Catherine Doherty quotes

Catherine Doherty was a Russian-Canadian social activist, spiritual writer, and foundress of the Madonna House Apostolate. Her life and work focused on serving the poor and promoting the integration of faith and daily life. She inspired many by fostering Christian communities rooted in hospitality, prayer, and social justice. Here are 34 of her quotes:

With God, every moment is the moment of beginning again.

Catherine Doherty

Lord, give me the heart of a child, and the awesome courage to live it out as an adult.

Catherine Doherty

Real zeal is standing still and letting God be a bonfire in you.

Catherine Doherty

What you do matters - but not much. What you are matters tremendously.

Catherine Doherty

A saint is a sinner who loves; it's that simple!

Catherine Doherty

What binds us together is love, and only love. For love is a Person. Love is God.

Catherine Doherty

Faith allows us to enter peacefully into the dark night which faces every one of us at one time or another.

Catherine Doherty

We do not have to wait for the hereafter - it is now that we are one with Christ.

Catherine Doherty

I go to my past in order to discern the future.

Catherine Doherty

Purity of heart is love for the weak who constantly fall.

Catherine Doherty

Pain is the kiss of Christ.

Catherine Doherty

To pass through the door that leads to God's kingdom, we must go down on our knees.

Catherine Doherty

Faith sees God's face in every human face.

Catherine Doherty

It is so important for us to have faith, trust, confidence in one another. It is the only way we can communicate. Without faith there is no communication, there is no love, or if there was a little love it will die without hope, trust, and confidence. Even if it doesn't die right away, it will be so ill, so weak, and so tired that communication will be miserable as well.

Catherine Doherty

When we reach the silver sands and plunge into the great sea of God's silence, we begin to understand that he alone is God - Lover, Friend, the totality of gentleness, peace and rest. He calls us and we cannot resist that call. We have to be alone with him. It is a necessity, it is a hunger. It has been said that prayer is a hunger. But this Christ walks with loneliness and rejection, and so must we.

Catherine Doherty

What is the market place? Is it the secular city? Is it the factual market place, that is to say the urban inner city? Is it suburbia where all the supermarkets are? No. The market place is simply the soul of man. It is the place where man trades his soul either to God or to the devil or to the 'in between', with indifference, tepidity and complacency.

Catherine Doherty

You live between two Masses. You exist in the present moment.

Catherine Doherty

To be simple is to accept the essence of the message and not try to twist it or adapt it to our own ideas. To be simple we must desire to remain in the image of God. We must not be so complex that we make God into our image! Simplicity is dying to self, an emptying.

Catherine Doherty

The duty of the moment is what you should be doing at any given time, in whatever place God has put you. You may not have Christ in a homeless person at your door, but you may have a little child. If you have a child, your duty of the moment may be to change a dirty diaper. So you do it. But you don't just change that diaper, you change it to the best of your ability, with great love for both God and that child.... There are all kinds of good Catholic things you can do, but whatever they are, you have to realize that there is always the duty of the moment to be done. And it must be done, because the duty of the moment is the duty of God.

Catherine Doherty

Identification [with the other] is difficult but precious. It involves doing violence to yourself. Yet Scripture says that "heaven is taken by violence" to oneself [Luke 16:16]. To identify oneself with the other is to love him beyond words, a total giving of oneself in truth.

Catherine Doherty

Here I want to reiterate very clearly that this Little Mandate did not come to me dictated, or as a whole, but as I am telling it now. Get the picture: it could happen any place, any time, in the midst of a group, in my office, at lunch in a cafeteria. Suddenly a little light, a little added word would come to me. I used to write them down on scraps of paper, on the back of old envelopes, in some diary, maybe lost or forgotten now; though some of them are still here. It was a patchy thing.

Catherine Doherty

The stranger is simply a friend I haven't met yet.

Catherine Doherty