The team at Joseph Karl Publishing is compiling for you a list of quotes by Servant of God, Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
More quotes on a variety of topics will be added, so please return again and again. Please share what you learn with others. God is at work in you!
On
the Holy Eucharist as Prayer
The Holy Eucharist is our most
powerful prayer.
"The Holy Eucharist is prayer."
"The Holy Eucharist is our most powerful prayer."
"We are so accustomed to praying at the Sacrifice of the Mass, praying when we receive Holy Communion, and praying before the Blessed Sacrament, that we are liable to forget, and what a lapse of memory this would be, that before, long before, we attach prayer to the Eucharist, we should identify the Holy Eucharist as prayer. It is, and not just the indefinite article A prayer, it is THE prayer. In fact, the most powerful source of grace we have on earth."
"The Holy Eucharist is a prayer for surrender to God's will."
"The Holy Eucharist is a prayer for obtaining love."
"The Holy Eucharist is a prayer for intimacy with Jesus Christ."
"The Holy Eucharist is the principle Sacrament. The other six Sacraments are directed to the Eucharist."
"The present Holy Father (at that time, Pope John Paul II) has been luminously clear, that when we speak of the Eucharist as a Sacrament, we should always, and from now on without failing, understand by that statement that the Eucharist is a Sacrament, to mean that it is a three-fold Sacrament. As the Pope tells us, the Eucharist is a sacrifice sacrament, a communion sacrament, and presence sacrament. Keeping always in mind the moment we use the word Sacrament as Catholics, we mean something in the sensibly perceptible order that signifies the conferral of grace and that produces, that's the Catholic verb, produces, the grace it signifies."
"The Mass gives grace just because the Mass is offered."
"Ask our Lord to inspire all priests to daily offer the Sacrifice of the Mass. If a Mass is not offered, only God knows how many... millions are deprived of the grace they would have received had the Mass been offered."
"The most potent prayer before God is the prayer of action."
"Everyone receives grace from every Mass offered throughout the world."
"What is the Real Presence? Who is the Real Presence? Jesus Christ. He is present among us, so we may become more intimate with Him."
"Our principle duty as Christians is to prepare others to live holy lives in today's unholy world."
"The most fundamental need we have in our lives is to beg God for His forgiveness."
"The price of heaven is carrying the cross."
"Never question God's dealings with you. Respect God's work in your soul with silence."
Sermon on Abortion
"If we are going to obtain the grace that a homicidal world needs to be converted, we must ourselves live lives of virtue. No ordinary virtue will do. It must be heroic virtue. Could you be more specific? Sure. What virtue do we especially have to practice? The virtue of chastity."
"The fifth commandment is being so widely ignored and openly denied. Innocent children are being murdered, and the laws of once civilized nations like our own legalize murder. Why? The main single reason is because unchaste people are cruel people. Only chaste people are loving people."
"If we want to merit the grace for a world gone mad, the demonic hatred of innocent children, we ourselves must, beginning with the speaker, we must look into our hearts and ask ourselves, each one, in the depths of our consciences, 'How chaste is my life?'"
"God has allowed the plague of abortion, I hope you will believe me, because of our sins, and don't change the phenomenal adjective, because of OUR sins, yours and mine."
"If we are going to obtain the grace for a world that has become intoxicated with pride and intoxicated with lust, we ourselves must live lives of above average sanctity. By living lives of prayer as we have never done before, by receiving the Sacraments of Confession and Holy Eucharist, frequently, and with resounding emphasis, living lives of honest to God chastity."
Conference
on the Gospel of Life, Talk 2, Part 1
"The Divine attribute of justice, God's justice, is never disobeyed without consequences. And let's be clear: as our faith teaches us, the consequence of every sin is always two-fold. One effect is what we call guilt. Guilt, theologically speaking, has nothing to do with an emotional state of mind. The essence of guilt as the Catholic Church understands it, the essence of guilt is a loss of grace."
"Consequently, if every sin has consequences, murder surely does. The first consequence therefore is the loss of grace. And our faith teaches us every deliberate homicide is a mortal sin and deprives the person who takes the human life of another person, deprives the murderer of his or her supernatural life. Abortion therefore is always, comma, always, comma, always a mortal sin."
"However, there is a second effect where we sin, and that is what we call penalty. Penalty is the debt of suffering which is due to everyone who commits sin. Sin and pain go together as cause and effect. All pain, all suffering, is always due to sin. Not necessarily, as we also believe, the sin of the one who suffers. There is such a thing as others suffering for my sin, and my suffering for their sin."
"The Divine Justice, therefore, has not changed. And when we say justice, let's be sure we are clear. The divine justice applies both to our good actions and to our sinful actions. God is just in rewarding our good actions, always."
"And in the same way, just as God's justice removes grace from the sinner in the measure of the sin committed, God's justice always sends suffering and pain as a consequence of sin, so conversely, for the practice of virtue, God always rewards in strict justice every good action we perform with doing what? with giving us grace."
"Every time we perform a good action we increase the grace in our souls. That's the Divine Justice. And, correspondingly, every good action we perform, deserves from God, and He always rewards, with happiness."
"The happiest people on earth, hear it, are the holiest people. The most unhappy are the most sinful."
"And by now the world has invented an ocean of ways of substituting, or trying to substitute, for the absence of happiness in sinners."
Conference on the Gospel of Life, Talk 2, Part 2
“What abortion is telling us is to wake up to the sacredness of human life. It must be very, very sacred if God became man to assume human life. And God, for all eternity, has a human life... God assumed human life at the incarnation.”
“What is the underlying philosophy behind the growing practice of killing the incurably ill and the dying. Behind this practice is the philosophy which ignores or denies the value of suffering.”
“Among the truths of our faith, there is none more precious, more important, than what Christ tells us is the precious, priceless value of suffering.
“A Christian never runs away from the cross, which is just the opposite of the philosophy of this world.”
“So killing the incurably ill or the dying, and that can be as you know, the killing of one’s self, or the killing of others. “
“We know that suffering is not something to be rejected. It is rather something which God wants us to accept. Every human being suffers.”
“The happiest people on earth are those who do not run away from suffering.”
“The greatest joy on earth is to suffer for the one you love, especially for the God whom I love so deeply. And I show Him how much I love Him by following His example. He suffered and died out of love for me, and that is not a pious statement; it’s real.”
“What is a more fundamental error underlying what is called euthanasia? A more fundamental error is the blasphemous attitude which these people think that they can control life and death by taking the decisions into their own hands. Only God has a right to determine who will be conceived and born.”
“There is no real overpopulation problem. No doubt, the poor countries generally have a higher rate of population growth. In fact, they seem to have a higher rate of population. This is difficult to sustain, that is, a population growth, in the context of low economic and social development. And hear it, and weep: the United States is a world leader in keeping poor countries poor.”
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Source: Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J. Archives
Quotes used with permission.
