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“All knowledge is sterile which does not lead to action and end in charity.”
– Cardinal Desire Joseph Mercier
“Learn the lesson that, if you are to do the work of a prophet, what you need is not a scepter but a hoe.”
– Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
“The Catholic school’s proper function is to create for the school community a special atmosphere animated by the Gospel spirit of freedom and charity, to help youth grow according to the new creatures they were made through baptism as they develop their own personalities, and finally to order the whole of human culture to the news of salvation so that the knowledge the students gradually acquire of the world, life and man is illumined by faith.”
– His Holiness Pope Paul VI, October 28, 1965
“It has been said that some of the great geniuses of the past never read half as much as the mediocre geniuses today, but what they read they understood and incorporated into a deeper dimension of knowledge.”
– Cardinal Desire Joseph Mercier
“The entire effort of the Catholic teacher is oriented toward an integral formation of each student.”
– William Cardinal Baum
“Study fatigues and wearies the mind and heart. Go from time to time to refresh them at the feet of Jesus Christ under the cross; some moments of repose in His sacred wounds give fresh vigor and new lights. “
– Saint Vincent Ferrer
“Ultimately, the idea of a Catholic University is about the mission to form students to become holy, saintly, well-educated, productive members of the Church and society.”
– Rev. Leonard A. Kennedy, “How to Keep Your University Catholic”
“From time to time friends outside the [Roman Catholic] Church consult me. They are attracted by certain features, repelled or puzzled by others. To them I can only say, from my own experience: ‘Come inside. You cannot know what the Church is like from outside. However learned you are in theology, nothing you know amounts to anything in comparison with the knowledge of the simplest actual member of the Communion of Saints.’ “
– Evelyn Waugh, English novelist after his conversion to Catholicism from Anglicanism
“In fact it must never be forgotten that the subject of Christian education is man whole and entire, soul united to body in unity of nature, with all his faculties natural and supernatural, such as right reason and revelation show him to be…”
– His Holiness Pope Pius XI, “Divini lllius Magistri,” 1929