From Christendom to Apostolic Mission Quotes

“There is an unfortunate by-product that comes from marginalizing God: one wakes to find the universe a boring place. God is the one supremely interesting personality, and a world that banishes him also banishes its only genuine source of animation and interest. This explains something of the massive boredom of the modern age. Because we have no engrossing and abiding interest that engages the whole of our minds and personalities, we need to be constantly titillated and distracted. When seen as reflections of the infinite creativity of God swept up in a momentous drama, all things, even the least significant, hold interest. When God is absent, nothing — not art nor politics nor sports nor sex nor the pursuit of money nor even “the most interesting man in the world” — can keep boredom and disillusion at bay for long.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“We came to think that we were superior to our ancestors, not just in rapidity of transportation or information flow, but in moral probity and wisdom about non-technological aspects of life — and this by the simple fact of being born later.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“This very brief time that we are given to live on earth is thus at once both immensely significant and of little importance: unimportant in itself and significant in what it prepares us for. Christians hold matters of this world lightly and at the same time take them very seriously. They are not impressed by the scramble for money, fame, power, and pleasure so characteristic of our fallen race, knowing that such things have no ultimate significance. But they realize that in dealing with even the smallest details of life, they are working out an eternal destiny. They fight the darkness within themselves and embrace the life of love laid out for them by Christ, delighting in conforming their wills to his, knowing that obedience to him does not limit them or impede their self-development but rather brings them to their true selves, to freedom and fulfillment.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“What is necessary here is a conversion of mind to a sacramental vision of the world. Not just at Mass, but all the time, we are living in a sacramental reality: we inhabit both a visible and an invisible world; we make our way through an intermingling of the seen and unseen such that what happens on the visible plane has implications in the vast invisible world. Our bodies are sacramental, a mingling of the spiritual and the material; the Catholic understanding of what and how we eat, what we do sexually, how we treat those who are sick or dead, are pointers toward the way the whole world works. Plunging a person into water really can, under the right circumstances, transfer an immortal soul from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. We walk in the presence of powerful invisible angelic beings not only when we might happen to think about them, but all the time. Touching another person involves two beings in spiritually meaningful contact. The world is an enchanted and dangerous and momentous place in which we are working out an incomprehensibly high destiny that transcends space and time. This view of the world is consonant with what natural sciences have discovered, but also goes beyond it. Once the realm beyond the natural world is seen and embraced, a whole set of doctrines becomes easier to understand and believe. What is true of the Eucharist and the sacraments is true of much of Catholic practice in other areas, as well. Catholic teaching on sex makes sense when embedded in a Catholic vision; it makes little sense under the subjectivist naturalist default vision of the current culture and can even appear morally bad. Obligations to attend Mass, duties of faithfulness in a difficult marriage or of obedience to incompetent superiors, the meaning of suffering, the very existence of a saving doctrine that needs to be believed, come alive to the understanding only when they are perceived as the natural outworking of a cosmic reality. This means that the exposition of the Gospel, in preaching and teaching and liturgy and architecture and the arts, needs to accent this conversion of mind.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“A sympathetic observer of the state of the French church around the year 1810 or 1815 would have seen nothing but wreckage and, given simple sociological data, would have predicted vocational disaster into the future with everything that implies. What happened was something different. In 1808 there were 12,300 religious sisters in France. In 1878 there were 135,000. In 1830 there were some 3,000 priests of all kinds serving the French Church. In 1878 there were around 30,000, a ten-fold increase in sixty years, and their median age in 1878 was significantly younger than it had been sixty years earlier. Whatever might be said of the Church’s fortunes at that time, it was evident that it wasn’t about to disappear. All of this was a great surprise to the Church’s enemies, especially to those who were developing the discipline of sociology as a kind of replacement for theology and who were happily predicting, under its methodology, the demise of the Church.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“In 1974, Archbishop Fulton Sheen said in a conference, “We are at the end of Christendom. Not of Christianity, not of the Church, but of Christendom. Now what is meant by Christendom? Christendom is economic, political, social life as inspired by Christian principles. That is ending — we’ve seen it die.” But he went on to say, “These are great and wonderful days in which to be alive. … It is not a gloomy picture — it is a picture of the Church in the midst of increasing opposition from the world. And therefore live your lives in the full consciousness of this hour of testing, and rally close to the heart of Christ.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“Again, to call such a society as this ‘Christian’ does not mean that the majority of its members were serious or educated Christians; in fact, there has probably never existed a human society for which that was the case. There is a reason why all the saints of Christendom have so constantly and urgently spoken out against the lack of genuine faith of their times.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“Faith gives us, from God himself, the overall narrative for the human race: who we are, who God is, what his purposes towards us are, how we have gotten into our current state, what God is doing about it, what is coming in the future, and therefore, how we should live. Reason keeps that narrative from wandering into superstition or bigotry or incoherency, such that it can provide a good and true basis for handling life.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“Faith gives us, from God himself, the overall narrative for the human race: who we are, who God is, what his purposes towards us are, how we have gotten into our current state, what God is doing about it, what it coming in the future, and therefore, how we should live. Reason keeps that narrative from wandering into superstition or bigotry or incoherency, such that it can provide a good and true basis for handling life.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“It is rather to note that for the majority, arguments are not the main basis of action. When a given way of thinking or acting is part of an overall imaginative vision, it will be assumed as self-evident. Arguments, such as they are, will be marshaled to support the previously held vision, and challenges to it will tend either to be ignored or ridiculed and shouted down.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“But for the majority the ruling vision is never examined, because it is not known to exist. It is not so much something that is seen as something /through which/ everything is seen. It appears, if at all, as simply self-evident.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“But for the majority the ruling vision is never examined, because it is not known to exist. It is not much something that is seen as something /through which/ everything is seen. It appears, if at all, as simply self-evident.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“Much of what it means to be converted in mind is to receive and embrace the Christian imaginative vision of the cosmos: to see the whole of the world according to the revelation given in Christ, and to act upon that sight with consistency.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“To call such a vision “imaginative” is not to say that it is “make-believe.” It refers rather to the remarkable human capacity to maintain in our minds much that is not immediately in our surroundings. Animals are dominated by time and sense; their world is circumscribed by what is available to their senses at any given moment. But humans are capable of transcending the immediate circumstances of time and place and of carrying a whole world in their minds, reaching back into the past and going forward into the future, embracing other places and realizing even invisible realities. This is why each individual has been called a “microcosm” of the universe, because each of us carries a whole cosmos within us, and we gauge how we are to act depending on the features of that cosmos.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“EVERY HUMAN society possesses with more or less strength a moral and spiritual vision, a set of assumptions and a way of looking at things that is largely taken for granted rather than argued for.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age

“We are dealing with the first culture in history that was once deeply Christian but that by a slow and thorough process been consciously ridding itself of its Christian basis.”
― University of Mary, From Christendom to Apostolic Mission: Pastoral Strategies for an Apostolic Age