"[Christ’s] created human nature is the indispensable and permanent gateway through which everything created must pass if it is to find the perfection of its eternal validity before God…"

"What was striking in [Pier Giorgio Frassati] was his purity, his radiant joy, his piety, the ‘freedom of the children of God’ with regard to all that is beautiful in the world, his social sense, his consciousness of sharing the life and destiny of the Church."

"In the face of negative experiences the question is very quickly asked: Shall I still remain in the Church? The question drives me 'crazy.' For me as a believer it is in the last analysis meaningless."

“The cross of the Lord is the revelation of what sin really is. The cross of Christ mercilessly reveals what the world hides from itself: that it, as it were, devours the Son of God in the insane blindness of its sin—a sin in which Godless hate is truly set on fire upon contact with the love of God”

"Consequently we know nothing except that man was created by God as God’s personal partner in a sacred history of salvation and perdition; that concupiscence and death do not belong to man as God wills him to be, but to man as a sinner..."

"Everyone knows that the Church in the exercise of her pastoral office, in her legislation, administration, adaptation to the requirements of the age, pastoral practice, in her activity in art, learning and the shaping of Christian life in practice..."

"Theological pluralism does not permit us to tolerate anything and everything. Credal profession and theology have a mutual relationship to each other, and they cannot be neatly distinguished from each other in concrete cases..."

"If one is a Christian, one very definitely has the duty of not being under any illusions about this magical Christmas spirit. For a Christian cannot be a person who hides the pitiful reality of human life under pious phrases. By God, she cannot."

"Dogmas have very differing degrees of importance. Of course, my faith in Jesus Christ means much more to me than the teaching of the FIrst Vatican Council about the pope. The first is very important to me; the other is secondary, which is not to say it does not bind."

"Marriage is not the act in which two individuals come together to form a ‘we’, a relationship in which they set themselves apart from the ‘all’ and close themselves against this. Rather it is the act in which a ‘we’ is constituted which opens itself lovingly precisely to all."

"What needs to be stressed is that the fact that there have been periods in which there was no actual eucharistic devotion outside the sacrifice of the Mass cannot be a valid argument against such devotions being genuinely Christian."

"Abstraction is the revelation of being as such which places man before God; conversion is the entrance into the here and now of this finite world, and this makes God the distant Unknown. Abstraction and conversion are the same thing for Thomas: man."

"Have we ever actually experienced grace? We do not mean by this some pious feeling, a sort of festive religious uplift, or any soft comfort, but precisely the experiencing of grace, i.e. of that visitation by the Holy Spirit of the triune God..."

“Prayer can be like a slow interior bleeding, in which grief and sorrow make the heart’s-blood of the inner man trickle away silently into his own unfathomable depths.” — “Encounters with Silence”

"The living personal God has spoken to man in Christianity, that is in Jesus Christ. With that a frightening reality has entered into the life of man, which renders impossible any attempt on the part of a human existence attuned to a world closed in upon itself to enter into God."