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“Hence we should all make St. Augustine's prayer our own: "Lord, here cut, here burn and spare me not, but spare me in eternity!”
― Alphonsus Maria de Liguori, Uniformity with God's Will & The Practice of the Love of Jesus Christ

“They who live in prosperity and have no experience of adversity know nothing of the state of their souls. In the first place, tribulation opens the eyes which prosperity had kept shut. St. Paul remained blind after Jesus Christ appeared to him and during his blindness he perceived the errors in which he lived. During his imprisonment in Babylon, King Manasseh had recourse to God, was convinced of the malice of his sins, and did penance for them. And after that he was in distress. He prayed to the Lord his God and did penance exceedingly before the God of his fathers. The Prodigal, when he found himself under the necessity of feeding swine and afflicted with hunger. exclaimed: "I will arise and go to my father.”
― St Alphonsus Liguori

“Scripture is a record of the same story, told again and again, in different ways but always with the same theme, for more than three thousand years. God loves man. Man betrays God. Then God calls man back to his friendship. Sometimes that call involves some very painful suffering, and for good reason. God respects our freedom. But he will not interfere with our choices or their consequences, no matter how unpleasant. As a result, the struggle in the human heart between good and evil-- a struggle that seems burned into our chromosomes-- projects itself onto the world, to ennoble or deform it. The beauty and the barbarism we inflict on one another leave their mark on creation.”
― Archbishop Charles J. Chaput

“History without tradition has produced a historicism that relativized the development of Christian doctrine in such a way as to make the distinction between authentic growth and cancerous aberration seem completely arbitrary... Tradition is the living faith of the dead. Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living.”
― Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition 1: The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition 100-600