Category: Fulton Sheen

Love is a vicarious principle. A mother suffers for and with her sick child, as a patriot suffers for his country. No wonder that the Son of Man visited this dark, sinful, wretched earth by becoming Man–Christ’s unity with the sinful was due to His love! Love burdens itself with the wants and woes and losses and even the wrongs of others.

Charity is to be measured, not by what one has given away, but by what one has left.

The sun which warms the plant can under other conditions also wither it. The rain which nourishes the flower can under other conditions rot it. The same sun shines upon mud that shines upon wax. It hardens the mud but softens the wax. the difference is not in the sun, but in that upon which it shines. The Divine Life which shines upon a soul that loves Him, softens it into everlasting life; that same Divine Life which shines upon the slothful soul, neglectful of God, hardens it into everlasting death.

The day that man forgets that love is identical with sacrifice, he will ask how a God of love could demand mortification and self-denial.

As the mother knows the needs better than the babe, so the Blessed Mother understands our cries and worries and knows them better than we know ourselves.

A divine trick has been played on the human heart as if a violin teacher gave his pupil an instrument with one string missing. God kept a part of man’s heart in Heaven, so that discontent would drive him back again to Him Who is Eternal Life, All-Knowing Truth and the Abiding Ecstasy of Love.

The humble, simple souls, who are little enough to see the bigness of God in the littleness of a Babe, are therefor the only ones who will every understand the reason of His visitation. He came to this poor earth of ours to carry on an exchange; to say to use as only the Good God could say: ‘you give me your humanity, and I will give you my Divinity; you give me your time, and I will give you My eternity; you give me your broken heart, and I will give you Love; you give me your nothingness, and I will give you My all.

Skeptics always want miracles such as stepping down from the Cross, but never the greater miracle of forgiveness.

Grace does not work like a penny in a slot machine. Grace will move you only when you want it to move you, and only when you let it move you. The supernatural order supposes the freedom of the natural order, but it does not destroy it.

No soul ever fell away from God without giving up prayer. Prayer is that which establishes contact with Divine Power and open the invisible resources of heaven. However dark the way, when we pray, temptation can never master us. The first step downward in the average soul is the giving up of the practice of prayer, the breaking of the circuit with divinity, and the proclamation of one’s own self sufficiency.