Is there a phrase in the Catholic Catechism that mirrors Mark Twain’s phrase, ‘man is a religious animal?’

Question

I thought I read it in some Catholic book but I can’t be sure. Or were there any Saints who said anything similar – maybe St. Augustine? Ages ago, in Sunday school, my teacher told me that if a person were isolated in a desert for a prolonged period, he would go beyond a primate’s survival instincts and he would eventually build a shrine. Is that a realistic story? Does Man really gravitate naturally to his God, even without external influence? Does mankind consider spirituality essential or is it a luxury? Compare it to love. Love is not essential to survival – however, the absence of love would, without fail, lead to dysfunctional behaviour, to some degree or other. And f.y.i., I am not confusing religion with spirituality; neither am I implying that religion means Christianity. And this is not a question asking ‘why do atheists do such and such’. This is about man’s spiritual nature. I hope there are Catholics out there who have my answers. Thanks

Answer 1

Catholics believe the desire for God is written in the human heart, because each person is created by God and for God; and God never ceases to draw each person to himself.

With love in Christ.

Answer 2

I'm not so sure about your question, but it's a very thoughtful one.

I do know that man's desire to want to believe in God is an argument that some make that there is one.

It's also noted that Twain was highly anti-Catholic.

Answer 3

Here are some other Twain quotes:

"Man is a marvelous curiosity … he thinks he is the Creator's pet … he even believes the Creator loves him; has a passion for him; sits up nights to admire him; yes and watch over him and keep him out of trouble. He prays to him and thinks He listens. Isn't it a quaint idea.
-- Mark Twain: Satan, writing back to his friends in Heaven upon visiting Earth, showing his contempt toward this curious invention, Man, after having a few days earlier earlier been banished for a thousand years for so doing prior to investigation, in Letters from the Earth (1909?; published in 1962)"

"One of the proofs of the immortality of the soul is that myriads have believed in it. They have also believed the world was flat.
-- Mark Twain, Notebook (1900)"


"There are those who scoff at the school boy, calling him frivolous and shallow. Yet it was the schoolboy who said, "Faith is believing what you know ain't so."
-- Mark Twain, Following the Equator, ch. 12, "Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar" (1897)"

"I cannot see how a man of any large degree of humorous perception can ever be religious -- unless he purposely shut the eyes of his mind & keep them shut by force.
-- Mark Twain, Frederick Anderson, ed., Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals (1979), notebook 27, August 1887-July 1888, quoted from James A Haught, "Breaking the Last Taboo" (1996)"


"A God who could make good children as easily a bad, yet preferred to make bad ones; who could have made every one of them happy, yet never made a single happy one; who made them prize their bitter life, yet stingily cut it short; who gave his angels eternal happiness unearned, yet required his other children to earn it; who gave is angels painless lives, yet cursed his other children with biting miseries and maladies of mind and body; who mouths justice, and invented hell -- mouths mercy, and invented hell -- mouths Golden Rules and foregiveness multiplied by seventy times seven, and invented hell; who mouths morals to other people, and has none himself; who frowns upon crimes, yet commits them all; who created man without invitation, then tries to shuffle the responsibility for man's acts upon man, instead of honorably placing it where it belongs, upon himself; and finally, with altogether divine obtuseness, invites his poor abused slave to worship him!
-- Mark Twain, The Mysterious Stranger"

"When one reads Bibles, one is less surprised at what the Deity knows than at what He doesn't know.
-- Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Notebook"

"Surely the *** who invented the first religion ought to be the first *** damned.
-- Mark Twain, on the margin of a newspaper report titled "God & the Earthquake; Rabbi Says God Who Would Kill The Innocent Isn't Worthy of Worship," about an earthquake in Italy and how people were fleeing into churches, only for the building to collapse in aftershocks, killing the followers (contributed to Positive Atheism by Twain scholar and collector Robert Solatta)"

"The so-called Christian nations are the most enlightened and progressive ... but in spite of their religion, not because of it. The Church has opposed every innovation and discovery from the day of Galileo down to our own time, when the use of anesthetic in childbirth was regarded as a sin because it avoided the biblical curse pronounced against Eve. And every step in astronomy and geology ever taken has been opposed by bigotry and superstition. The Greeks surpassed us in artistic culture and in architecture five hundred years before Christian religion was born.
-- Mark Twain, from Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, a Biography (1912), quoted from Barbara Schmidt, ed., "Mark Twain Quotations, Newspaper Collections, & Related Resources"

"I was dead for millions of years before I was born and it never inconvenienced me a bit.
-- Mark Twain (attributed: source unknown)"


More great ones from Twain here:

http://www.positiveatheism.org/hist/quotes/