Catholic Daily Brief

The Crucifixion and Death of Jesus; The Earthquake and Appearance of the Dead

The Scourging, the Crowning with Thorns, and Pilate's 'Ecce Homo'

Mary's grief; Jesus in the subterranean prison

The cruelty towards Our Lord in the house of Caiphas, and the denials of St Peter

Jesus before the tribunals of Annas and Caiaphas

The plotting of the enemies of Christ, and the chaos in and around Jerusalem during Holy Thursday night

Chapter 3: Jesus is Arrested

Chapter 2: Judas and His Band

The Agony in the Garden

Meditation 9: Private Instructions and Consecrations

Meditation 8: The Institution of the Holy Eucharist

Meditation 5: Jesus Goes Up to Jerusalem Meditation 6: The Last Pasch Meditation 7: The Washing of the Feet

Meditation 1: Preparations for the Pasch Meditation 2: The Supper Room Meditation 3: Arrangements for Eating the Paschal Lamb Meditation 4: The Chalice Used at the Last Supper

There are three laws of pleasure which make the attainment of happiness easier.

"Men and women are forever trying to add to their possessions far beyond the limit of enjoyment. This is because of their mistaken belief that their hunger for Infinity can be satisfied by an infinity of material things: what they really wish is the Infinity of Divine Love."

"Repose allows us to contemplate the little things we do in their relationship to the vast things which alone can give them worth and meaning."

"I find that when I think I am asking God to forgive me I am often in reality (unless I watch myself very carefully) asking Him to do something quite different. I am asking him not to forgive me but to excuse me. But there is all the difference in the world between forgiving and excusing."

"Whom the Lord loveth tenderly, He chasteneth."

"From examining his own soul, any one of us can learn five general truths about all human beings."

"God made us out of nothing - nothing at all - and it well for us occasionally to recall that fact."

"This is, indeed, a century of revolutions. But it need not go down in history as a period when revolutions were entirely economic and political."

"Our exterior world today is in desperate straits, but the inner world of man is far from hopeless."

Sheen's thoughts on humility, egotism, and joy

"'Great works' (of art) and 'good works' (of charity) had better also be Good Work. Let choirs sing well or not at all. Otherwise we merely confirm the majority in their conviction that the world of Business, which does with such efficiency so much that never really needed doing, is the real, the adult, and the practical world; and that all this 'culture' and all this 'religion' (horrid words both) are essentially marginal, amateurish, and rather effeminate activities."

"It will be infallible judgment. If it is favorable we shall have no fear, if unfavorable, no hope, that it is wrong. We shall not only believe, we shall know, know beyond doubt in every fibre of our appalled or delighted being, that as the Judge has said, so we are: neither more nor less nor other."

The theological implications of extraterrestrial life

"Can we believe that God ever really modifies His action in response to the suggestions of men?"

"How is it right, or even psychologically possible, for creatures who are every moment advancing either to heaven or to hell, to spend any fraction of the little time allowed them in this world on such comparative trivialities as literature or art, mathematics or biology?"

The Seventh Word from the Cross: "Father, into Thy hands I commend My spirit"

The Sixth Word from the Cross: "It is finished"

The Fifth Word from the Cross: "I thirst"

The Fourth Word from the Cross: "My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken Me?"

Monica's death; Augustine's grief and prayers for her soul

The Third Word from the Cross: "Mother behold thy son; son, behold thy Mother"

The Second Word from the Cross: "This day you will be with me in Paradise"

The First Word from the Cross: "Father forgive them, for they know not what they do."

"The ancient man approached God (or even the gods) as the accused person approaches his judge. For the modern man the roles are reversed. He is the judge: God is in the dock."

Augustine speaks of the joy of his conversion, and he abandons his teaching post; his friends both die baptized; he reads the Psalms and Isaiah; he is baptized along with his son, Adeodatus; he is inspired by the singing of hymns in Ambrose's church, Ambrose finds the incorrupt bodies of Sts. Gervasius and Protasius, which were the cause of several miracles

The Christian way to deal with those who are a bother to us

"Because we love something else more than this world we love even this world better than those who know no other."

Chapter 48: The Crucifixion

Chapter 47: Second Trial Before Pilate

Christianity "is the marriage of heaven and earth: perfect myth and perfect fact: claiming not only our love and our obedience, but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher."

Lewis fields questions on Christianity asked at a live event in 1944

A planned society will always tend to the tyranny of technocracy

A critique of the modern theory of punishment, which removes justice from the question of punishment, and ends in tyranny under the guise of therapeutic "curing".

Chapter 46: Judas at the Bottom of the List

Can the unchanging Christian dogmas survive the ever-growing body of scientific knowledge?

Chapter 45: Trial Before Pilate

The value of gaining a wider and more solid intellectual foundation by reading the wisdom of the past (which is really timeless wisdom)