If you're going to say you're Catholic, you inform your conscience so that you're activities will conform to what God is telling us through the Church. If God is telling you something outside of that, well, the Church will look at that and say: we think it is true or we don't think it is true. The Church might say: that might be true for you but it has no public normative value.

Faith is not a contract. Faith is surrender. If no other relationship in our experience is one of self-surrender, if it's all contractual, people won't know how to believe.

That question in marriage is mutual submission, really - the next verse goes on: "husbands love your wife as Christ loves the Church."

The primary moral judgment on candidates and their positions is to be made in the light of their concern for protecting human life from conception to natural death.

The presumption that the law can tell us what natural institution is supposed to be is a formula for totalitarianism. There's not equality in a family; there never is. And yet for that reason, the family is condemned as patriarchal. The goal of this sort of legislation is about the destruction of the traditional family, not just marriage.

He [God] made us free, and He respects that. It is two different spheres of causality. Interdependent, though. It is not two boxes looking at one another without any kind of direct connections. There are very direct connections. That's why the question of "how are we free if God is omnipotent?" is a real, constant question. Ultimately, God is all powerful, and yet we are free.

Christ didn't leave us a book of instructions; He left us a body, a family - a Church. If it were perfectly clear, there wouldn't be any freedom.