Take a moment this Mother’s Day to reflect on these inspiring quotes in praise of mothers and motherhood!
Pope St. John Paul II
“Letter to Women”
June 29, 1995
“Thank you, women who are mothers! You have sheltered human beings within yourselves in a unique experience of joy and travail. This experience makes you become God’s own smile upon the newborn child, the one who guides your child’s first steps, who helps it to grow, and who is the anchor as the child makes its way along the journey of life.”
St. Gianna Beretta Molla
“Yes, I have prayed so much in these days. With faith and hope I have entrusted myself to the Lord. … I trust in God, yes; but now it is up to me to fulfill my duty as a mother. I renew to the Lord the offer of my life. I am ready for everything, to save my baby.”
St. Augustine of Hippo
Book IX of “Confessions“
“And inspire, O my Lord my God, inspire Your servants my brethren, Your sons my masters, who with voice and heart and writings I serve, that so many of them as shall read these confessions may at Your altar remember Monica, Your handmaid, together with Patricius, her sometime husband, by whose flesh You introduced me into this life, in what manner I know not. May they with pious affection be mindful of my parents in this transitory light, of my brethren that are under You our Father in our Catholic mother, and of my fellow citizens in the eternal Jerusalem, which the wandering of Your people sighs for from their departure until their return. That so my mother’s last entreaty to me may, through my confessions more than through my prayers, be more abundantly fulfilled to her through the prayers of many.”
Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen
“Way to Happiness”
“In a mother, two of the great spiritual laws are united into one: love of neighbor and cooperation with God’s grace — and both of them are applied in a unique way. For love of neighbor, to anyone except a mother, is love of a nonself; a mother’s neighbor during pregnancy is one with herself, yet to be loved differently from the self. The sacrifice sometimes involved in neighborly love now takes place within her flesh: the agent and the object of her sacrifice are both contained within her.”
Pope Francis
Homily at Holy Mass
Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God
Jan 1, 2019
“The gaze of the Mother, and the gaze of every mother. A world that looks to the future without a mother’s gaze is shortsighted. It may well increase its profits, but it will no longer see others as children. It will make money, but not for everyone. We will all dwell in the same house, but not as brothers and sisters. The human family is built upon mothers. A world in which maternal tenderness is dismissed as mere sentiment may be rich materially, but poor where the future is concerned. Mother of God, teach us to see life as you do. Turn your gaze upon us, upon our misery, our poverty. Turn to us thine eyes of mercy.”
St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross
“The Significance of Women’s Intrinsic Value in National Life”
“Everywhere the need exists for maternal sympathy and help, and thus we are able to recapitulate in the one word motherliness that which we have developed as the characteristic value of woman.”
G.K. Chesterton
“The Superstition of Divorce”
“You can put down the mighty from their seat; you can turn the world upside down, and there is much to be said for the view that it may then be the right way up. But you cannot create a world in which the baby carries the mother. You cannot create a world in which the mother has no authority over the baby.”
