Considering these high and extraordinary favours

vouchsafed to the Apostle, we should naturally suppose that some great objects in the history of the Church were contemplated by means of them, such as in the event were fulfilled.

John Henry Cardinal Newman

Paul can be put to death

but never conquered.


Pope St. Gregory the Great

He gave up everything

--career, interests, affections--and allowed himself to be filled and molded by grace. In him, two forces were always acting: God, who made the approach to him, and Paul, who went in return to meet God.


Igino Giordani
St. Paul, Apostle and Martyr

St. Paul was the true "Man of God,"

A man filled to an exceptional degree with grace, a man to whom the things of God were particularly entrusted, a man especially obligated to God, a man who could say "His grace in me has not been fruitless."

Blessed James Alberione

Paul nevertheless claims

the title [Apostle] as his own because he was chosen and transformed by the grace of God, and shared the three principal characteristics of the true apostle.

Pope Benedict XVI

Paul never interprets this moment

as an event of conversion. Why? ....This change of his life, this transformation of his whole being was not the result of a psychological process, of a maturation or intellectual and moral evolution, but it came from...the encounter with Jesus Christ.

Pope Benedict XVI

Only one thing he considered shameful:

to overlook anything that contributed to salvation. Therefore he left no stone unmoved, he shrunk from no expenditure for those to be saved: words, deeds, his very life.

St. John Chrysostom

Paul gained more glory

by his boasting than another would gain for keeping silent about his good deeds, for no one gained as much by silence as Paul did by boasting.

St. John Chrysostom

Paul was the leader

and the standard-bearer of martyrdom.

Cornelius a Lapide, SJ

Paul's heart was so expansive,

so great, and so wide open to everyone that the whole world appeared small to him.


Cornelius a Lapide, SJ

St. Paul was thus carried on by the providence of God,

and brought into the light by a miracle; that we may learn, by a memorable instance of His grace, what He ever does, though He does not in ordinary cases thus declare it openly to the world.

John Henry Cardinal Newman

To enjoy Christ's love

completely was life itself for Paul; it was the whole world, the Angels, all things present and things t come, the kingdom and the promise, since Christ's love represented for him untold blessings.


St. John Chrysostom
Homily 2 In Praise of St. Paul

He had a miserable physique

but it was inhabited by an imperial soul.


Igino Giordani
St. Paul, Apostle and Martyr

Paul the apostle of Christ

sought to conform his thinking and behavior according to the example of Christ. Indeed, this will become his major defense to those who dismiss his ministry as inferior and weak.

Paul Barnett
Paul, Missionary of Jesus

This is the certainty,

the profound joy that guides the Apostle Paul in all these affairs: Nothing can separate us from the love of God. And this love is the true wealth of human life.

Pope Benedict XVI

Paul met not only

the historical Jesus of the past, but the living Christ who revealed himself as the one Saviour and Lord.

Pope Benedict XVI

This is the objective

of the Pauline Year: to learn the faith from him, to learn from him who Christ is, to learn, in the end, the path for an upright life.

Pope Benedict XVI

Paul was a man of fire

...and just as a spark that is cast into hay or aird woodland at once bursts into flame and spreads rapidly, so also Paul blazed continuously with ever new and greater fires of love.

Cornelius a Lapide, SJ

Paul's way of speaking

was remarkably affable and gracious and his manner of conversing drew people to him.


Cornelius a Lapide, SJ

Paul describes himself

as 'Apostle of Jesus Christ,' namely, his delegate, placed totally at his service, so much so as to call himself 'a slave of Jesus Christ.'

Pope Benedict XVI

My prayer is Paul's,

my apostolate is Paul's, so that they may be Christ's prayer and apostolate.

Blessed James Alberione

Strange indeed it was,

and what would have been St. Stephen's thoughts could he have known it! ... The first Martyr had such power with God to raise up the greatest Apostle.


John Henry Cardinal Newman

This man, small of stature and infirm in health,

has a powerful strength, the greatest that any man can have because it is the strength of God.


Igino Giordani
St. Paul, Apostle and Martyr

[In Antioch], Barnabas is the first

of the prophets, Paul the latest arrival, but Barnabas sees his true worth and introduces him to a work which is to become the most fruitful in the whole early Church.


Carlo Cardinal Martini
The Testimony of St. Paul

The Apostle instinctively experiences his sufferings

not as a solitary personal fate, but as Christ's sufferings in him, because they occur within the ministry that the Lord Jesus has entrusted to him.... he calls them Christ's sufferings in himself.

Carlo-Maria Cardinal Martini