“Hypocrisy is not about failing to live up to our beliefs and values; there can be honesty in failure. Hypocrisy is about pretending to hold beliefs and values which in truth we do not believe; it's a lie. As long as our failures have power to challenge us and cause us to pause and re-evaluate and recommit to our God we are faithful and true. It’s when they lose that power that we're in trouble”.
Fr John Cummins, My Life in Your Hands, From Homily for 22nd Sunday of Ordinary Time.
‘To be human, our response to God by faith must be free, and... therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act. God calls us to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently we are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced. . . This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus. Indeed, Christ invited people to faith and conversion, but never coerced them. For he bore witness to the truth but refused to use force to impose it on those who spoke against it. His kingdom... grows by the love with which Christ, lifted up on the cross, draws men to himself."
Catechism of the Catholic Church, 160.
'One of the greatest difficulties is to keep before the audience’s mind the question of Truth. They always think you are recommending Christianity not because it is true, but because it is good. And in the discussion they will at every moment try to escape from the issue ‘True-or False’ into stuff about a good society, or morals, or incomes of Bishops, or the Spanish inquisition, or France, or Poland—or anything whatever. You have to keep forcing them back, and again back, to the real point. Only thus you will be able to undermine…their belief that a certain amount of ‘religion’ is desirable but one mustn’t carry it too far. One must keep on pointing out that Christianity is a statement which, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The one thing it cannot be is moderately important.
C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock.
‘To become Catholic is not to leave off thinking but to learn how to think’.
G.K Chesterton
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