No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.

No one, on his deathbed, ever regretted having been a Catholic.

The wish to pray is a prayer in itself.

Could there be any doubt that the Jews would seek to harm the Son of God again, knowing that his body was now readily accessible in the form of defenseless crackers?

His face frankly displays his suffering, expressing it with a truly royal simplicity. At such moments even the very best people are apt to give themselves away with the kind of look which says to you more or less directly: 'You see how I'm sticking it out; don't praise me, it's my nature; thanks all the same.' But the Curé de Torcy looks straight at you, guilelessly. His eyes beg your compassion and sympathy. But with what nobility they beg! A king might beg in just that way.

There is no physical description of Christ in the Gospels, and so we are unable to know whether he was physically attractive or not. Of course, the specifications for what constitutes physical beauty are culturally conditioned and so change from place to place and from time to time. Christ's beauty then does not stem from physical attractiveness. It's rather the 'harsh' beauty of a God Who has given Himself so completely in love that it takes Him to the most ignominous death, on the Cross. Bruno Forte writes: 'Christ, the crucified God, is the place where beauty happens: in His self-emptying, eternity is present in time, the All Who is God is present in the fragment of Christ's human form (cf. Phil 2:6ff.). It is the cross that reveals the beauty that saves'. Christ is beautiful because He is Love incarnate, and, in a world disfigured by sin, that love is necessarily manifest in His suffering for others. This means that in our broken, marred condition, the shape of deepest beauty is cruciform.