Home > Work > The Cross and Beatitudes: Lessons on Love and Forgiveness
1 " A person is merciful when he feels the sorrow and misery of another as if it were his own. "
― Fulton J. Sheen , The Cross and Beatitudes: Lessons on Love and Forgiveness
2 " The very word mercy is derived from the Latin miserum cor, a sorrowful heart. Mercy is, therefore, a compassionate understanding of another’s unhappiness. "
3 " the very permanence of marriage is destructive of those fleeting infatuations, which are born with the moment and die with it; it destroys selfishness, furthermore, because the mutual love of husband and wife takes them out of themselves into the incarnation of their mutual love, their other selves, their children; and finally it narrows selfishness because the rearing of children demands sacrifice, without which, like unwatered flowers, they wilt and die. "
4 " greatest poverty of all—the spiritual poverty of seeming abandonment by God: "
5 " Blessed finally are the poor in spirit intellectually. Blessed are the humble, and the teachable who like the Shepherds know they know nothing, or like the Wise Men who know they do not know everything. "
6 " Blessed also are the poor in spirit socially. "
7 " Woe to you that are filled: for you shall hunger”; "
8 " The world blesses not the meek, but the vindictive; it praises not the one who turns the other cheek, but the one who renders evil for evil; it exalts not the humble, but the aggressive. Ideological forces have carried that spirit of violence, class-struggle, and the clenched fist to an extreme the like of which the world before has never seen. "
9 " You have heard that it has been said: An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. But I say to you not to resist evil: but if one strikes you on your right cheek, turn to him also the other: and if a man will contend with you in judgment, and take away your coat, let go your cloak also unto him. And whosoever shall force you one mile, go with him two. . . . You have heard that it has been said: You shall love your neighbor, and hate your enemy. But I say to you: Love your enemies: do good to them that hate you: and pray for them that persecute and calumniate you that you may be the children of your Father who is in heaven, who makes His sun to rise upon the good and bad, and rains upon the just and the unjust. "
