Christians have no business moping around.

The long nights that Pier Giorgio Frassati spent on his knees in front of the Blessed Sacrament had something to do with the long days spent in service of the poor.

The only thing particularly new about the "new atheism" is its nastiness.

Love without truth devolves into sentimentality. Truth without love becomes cold and calculated.

For many people, the big feast of the year is Christmas, but for Christians, the truly great feast is Easter. Without Easter, without the Resurrection, we would not have the gift of salvation. Jesus had to rise from the dead or else he would have just been another failed Messiah and his birth would be a forgotten footnote of history.

In a way, fasting is like the "calming of the monkey mind" effected by the rosary prayer: both are means of stilling the effervescence of relatively superficial preoccupations.

Christ's invitation to the priesthood is an invitation to a way of life that is athletic in its intensity and heroic in its form.