All Catholic countries have placed charity in the law, but what has saved them is that they have not extinguished it...
Frederic Ozanam
Useless Servants • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
We are useless servants: such is the testimony that must give those who unite to serve God and men. [...] Not to show...
The Fundamentals of our Faith • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Our century has forgotten to such an extent the Christian language of our parents that it is difficult to speak...
To Comply with the Precepts or to Be Truly Christian • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
It is easier to use an uplifting language, to fulfill certain positive precepts, to reject certain pleasures, than to be deeply filled with the evangelical spirit, to keep it in the depths of the soul to ennoble it, purify it, and improve it; in short: to reproduce it...
Being on the Side of the Workers • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Of course, the districts of Saint-Jacques and of Jardin-des-Plantes do not always give the spectacle of the same desolation. We know there shopping streets, poor but livable houses, narrow but well-kept rooms that retain remains of an old slack, waxed furniture, white...
What Rich Man will be Saved? • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
We need not dwell on those amongst them who are better off [at Lyonnais Street]; those who, for six persons, can supply two beds, into which are huddled pellmell the sick and the healthy, boys of eighteen with girls of sixteen. Let's not talk about the ruin of the...
The Situation of the Poor in our Cities • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
On either side of a filthy sewer rise houses five stories high, many of which shelter fifty families. Low, damp, and noxious rooms; [...] no paper, often not a single piece of furniture, hides the nakedness of the wretched walls. In a house of the Rue des Lyonnais we...
The Privilege of Serving the Poor • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Those who have the privilege of distributing the public help [...] go, for instance, to the twelfth arrondissement, one of the strongholds of the insurrection, and out of about ninety thousand inhabitants they find eight thousand families inscribed on the list of the...
The Small Graces We Receive from God • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
We are not sufficiently grateful for God's little benefits. We thank Him for having created and redeemed us, and given us good parents, and a wife, and beloved children, and for so often giving us Himself in the Sacrament of the Altar. But besides these powerful...
Responsible for Proclaiming the Word of God • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Dear friend, we have not faith enough; we are always looking for the re-establishment of religion by political means; we dream of a Constantine who, with one blow and one effort, would bring back the nations to the fold. The fact is we don't really know the history of...
Faith: an Act of Will • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Dear friend, you are continually heading out on long and fatiguing journeys that are dangerous to your health (your health has already been severely tested). Bear with me as I express my concern. You say you are seeking to create new sources of interest for yourself...
Defending our Beliefs and Loving our Adversaries • A Weekly Reflection with Ozanam
Above all else, let us learn how to defend our convictions without hating our adversaries, to love those who have a different opinion, to recognize the fact that Christians have many and varied viewpoints and that God can be served today as always. Let us complain...
