Franciscan Quote of the Day

If investments in the banks fail, “Oh, it’s a tragedy.” But if people die of hunger or don’t have food or health, nothing happens. This is our crisis today.

~ Pope Francis, via Bread for the World

Parents are the most fundamental defenders of life; they will die for their children’s sakes. Disrupt the family and you disrupt life, but not death. Death goes on. Our increasingly secular society sanctions abortion and euthanasia and battles to celebrate sterile unions that cannot naturally populate the world. We are in dissolution, so lonely that we are killing ourselves, so earth-bound in our thinking that we throw people away.

~ Elizabeth Scalia,  “If Women Ran the World” via First Things.

As you announce peace with your mouth, make sure that you have greater peace in your hearts, thus no one will be provoked to anger or scandal because of you. Let everyone be drawn to peace and kindness through your peace and gentleness. For we have been called to this: to cure the wounded, to bind up the broken, to recall the erring. Many who seem to us members of the devil will yet be disciples of Christ.

~ St. Francis of Asissi

For the intellectual mind can never behold the depth of God. Only the heart can enter into the incomprehensible mystery of divine love.

~Ilia Delio, The Humility of God: A Franciscan Perspective

We are here to serve each other. Humanity’s grotesque pride and individualism has turned the idea of serving into something negative, when in fact it’s the whole point of all our life and all our relationships. In the end, the only things that truly matter are those things we do for others.

~ Thomas L. McDonald, “In Sickness and in More Sickness”

That is Francis’ formula for peace: You have to come out from behind your defenses and risk embracing what is seemingly repulsive and dangerous. Only then will there be peace, and only love can make it happen. For Francis peace is inseparable from peace of soul, and neither can be achieved without the risk of loving your supposed or real enemies.

~Murray Bodo, O.F.M. — The Way of St. Francis: The Challenge of Franciscan Spirituality for Everyone

I counsel, admonish, and exhort my brothers in the Lord Jesus Christ not to quarrel or argue or judge others when they go about in the world; but let them be meek, peaceful, modest, gentle, and humble, speaking courteously to everyone, as is becoming.

~St. Francis of Assisi, The Later Rule

A genuine delight in people, in life, even in the absurdity of the hopeless challenges overwhelming us: this is one characteristic of the Franciscan spirit.

~ Br. William Short, OFM via Lisa Josephsdatter

Our souls are like wood: the more they imbibe the oil of submission and humility the more they are set on fire with divine love.

~St. Clare of Montefalco

It was my first introduction to the application of the Gospel to something besides myself. The first understanding that as a collective group, we’re complicit in people’s sufferings because of the decisions that our government’s making with our approval, our blessing almost, even if we don’t know it. We really sort of have to be more responsible to know what the government’s doing in our name.

~Dennis Apel in an interview with Heather King posted on her blog Shirt of Flame

And the Spirit of the Risen Christ drove out fear from the Apostles’ hearts and impelled them to leave the Upper Room in order to spread the Gospel. Let us too have greater courage in witnessing to our faith in the Risen Christ! We must not be afraid of being Christian and living as Christians! We must have this courage to go and proclaim the Risen Christ, for he is our peace, he made peace with his love, with his forgiveness, with his Blood and with his mercy.

~Pope Francis, Regina Caeli, Divine Mercy Sunday, 7 April 2013

Most certainly, it is easier to believe now that the sun warms us, and we know that buds will appear on the sycamore trees in the wasteland across from the Catholic Worker office, that life will spring out of the dull clods of that littered park across the way. There are wars and rumors of war, poverty and plague, hunger and pain. Still, the sap is rising, again there is the resurrection of spring, God’s continuing promise to us that He is with us always, with His comfort and joy, if we will only ask.

~Dorothy Day, “The Mystery of the Poor”

Words which do not give the light of Christ increase the darkness.

~Mother Teresa via OH……….. FRANCESCO

Franciscans are determined to avoid whatever diminishes relationships and to engage in whatever would enhance unity.

~ Lester Bach, OFM Cap, The Franciscan Journey: Embracing the Franciscan Vision

Secular Franciscans develop love in full measure so that it becomes their natural reaction to life and people and problems and celebrations. The SFO Rule is clear on this when it states: … In these fraternities the brothers and sisters, led by the Spirit, strive for perfect charity in their own secular state (SFO Rule – #2).

~ Lester Bach, OFM Cap, The Franciscan Journey: Embracing the Franciscan Vision

This approach to ministry is one that places relationship and community above one’s personal faith journey and conversion. In fact, one’s own conversion, if indicative of a Franciscan hue, should lead toward humanity and away from only one’s self. It is for precisely this reason that Francis insisted that the friars were to remain mendicants and not monks, to live as if the whole world were a cloister and not be limited to the four walls of private religious life.

~Francis of Assisi and the Future of Faith by Daniel Horan OFM

I cannot help but wonder what remains behind when Christianity’s power over culture recedes? How long can our gentler ethical prejudices [toward the vulnerable—the diseased, disabled, or derelict among us], many of which seem to be melting away with fair rapidity, persist once the faith that gave them their rationale and meaning has withered away? Love endures all things perhaps, as the apostle says, and is eternal; but as a cultural reality, even love requires a reason for its preeminence among virtues. And the mere habit of solicitude for others will not necessarily long survive when that reason is no longer found. If . . . the human as we understand it is the positive intervention of Christianity, might it not be the case that a culture that has become truly post-Christian will also, ultimately, become posthuman?

~David Bentley Hart via Maureen Mullarkey | A First Things Blog

To dare to believe that we are truly loved, not for anything we have accomplished, earned, produced, learned, achieved, or sacrificed for, but simply for existing is a reality that can hardly be borne. We want that love more than anything; we search for that love all our lives. Yet we’re somehow not able, not equipped to see it, perhaps, except by prolonged, sustained suffering—and uniting our suffering to Christ’s. Thérèse did seem to be able to experience herself as fully loved—because she loved so much herself—and in the end that was perhaps her greatest gift: to God, to us.

~Heather King, Shirt of Flame: A Year with Saint Therese of Lisieux

America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It has sown violence and discord at the heart of the most intimate human relationships.

It has aggravated the derogation of the father’s role in an increasingly fatherless society. It has portrayed the greatest of gifts—a child—as a competitor, an intrusion, and an inconvenience. It has nominally accorded mothers unfettered domination over the independent lives of their physically dependent sons and daughters.

And, in granting this unconscionable power, it has exposed many women to unjust and selfish demands from their husbands or other sexual partners.

Human rights are not a privilege conferred by government. They are every human being’s entitlement by virtue of his humanity. The right to life does not depend, and must not be declared to be contingent, on the pleasure of anyone else, not even a parent or a sovereign.

~Mother Teresa’s Letter to the US Supreme Court on Roe v. Wade (1994) via Shameless Popery: Why March for Life?.

So the divine love is sacrificial love. Love does not mean to have and to own and to possess. It means to be had and to be owned and to be possessed. It is not a circle circumscribed by self, it is arms outstretched to embrace all humanity within its grasp.

~Archbishop Fulton Sheen via Little Portion Hermitage