The Day is Now Far Spent Quotes

“In our materialistic civilization, man thinks almost exclusively of his own narrow interests. He sees God as the one who ought to provide him with what consumption does not give him. God is utilized to satisfy selfish demands. If he does not answer prayer, they abandon him. Some even go so far as to blaspheme his holy name. The religion that ought to connect heaven and earth then runs the risk of becoming a purely narcissistic space.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Man’s dignity is an echo of God’s transcendence. But if we no longer tremble with a joyful, reverential fear before the greatness of God, how could man be for us a mystery worthy of respect? He no longer has this divine nobility. He becomes a piece of merchandise, a laboratory specimen. Without the sense of the adoration of God, human relations become tinged with vulgarity and aggressiveness. The more deference we show to God at the altar, the more tactful and courteous we will be toward our brethren.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Man’s dignity is an echo of God’s transcendence. But if we no longer tremble with a joyful, reverential fear before the greatness of God, how could man be for us a mystery worthy of respect? He no longer has this divine nobility. He becomes a piece of merchandise, a laboratory specimen.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Refusing to let God enter into all aspects of human life amounts to condemning man to solitude. He is no longer anything but an isolated individual, without origin or destiny. He finds himself condemned to wander through the world like a nomadic barbarian, without knowing that he is the son and heir of a Father who created him through love and calls him to share his eternal happiness. It is a profound error to think that God came to limit and frustrate our freedom. On the contrary, God comes to free us from solitude and to give meaning to our freedom. Modern man has made himself the prisoner of reason that is so autonomous that it has become solitary and autistic.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“In large sectors of the Church, we have lost the sense of God’s objectivity. Each individual starts from his subjective experience and creates for himself a religion that suits him.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“and to each Christian they will say, as once to Francis of Assisi: “Go and repair my Church!” Go, repair by your faith, by your hope and your charity. Go and repair by your prayer and your fidelity. Thanks to you, my Church will again become my house.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“I think that men need to be astonished in order to adore, to praise, to thank this God who is so good and so great. Wisdom begins with wonder, Socrates said. The inability to wonder is the sign of a civilization that is dying.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“T. S. Eliot, escribió tres versos que dicen más que libros enteros: “En un mundo de fugitivos, el que tome la dirección contraria pasará por desertor”.”
― Robert Sarah, Se hace tarde y anochece

“Simplicity, confidence, self-abandonment in God’s hands: that is our path to God. Christian life is a conspiracy of charity.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“True freedom lies in the battle to agree with the Father’s will and to correspond to it.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day is Now Far Spent

“Un sacerdote es un buen pastor. No está ahí para dedicarse prioritariamente a la justicia social, la democracia, la ecología o los derechos humanos. Estas derivas lo convierten en un experto en ámbitos muy alejados de la identidad sacerdotal querida por Cristo.”
― Robert Sarah, Se hace tarde y anochece

“¡Hasta ese extremo nos ama Dios! Consiente en confiar su cuerpo eucarístico a las manos sacrílegas de sacerdotes miserables. Si pensáis que vuestros sacerdotes y vuestros obispos no son santos, sedlo vosotros por ellos. Haced penitencia, ayunad en reparación de sus faltas y de su cobardía. Solo así podremos llevar sobre nosotros la carga de los otros.”
― Cardenal Robert Sarah, Se hace tarde y anochece

“La Iglesia no se reforma con la división y el odio. La Iglesia se reforma comenzando por cambiar nosotros mismos. No dudemos, cada uno desde nuestro sitio, en denunciar el pecado, empezando por el nuestro.”
― Cardenal Robert Sarah, Se hace tarde y anochece

“He revealed to us the fact that the true priest offers himself as a sacrifice. To be a priest is to enter ontologically into this offering of self to the Father for the Church that Jesus exemplified throughout his life.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Dear young Christians, if it is permissible for an old man, like Saint John was, to speak to you directly, then I too exhort you, and I tell you: you have overcome the Evil One! Fight any law against nature that they try to impose on you, oppose any law against life, against the family. Be one of those who take the opposite direction! For us Christians, the opposite direction is not a place; it is a Person, it is Jesus Christ, our Friend and our Redeemer.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“No! The world that should not be loved is another world, namely, the world as it has become under the dominion of Satan and of sin. The world of ideologies that deny human nature and destroy the family.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Priests in particular ought to carry them in their heart when they climb the steps to the altar. They must remember that at the altar they are facing God. At Mass, the priest is not a professor who gives a lecture while using the altar as a podium centered on the microphone instead of the Cross. The altar is the sacred threshold par excellence, the place of the face-to-face encounter with God.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“For the Church’s mission is a mission of love, and love does not dominate. Love is there to serve and to die, so that man might have life, and have it abundantly. John Paul II was right when he used to say that we are only just starting to evangelize.”
― Robert Cardinal Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Faith is therefore a Yes to God. It requires a person to leave his gods”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Christian lay people should organize themselves so that their concrete everyday life does not separate them from God and allows them to act in a way that is truly consistent with their faith. This implies rethinking all social and professional relations, the ways in which we relax, learn, stay informed, and educate our children. We cannot leave these things up to a world that is founded on atheism. Christian prudence commands us to discover the means of a personal, familial, and social life that is organized according to Christ.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Those who have been martyred by Islamism proclaim the “power of powerlessness” in confronting violence. I am thinking of all those brothers and sisters in Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Nigeria, and Sudan. They are models for us who do not experience bloody persecution. They are also a reproach for all our compromises with the power of lying. They question our middle-class Christianity, which proceeds from one compromise to the next so as to avoid any trouble. They tell us with blinding clarity: if Christianity makes its peace with the decadence of the West, the reason is because Christians are not faithful to the essence of their faith. Their faces are the true light for the Church of our time. Their example is truly the foundation of our hope. They are the face of Christ today.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“At the root of the collapse of the West there is a cultural identity crisis. The West no longer knows who it is, because it no longer knows and does not want to know who made it, who established it as it was and as it is. Many countries today do not know their history. This self-suffocation naturally leads to a decadence that paves the way for new barbarian civilizations. I am certain of it: the paganization of the West will paganize the whole world, and the collapse of the West will cause a general cataclysm, a complete cultural, demographic, and religious upheaval.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Living in a present moment that we wish could be endless manifests a rejection of the things of eternity. The present becomes superabundant, and God—invisible. Man seeks more and more to escape into alternate realities. I am struck by all the persons who spend endless time with their mobile telephone, absorbed by images, lights, ghosts. The eternal present is an eternal illusion, a little prison cell. A mobile phone constantly transports us outside of ourselves; it cuts us off from any interior life. It gives us the sense of always traveling across continents, allowing us to be in contact with everybody. In reality, it empties us of our interior life and puts us down in the world of ephemeral things. A mobile phone makes us lose real contact; it projects us toward what is far-off and inaccessible. It gives us the impression of generating space and time, of being gods capable of communicating without being stopped by any obstacle. These insane communication devices steal silence, destroy the richness of solitude, and trample on intimacy. It often happens that they snatch us away from our loving life with God to expose us to the periphery, to what is external to us in the midst of the world.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“What an astonishing paradox: at a time when most societies want to abolish the death penalty for murderers, they reinstate it for innocent, vulnerable people, from the child in the womb to the sick or elderly person or even those who are tired of living”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Today, globalization is contrary to the divine plan. It tends to make humanity uniform. Globalization means cutting man off from his roots, from his religion, from his culture, history, customs, and ancestors. He becomes stateless, without a country, without a land. He is at home everywhere and nowhere. Nevertheless, man’s wealth is the land that saw his birth and growth. He draws incalculable resources from that particular geographical space. The earth cannot be an ocean without boundaries. This planet could become a nightmare.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“What will our world look like in a century? Abortion, the commercialization of the body, sexual excesses, gender theory, the disintegration of marriage, and euthanasia are the many fronts of one and the same battle with the Western elite that knows only three principles: money, power, and pleasure. These people dance on the cadavers of hundreds of thousands of fragile human beings whom they have deliberately sacrificed in order to keep their dominance.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“Whoever defends God defends the child and his right to be born of a father and a mother. Without that, there is no longer any clear filiation. The latter disappears on the altar of politically correct thinking that claims to fight discrimination against homosexuals who want to have a child. Who, then, is leading the march toward the abyss in which children will never be able to know their origins? Born of the process of surrogate gestation, they will bear for their whole lives the burden of an anonymous birth. This system threatens to muddle the very notion of filiation and to turn children into perpetually displaced persons. How can anyone deny a child the right to know and to love his biological father and mother? Man must reflect before the consequences are irreversible. Laws that promote such practices are profoundly unjust. We will end up with incredible inequalities in which humanity will be divided in two: people who know their parents and those who are deprived of that joy, the perpetual orphans.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“We study theology while making God a mere rational hypothesis. We read Scripture as a profane book and not as God’s inspired Word. We organize the liturgy as a spectacle and not as the mystical renewal of the sacrifice of the Cross. We have come to the point where priests and consecrated religious live in a way that is sheer worldliness. Soon Christians themselves will live “as though God did not exist”.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“In large sectors of the Church, we have lost the sense of God’s objectivity. Each individual starts from his subjective experience and creates for himself a religion that suits him. What a shame! Each one tries to construct his Church to fit himself according to his own plan. But this sort of business interests nobody.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent

“La verdad y la justicia han de estar por encima de mi comodidad e incolumidad física, de otro modo mi propia vida se convierte en mentira.”
― Robert Sarah, Se hace tarde y anochece