? 'Hey, you should be looking at me!' Rather, the artist would receive honor because of the attention you were giving his work. And Mary is God's work, from beginning to end.

Diotrephes and Demetrius 9 I have written something to the Church; but Diot'rephes, who likes to put himself first, does not acknowledge my authority. 10So if I come, I will bring up what he is doing, accusing me falsely with evil words. And not content with that, he refuses himself to welcome the brethren, and also stops those who want to welcome them and puts them out of the Church. 11 Beloved, do not

It would be more accurate to say that human fatherhood is metaphorical, a temporal sign of an eternal reality. God's fatherhood is true fatherhood in the truest sense.

A joyless Catholic is the devil's best tool. A joyful Catholic is God's greatest instrument.

What's wrong with the world?
It's easy to probe the ills of the nation, the Church, and the planet and come up with a grave diagnosis ... But it takes all the strength we can muster to stand at Mass and honestly say, 'I have greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and what I have failed to do ...
Sin is not out there; it's deep inside you and me ... What's wrong with the world? I am, because I sin, and my sins well up from the darkness in my own heart.

But understand this, that in the last days there will come times of stress. 2For men will be lovers of self, lovers of money, proud, arrogant, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, 3inhuman, implacable, slanderers, profligates, fierce, haters of good, 4treacherous, reckless, swollen with conceit, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, 5holding the form of religion but denying the power of it. Avoid such people. 6For among them

The family is the key to Christmas. The family is the key to Christianity. Pope Saint John Paul II noted that everything good - history, humanity, salvation - "passes by way of the family."1 When God came to save us, he made salvation inseparable from family life, manifest in family life. Since the family is the ordinary setting of human life, he came to share it, redeem it, and perfect it. He made it an image and sacrament of a divine mystery. Salvation itself finds meaning only in familial relations.

New Evangelization is the work of the whole Church - lay, ordained, and consecrated. It's about friends, family, and co-workers reaching out to one another and proclaiming the truth of Christ using all available means - conversation, personal witness, media, and the vast array of intellectual and spiritual riches the Church has built up in her two-thousand-year history. It's about simple acts of kindness, simple challenges issued in love, and simple questions asked with sincerity. More fundamentally, the New Evangelization is more for the baptized than the unbaptized. It's for those who've been inadequately catechized but all too adequately secularized, and it's for those who've been de-Christianized in the very process of being sacramentalized.

[God] disciplines us for our good, that we may share His holiness.

If we do not fill our mind with prayer, it will fill itself with anxieties, worries, temptations, resentments, and unwelcome memories.

The family is the key of Christmas.

Only when we cease to rely on our own strength can we discover that God's strength is always there for us.

People who give a shit are sexy.

To go to Mass is to go to Heaven.