Jesuits again

The Jesuit CEO of UCA News says that the Catholic understanding of transubstantiation is no longer tenable in our "post-Newtonian world of quantum physics."

Welfare

In America there is a bumper sticker that says "Work harder, millions on welfare depend on you."

Socialism

"The problem with socialism is sooner or later you run out of other people's money." - Margaret Thatcher

Money

Money can't buy you friends, but it does get you a better class of enemy" – Spike Milligan

Luck

As the song says, if it weren’t for bad luck, the Democratic Party would have no luck at all

O'Malley

More and more O'Malley appears to be a dissenter from Church orthodoxy and on the side of secular forces. He seems more faithful to the Boston Globe than the Roman Curia.

Admiral King

Adm. Ernest J. King, bullied and cajoled. (“He is the most even-tempered man in the Navy,” his daughter said. “He is always in a rage.”)

Abp Chaput

Those groups were formed to support Democrats in the face of issues in the Democratic platform that are contrary to church teaching. I don’t know why else they were formed. So I think they are dust in the air; they cause confusion.
[Caths for Choice, et al.]

Abp Chaput

I want to end with two modest suggestions. The first comes from Susan Sontag. In one of her last talks she said, “The writer’s first job is not to have opinions, but to tell the truth and to refuse to be an accomplice of lies and misinformation.” That’s a noble task for the journalist in the 21st century. And while I’m quoting nonbelievers who had no love for the Catholic Church, here’s my second suggestion. It comes for George Orwell. He said, “Very few people, apart from Catholics themselves, seem to have grasped that the church is to be taken seriously.”

Abp Chaput

When reporters talked with me last fall about my book, Render Unto Caesar, I learned a number of things. First, many hadn’t really read it, but they interviewed me. Many lacked even a basic understanding of Catholic identity that you need for useful disagreement, although they wanted to disagree. And many weren’t interested in learning what they didn’t know. At the same time, some did, unfortunately, know what they planned to write before they walked into my office for the interview.

Nothing

"an impressive attempt to say nothing whatsoever"

Lutheran Church

Bishop Margot Käßmann, who led Germany’s Lutherans until her February arrest for drunk driving, paid tribute to the birth control pill.

Expenditures

"Congress does not always act on authorizations that are put into legislation by drafters," explained Kenneth Baer, a spokesman for the White House budget agency. "Authorizations for discretionary spending are not expenditures."

Our Bishops

"These silly men," Hewitt complains, "issued reams of nonsense and met and met and met even as the liturgy collapsed into incoherence and the preaching dissolved into eight-minute homilies on the need for love. There was also the problem of the Responsorial Antiphon. It would almost always cause me to either laugh or grind my teeth. Is there a worse collection of 'music' anywhere? And the Christian Rite of Initiation, and the revamped Sacrament of Reconciliation -- all of it just another set of committee reports from priests and nuns bored with the old Church. I could go on, but my guess is that you have heard it all before."

Los Angeles cathedral

Hewitt points to the cathedral in Los Angeles as "the perfect expression of the American Church today -- so sterile it could be an air conditioning plant and designed to please non-Catholics with the taste of the leadership."

Grayling

INDUSTRIAL-STYLE authorship of this kind is a triumph of the will rather than a display of intelligence. The effect is one of wearisome repetition, and one wonders what Grayling imagines he has achieved by the exercise.

Santayana on Russell

George Santayana, a thinker of insight and subtlety (these days much neglected), summed up Russell’s predilections perfectly: “His radical solutions were rendered vain by the conventionality of his problems. His outlook was universal, but his presuppositions were insular.”

John Gray

SEEING THEMSELVES as fiercely independent thinkers, bien-pensants are remarkable chiefly for the fervor with which they propagate the prevailing beliefs of their time. Bertrand Russell, John Stuart Mill’s godson and a scion of one of England’s great political dynasties, exemplified this contradiction throughout most of his life. British philosopher A. C. Grayling can now be counted amongst his number.

Kolakovski

He dismissed the idea of democratic socialism as "contradictory as a fried snowball",