I think the best place to begin an immense subject, is to ask ourselves, why did Christ when He came into the world institute the Sacrament of Matrimony? After all, marriage itself was already instituted by God at the dawn of human history. Evidently, there must have been a profound reason, and in plain language the reason was because it was necessary.

This is a transcription of a taped Perpetual Eucharistic Adoration sign-up Sunday homily given by Rev. Robert Goedert, O.P., to the people of St. Anthony's parish in Ohio.

The most important word we have to explain in the title of this conference on "Sacramental Life Assures Eternal Life" is the word life. We cannot begin to talk about the sacraments unless we first understand that there are two forms of life.

"This is also part of the crisis in the Christian world today. There are those who still believe that Christ instituted seven channels of His grace, and those who may use the word "sacrament" but no longer believe either in the sacraments as communicators of grace or the Church's authority over the sacraments. We may even say that the future of Christianity depends on professed Christians understanding — and I mean understanding — the necessity of the sacraments for reaching eternal life." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"From the dawn of Christian history, Baptism and Confirmation have been very closely associated. To this day, Catholics belonging to the Eastern rite receive both sacraments in infancy. Pope St. Leo I makes this relationship very clear. He compares the natural life of our bodies with the supernatural life of our souls. Baptism, he says, corresponds to our bodily birth. Confirmation corresponds to our bodily growth." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"The importance of associating the Holy Eucharist with devotion to the Sacred Heart can scarcely be overemphasized. Our instinctive Catholic sense tells us that no devotion is worth cultivation unless it is grounded on the solid dogmas of revelation and its roots go back to the tradition of the Apostolic Church. The question before us, therefore, is whether and to what extent the cultus of the Sacred Heart, which in its modern form is only three hundred years old, actually rests on that sublime mystery of love which the Son of God instituted at the Last Supper when He gave us the Sacrament of the Altar. The answer to this question will determine in great measure our attitude toward the Sacred Heart, whether we shall consider it just another devotion, based on some private revelations given to a saintly nun in the seventeenth century, or whether we should associate it with an essential doctrine of the Catholic Faith, outside of which there is no salvation." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist (Alt)

"Our focus will be on what we mean when we say the Sacred Heart is the Holy Eucharist. Then, we shall discuss why this is so and how we can put Sacred Heart devotion into practice." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Every vocation is born of sacrifice, is maintained by sacrifice and is measured in the apostolate by the sacrifice of those whom God calls to the priesthood or the religious life. This should not be surprising, once we realize that it was by His sacrifice that Christ redeemed the world. The servant is not greater than his Master. In fact, the more intimate is one's vocation to the service of Christ, the more demanding will be the sacrifices required.

Sacrifice of the Mass (Alt)

"We know that in Sacred Writing and in the teachings of the Church, the Mass has acquired a variety of synonymous names. It is called the Eucharistic Sacrifice, the Eucharistic Liturgy, or simply, the Liturgy; it is the Eucharistic celebration, the Holy Sacrifice, or the Sacrifice of the Altar. All of this reflects the richness of mystery revealed to us by Christ when He instituted the Mass on the night before He died. It also indicates that there has been a remarkable development of doctrine regarding the Mass." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Now some insights into Aloysius' spirituality. To the one virtue which the Church has chosen, and on account of which has chosen him 'the universal patron of youth', was his chastity. All the evidence we have indicates that he had very strong sexual passions. We know that from his own writing; we know that from people who knew him and we know that from what is called penance from one view-point, what is really, you might say 'preventive austerity' from another. He simply believed that unless he mortified his body, and I didn't tell you one tenth of what he did, he just would not get that passion under control. The lesson for us, in a sex-mad world, is obvious.

We have so far been reflecting mainly on priests. We should have at least one lay brother. He is the outstanding lay brother among the Jesuits by the name of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez. His feast day is October 31st. He was born in Spain in 1533 and died in 1617. That's a good long life.

What makes the Confessions of St. Augustine so famous is the depth of their understanding of the mercy of God. Written thirteen years after his conversion, they represent the mature thought of one of the world's greatest minds praising God for His boundless goodness to a great sinner.

"If we look closely at the doctrine on marriage in the "Constitution on the Church in the Modern World," we shall find that all the basic premises of this document on the meaning and responsibilities of marriage are the premises of Saint Augustine. Not only is Augustine's famous treatise on "The Good of Marriage" directly used by the Council, but what Augustine said the Council canonizes with its authority, as the Church's magisterium has been canonizing over the centuries." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"He was born in 1540 in London, a very talented person, especially skilled in oratory. It seems that in his early days he was a Protestant, at least the family and he, himself took the oath of allegiance to the Queen, who was the good Queen Beth, otherwise known as Queen Elizabeth the 1st of England. When she visited Oxford in 1566, he was told to give the oration in her honor. The prime minister of England at the time spoke of him as one of the great diamonds of England, gifted and one of the great hopes of the crown." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Ignatius had no hesitation, once it was clear to him that Francis had a vocation, to keep hounding Francis to the point of making himself very unbearable. When he told Francis, I'm sure you've heard over the years, "Francis, what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul." Francis had everything, humanly speaking in his favor. He was young, intelligent, had a good position, highly respected, very influential and the prospect of advancement." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

St. Ignatius' Letter on Obedience which he wrote to the Jesuits in Portugal on March 26, 1553, is justly regarded as "the most admirable of all the letters which came from his pen." In the four centuries since its composition, the letter has been translated into all the major languages in use in modern times. Its teaching is not only "the backbone of the Society of Jesus," but it has become the classic exposition of perfect obedience for most of the religious orders and congregations that have arisen in the Church in the past four hundred years.

"We might begin by noting that Ignatius was not his baptismal name. Ignatius was originally Inigo, I-n-i-g-o. He changed his name to Ignatius in honor of St. Ignatius of Antioch. Remember, the famous bishop and martyr who wrote seven famous letters on his way to Rome where he was martyred in the year 107? And the two reasons why Inigo changed his name to Ignatius were that Ignatius of Antioch had such a love of martyrdom and he was so devoted to the Holy See." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

…Most educated Catholics have not kept pace by growing in the faith which they verbally profess. It is not too much to say that their grasp of God’s revealed truth is minimal, and their ability to explain the faith or defend it before the bar of reason is infantile…There is no choice. Either we continue to grow, all through life, in our grasp of the faith we profess, or we shall lose this precious gift that we once happily possessed.

"John Berchmans, I thought I would cover all the young Jesuit saints to make sure that I didn't slight any of them. St. John Berchmans was born in 1599 in Berbont, Belgium and died in Rome in 1621 at the ripe age of twenty-two." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Father Hardon was a man of deep faith, tremendous learning, and great charity. He made a lasting and positive impact on the lives of literally thousands; on the lives of Cardinals, Bishops, priests, deacons, seminarians, consecrated men and women, and on laity from all walks of life - on Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Mohammedans - on atheists and agnostics.

"After some lapse of time, our conference this evening will be on St. John Francis Regis. In many ways he is the Cure de Ars of the Society of Jesus. He was born in 1597 in France… He went to the Jesuit college and entered the Society, as we call ourselves, in 1615, that would be the age of eighteen. From his days in the novitiate he had a reputation for being hard on himself and easy on everyone else. The comment, 'he vilifies himself beyond measure and he canonizes everyone else.' That surely is a mark of grace." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Our conference today is on, for a change, a saint from the British Isles, John Ogilvie. He was born in Scotland of the nobility in 1589 and by that time Scotland had pretty well been lost to the Catholic Church so his up-bringing was Presbyterian. His father, to give him a better education than he could get in Scotland, sent him to the continent for education. Specifically, he went to France." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"But John the Baptist was by all accounts the principal figure after Christ Himself in the Gospels until the Church was founded. He is the last of the prophets of the Old Testament and the first of the prophets of the New. There are three features about John the Baptist that I believe the Church especially wants us to recognize and, as far as we can, imitate: John’s faith, humility and fearless courage." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Our plan here is to identify just five qualities of Saint Joseph. Each quality will be briefly described and then applied to ourselves. Of the twenty five invocations in the Litany of Saint Joseph, the ones on which we shall concentrate really cover all we know about the spouse of the Mother of God. Each invocation deserves a volume of commentary." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"There are many good reasons why St. Joseph should be the special heavenly patron of dedicated souls - in the religious life, in the priesthood, and among the laity. But as the Church teaches, he is especially to be venerated and his patronage invoked because he was the guardian of the Virgin Mary and the foster-father of Jesus." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"I would like to speak to you in the present conference on the saint that I suppose many of you have never heard of, but after St. Ignatius, is the most important Jesuit in our history. His name is St. Joseph Pignatelli. The reason he's so important is because he is the link between the two Societies of Jesus, as you know, there is the old society and the new society with forty years of nonexistence in between. It might be well to give a little background to what happened before and after so as to put St. Joseph Pignatelli into context." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"If there is one feature of the present Pope's pontificate, it is his emphasis on the need for devotion to the Blessed Virgin to stem the tide of global secularism in the modern world. It is easy to dismiss the Pope's Marian spirituality as a pious eccentricity. But Pope John Paul II is too intelligent and too experienced not to know that only supernatural means can halt the advance of unbelief in what he calls "the materially super-developed nations" in Western society. In one conference after another, in one document after another, the Pope insists: only a renaissance of Mariology in thought and practice can restore once Christian nations to their original commitment to the Son of Mary. It is in this context that we should look more closely at the Marian teaching of St. Louis de Montfort. What needs to be underlined is what de Montfort calls the True Devotion to Mary." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"The spirituality of St. Maximillian is based directly on this truth: the Immaculate Virgin Mary is the Mediatrix of all graces. That is the first premise of his Marian thinking. If this were not so, Maximillian explains, all our strength and effort in the spiritual life would be in vain. In other words, our spiritual life depends on grace. That's obvious, but it also depends on the grace that we must receive through Mary." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"He is a doctor of the Universal Church and surprising, he was not canonized until 1925, almost 400 years after his birth. He was born in 1521 at Memigan in Holland; died at Freidborg in Switzerland in 1597; his mother died when he was still a child; his father remarried and his stepmother turned out to be a very good Catholic and a loving foster mother." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

In the three hundred and fifty years since Peter Canisius died at Fribourg in Switzerland on December 21, 1597, his name has become synonymous with the Counter-Reformation of the Church in German-speaking Europe. He has been variously called the “hammer of heretics,” the “Second Apostle of Germany,” “Papstesel,” “swindling trickster,” “blasphemer of God”—all depending on whether the epithets originated with his friends or his enemies. As a contemporary of personalities like Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Bucer and Queen Elizabeth, Canisius could hardly escape making a name for himself as long as he felt that “I can never satisfy my desire of struggling against the enemies of the Catholic Faith.”

"I thought we would address ourselves in todays' conference to the priest whom brother Alphonsus Rodriguez had sent to the missions, St. Peter Claver who the Church has declared patron of all missionaries to the Negroes. He was born in Catalonia, Spain in 1581 and died on Our Lady's birthday, September the 8th, 1654. He died in Cartagena in South America which is now part of Columbia in South America." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

As a young priest, Father Eymard burned with the desire to establish perpetual adoration of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament exposed upon a royal throne. He felt that priests, religious, and the laity should make up the Honor Guard adoring their Eucharistic Master day and night unceasingly.

"In the providence of God, different saints are raised up by Him in different periods of history to provide the world with solutions to the deepest problems of their age. The deepest problem of the modern age is alienation from God. Call it separation from God or indifference to God; call it unawareness of God or disinterest in God. By whatever name, in so—called developed countries of the Western world, God has been replaced by Self as the focus of attention and, I would not hesitate to say, adoration. That is why an unlikely saint like St. Peter Julian Eymard should have arisen to alert the world that the Incarnate God is in our midst in what we may casually call the Blessed Sacrament." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Robert was naturally very brilliant. As a youth of seventeen, his teachers declared he was the best in the school in his studies and not far from heaven. At the age of eighteen, he entered the Society of Jesus and for the rest of his life was plagued with poor health. Because of his poor health, his superiors sent him from one city to another, and from one country to another, in the hope of restoring his health. Because Bellarmine was appointed to preach even before his ordination to the priesthood, everywhere he was sent he would preach. Bellarmine was ordained in 1570 and appointed professor at the University of Louvain in Belgium where he lectured on the work of St. Thomas Aquinas." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

St. Robert Bellarmine, as a Saint, scholar and Doctor of the Church, needs no introduction to Catholic readers. When Clement VIII appointed him to the College of Cardinals, he is reported to have said: "We elect this man because he has not his equal for learning in the Church of God." Shortly before his canonization in 1930, the semiofficial organ of the Holy See, Osservatore Romano, identified Bellarmine with Saints Francis de Sales and Alphonsus Ligouri as one of the three great "masters of Catholicism in modern times."

"Our saint for this evening is St. Robert Southwell, the English Jesuit, poet and martyr. He was born in 1561, died in 1595 at the ripe old age of thirty-three. He was canonized – took a long time, in 1970. His family on his mother's side was related to the Shelleys', the other English poet. By this time the Catholic faith was proscribed in England – English Catholics, had to go into hiding. If they wanted a catechetic education they had to leave the country. In case you haven't been told, it's getting closer and closer to that in the United States." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"I chose St. Stanislaus. He is the youngest of the Jesuit saints, born in Poland in 1550 and died in Rome on August the 15, 1568 at the age of eighteen. His father was a Polish senator by the name of John Kostka and he remained at home studying under tutors until the age of fourteen at which time they were sent by his father, along with his older brother Paul, into the company of a Dr. John Bolinski (who figures importantly in the saint’s life) to be their companion and tutor. They were sent to Vienna to the Jesuit college." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Two years before her death, Sister Therese of the Child Jesus and of the Holy Face wrote to her aunt, Isidore Guerin: I love to read the lives of the saints very much. The account of their heroic deeds inflames my courage and spurs me on to imitate them. I must admit, however, that I have envied, at times, the happy lot of relatives who had the good fortune to live in their company and enjoy their holy conversation (July 20, 1895).

St. Therese of Lisieux chose to demonstrate her ardent love for God in little ways. In her Eucharistic adoration as a child she tells us: I loved above all the processions in honor of the Blessed Sacrament. What a joy it was for me to throw flowers beneath the feet of God! Before allowing them to fall to the ground, I threw them as high as I could and I was never so happy as when I saw roses touch the sacred monstrance.

"First, by way of introduction, we have so far seen that the foundations of the pro-life movement are the Christian Faith. Reason can go just so far; it needs the resources of revelation from God and Faith from us. We’ve also seen that the great gift of Christianity to the whole world was the recognition that human life is sacred from the moment of conception." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"My purpose in the present conference is to identify what I call the key features of the Spiritual Exercises. These key features of the Spiritual Exercises I number at seven. In the forty-minutes I have been given to share with you, I would like to communicate both with you and to you what I am convinced is nothing less than a divinely-provided means of performing moral miracles in changing ordinary Catholics into heroic Catholics, the kind that are needed to re-Christianize one once-Christian nation after another, including our own." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

There is a growing number of satanic organizations throughout the country, national like the American satanic Brotherhood and local. Churches of satan are being organized and legally recognized. Clearly some evaluation is called for naturally in the light of our Catholic faith. For the sake of convenience I will distinguish the three main forms of satanism known to past and present history about which the Catholic Church has some very definite ideas and counsel to offer. These three historic forms of satanism while they can be given different names, I would identify as philosophical satanism, polytheistic satanism and cultic satanism.

The problem of how persons outside Judeo-Christianity can be saved has troubled theologians for centuries, and the final solution is still a matter of speculation. Certainly God wills all men to reach their heavenly destiny.

Man himself cannot simply 'make' worship. Proper worship is received from God in faith - Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger.

"Who are meek people? Meek people are those people who control their anger. We all have a temper. I tell people you’ve got a temper, when necessary use it but never loose it. Keep it in control. Meekness is therefore the virtue which controls irascibility." - Fr. John A. Hardon

Many of those on a spiritual journey often wonder where they are, where others are, and how to recognize the more evident sign posts along the way. Of the prominent works on spirituality one of the things found in almost all these works is an understanding of the three major levels of conversion we must go through in order to reach the ultimate destiny desired by Our Lord for all souls, namely that state generally described as the transforming union or spiritual marriage of the soul with God. The intent here is to try to summarize what those three conversions are, why they are necessary, and the signs to look for which tell us when they are necessary.

Our present meditation is still on the Second Commandment of the Decalogue on religious communication. You might ask yourselves what does this mean? It means that God wants us first of all to articulate our thoughts and desires to Him in prayer. And not only as we’ve seen, though of course also, but not only, by the internal movements of our mind and will directed towards God. God wants us to also communicate with Him with our bodily, sensibly perceptible, what we call vocal prayer. But the focus of our reflections is the third stage. God wants us also to communicate with others about Him. In other words He wants us to communicate not only to Him in prayer but about Him in our religious communication with others. Our purpose then will be to look at the following aspects of this immense and I should add, widely neglected aspect, to put it very mildly, of the Second Commandment of the Decalogue.

"The Second Vatican Council exhorts all Catholics to partake of the sacraments frequently, particularly the Eucharist which has previously been recognized in Sacrosanctum Concilium as the source and the summit of the spiritual life."

"Religious historians sometimes call the United States the most sectarian country in the world. Hundreds of independent religious groups have developed and flourished in the nation. While some have been distinctly Protestant in character, many other small sects and cults have been so divorced from the mainstream of Protestantism that they have been called the "third force in Christendom."" - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"The stress in my presentation, therefore, is on sex as a means, and sanctity as the end. I assume that sanctity is achieved by doing the will of God according to one’s state of life; and sex is an inevitable part of everyone’s state of life. Sex is inescapable, sanctity is attainable. And a major factor in attaining sanctity depends on how a person copes with sex in his or her particular state of life. For the sake of convenience, I will distinguish three general states of life in each of which sex is divinely intended to be a means of sustaining and growing in the life of God." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"SEX EDUCATION IS CONSCIOUSLY AND DELIBERATELY SEX STIMULATING. SEX EDUCATION IS SEX AROUSING, SEX STIMULATION, WHICH IS CONTRARY TO THE NATURAL LAW." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Our subject for this evening's conference is Sex Stimuli and Christian Chastity. A subtitle for this conference could be: Sex Stimuli and Christian Sanctity. Everything in our lives is intended by God to draw us closer to Him in this world and bring us to the possession of Him in a heavenly eternity. Sex stimuli are a part of Divine Providence. Provided they are used according to the will of God, they are not only the occasion for the practice of moral chastity. They can be the means of reaching the highest sanctity.

"We begin then our reflections on sin and its consequences. The Bible takes sin very seriously. Unlike so many modern writers including theologians and philosophers, the authors of Sacred Scripture consider sin the only real evil in the world, and they measure all other suffering or misfortune in their relationship to sin. Sin appears early in the history of mankind in the first chapters of Genesis, and it remains as a threat of tragic unity all through the Sacred Writings up to, and I have checked it, the closing verses of the Apocalypse." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Our plan here is to meditate with you on four aspects or kinds of sin, to see how each is intended by God to serve a providential purpose in our lives. We shall look at Divine Providence and original sin. Divine Providence and our sinful tendencies. Divine Providence and our own personal sins as offenses against a loving God. And finally Divine Providence and the sins of other people who enter our lives and can cause us as we know great anguish and even agony." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"Judging by the drastic drop in confessions in countries like the United States, the false opinion is gaining ground that Confession is not to be received, or made, frequently. No doubt, one reason for this sad state of affairs is the prevalence of some wild theories about mortal sin. For example, the Fundamental Option theory claims that no mortal sin is committed unless a person totally rejects God. Who but the devil hates God? One adultery or one abortion is not a mortal sin. On these grounds, there are parishes in which almost no one goes to Confession." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"As you know the beatitudes are the beginning of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount, which is chapters five, six, and seven of the Gospel of St. Matthew. In our next conference we shall take the Lord’s prayer. Between the beatitudes and the Lord’s prayer, we have a synthesis of all that Jesus wanted to teach us in His Sermon on the Mount. What our Lord did in the beatitudes is give us not just a synthesis but what I might call an ocean of Christian spirituality." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"First of all because Sacred Scripture is co-equal with Sacred Tradition as the source of divine revelation. In other words, unlike any other kind of writing the Bible has as its principal author God Himself. Surely we want to know what God tells us about the spiritual life. Moreover, and very practically, our spiritual life will be only as strong as our faith and our faith is faith in God’s revealed words found co-equally in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition. Every insight, every increase of understanding that we get of those revealed biblical words strengthens and deepens our foundation for the spiritual life." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"In order to do some justice to this very practical subject I propose to ask a series of questions and answer them as we go along. My hope is to end up with one good answer to the one question which is the subject of our reflections: spiritual reading---who needs it?" - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"The teaching of Christ is literally the teaching of God or, better, it is God Himself teaching His creatures. The attributes of Christ as God were made manifest in the words and actions of Christ as man. Everything He said and everything He did were so many self-revelations of the mind and will of Yahweh." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"It is a privilege to say a few words about Mother Teresa at this first anniversary Mass, commemorating her death on September the fifth, 1997. I thought I would concentrate on some of the features of her spiritual life that I had come to know in my twenty-five years of knowing her." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

"The expression, "Spirituality of Sacred Scripture," can have many meanings. It will be useful in this article to examine some of these meanings, and then concentrate on the one meaning in which we use this term in the present volume." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

Strategy of the Devil in Demonic Temptations, The  (Alt)

"It was divinely providential that Christ allowed Himself to be tempted by the devil at the beginning of His public ministry. He is teaching us one of the most important lessons we need to learn in life. If He, the living God in human form, was tempted by the evil spirit, then we must expect to be tempted as well." - Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.

One of the sins of the New Creation Series is its flagrant violation of the latency stage, or—as is termed in "Familiaris Consortio"—"the years of innocence" (N. 37). It would be good to make specific mention of this fact in your Analysis. I also suggest an additional aspect, to which you would do well to give specific consideration in your Analysis: certain of the Source and Enrichment authors/books listed in the New Creation Series.

The Catholic family in super-developed countries like the United States is on trial for its existence. This is not my personal opinion but the measured judgment of the Vicars of Christ. One modern pope after another keeps warning the faithful about the deadly struggle going on in the world today, between Christ, the Light of the world, and Satan, the prince of darkness, and the main focus of this struggle is the FAMILY.