Whitney Lebsock

“The most frequent weak points in man are, from time to time, always the same: pride, money, and lust.”
― Fr Gabriele Amorth, An Exorcist Explains the Demonic: The Antics of Satan and His Army of Fallen Angels

“Yes, I do. It’s the right to life; it’s the protection of innocent life. If anything is the linchpin of a moral program, it’s the protection of innocent life. That’s why abortion does have a certain pride of place in the hierarchy [of moral concerns]. They’re all in the picture, but there is a proper ordering. Whatever threatens innocent life takes priority, morally speaking. Yes, I get the fact that people are especially preoccupied with abortion, but [the Church’s position] doesn’t mean we’re shills for the Republican Party. It means we’re trying to bring all of life under the aegis of radical love, but there’s a prioritization.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“One way I try to do it is to observe that in any other area of life that people take seriously, they naturally assume there’s legitimacy to objective values. Take a golf swing. Nobody would seriously say, “Just go swing it any way you want to, because who am I to tell you what to do?” Well, how would that work out? Horrifically. We know that in something like golf, you start to internalize objective ideals, and in that process, you become freer and freer. You become a freer player of golf, and you can actually do what you want to do. That’s true of anything—language, music, politics, anything. You begin to internalize objective values in such a way that they now become the ground for your freedom, and not the enemy of your freedom. The binary option we have to get past is “my freedom versus your oppression.” What we need to say is, No, no, the objectivity of the moral good enables your freedom, opens freedom up. Once you get that, you see the Church is not the enemy of your flourishing, but the condition for it.”
― Robert E. Barron, To Light a Fire on the Earth: Proclaiming the Gospel in a Secular Age

“If you want to see what Christ looks like, look at those who participate in him in the most dramatic way,” 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