Barren wombs

The time will come when men will say 'Blessed are the barren and wombs that never bore and breasts that never nursed' [Luke23:26-32]

Macaulay on the Church

In conclusion, it might be well to recall the words written more than a hundred years ago by Lord Macaulay, who was a Protestant. They were written to be the introduction to the English translation of von Ranke's History of the Popes. He said:

"There is not and never was on earth a work of human policy so well-deserving of examination as the Roman Catholic Church. The history of that Church joins together the two great ages of human civilisation. No other institution is left standing which carries the mind back to the time when the smoke of sacrifice rose from the Pantheon, and when camelopards and tigers bounded in the Flavian amphitheatre. The proudest royal houses are of yesterday when compared with the line of Supreme Pontiffs…. The republic of Venice was modern when compared with the papacy. The republic of Venice is gone; the papacy remains, not in decay, not a mere antique, but full of life and youthful vigor. The Catholic Church is still sending to the farthest ends of the world missionaries as zealous as those which landed in Kent with Augustine, still confronting hostile kings with the same spirit with which she confronted Attila.… She saw the commencement of all the governments and all the ecclesiastical establishments that now exist in the world and we feel no assurance that she is not destined to see the end of them all."

Card. Pole on the papacy

He turned to his secretary and said, "Scripture tells us you must not uncover your father's nakedness." It was a dramatic moment and it's one we who are devoted to the See of Peter should remember. We must not "uncover our father's nakedness."

Bp. Bruskewitz on bishops

When Henry VIII arranged to have himself declared the head of the Church, all of the bishops of England except one agreed with him. It was only St. John Fisher who disagreed and suffered martyrdom because of it. I always use this example as a caution for episcopal conferences when we have votes. Cardinal St. John Fisher was the heroic one who stood against the tide, and at the time he was reproached for that -- "How dare you stand against the views of all your brother bishops who acquiesce in the statute of Parliament?" And he said, "For every bishop you show me now I can show you hundreds of thousands throughout history who stand and agree with me." There's a certain sense in which episcopal consensus means not only those who are here now, but also those who have gone before us -- quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est.

Bp. Bruskewitz

I do not want to comment on the Common Ground Project, but you can take this remark to apply if you wish: I find it extremely difficult to understand how one can have dialogue between the fire and the fire department.

Bp. Bruskewitz

I do not want to comment on the Common Ground Project, but you can take this remark to apply if you wish: I find it extremely difficult to understand how one can have dialogue between the fire and the fire department.

Bingo & Bp. Bruskewitz

I might add that certain scholars are neo-gnostics. They feel that they have some secrets that the rest of us who play bingo and pray the rosary don't know about.

Jesuits

Fr. Kolvenbach said that a French Jesuit, Fr. Jean-Yves Calvez, is “working on proposals for a new papal encyclical on problems of marginalization, unemployment, and social rejection.” But the proposed new encyclical will not deal only with the problems being experienced by the Jesuits. [Fr. Neuhaus 2/98]

Plastic Jesus

I don’t care if it rains or freezes
long as I’ve got my Plastic Jesus
Glued to the dashboard of my car,
You can buy Him phosphorescent
Glows in the dark, He’s Pink and Pleasant,
Take Him with you when you’re travelling far.

I don’t care if it’s dark or scary,
Long as I have magnetic Mary,
Ridin’ on the dashboard of my car,
I feel I’m protected amply,
I’ve got the whole damn Holy Family,
Riding on the dashboard of my car.

You can buy a Sweet Madonna
Dressed in rhinestones sitting on a
Pedestal of abalone shell,
Goin’ ninety, I’m not wary
‘Cause I’ve got my Virgin Mary,
Guaranteeing I won’t go to Hell.

My Lord of Canterbury on "gay marriage"

"In his 1989 essay The Body’s Grace, Dr Williams argued that the Church’s acceptance of contraception meant that it acknowledged the validity of nonprocreative sex. This could be taken as a green light for gay sex".

Will Rogers

"There's no trick to being a humorist when you have the whole government working for you."
~Will Rogers

Brides

"The fault-finder will complain that the bride is too pretty."
-- Jewish saying

Wales

"That's a chain of office you're wearing? .....Sir Richard is appointed Attorney General for Wales. For Wales? Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world....but for Wales?"

Lutheranism & the budget

All sixty-five bishops of ELCA Lutheranism signed a plea for what they called a “moral” federal budget. Forum Letter overheard this at a pastors’ gathering: “I find it remarkable that the conference of bishops aren’t of one mind on sexuality, they aren’t of one mind on abortion, they aren’t of one mind on ordination. But they are completely of one mind on federal student loans.” To which another pastor replied, “Well, they all have kids in college.” Think low.

Palmerston on change

British prime minister Lord Palmerston is reported to have said, “Change, change, change! All this talk about change! Aren’t things bad enough already?”

Bonhoefer on abortion

Bonhoeffer, who was executed by the regime in April of 1945, spoke of four divine “mandates” in the ordering of human life: family, labor, government, and Church. The following passage from his Ethics occurs in a discussion of the family:

Marriage involves acknowledgment of the right of life that is to come into being, a right which is not subject to the disposal of the married couple. Unless this right is acknowledged as a matter of principle, marriage ceases to be marriage and becomes a mere liaison. Acknowledgment of this right means making way for the free creative power of God which can cause new life to proceed from this marriage according to His will. Destruction of the embryo in the mother’s womb is a violation of the right to live which God has bestowed upon this nascent life. To raise the question whether we are here concerned already with a human being or not is merely to confuse the issue. The simple fact is that God certainly intended to create a human being and that this nascent human being has been deliberately deprived of his life. And that is nothing but murder. A great many different motives may lead to an action of this kind; indeed in cases where it is an act of despair, performed in circumstances of extreme human or economic destitution and misery, the guilt may often lie rather with the community than with the individual. Precisely in this connection money may conceal many a wanton deed, while the poor man’s more reluctant lapse may far more easily be disclosed. All these considerations must no doubt have a quite decisive influence on our personal and pastoral attitude towards the person concerned, but they cannot in any way alter the fact of murder.

Maureen Dowd

Maureen Dowd, thinking herself quite incapable of racism, effectively calls Justice Thomas a nigger who—given his fundamental inferiority—should show “gratitude” to his white betters. In her rage, this ever so hip baby boomer liberal invokes white supremacy itself to annihilate Thomas—in reaction to her sense of being annihilated by him. So mired in white blindness, so lost in the liberal orthodoxy that counts mere dissociation from racism as virtue, and so addicted to the easy moral esteem that comes to her from dissociation, Dowd plays the oldest race cards of all-I’m white and you’re black, so shut up and be grateful for my magnanimity. It is as though in fighting for her human visibility she is really fighting for her superiority—a superiority that Thomas annihilated and that she now wants back.

Newman in the APOLOGIA

"To consider the world in its length and breadth, its various history, the many races of man, their starts, their fortunes, their mutual alienation, their conflicts; and then their ways, habits, governments, forms of worship; their enterprises, their aimless courses, their random achievements and acquirements, the impotent conclusion of long-standing facts, the tokens so faint and broken of a superintending design, the blind evolution of what turn out to be great powers or truths, the progress of things, as if from unreasoning elements, not towards final causes, the greatness and littleness of man, his far-reaching aims, his short duration, the curtain hung over his futurity, the disappointments of life, the defeat of good, the success of evil, physical pain, mental anguish, the prevalence and intensity of sin, the pervading idolatries, the corruptions, the dreary hopeless irreligion, that condition of the whole race, so fearfully yet exactly described in the Apostle’s words, ’having no hope and without God in the world,’-all this is a vision to dizzy and appall; and inflicts upon the mind the sense of a profound mystery, which is absolutely beyond human solution".

Ethics and civility

reducing Judaism to ethics, e.g., Hermann Cohen and Emmanuel Levinas. I have referred to ethics as the Judaism of the assimilated and have noted that neither Cohen nor Levinas has much to say about the akeida, the binding of Isaac.

Hofstadter

"It was, indeed, Hofstadter’s rejection of sentimentality that made him, and other 50’s intellectuals like him, outsiders in their own political community. If 50’s liberalism prided itself on its sense of irony, theirs was an irony within an irony, too fragile by far to contend with the newly radicalized forces that were pushing liberalism leftward and for whom both irony and moderation constituted forms of betrayal".

MacIntyre on the university

"From a Catholic point of view, the contemporary secular university is not at fault because it is not Catholic. It is at fault insofar as it is not a university." So says the distinguished philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre of Notre Dame, writing in Commonweal. Catholic universities, he writes, are uncritically aspiring to imitate their secular betters. "So we find Notre Dame glancing nervously at Duke, only to catch Duke in the act of glancing nervously at Princeton." What is wrong with universities more generally, he says, is their fragmentation into disciplines, subdisciplines, and subsubdisciplines, with nobody attending to knowledge of the human condition as a whole. Academic success depends upon identification with one of the fragments. "That identification is secured by two successive apprenticeships, one aimed at the PhD, and a second aimed at achieving tenure. During both what is rewarded is the successful completion of those short-term tasks approved by their seniors. So respect for the prejudices of those seniors is inculcated, while long-term adventurous risk-taking and unfashionable projects tend to go unrewarded, and are therefore increasingly rarely undertaken. In this way many academics are conditioned to become respectful guardians of the disciplinary status quo, sometimes disguising this from themselves by an enthusiasm for those interdisciplinary projects that present no threat to that status quo." Nobody is responsible for making the connections between all the parts of university education. MacIntyre writes: "Ours is a culture in which there is the sharpest of contrasts between the rigor and integrity with which issues of detail are discussed within each specialized discipline and the self-indulgent shoddiness of so much of public debate on large and general issues of great import (compare Lawrence Summers on economics with Lawrence Summers on gender issues, Cardinal Schnborn on theology with Cardinal Schnborn on evolution)." As it happens, I think Cardinal Schnborn demonstrates a good deal of rigor and integrity in his approach to evolution, and I’m not sure what rigor and integrity means with respect to "gender issues." In the curriculum that MacIntyre has in mind, theology is key. "The adoption of such a curriculum would serve both universities and the wider society well. But it would be of particular significance for a Catholic university and for the Catholic community. Newman argued that it is theology that is the integrative and unifying discipline needed by any university, secular, Protestant, or Catholic. And it is in the light afforded by the Catholic faith and more especially by Catholic doctrines concerning human nature and the human condition that theologians have a unique contribution to make in addressing the questions that ought to be central to an otherwise secular curriculum. It is not just that Catholic theology has its own distinctive answers to those questions, but that we can learn from it a way of addressing those questions, not just as theoretical inquiries, but as questions with practical import for our lives, asked by those who are open to God’s self-revelation. Theology can become an education in how to ask such questions." He is doubtful, however, that today’s theology departments are up to the job, since they suffer from the same specialization and fragmentation that afflict other departments. Some will object that MacIntyre’s vision shortchanges specialized training for research. To that concern, he responds: "The curriculum I am proposing, including theology, could perhaps be taught in three well-structured and strenuous years. A fourth year would thereby become available for research or professional training. We do not have to sacrifice training in research in order to provide our students with a liberal education, just as we do not have to fragment and deform so much of our students’ education, as we do now." MacIntyre’s critique of contemporary university education, while making no claims to be original, is convincing. The doleful fact, however, is that universities locked into the status quo are institutionally thriving and able to command ever higher fees for the certifications on offer. In discussions of these matters, Newman’s The Idea of a University is regularly invoked, only to be set aside with the sigh, "Wouldn’t that be nice?" Of course, there are many smaller colleges and universities, Catholic and other, that do make the connections that MacIntyre says is the university’s job. They are commonly called "alternative" schools, and will likely remain alternatives to the established research universities that seem to have little incentive to change the institutionalized entrenchment of their accustomed and comfortable ways. [COMMONWEAL 20 Oct 2006]

Christian Century

Some complain that the editorial mind of the Century is suffering from terminal niceness.

Charity

People in the rich county of San Francisco give but a small fraction of the time and money given by the relatively poor people of South Dakota.

Secty for Culture

One prominent artist, the realist painter John French Sloan, replied scornfully: "Sure, it would be fine to have a Ministry of the Fine Arts in this country. Then we'd know where the enemy is."

Teddy on abortion

Ted Kennedy, then as now the lion of progressive Democrats in the Senate, wrote to a constituent in 1971 that "the legalization of abortion on demand is not in accordance with the value which our civilization places on human life. . . . When history looks back on this era it should recognize this generation as one which cared about human beings enough to halt the practice of war, to provide a decent living for every family and to fulfill its responsibility to its children from the very moment of conception." Even in 1976, three years after Roe v. Wade, Kennedy insisted that "abortion is morally wrong. It is not a legitimate or acceptable response to any problem of society. And if our country wishes to remain true to its basic moral strength, then unwanted as well as wanted children must be unfailingly protected."

new liturgy

Catholics, who are forced to listen to the clunky New American Bible at Mass, get to work off in advance some of the punitive aspects of purgatory.

America - a Christian nation?

America obviously is, historically and sociologically, a Christian nation at least in a sense similar to its being an English-speaking nation. Not everybody speaks English, and relatively few speak it very well,

St. Louis U

I expect one would with some difficulty try to explain to Ignatius Loyola how it came about all these years later that the Masons accused one of his universities of being Catholic and the university prevailed in denying it.

Jonathan Rosenblum

But smart technocrats are notoriously thick when it comes to apprehending the force of religion, either for good or bad, because it so rarely plays a role in their own lives. Those who entreat Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist, for instance, fail to comprehend that they are asking Hamas to dissolve itself and to renounce its fundamental religious belief that all land which was ever under Moslem sovereignty must remain so forever.

St Francis preaching

Preach at all times and if necessary use words

George Will

George Will’s quip comes to mind: football combines the two worst features of America—violence interspersed with committee meetings.