Strong families serve society by bringing forth healthy children and maturing young adults, by being a rich source of a compassion for sick members, of support for others in time of crisis and of care for the elderly and the dying.

In the eyes of the Catholic Church, abortion is a tragedy. Our principle objective must be to try and win greater sympathy for that perspective and for the value of human life from its beginnings.

A Catholic understanding of priesthood is so strongly rooted in the historic actions of Jesus and in all their antecedents in the place of sacrifice in life. And those things... they are rooted to the role of the man.

In the Catholic tradition, the idea of giving something up on a Friday - the act of self denial - has always been tied with being generous to those in need.

Nothing I read about grief seemed to exactly express the craziness of it; which was the interesting aspect of it to me - how really tenuous our sanity is.

Among the many signs of a lively faith and hope we have in eternal life, one of the surest is not being overly sad at the death of those whom we dearly love in our Lord.

I have a store full of thousands and thousands of images in my brain. I've got this terrible feeling I'm like some abattoir boss: I know death; I know the cut pieces of the human body.

I've told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.