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“One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as "concupiscence," but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term "addiction." When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.”
― Robert Barron

“Meek - free from the addiction to ordinary power - you can become a conduit of true divine power to the world.”
― Robert Barron

“Who had the biggest army in the ancient world? Caesar Augustus in Rome, and that is precisely how he was able to dominate that world. Nevertheless, his army is nothing compared to this angelic stratias that has lined up behind the new emperor. Remember Isaiah's prophesy that Yahweh would one day bare his mighty arm before all the nations. N.T. Wright has magnificently observed that the prophecy finds its fulfillment in the tiny arm of the baby Jesus coming out of his manger-crib.”
― Robert Barron

“Adam, we hear, walked in easy fellowship with God in the cool of the evening and spoke to him as to a friend. This ordering of Adam to God meant that our first parent was effortlessly caught up in adoration. The term "adoration" comes from the Latin ado ratio, which in turn is derived from "ad ora" (to the mouth). To adore, therefore, is to be mouth to mouth with God, properly aligned to the divine source, breathing in God's life. When one is in the stance of adoration, the whole of one's life - mind, will, emotions, imagination, sexuality - becomes ordered and harmonized, much as the elements of a rose window arrange themselves musically around a central point.”
― Robert Barron

“Love actually is a great act of the will. It's when I say, "I desire your good, not for my sake but for yours". To love is to break out of the black hole of the ego and say, "My life is about you".”
― Bishop Robert Barron

“In the, Dei Verbum, there is a great statement of Vatican II: The bible is the word of god but in the words of men.”
― Robert Barron

“The twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner commented that “Godâ€� is the last sound we should make before falling silent, and Saint Augustine, long ago, said, “si comprehendis, non est Deusâ€� (if you understand, that isn’t God). All of this formal theologizing is but commentary on that elusive and confounding voice from the burning bush: “I am who am.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“Joseph Ratzinger commented that the opening line of the Nicene Creed, Credo in unum Deum (I believe in one God), is a subversive statement because it automatically rules out any rival claimant to ultimate concern. To say that one accepts only the God of Israel and Jesus Christ is to say that one rejects as ultimate any human being, any culture, any political party, any artistic form, or any set of ideas.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“Essential to the Catholic mind is what I would characterize as a keen sense of the prolongation of the Incarnation throughout space and time, an extension that is made possible through the mystery of the church.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“So the Eucharist -- in its sumptuous liturgical setting, surrounded by music, art, the word of God, and the prayer of the community -- does more than sustain the divine life in us. It delights us, as a foretaste of the heavenly banquet.”
― Robert Barron, Eucharist

“Now Christianity proposes a completely different account of how history comes to a climax and what precisely constitutes the new order of the ages—which helps to explain why so many of modernity’s avatars, from Diderot to Christopher Hitchens, have specially targeted Christianity. On the Christian reading, history reached its highpoint when a young first-century Jewish rabbi, having been put to death on a brutal Roman instrument of torture, was raised from the dead through the power of the God of Israel. The state-sponsored murder of Jesus, who had dared to speak and act in the name of Israel’s God, represented the world’s resistance to the Creator. It was the moment when cruelty, hatred, violence, and corruption—symbolized in the Bible as the watery chaos—spent itself on Jesus. The resurrection, therefore, showed forth the victory of the divine love over those dark powers. St. Paul can say, “I am certain that neither death nor life, neither angels nor principalities, nor any other creature can separate us from the love of God,â€� precisely because he lived on the far side of the resurrection.”
― Robert Barron

“Christianity is not a set of private convictions that we cultivate inwardly or whisper among ourselves. It is the message that the whole world needs to hear. We who have heard it must become agents of subversion and transformation.”
― Robert E. Barron, Exploring Catholic Theology: Essays on God, Liturgy, and Evangelization

“It has been suggested that the heart of sin is taking oneself too seriously.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“But the true emperor, Luke insists, is not the one who feeds himself but who is willing to offer his life as food for the other. At the climax of his life, this child, come of age, would say to his friends, "This is my body, which will be given for you' do this in memory of me" (Lk 22:19).”
― Robert Barron

“But the true emperor, Luke is telling us, arrives vulnerable and exposed, because the good life is not about the protection of the ego, but rather about the willingness to become open to the other in love.”
― Robert Barron

“According to the basic narrative of the Old Testament, God’s answer to human dysfunction was the formation of a people after his own heart.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“When a person has fallen in love with God, both his ethical commitments and aesthetical pleasures become focused and satisfying. But when the religious is lost, ethics devolves into, first, a fussy legalism, and then is swallowed up completely by the lust for personal satisfaction.”
― Robert Barron, Seeds of the Word: Finding God in the Culture

“no one in the biblical tradition ever is granted an experience of God without being subsequently sent. Scriptural religion is a religion of mission.”
― Robert E. Barron, Exploring Catholic Theology: Essays on God, Liturgy, and Evangelization

“Thoughtful Christians must battle the myth of the eternal warfare of science and religion. We must continually preach, as John Paul II did, that faith and reason are complementary and compatible paths toward the knowledge of truth. â€� BISHOP BARRON”
― Robert E. Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

“No one saint could ever exhaustively express the infinite holiness of God; and therefore, God makes saints the way he makes plants and animals and stars: exuberantly, effervescently, and with a preference for wild diversity.”
― Bishop Robert Barron

“When at the consecration the priest moves into the mode of first-person quotation, he is not speaking in his own person but in the person of Jesus—and that’s why those words change the elements.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“In the end, we are not Catholics because our leaders are flawless, but because we find the claims of Catholicism both compelling and beautiful. We are Catholics because the Church speaks of the Trinitarian God whose very nature is love; of Jesus the Lord, crucified and risen from the dead; of the Holy Spirit, who inspires the followers of Christ up and down the ages; of the sacraments, which convey the Christ-life to us; and of the saints, who are our friends in the spiritual order. This is the treasure; this is why we stay.”
― Robert Barron, Letter to a Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Crisis

“Jesus turned upside down many of the social conventions of his time and place precisely because he was so concerned to place the instantiation of the Kingdom of God first in the minds of his followers.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“If you want to see what Christ looks like, look at those who participate in him in the most dramatic way,â€� he says. “It’s the Cross, participation in the Cross. It’s conforming to Christ, it’s Christ appearing vividly in our midst.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“The shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe is the most visited religious site in the Christian world, surpassing Lourdes, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and St. Peter’s itself. People still go there by the millions every year in order to commune with La Virgen Morena, many journeying to her over many miles on their knees.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“This Church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people.â€� What the Pope is signaling here is that the Church, as his predecessor Paul VI put it, doesn’t have a mission; it is a mission, for its purpose is to cause the merciful face of Jesus to gaze upon everyone in the world. It is not an exclusive club where only the morally perfect are welcome, but, rather, a home for sinners, which means a home for everybody. And”
― Robert E. Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

“The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments,â€� Ratzinger said, “namely, the saints the Church has produced, and the art which has grown in her womb.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“When our lives revolve around Christ we find order and harmony. And by implication, whenever something other than Christ—money, power, pleasure, honor—fills the center, the soul falls into disharmony. The well-ordered soul begins to wobble and go off-kilter.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“Therefore in this more biblical way of looking at things joy (beatitude) is the consequence and not the enemy of law. What Jesus gives us in the Sermon on the Mount, therefore, is that new law that would discipline our desires, our minds, and our bodies so as to make real happiness possible.”
― Robert E. Barron, Catholicism: A Journey to the Heart of the Faith

“The Emperor Napoleon is said to have confronted Cardinal Consalvi, the secretary of state to Pope Pius VII, saying that he, Napoleon, would destroy the Church—to which the Cardinal deftly responded, “Oh my little man, you think you’re going to succeed in accomplishing what centuries of priests and bishops have tried and failed to do?”
― Robert E. Barron, Letter to a Suffering Church: A Bishop Speaks on the Sexual Abuse Crisis