France

The bourgeois spirit in France was already too strong to be eliminated and it allied itself with the monarchy and the Gallican church against ultramontane Catholicism and Baroque culture.

French eighteenth-century culture became an open door through which the bourgeois spirit penetrated the closed world of Baroque Catholicism, first as a leaven of criticism and new ideas, and finally as a destructive flood of revolutionary change which destroyed the moral and social foundations of the Baroque culture.

Max Weber's thesis

The bourgeois culture actually developed on Protestant soil, and especially in a Calvinist environment, while the Catholic environment seemed decidedly unfavourable to its evolution...

The bourgeois culture has the mechanical rhythm of a clock, the Baroque the musical rhythm of a fugue or a sonata.

Pharisee

For what is the Pharisee but a spiritual bourgeois, a typically “closed” nature, a man who applies the principle of calculation and gain not to economics but to religion itself, a hoarder of merits, who reckons his accounts with heaven as though God was his banker?

Anti-bourgeois

The antibourgeois temperament, the type of character which naturally prefers to spend rather than to accumulate, to give rather than to gain.

Bourgeois

In short the bourgeois is essentially a moneymaker, at once its servant and its master, and the development of his social ascendancy shows the degree to which civilization, and human life are dominated by the money power.

Heresy

A heresy being a truth that has been exaggerated into falsehood

Nicelings

Sallow-faced nicelings.

Belloc and the Church

Hilaire Belloc: “[The Church is] an institute run with such knavish imbecility that if it were not the work of God it would not last a fortnight.”

Jewish marines

"Why is it," I asked, "that every Jew I know seems to be a Marine, the father of a Marine, or the son of a Marine?"

He didn't skip a beat. "Well, we quickly found out that controlling all the levers of international finance wasn't enough. We needed an elite fighting force to defend it."

Hitler the Liberal

“This new Reich will give its youth to no
one, but will itself take youth and give
to youth its own education and its only
upbringing. Your child belongs to us
already... What are you? You will pass
on. Your descendants, however, now
stand in the new camp. In a short time
they will know nothing else but this new
community.” Adolph Hitler

Avant garde

Senile avant-gardism

Fred Hoyle

"Imagine 10 to the 50th blind persons each with a scrambled Rubik's cube, and try to conceive of the chance of them all simultaneously arriving at the solved form. You then have the chance of arriving by random shuffling, of just one of the many biopolymers on which life depends. The notion that not only the biopolymers but the operating program of a living cell could be arrived at by chance in a primordial organic soup here on the Earth is evidently nonsense of a high order."

Reform Judaism 2

The old quip that Reform Judaism consists of the Democratic Party platform with holidays thrown in...

Reform Judaism

The 50th anniversary of Reform's Religious Action Center was not exactly a coincidence. The RAC is the embodiment of the belief by some that the liberal political stands are indistinguishable from Judaism. Much of the RAC's agenda: support for abortion...

Experts

“No lesson seems to be so deeply inculcated by the experience of life as that you should never trust experts. If you believe doctors, nothing is wholesome: if you believe the theologians, nothing is innocent: if you believe the soldiers, nothing is safe. They all require their strong wine diluted by a very large admixture of insipid common sense.”-

Beau Brummel on men's clothes

“If people turn to look at you in the street, you are not well dressed…,”

Drinking

Bill(not IB)’s regulars drank like it was their job.

Bankruptcy

“Capitalism without bankruptcy is like Christianity without hell.”

Truth and courtesy

"It is better to hold back a truth," said Saint Francis de Sales, "than to speak it ungraciously."

Basil's liver

When the furious governor of Pontus threatened to tear out his liver, Basil, a confirmed invalid, replied suavely, "It is a kind intention. My liver, as at present located, has given me nothing but uneasiness."

Lord, do not forget me

Sir Jacob Astley (a hardy old Cavalier who was both devout and humorous) before the battle of Edgehill: "Oh, Lord, Thou knowest how busy I must be this day. If I forget Thee, do not Thou forget me. March on, boys!"

Prince Rupert

What the English Puritans especially resented in Prince Rupert was his insistence on regimental prayers. They could pardon his raids, his breathless charges, his bewildering habit of appearing where he was least expected or desired; but that he should usurp their own especial prerogative of piety was more than they could bear.

Carnal mirth

In the diary of Henry Alline; "On Wednesday the twelfth I preached at a wedding, and had the happiness thereby to be the means of excluding carnal mirth".

Nuns' shoes

Saint Francis de Sales to the nuns who wanted to go barefooted, "Keep your shoes and change your brains".

Academic style

"I know not how it comes to pass," he said, "that professors in most arts and sciences are generally the worst qualified to explain their meaning to those who are not of their tribe."

Courage

Courage is fear that has said its prayers.

Political pusillanimity

No one ever made much of a mistake by overestimating the pusillanimity of the British political class.

J S Mill

Mill’s contention that a father who abandons his children may rightfully be put to forced labor.

Socialism and crime

The Netherlands, with its relatively virtuous Gini coefficient, is one of the most crime-ridden countries in Western Europe, as is Sweden, with an even lower Gini coefficient.

TR on the Senate

As Teddy Roosevelt shot back when an aide recommended he inform the Senate of a secret agreement with Japan, "Why invite the expression of views with which we may not agree?"

Communism

Communism: a state body of favored officials.

U.S. basketball

There were sighs of relief at the prospect there might not be a professional basketball season this year, when the owners and players couldn't get together on how to co-ordinate their greed.

Jobs

If all we want are jobs, we can create any number -- for example, have people dig holes and then fill them up again.

Yes and no

Yes is no good unless a no is possible.

Rabbi Sacks

"Therefore the answer to the consumer society is the world of faith, which the Jews call the world of Shabbat, where you can’t shop and you can’t spend and you spend your time with things that matter, with family".

Gompers on socialism

“Socialism has no place in the hearts of those who would secure the fight for freedom and preserve democracy.” Samuel Gompers, 1918

American women

Not one single American woman has EVER condemned their fellow American women for committing these crimes against men. Silence means consent. Therefore, American women support and enjoy destroying men’s lives and causing men to commit suicide. Therefore, is it any surprise that a huge percent of American men no longer want anything to do with American women, other than using them for easy sex and then throwing them away?

Over 50 percent of American women are single, without a boyfriend or husband; so the fact is most American men no longer want to marry American women. Let these worthless American women grow old living alone with their 10 cats.

Religion and social justice

Could it be that people don’t need to attend churches in order to tackle problems like poverty, hunger, and housing? Is it possible that people attend churches for entirely different reasons

USCCB

One does get the impression that the staff of the U.S. Catholic Conference and the diocesan chanceries are bureaucratic perpetual motion machines which operate without much in the way of a mind.

Cure d'Ars

The Cure de Ars once said: "leave a village for twenty years without a priest -- and they'll be praying to animals."

Power

Shelley said that power “pollutes whate’er it touches.”

Men of the year

Time named Man of the Year long ago, Stalin in 1942, Hitler in 1938.

Impartiality

It may appear paradoxical, but it is exceedingly practical. We must be not so much impartial as partial to both sides.

French liberty

At the time, the French right opposed foreign adventures. The French left were the ones who advocated imperialism as part of their Jacobin legacy. Occupying faraway places was an extension of what Robespierre and his friends had begun in 1793 by invading and “liberating” France’s neighbors.

Emma Goldman

The descendant of an old New York Sephardic family, Miss Emma drew the line with German Jews, who might create problems if one tried to assimilate too many of them.

Persons

When a nation ceases to put the highest value on the home, it will not be long before it ceases to put a value on a person.

Fall of Empire

In 150 B.C. Polybius, in writing about the decline of Greece, said: “For the evil of depopulation grew upon us rapidly, and without attracting our attention, by our men becoming perverted to a passion of show and money, and pleasure of an evil life, and accordingly either not marrying at all, or if they did marry, refusing to rear children that were born, or at most, one or two out of the great numbers, for the sake of leaving their well-being assured, and bringing them up in extravagant luxury. The result, houses are left heirless, and like swarms of flies, little by little, the cities become sparsely inhabited and weak.”

Slavery

We came, before the Church was founded, out of a pagan social system in which slavery was everywhere, in which the whole structure of society reposed upon the institution of Slavery. With the loss of the Faith we return to that institution again.

Unemployment

Under full Communism there would be no unemployment, just as there is no unemployment in a prison.

The State

"the State," but what is in practice a body of favored officials.

Seneca

As Seneca once told Lucilius: ”No wonder there is so much sickness. Look at all the cooks!”

Dilution

diluted Christians

Leonardo

Leonardo spent nearly 20 years in Milan, arriving at the court of Ludovico Maria Sforza in 1482 and skedaddling as soon as his patron was deposed in 1499. A despot’s court was obviously the perfect environment for the original Renaissance Man.

College children

Occupy Wall Street encampments across the country. The bulk of their complaint seems to be that it is somehow unfair that the creature comforts of campus life should ever come to an end

Kierkegaard

The matter is quite simple. The Bible is very easy to understand. But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly. Take any words in the New Testament and forget everything except pledging yourself to act accordingly. My God, you will say, if I do that my whole life will be ruined. How would I ever get on in the world? Herein lies the real place of Christian scholarship. Christian scholarship is the Church’s prodigious invention to defend itself against the Bible, to ensure that we can continue to be good Christians without the Bible coming too close. Oh, priceless scholarship, what would we do without you? Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.

Commentating

Brokaw stands as the last of the respected "voice of God" news anchors.

Gandhi's India

India, the result of Gandhi, is 600 million people living in maximum poverty.

Verbicide

Verbicide precedes homicide.

Tenderness

Flannery O'Connor's warning that tenderness leads to the gas chambers.

Modern church

I never imagined that I would grow up to become a priest in the Church of What’s Happening Now, a.k.a. The Episcopal Church.

Merton on Progressive Catholics

Merton put the complaint about progressive Catholicism and its furies about as well as it can be put in one of the “nonsense letters” he wrote to his old friend, the poet Robert Lax: “I am truly spry and full of fun, but am pursued by the vilifications of progressed Catholics. Mark my word man there is no uglier species on the face of the earth than progressed Catholics, mean, frivol, ungainly, inarticulate, venomous, and bursting at the seams with progress into the secular cities and Teilhardian subways. The Ottavianis was bad but these are infinitely worse. You wait and see.”

Theory and practice

“Theory is when you understand everything, but nothing works.”
“Practice is when everything works, but nobody understands why.”

Oh dear, Oh dear

Liturgy of the Wringing of the Hands

Get a bat!

[I am reminded of the story of a kid harassing the pitcher, telling him how slow he was, how washed up, etc. The pitcher responded: "Okay, kid. Get a bat!"]

Poetry and philosophy

As a student wrote in a paper I read recently, “I love poetry—it’s like philosophy with its clothes on.”

Finance

Peter Kodwow Appaih Cardinal Turkson, an impressive man with a doctorate from the Biblicum in Sacred Scripture. His advice on world banking is as welcome as the views of the Chairman of Credit Suisse on the authorship of Deutero-Isaiah.

Abp Weakland

In 1986, the same bishops issued another pastoral letter, “Economic Justice for All,” which was dissected by competent lay economists and expectorated by the encyclical “Centesimus Annus.” Of all the bishops, the one selected to chair the writing of that paper on financial accountability was Rembert Weakland, whose perception of the market place had the perspicacity and dispassion of a debutante at a bullfight.

Eminent domain

As it happened, getting rid of Susette Kelo’s house—ultimately, New London moved it from its waterfront site rather than demolish it—produced no gain to anyone. In the wake of a merger, Pfizer moved its research facility elsewhere; the redevelopment agency couldn’t raise the necessary financing for the rest of the project, which Pfizer’s withdrawal rendered problematic; and the land sits vacant, generating not a nickel of tax revenue.

Tertullian

"Our teeming population is the strongest evidence our numbers are burdensome to the world, which can hardly support us from its natural elements. Our wants grow more and more keen and our complaints more bitter in all mouths, while nature fails in affording us our usual sustenance. In every deed, pestilence and famine and wars have to be regarded as a remedy for nations as the means of pruning the luxuriance of the human race." Paul Ehrlich in 1968? Al Gore last year? Nope. It was Tertullian, a Carthaginian priest in 210 AD

Fordham

Poe spent many of his days in the Bronx (then considered a part of Westchester County) wandering through the woods and by the river. St. John’s College, now Fordham University, had opened just a few years before his arrival, and he frequently visited the first generation of Jesuits there, writing that they “enjoyed smoking, drinking and playing cards, and they never discussed religion.”

Hawkins and the universe

Stephen Hawking has noted that "if the rate of expansion one second after the big bang had been smaller by even one part in a hundred thousand million million, the universe would have recollapsed before it ever reached its present size."

In charge

Most of the people who want to be in charge probably shouldn’t be.

Bishops

Bishops: a feckless group of powerless bureaucrats

Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa of Calcutta said about being called not to be "successful but to be faithful."

B Franklin

"When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic." ~ Benjamin Franklin

What the Lord hates

"Six things the LORD hates, seven which are an abomination to him:

haughty eyes, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that make haste to run to evil, a false witness who breathes out lies, and a man who sows discord among brothers. (Prov 6:16-19)"

Salvation

Man's ultimate purpose is to let God save him.

Editing

Adlai Stevenson's definition of an editor: "One who separates the wheat from the chaff and keeps the chaff."

Gay marriage

Gay marriage? It’s like Grape Nuts: neither grape nor nuts.

Unintended consequences

Responding to peace activists, some Montgomery County Council members sponsored a resolution to instruct Congress to slash defense spending. The idea died when Virginia began inviting the county's second-largest private-sector employer, Lockheed Martin, to move across the Potomac.

Breakaway Churches

Jesuit-educated Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe reminded the Archbishop of Canterbury that the Church of England is “a breakaway group from the Roman Catholic Church” during an awkward meeting in Harare yesterday.

The sparrow

This is how the present life of man on Earth, King, appears to me in comparison with that time which is unknown to us. You are sitting feasting with your ealdormen and thegns in winter time. The fire is burning on the hearth in the middle of the hall and all inside is warm, while outside the wintry storms of rain and snow are raging – and a sparrow flies swiftly through the hall. It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other. For the few moments it is inside, the storm and wintry tempest cannot touch it, but after the briefest moment of calm, it flits from your sight, out of the wintry storm and into it again. So this life of man appears but for a moment. What follows or, indeed, what went before, we know not at all. - Saint Paulinus of York, speaking in Northumbria

Euthanasia in the movies

Film A is about a loving husband whose young wife contracts a painful, incurable disease. He helps her kill herself and is tried for homicide, but is acquitted because the court recognizes the rightness of his deed.
Film A is I Accuse, produced in Germany in 1941 as propaganda for the Nazi euthanasia campaign.

California

California is like a middle-aged wastrel who finally has run through his trust fund and has to get a real job.

Sex scandals

Would the sex-abuse nightmare have occurred at all, if the average Australian or American Catholic had bothered to realize all this? St. Thomas Aquinas, commenting on Galatians, is absolutely emphatic. "When the faith is endangered," Aquinas writes, "a subject ought to rebuke his prelate, even publicly."

Flannery

Flannery O'Connor, who once observed: "The Catholic Church has saved me a couple of thousand years in learning how to write."

Shaw

A passage in Bernard Shaw's Too True To Be Good, in which an old pagan, very obviously speaking for Shaw himself, sums up what I am convinced was Dad's attitude near the end. The passage runs: "The science to which I pinned my faith is bankrupt. Its counsels, which should have established the millennium, led, instead, directly to the suicide of Europe. I believed them once. In their name I helped to destroy the faith of millions of worshipers in the temples of a thousand creeds. And now look at me and witness the great tragedy of an atheist who has lost his faith.")

Being stoic

Clive James's cruel remark: "we would like to think we are stoic...but would prefer a version that didn't hurt."

Rosewater Catholics

They seem to enjoy all the benefits of Catholic life, and none of the inconveniences.

The chenical brain

Every materialist argument about thoughts and beliefs being reducible to chemistry would itself be reducible to chemistry. There would no longer be truth as we understand it, just chemistry.

The Minute Men

A British lieutenant-general who fought the Minutemen observed, "Whoever looks upon them as an irregular mob will find himself very much mistaken."

Atheists

Atheists are such a bore; they are always talking about God.

Mr. Obama - shape shifter

His habit of spiritual shape-shifting.

Slaves in America

Here is another piece of history that might shock Garofalo: In 1654, black slave John Casor sought freedom from Anthony Johnson, a black slave owner—the first official slave owner in America. Uh-oh…the dirty little secret revealed.

The Gaurdian

By God, The Guardian is a loathsome newspaper; a local north London morning daily for Stalinist metro libtards, perpetually arrogant, snobbish, self-righteous, humourless, dull, relentlessly middle class, cowardly and cheap.

Bishops and laity

The role of Bl. Clemens von Galen and other bishops is well-known, but they received their influence from their flock, ordinary German Catholics who were shocked to their core by this Social Darwinist experiment.

German bishops

(Fearful of what would happen, the senior bishops had overruled both Von Preysing and Cologne’s Archbishop, Josef Frings).

Auden & Aquinas

W.H. Auden's Letter to Lord Byron: I bought and praised but did not read Aquinas

Hard science

If it is true that all truths are discoverable by hard science, then it is discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science. But it is not discoverable by hard science that all truths are discoverable by hard science.

The barbarians

W. H. Auden, in The Age of Anxiety wrote:

But the new barbarian is no uncouth
Desert-dweller; he does not emerge
From fir forests; factories bred him;
Corporate companies, college towns
Mothered his mind, and many journals
Backed his beliefs.

Church and State

Joanie Wentz, vice president of development and communications for the organization [Catholic Charities], insisted the closure was not related to the July 1 incident. She said the St. Michael's program, which is approaching its 25th anniversary, suffered a $1 million cut from the federal government in the last budget, reducing the number of beds from 88 to 52 and resulting in the layoffs of 19 employees.

Benedict XVI's smaller Church

"It will be small communities of believers -- and these already exist -- whose enthusiasm spreads within a pluralistic society and makes others curious to seek the light which gives life in abundance."

Liturgist

Question: What’s the difference between a terrorist and a liturgist?

Answer: You can negotiate with a terrorist.

Protestantism

Mozart's comment that, "Protestantism is all in the head".

Mary Midgley and R Dawkins

She wrote that she had previously "not attended to Dawkins, thinking it unnecessary to "break a butterfly upon a wheel.

Mary Midgley

Midgley sees philosophy as plumbing, something that nobody notices until it goes wrong.

Oxford communism

After a split in the Labour club at Oxford over the Soviet Union’s actions

Ex ore infantium

“Remember, we are here to help others.” In response, one wise child then asked: “Then what are the others here for?"

Church in Germany

Using Catholicism in Germany as an example, the Pope said that while the German Church was “superbly organized” it was perhaps lacking in a “corresponding spiritual strength, the strength of faith in a living God.”

The Positivist Bunker

The positivist reason which recognizes nothing beyond mere functionality resembles a concrete bunker with no windows,

Islam

The Muslims have been having a high old time of it all week, living it up in their role as the splinter in the world’s big toe.

Feminism

Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.

Jobs abroad

Just ask the CEO who started sending jobs overseas, when the U.S. government fined him for hiring too many people.

Women priests

The basic study with German thoroughness is Manfred Hauke's Women in the Priesthood? A Systematic Analysis in the Light of the Order of Creation and Redemption (Ignatius Press, 1988).

Abp Nichols on abortion

On abortion, Archbishop Nichols' message is one of carefully worded support for the MP Nadine Dorries, and her amendment on independent abortion counsellors. "In the eyes of the Catholic Church abortion is a tragedy," he says in a voice that still bears a hint of his Liverpool upbringing. "Our principle objective must be to try and win greater sympathy for that perspective and for the value of human life from its beginnings.

[In the eyes of the Church, abortion is a sin. But this is not to be mentioned].

Bishops in England

"I'm not sure he'll say much on that," says the press man for Archbishop Vincent Nichols when asked whether the leader of Catholics in England and Wales will broach the topic of abortion. "We're not really keen on an 'archbishop versus the politicians' headline'."

Jimmy Carter

"Jimmy Carter, the senile old crank in the White House attic"

Galileo and Whitehead

“In a generation which saw the Thirty Years’ War and remembered Alva in the Netherlands, the worst that happened to men of science was that Galileo suffered an honorable detention and a mild reproof, before dying peacefully in his bed.”
Alfred North Whitehead

Education

The purpose of a college education, is to give people the correct attitudes towards all minorities and the financial means to live as far away from them as possible .

Life in NYC

All the overserved undergrads.

The NY election

Drudge has a headline up there about this New York 9 election: "Revenge of the Jews."

Bunch of Jews

Henry Waxman last night, Henry "Nostrilitis" Waxman, you know what his reaction was [to the defeat of Weiner]? He said, "Well, this is just a bunch of Jews in New York trying to protect their wealth."

Progress

We alter the test instead of trying to pass the test.

Bishops

The kind of men St Augustine referred to when he said, “You say, ‘He must be a bishop for he sits upon the cathedra.’ True – and a scarecrow might be called a watchman in the vineyard.” ...

Congress and Progress

'If pro- is the opposite of con-, what is the opposite of progress?'

Col. Tarleton

Colonel Banastre Tarleton who is still remembered for “Tarleton’s Quarter” that he gave to the surrendering Americans at Waxhaws by butchering them.

Mrs. Clinton

Hillary Clinton’s “f—n jew bastard” remark

Liberal media

“World Ends Tomorrow: Women and Minorities Hit Hardest!”

Galileo [again]

Galileo Galilei, scientist's insistence that not only the earth, but the entire universe, revolved around the sun.

Soldiers

"We were soldiers once, and young".

Broke

Hemingway described going broke as “slowly at first, then all of a sudden.”

U.S. Bishops

Most worrisome for the bishops may be that three-quarters of those who were even aware of “Faithful Citizenship” say the document had “no influence at all” on the way they voted in 2008; 71 percent said it would have made no difference even if they had known about it.
Overall, just 4 percent of adult U.S. Catholics say the statement from the U.S. hierarchy either was a major influence, or would have been if they’d known about it.
“Those who think the bishops have too much influence on Catholic voters may be relieved by these findings,” said Peter Steinfels, co-director of Fordham University’s Center on Religion and Culture, which sponsored the survey. “Those who think that the bishops have too little influence or have influence of the wrong sort may be distressed.”

Protestantism in Germany

"The German Christian Movement had as its stated aim the uniting of all Protestant Christians into an inclusive and affirming body. However the doctrine of this group was based on an errant theology of revelation which placed human experience above the revealed word of God. The great theologian Karl Barth listened patiently, read the prepared memorandum, then stood up and to the shock of everyone present announced “we have different beliefs, different spirits, and a different God” and walked out. That event marked the formation of the “Confessing Church” in Germany – a small but effective group of Christian leaders who were prepared to stand up against a heresy within the Church. On the other hand the greater portion of the Christian Protestant Church leadership in Germany succumbed to the call for unity. As time went on, this greater group that placed unity above truth was gradually absorbed, like a python’s prey, by the false gospel of the “Reichs Church”, rendered voiceless and impotent against the tide of Nazi totalitarianism that swept all before it. This subversion of effective Christian witness removed a major obstacle to Hitler’s ambitions and the resulting conflagration we call World War 2".

Opinions

The work of professors who mistake the opinion of their peers for the opinion of the public.

The Church

Rosewater Catholics

Non-employment

This is a politician’s nightmare. It will be years before they can take credit for something they didn’t do.

President's press officer

Ventriloquist’s dummy Jay Carney

Rank

If you need the rank, you're not worth it.
If you're worth the rank you don't need it.

Clarence Thomas

“If our history has taught us anything, it has taught us to beware of élites bearing racial theories.”

Macmillan

When asked what posed the greatest challenge to statesmen, Harold Macmillan, the former British prime minister, responded, "Events, my dear boy, events."

NYTimes

The New York Times is a legend in their own eyes.

Truth

Winston Churchill, who once said, “The truth is incontrovertible. Malice may attack it, ignorance may deride it, but in the end, there it is.”

Interventionism

The foreign policy of the Founders – who inveighed against going abroad “in search of monsters to destroy”.

Clinton on negroes

“African Americans watch the same news at night that ordinary Americans do.”

Birth prevention

Studies such as the one reported by the Guttmacher Institute showing that 54 percent of women who have had abortions have been using birth control [prevention].

Evolution in schools

It should be taught in public schools but not until students have been taught to read and count.

Priests and bishops

There is one further, curious and very important footnote to the Church’s reaction to the Abyssinian War: research has shown that the vast majority of parish priests in the country were resolutely opposed to the adventure.

Science and belief

The discovery only applies if the moon was in fact created when a Mars-sized rock crashed into the still molten Earth and shot debris into orbit around us. Since this is the current theory most scientists believe, it means that either the collision occurred much later than they thought, or that the moon was created some other way entirely.

Death

You don't have any choice in where you die or how you die. The only choice you have is what you die for.

Lapsed Catholics

This is the fervent evangelistic writing of a “collapsed Catholic”.

Sea to sea

The ululations of the aggrieved resounded from sea to whining sea.

Cardinal Newman

"If the Church would be vigorous and influential, it must be decided and plain-spoken in its doctrine".

The New Deal

In May 1939, shortly after learning that unemployment stood at 20.7%, Henry Morgenthau, the secretary of the Treasury, exploded: “We have tried spending money. We are spending more than we have ever spent before and it does not work.” Morgenthau concluded, “I say after eight years of this administration we have just as much unemployment as when we started. . . . And an enormous debt to boot!”

H Clinton and China

Shortly after becoming U.S. Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton stated clearly that she was not going to allow human rights to ‘interfere’ with economic issues with China.

Jews and abortion

Jewish doctors were most likely to say they would do an abortion.

Fascism in Italy

Mussolini’s supporters, including far too many Catholic bishops, used it as an excuse for his dictatorship.

Sowing and reaping

"Were we directed from Washington when to sow and when to reap," Jefferson dryly remarked, "we should soon want bread."

Evolution or appearance

Their assertion, if sustained, confirms the view that life evolved on earth surprisingly soon after the Late Heavy Bombardment.

[The confusion between evolution and appearance]

Provocation

Israel doesn't want to provoke Egypt by preparing for the worst.

[Where have we heard that before?]

Loyalty

"To be sure, the dog is loyal. But why, on that account, should we take him as an example? He is loyal to men, not to other dogs." --- Karl Kraus

Friends and enemies

Henry Kissinger's words still resonate: the only thing worse than being America's enemy is being America's friend.

The student party

As a student who was full of enthusiasm about life after the student party is over, I am left totally disillusioned.

Penn

"Those who will not be governed by God will be ruled by tyrants.”

Hamilton

Hamilton, like his fellow Founders, had a lot to say about virtue and principle. He is said to have stated, “He who stands for nothing, will fall for anything.”

JFK and Krushchev

“Little Boy Blue meets Al Capone,” a U.S. diplomat said.
Khrushchev treated Kennedy with brutal disdain. In excruciating pain from his ailing back and pumped full of perhaps disorienting drugs by his disreputable doctor (who would lose his medical license in 1975).

Liberalism

If Jewish, they live like WASPs, vote like blacks, and lobby like La Raza—and then complain that many don’t like them. If Christian, they vote socialist and then discover the unknowable secret that socialists hate Christians.

Paul Krugman

Former Enron adviser Paul Krugman

ECUSA

The Episcopal Church which has "more clergy than people".

The Poor

Protect the Poor, Not Poverty Programs

Liberal religion

On the other hand, the Episcopalians and the rest of the Christian left, for whom terms like God, Jesus and the Gospel are nothing more than professional jargon, put their whole trust in governmental policy position papers.

Mr. Obama

He is the man with a poor mistress and a rich wife.

Economics

Economics really is taking in each other's laundry.

Debt ceiling

As part of this historic "cut," we've now raised the "debt ceiling" – or, more accurately, lowered the debt abyss.

Jobs in Russia

He graduated from Moscow State Textile University and was dismayed to discover that all the textile factories in the region had closed, with little hope for a comeback in the near future.

Wisdom

"Man is only wise while he searches for wisdom; if he thinks he's found it, he's a fool."

The media

"The media has, as it's always done, done a terrible job reporting on this. They have seen the fire and they've decided to throw gasoline on it,"

El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles

Jane Jacobs, for instance, denounced Los Angeles as a “vast, blind-eyed reservation.” But people continued to move to a place that offered the promise of urban opportunity along with a single-family house, a swimming pool, and access to beaches and mountains.

Eating the corn

"The only way the Americans have come up with to improve economic growth has been to take on new loans to repay the old ones," a blistering commentary published on the official Xinhua news agency said. "To eat May's grain in April, however, will never be a permanent solution to a problem,"

Poor

A group calling itself the “Circle of Protection” recently promoted a statement on “Why We Need to Protect Programs for the Poor.” But we don’t need to protect the programs. We need to protect the poor. Indeed, sometimes we need to protect the poor from the programs. Too many anti-poverty programs are beneficial for the politicians that pass them, and veritable boondoggles for the government bureaucracy that administers them, but they actually serve to rob the poor of their dignity and their initiative, they undermine the family structures that help the poor build prosperous lives, and ultimately mire the poor in poverty for generations.

National Council of Churches

National Council Of Churches Nobody Goes To Anymore

Genius

Einstein is right when he says. “the difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limit.”

American economy

The assumption . . . is that there is some kind of perpetual engine of economic prosperity in America that is going to just continue.

Employed unemployment

The unemployment rate ticked down to 9.1 percent. The Labor Department said the improvement was mostly due to people leaving the labor force.

Archaic government

The simplest explanation—and the president's real bluff—is that they don't want to commit publicly to the kind of tax increases and health-care rationing that would be required to sustain their archaic vision of government.

Progressives

The Progressives came to do good...and did very well indeed.

Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who lives in an academic bubble as a tenured professor at Princeton, protected from the rough and robust reality of the real world, complains that he doesn’t understand why everyone is talking about cutting the size of government, anyway. The skin on his nose is intact.

Economic growth

And now it's going to see an unprecedented period of economic collapse due to the same US hegemony.

The "growth" has turned out to be nothing more than an inflation of asset bubbles hiding unsustainable debt... POP!!

Charity

“Charity is not the willingness to take from somebody in order to give to somebody else.”

Mr Gore

Al "Boy Scout" Gore:
"We are ready for any unforeseen event that may or may not occur."

Opportunity knocks

As they look across their northern border, Pennsylvanians can be forgiven for thinking of New Yorkers the way Abba Eban once described the Palestinians: They never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.

United Nations

The United Nations, for example, survives as a glorious idea, despite how corrupt, counterproductive and even dangerous its actions are.

Italy

That is why the closed shop, a fading memory of the bad old days for people in Britain, is the way Italy still functions at every level. It's why there are no brown or black faces behind the counters in the post office or among the ranks of taxi drivers, why university heads have no embarrassment about giving tenured positions to their closest relatives, why in politics the same old party hacks are recycled year after year – and why so many young Italians of energy and talent flee abroad as soon as they can.

New limousine liberals

The adopted son of the lead guitarist of Pink Floyd, with a personal fortune estimated at $160 million, he was the very image of the caviar anarchist.

Aquinas on emotions

St. Thomas warns that the intellect must always confirm the intuitive insights of the emotions, he is equally concerned about the consequences of ignoring the input of the emotions.

National Public Radio

NPR consists of “pseudo-liberals”.

Mr. Obama

He's like a walking headache.

Two plus two

There is a world where two plus two still does equal four. It is the world of our foreign creditors.

Appeasement

An appeaser is one who feeds the crocodile hoping it will eat him last.

Separation of school...

One may prattle about church and state, but school and state require a “wall of separation”

Abp Chaput

“If our political leaders lack conviction about their faith, it's because the members of the Church lack conviction about their faith".

Debt ceiling and Mr. Obama

Barack Obama said in 2006 that a bill to raise the debt limit was “a sign of leadership failure.”

Debt ceiling

U.S. Congressional leaders are refusing to lift the country's debt ceiling, preventing the Treasury from raising money it has already spent.

Economic growth

And more jobs will be created once the economy again begins to grow.

-Is the growth of the economy a certainty?

Abp Nichols

This champion of imitation Catholicism

Materialism

The venerable Victorian materialist wanted the world to grow more and more scientific, but only on the strict condition that the science should grow more and more materialistic.

Bluffing

In the midst of testy debt-limit negotiations, Obama told House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, "Don't call my bluff."

Center of the universe

That the location of the Earth does not coincide with the center of mass of the universe is a matter of taste, not of "science".

Niceness

The churches have capitulated and preach niceness rather than holiness.

Elitism

If the elites had not polluted the moral watershed upstream,

Feminism

Feminism: that always was a revolt of some women against other women.

Right or wrong

"my president, wrong or wrong!"

Laws

The more numerous the laws, the more corrupt the government.

Shorts at Mass

"If these same folks who wear shorts to Mass were invited to the White House for dinner, would they wear shorts?"

Government

"Democrats warned that if the debt ceiling isn't raised, the government would cease to function. How would you be able to tell?"

Socialism

The terminal ailment of socialists: “They always run out of other people’s money.”

Cardinal Arinze

This is Divine law, it’s not a tennis club regulation.

The necessity of heresy

Oportet ut scandala eveniant.

Gay marriage

The biological impossibility some call “gay marriage”.

GKC on race

“I shall,” he wrote in 1925, “begin to take [racial distinctions] seriously … when I find a man classifying himself as inferior … I never heard a man say: Anthropology shows that I belong to an inferior race.”

Immigration

Legislators from the Mexican border state of Sonora sent a delegation north to Arizona. Their mission? To complain to Arizona officials that the Legal Arizona Workers Act was sending too many Mexican nationals home too quickly, and that Sonora could not handle the burden on its public services and infrastructure.

Our bishops

Cardinal Heenan noted the relativist scepticism that generally characterizes the Churchs teachers: “The magisterium has survived only in the Pope. It is no longer exercised by the bishops and it is rather difficult to get the hierarchy to condemn a false doctrine. Outside Rome the magisterium today is so unsure of itself that it no longer even attempts to lead.”

Social justice

The Church is not a social or philanthropic organisation

Newman and Social Justice

…. this well-ordered and divinely-governed world, with all its blessings of sense and knowledge, may lead us to neglect those interests which will endure when itself has passed away.… And hence it is that many pursuits in themselves honest and right, are nevertheless to be engaged in with caution, lest they seduce us; and those perhaps with especial caution, which tend to the well-being of men in this life. The sciences, for instance, of good government, of acquiring wealth, of preventing and relieving want, and the like, are for this reason especially dangerous; for fixing, as they do, our exertions on this world as an end, they go far to persuade us that they have no other end

Entitlements

Entitlement programs that were not adequately funded and only promise to grow even larger.

J C Murray

Murray defended the distinction between private and public morality, and that the Church should not attempt to impose Catholic morality in the public sphere. He failed to see the results of sexual licentiousness. He believed too strongly in the democratic ideal. He did not realize the necessity of restraint.

J.C.Murray

Its most striking characteristic is its profound materialism . . . It has given citizens everything to live for and nothing to die for.

SJ

The Society of Judas.

Canadian bishops & D and P

This world has never seen such a disastrous generation of bishops like this one.

Science

Scientists are absolutely sure of something until they change their mind upon receiving new information.

GKC on schools

The State did not own men so entirely, even when it could send them to the stake, as it sometimes does now where it can send them to the elementary school.

Secularism

The history of modernity is, among other things, the history of substitutes for God. Art, culture, nation, Geist, humanity, society: all these, along with a clutch of other hopeful aspirants, have been tried from time to time. The most successful candidate currently on offer is sport, which, short of providing funeral rites for its spectators, fulfils almost every religious function in the book.

John Brown

Explode another liberal myth: abolitionist "hero" John Brown wasn't one of the good guys, he was a murdering psychopath. At the 1856 Pottawatomie Creek Massacre, he and his fanatical followers dragged five innocent men—none of them slave owners—from their beds and slaughtered them in front of their screaming families.

Faith

The empty conceit of people who want the comfort of faith but not the cost of actually believing and living it.

Donors

Cooperation can easily turn Catholic organizations into sub-contractors of large donors — donors with a very different anthropology and thus very different notions of authentic human development. And that can undermine the very purpose of Catholic social work.

Love for neighbor

Our love for God and our love for neighbor begin as responses to love we’ve already received.

Christianity

“Christianity doesn’t begin by telling people what they must do, but what God has done for them. Gift comes before duty.”

Individualism

American life has always had a deep streak of unhealthy individualism, rooted not just in the Enlightenment, but also in Reformation theology.

Habits

He may start as a good man with some unhappy appetites and alibis. But unless he repents and changes, the sins become the man. The habit of stealing or lying or cowardice or adultery reshapes him into a different creature.

Bernanos on hope

Georges Bernanos described the virtue of hope as “despair overcome.”

Progressivism

The termites of progressivism

Soviet Russia

To Gorbachev's prime minister Nikolai Ryzhkov, the "moral [nravstennoe] state of the society" in 1985 was its "most terrifying" feature:

"[We] stole from ourselves, took and gave bribes, lied in the reports, in newspapers, from high podiums, wallowed in our lies, hung medals on one another. And all of this -- from top to bottom and from bottom to top".

Experts 3

"We tend to forget," historian Adam Ulam would note later, "that in 1985, no government of a major state appeared to be as firmly in power, its policies as clearly set in their course, as that of the USSR."

Experts 3

Even the leading student of the revolution's economic causes, Anders Åslund, notes that from 1985 to 1987, the situation "was not at all dramatic."

Experts 2

Richard Pipes, perhaps the leading American historian of Russia as well as an advisor to U.S. President Ronald Reagan, called the revolution "unexpected."

Experts

George Kennan, wrote that, in reviewing the entire "history of international affairs in the modern era," he found it "hard to think of any event more strange and startling, and at first glance inexplicable, than the sudden and total disintegration and disappearance … of the great power known successively as the Russian Empire and then the Soviet Union."

Robespierre

Maximilien Robespierre, who spoke ecstatically of “virtue and its emanation, terror.”

Thomas Paine

"the summer soldier and sunshine patriot"

Fr. Rahner

Hell is simply “threat discourse” (as Karl Rahner called it).

Herman Cain

"Not a conservative but a constitutionalist"

Bishops and the flag

A 2007 United States Conference of Catholic Bishops report states there are no steadfast rules on the issue, but the recommendation is for churches to keep the flag out of the chapel.

Million dollar jobs

At Cree Inc., an LED light bulb maker. Under the supposedly jobs-boosting stimulus, Cree received $5.2 million. According to Recovery.gov, that $5.2 million created 3.02 jobs. That's $1,716,171 per job.

Nuns teaching

Yet, one of the old nuns who trusted me, told me twenty years ago that the various orders and dioceses were getting into more lucrative things than schools.

Social justice

We differ from the "social justice" crowd who thrive in "Catholic" schools who pass out their personal political opinion-bilge as "Church Teaching."

Bastiat

Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850) said, "Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."

Media

In the invasion of Grenada, a reporter complained to a high officer that in World War II, unlike today, the press had been allowed to go to the front lines. The officer replied, “In World War II you were on our side.”

Employment

Employment will NEVER recover simply because there is no need for employment at that level since the tendency is to reduce the number of humans employed, being replaced by Automation. Why? because machines don't take breaks, don't have families to support, and can work for double the years worked by a human before the need for replacement.

Benedict XVI

Abraham's thought, which seems almost paradoxical, can be synthesized thus: obviously the innocent cannot be treated as the guilty, this would be unjust; instead, it is necessary to treat the guilty as the innocent, putting into act a "superior" justice, offering them a possibility of salvation, because if the evildoers accept God's forgiveness and confess their fault letting themselves be saved, they will no longer continue to do evil, they will also become righteous, without any further need to be punished.

GKC

We all know that Experience now stands for the philosophy of those who claim to be young long after their time.

Literature departments

“Literature departments really are where bad ideas go to die — or, rather, to walk the earth as poorly reanimated zombies, eating the brains of heedless young people.”

Freud again

A classical Freudian analyst is becoming as hard to find as a good phrenologist.

Freud

Likewise, Freudianism, which its founder promulgated as the strictest result of empirical science, claimed to describe the structure of every human mind based on the subjective hunches a single shrink collected from interviewing a narrow slice of high-strung, rich Viennese — the kind of people you see staring hollow-eyed out of Klimt and Schiele pictures.

Marxism

Discredited, dead economic ideas that Karl Marx left lying around the life of the mind like rusting Soviet tanks.

Warming

Stephen Schneider, from his well-funded government perch at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, called it “journalistically irresponsible to present both sides” of the story.

Veni, vidi, vici

“sighted sub, sank same.”

Tolstoy

In 1886 in What Then Must We Do? Leo Tolstoy wrote, "I sit on a man's back, choking him, and making him carry me, and yet assure myself and others that I am very sorry for him and wish to ease his lot by all possible means-except by getting off his back."

Congress

Replacing Gus Savage with a stalk of celery would elevate the intellectual and moral tone of Congress.

Funded never paid debt

Nor did Madison like Hamilton’s idea of a funded debt, perpetually rolled over, never extinguished, and requiring taxation to service it. Such a market in government paper called into being a class of financiers and investors, dependent on the Treasury and prone to corruption.

Fr. Reese on Edward Peters' explanation of canon law

To Edward Peters' explanation of the reasons for denying Communion to Gov. Cuomo with his paramour, Fr. Thomas Reese SJ referred to Peters as "some guy from Detroit". So much for Jesuit humility.

Cardinal O'Malley

In the Culture of Corruption, Michelle Malkin exposes Joe Biden as a corrupt individual who pretends to be stupid. Cardinal Sean is the Joe Biden of the Catholic hierarchy.

Buying people

I think it was Napoleon who said, "It is not surprising that men can be bought, but that they can be bought for so little."

God's side

In the midst of the Civil War, the first Republican president was asked by a clergyman if God was on his side. Lincoln’s reply: "Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side. My great concern is to be on God's side.”

Liberal Hollywood

For example, William Bickley, a writer on The Partridge Family and a producer on Happy Days, says he infused Vietnam War protest messages into the latter. “I was into all that kind of masturbation,”

Rebuking bishops

St. Thomas also defends public rebuke of prelates:
"It must be observed, however, that if the faith were endangered, a subject ought to rebuke his prelate even publicly. Hence Paul, who was Peter's subject, rebuked him in public, on account of the imminent danger of scandal concerning faith, and, as the gloss of Augustine says in Gal. 2: 11, 'Peter gave an example to superiors, that if at any time they should happen to stray from the straight path, they should not disdain to be reproved by their subjects'."

UN

ceaseless UN-speak

Scarecrow

When Dorothy asked how he could talk if he didn’t have a brain, the Scarecrow replied, “I don’t know. But some people without brains do an awful lot of talking."

Damned if you do...

Gone, too, was the notorious Irish promiscuity of those years; New York’s Irish became known by the latter part of the nineteenth century as a churched people, often chided by the press for their “puritanical” attitudes.

Personal charity

Hughes and Ives made it clear that these children were the community’s responsibility: their own Irish parents—not the nativists or the unfeeling city—had abandoned them to their plight. The Irish, as Hughes and his priests and nuns tirelessly taught, had a moral responsibility to give money to this cause, as well as to the Church and all its other charitable organizations. For Hughes, such community self-help and personal responsibility were the essence of Christian charity.

Hughes and social justice

Hughes dismissed this approach, which made no effort to re-moralize the demoralized poor, as “soupery.”

Dagger John and women

Given the demographic facts, along with the high illegitimacy rate and the degree of family disintegration, Hughes clearly saw the need to teach men respect for women, and women self-respect.

Confession

With unerring psychological insight, Hughes had his priests emphasize religious teachings perfectly attuned to re-socializing the Irish and helping them succeed in their new lives. It was a religion of personal responsibility that they taught, stressing the importance of confession, a sacrament not widely popular today—and unknown to many of the Irish who emigrated during the famine, most of whom had never received any religious education. The practice had powerful psychological consequences. You cannot send a friend to confess for you, nor can you bring an advocate into the confessional. Once inside the confessional, you cannot discuss what others have done to you but must clearly state what you yourself have done wrong. It is the ultimate taking of responsibility for one’s actions; and it taught the Irish to focus on their own role in creating their misfortune.

Hughes

Hughes’s solution for his flock’s social ills was to re-spiritualize them. He wanted to bring about an inner, moral transformation in them, which he believed would solve their social problems in the end.

NY Irish gangs in 1880s

Inflamed by this spectacle of social ruin, nativist sentiment grew and took a nastier, racist turn, no longer attacking primarily the superstition and priestcraft of the Catholic religion but rather the genetic inferiority of the Irish people.

NY Irish gangs in 1880s

Illegitimacy reached strato-spheric heights—and tens of thousands of abandoned Irish kids roamed, or prowled, the city’s streets. Violent Irish gangs, with names like the Forty Thieves, the B’boys, the Roach Guards, and the Chichesters, brought havoc to their neighborhoods.

NY Irish in 1880s

In The New York Irish, Ronald Bayor and Timothy Meagher report that besides rampant alcoholism, addiction to opium and laudanum was epidemic in these neighborhoods in the 1840s and 1850s. Many Irish immigrants communicated in their own profanity-filled street slang called “flash talk”: a multi-day drinking spree was “going on a bender,” “cracking a can” was robbing a house. Literate English practically disappeared from ordinary conversation.

Dagger John Hughes

Lost in a land where many didn’t want them, violent, without skills, the Irish were in need of rescue. This was Hughes’s flock, and he was prepared to be their rescuer.

Dagger John Hughes

He thought he had a duty not to repeat the mistakes of the clergy in Ireland, who in his view had been remiss in not speaking out more forcefully against English oppression.

Schools

Why would I pay $8,000 for my kids to weaken their faith in the church by questionable religious when they can lose their faith in public school for free?

Absurdity

There is nothing so absurd or incredible that it has not been asserted by one philosopher or another [Descartes]

Destroying the Church

Napoleon said to Cardinal Consalvi that he would destroy the Catholic Church; Cardinal Consalvi laughed at him and responded "Sire, if immoral priests, and bad popes, and countless sinners in the church have not been able to destroy Her from within...you surely will not destroy Her from without".

Pakistan

Most countries have armies. Pakistan is often said to be an army that has a country.

Instant Christianity

It is hardly a matter of wonder that the country that gave the world instant tea and instant coffee should be the one to give it instant Christianity.

USCCB

The misinterpretation found in a July 2002 newsletter from the USCCB’s own liturgy committee, which stated that “kneeling is not a licit posture.” It is now quite clear that kneeling to receive Communion is a licit posture and not one of disobedience, as some had previously thought.

GKC on Macaulay

He was the son of one of the first "friends of the negro," whose honest industry and philanthropy were darkened by a religion of sombre smugness, which almost makes one fancy they loved the negro for his colour, and would have turned away
from red or yellow men as needlessly gaudy.

GKC on the romantics

There had been about these great poets a young and splendid sterility.

Individuality

It is useless for the æsthete (or any other anarchist) to
urge the isolated individuality of the artist, apart from his attitude to his age. His attitude to his age is his individuality: men are never individual when alone.

California

The self-licking ice-cream cone that is California.

Fr. Neuhaus

The late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus used to say that, when the Church is not obliged to speak, the Church is obliged not to speak;

Godfather

A broad shouldered man in a double-breasted suit and sunglasses holding a baby over the font with a priest standing nearby. The caption read something like, “Perhaps I should explain the meaning of the term Godfather…”

Education

A graduate of the public school educational drivel factory.

Plumbing lawyers

"Nobody has told the law schools that the $160,000 jobs are dying out. Tuition has skyrocketed and wages are collapsing. Take it from a 2007 graduate, get thee to plumbing school. "

Joseph, San Francisco

San Francisco

A new study shows that nearly half the young families who live in San Francisco are planning to move within the next three years. The city already has the lowest population of children per capita of any big U.S. city.

China and Tibet

The Chinese Government has prohibited the living Buddhas of Tibet from reincarnating without government approval.

Jewish blessing before meals

They tried to kill us: they failed: let's eat.

Cops

If you hate cops so much, then next time you get robbed, call a hippie.

Bureaucracies

A bureaucracy is fundamentally incapable of fulfilling the regulatory responsbilities it assumes.

Religious orders

A Franciscan noted that “Dominicans are great preachers and Jesuits are brilliant, but when it comes to humility we’re tops”.

Judging others

Cavalier condemnation, so easy for someone who has had the bramble-free path,

German

Like one of those German compound nouns that rumble past like a line of boxcars.

Cheap grace

"Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance, baptism without church discipline, communion without confession, absolution without personal confession."

TIME Magazine

TIME Magazine, ever limping behind what it saw as progressive opinion on matters of taste...

Elections

IF YOU VOTED FOR OBAMA IN 2008 TO PROVE YOU ARE NOT A RACIST,
VOTE FOR SOMEONE ELSE IN 2012 TO PROVE YOU ARE NOT AN IDIOT

U.S. Senate

As the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid bears special responsibility for failing to direct attention to the central challenges of our time. His floor strategy seems to be focused on saving Democrats more than democracy.

Causes

Nelson Algren once said that every movement begins as a cause, becomes a business and ends up as a racket.

Rebuking

Rebuke cannot be given without first expressing love

Sword of Constantine

"A lengthy book that actually argues little but avers grandly".

James Carroll

James Carroll is a professional anti-Catholic

State Dept. and Israel

The State Department has been the locus of anti-Israel -- and anti-Jewish -- sentiment since long before Secretary of State George C. Marshall sulked and pouted through the Cabinet sessions leading up to the recognition of the Jewish state in 1948. Mr. Marshall threatened to resign if President Harry S Truman accorded recognition, finally agreeing, reluctantly, to stay in his job only as a courtesy to the president. The Foggy Bottom establishment has never quit sulking since, patiently waiting for the opportunity to exact revenge. Finally the Foggy Bottom wise men have a friendly president at their back.

Poverty

In the 1960s, we fought a war on poverty; poverty won.

Immigrants

Yet whatever the degree of assimilation, most accepted a fundamental truth: that whatever affection they had for their homes, for their native tongue, or for their old ways and customs, those cultures had in some significant way failed them.

Harvard

Respect for merit remains, but it wavers and yields to the conventions of flattened self-esteem in which everyone is entitled to a point of view—and, need I add, a high grade.

Mr. Obama

President Hopey Changey

Life

Enjoy life NOW .. it has an expiration date

French

The French are never happy unless they're unhappy.

Atheists

Atheists, I have heard, are smart folks; which says a thing or two about mere human intelligence left on its own.

Osama and Obama

The cadaver of Osama and the palaver of Obama

New bishop of Berlin

plain text Catholicism

French bishops supporting abortion

The page advertises INDESO Mujer’s participation in the annual September 28th Campaign for the Depenalization of Abortion in Latin America and the Caribbean, and offers a an online “book” on “sexual and reproductive rights” which advocates the slogans “sexual education to decide, contraceptives to avoid abortion, and legal abortion to avoid death” and “legal, safe, and free abortion”. (p. 21, 19 of pdf).

The same manual claims that people have a right to “sexual relations independently of age, civil state, or family model” and a right to “a pleasurable, recreational sexuality, independently of reproduction.” (p. 24, 22 of pdf)

In addition the organization links to an edition of its magazine “La Chancleta,” which is devoted to advocating “sexual and reproductive rights,” including abortion.

Charity

“I beg you not to criticize me by invoking charity, because the greatest charity is to deliver souls held fast by Satan in order to win them over to Christ.” – Saint Padre Pio

"Law fare"

Liberals, when threatened with contradiction, always call in the lawyers. It is called "law-fare".

The Soft Man

The Soft Man is intellectually at ease. Having been to college he believes all the right things.

Beauty and the good

Pulchrum et bonum sont idem subiecto sola ratione differunt. Thomas S.T.

Hume

There can be no demonstrative argument for a matter of fact or existence.

Los Angeles archbishops

L.A. archbishop Gomez refused to join in the 2011 May Day march of immigrants because it has been co-opted by socialists, gay priders, and the like, using the problems of immigrants to cover and further their own causes, which were anti-Catholic, at the least. Abp. Cardinal Mahoney was a regular attendant.

Defoe

Defoe said that around that most Englishmen were ready to fight against popery without knowing whether popery were a man or a horse.

Bertie Wooster

If things had been different...but then they never are.

Jesuits

"NONE OF THE MEN I know cares about being a priest," reports a man in charge of theological training. "What matters is being a Jesuit."

Jesuit colleges

The single most important post-conciliar change in the command structure of American Jesuits: the shift of de facto power from the formal hierarchy (rectors, provincials) to university presidents. On paper, the presidents remain subject to their religious superiors; in reality the presidents set the tone by which Jesuit life is lived and, on the occasions of a conflict between presidents and superiors, the presidents win hands-down.

Gay Jesuits

In 1999 the American Jesuits decided to give priority to the recruitment of gays (under the rubric of "men comfortable with their sexuality"), and the majority of American formatores, Jesuits in charge of training, are homosexual as well.

Liberalism

Liberalism had been seen to foster tolerance and mutual respect in pluralist secular communities. Yet, being purely negative in content and procedural in application

James on the Swiss

Henry James on the Swiss: “The want of humour in the local atmosphere, and the absence, as well, of that aesthetic character which is begotten of a generous view of life.”

Insults

I told him I had been a frequent visitor to his mother’s whorehouse when I was young.

A T Ellis

Too many Church leaders are yellow-bellied sycophants, more concerned with appearing fashionably liberal than defending whatever remnants of belief they may retain.

Higgins

But Higgins is a Heathen,
And to lecture rooms is forced,
Where his aunts, who are not married,
Demand to be divorced.

Brits

The Brits are very civilized, if a tad stupid.

Gaddafi

Gaddafi, with his dyed hair and Prisoner of Zenda uniforms, covered in medals despite the fact he’s never been in the line of fire, has gauged the West correctly. We’ll do anything for his gas and oil

Reformation

Would it be inspired by people like Saint Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) a Spanish knight from a Basque noble family, hermit, priest, and founder of the Jesuits and Saint Peter of Alcántara (1499 -1562) a Spanish Franciscan and the woman he inspired, Saint Teresa of Ávila, ( 1515- 1582) Carmelite nun and reformer of convents, and her friend Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591), Spanish mystic and Carmelite friar and priest? They taught that only a renewal of the soul, particularly among the clergy and religious could untie the knot.

Calvin

He taught five central points that can be remembered by the acronym T-U-L-I-P:

Total depravity (Good name for a punk rock band)
Unlimited election (Sounds like Chicago politics)
Limited atonement (Sounds like the fine print in a car warranty)
Irresistible Grace (Sounds like something from a beauty pageant)
Perseverance of the Saints (Sounds like a New Orleans football game)

Spain and the Reformation

Oddly enough Spain was the safest place to be at the time. The Spanish Inquisition hadn’t let the lunacy get a foothold and not one person died in religious wars in Spain.

Peasants' War

This was not what Fr. Luther had in mind, so he wrote a tract to the German nobility asking for their help. It has the charming title “Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants” which urged the nobility to treat the rebels like mad dogs. Allow me to quote : “Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel... For baptism does not make men free in body and property, but in soul."

Luther

“I confess that I am much more negligent than I was under the pope, and there is now nowhere such an amount of earnestness under the Gospel, as was formerly seen among monks and priests.” (Walch. IX. 1311) In 1538, Luther wrote, “Who would have begun to preach, if we had known beforehand that so much unhappiness, tumult, scandal, blasphemy, ingratitude, and wickedness would have been the result?” (Walch. VIII. 564

English bishops

Of the bishops in England, 26 in all, only St. John Fisher refused to give in

Burning at the stake

We Americans still burn people at the stake, we just call it electrocution.

Spirit of the age

HE WHO MARRIES THE SPIRIT OF AN AGE SOON FINDS HIMSELF A WIDOWER

Joseph Kennedy and FDR

When asked why he had hired such a crook, Roosevelt replied, “Takes one to catch one.”

Harvard and the Vatican

the Vatican, at least in 2007, had a surplus of $10 million dollars. ($10,000,000) Harvard has an endowment of $27.4 Billion ($27,400,000,000) so in a certain sense, Harvard is 2,740 times richer than the pope. Next time someone says to me why doesn’t the pope do more to help the poor, just say, “Maybe Harvard could kick in a little..”

USCCB

A spokesman from the USCCB commented: "While Fr. Bailey's plan is original and unorthodox, the bishops haven't issued any formal statement of support or condemnation. And they probably won't. Or maybe they will. No one's quite sure what the bishops intend to do, about this or any other issue, for that matter."

Pride

Lucifer when hurl'd from heaven for sinning;
Our sin the same, and hard as his to mend,
Being pride, which leads the mind to soar too far,
Till our own weakness shows us what we are.

Faces

A face made for radio

Just man

"For a just man shall fall seven times” (Prov. 24:16).

Charles II

"Charles II.," said Thackeray, with unerring brevity, "was a rascal, but not a snob."

Pope by GKC

Pope was really a great poet; he was the last great poet of civilisation.

Byron by GKC

When a young man can elect deliberately to walk alone in winter by the side of the shattering sea, when he takes pleasure in storms and stricken peaks, and the lawless melancholy of the older earth, we may deduce with the certainty of logic that he is very young and very happy.

Byron

A devotee when soars the Host in sight,
An Arab with a stranger for a guest,

Bishops

Bishops, in my experience, have inflated ideas of their own importance; jacks-in-office, they succumb to the tendency of minor bureaucrats or middle management, to throw their weight about and insist on having their own way... [Alice T. Ellis]

Jews for Jesuits

There are no full-time Jesuit staff members at the Washington Jesuit Academy, where the board chairman is Jewish.

Union slavery

Most of those who fought for Southern independence did not own slaves, while Northern commanders such as McClellan and Grant did.

Abe and Russia

Lincoln sided with Russian suppression of the 1863 Polish uprising against Russian occupation.

Aced

He played the king like he was afraid that someone else was going to play the ace.

Juan's mother

Some women use their tongues -- she look'd a lecture,
Each eye a sermon, and her brow a homily

Morality's prim personification

Now Donna Inez had, with all her merit,
A great opinion of her own good qualities

'T is pity learnéd virgins ever wed
With persons of no sort of education

Byron on Coleridge

Coleridge, too, has lately taken wing,
But like a hawk encumber'd with his hood, --
Explaining metaphysics to the nation[1] --
I wish he would explain his Explanation.

Gissing

It is true, May concedes, that the audience may be weary and discontented. "But they must be made to understand that their weariness and discontent is wrong. We have to show them how bad and poor their taste is, that they may strive to develop a higher and nobler".

Kueng

Küng might be a one-trick theological pony,

Ronald Knox

Ronald Knox who quipped that mysticism begins in mist and ends in schism.

Intellectual impressionism

This is an early example of what might be termed “intellectual impressionism”: a failure to provide definitions and a spurning of clear meaning in favor of a fuzzy and foggy “feel-good” factor.

Madeleine Albright and Serbia

Madeleine Albright herself said in 1999: The Serbs need some bombing and that's what they are going to get.

Canadian bishops - pusillanmity at work

In a strong rebuke of LSN, the report, stated: “We are convinced that when a group makes allegations, accusations and denunciations against another, this can bring nothing positive to our Church and is a counter-witness to that Gospel spirit that should guide all Christians. Negative actions of this kind encourage suspicion, scandal and division in the Church.”

When asked about these charges in the report, Archbishop Currie stated, “Well, I didn’t say that.” When informed that those were quotes from the CCCB report that contained his signature, the archbishop indicated that the report was written by D&P and the CCCB General Secretary, adding, “I wouldn’t use that kind of language myself, you know.”

Heine on Beer

As long as he lives, he will be immortal.

Bishops

David Carlin, in his “Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America,” pointed out that the episcopate is remarkable for one destructive trait: the ability to consistently alienate those who are their most naturally loyal constituency.

Mr. Obama

His words waver, his policies are more like moods.

Fake cowboys

"All hat and no cattle"

Carry a tune

He couldn't carry a tune in a bucket.

The new house

Except the LORD build the house, they labor in vain that build it: except the LORD keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain."

Rowan Williams

The Archbishop of Canterbury, on the other hand, thinks everybody is right even when they contradict one another and therefore the journey is the destination.

Life at Yale

When the women act like men, the men act like boys.

Mrs. Palin

GOP leaders need to learn how to fight like a girl.

Too big to [allow to] fail

He thinks that if something is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. He believes, as Milton Friedman said, that America has a profit and loss system — the possibility of profit is an incentive for risk, the possibility of loss is an incentive for prudence in the pursuit of profit.

Gloria Steinem

In 2000, at age 66, to everyone’s surprise, Gloria Steinem got married.

John Dewey and the Soviets

John Dewey, for instance, hailed the Bolsheviks’ “Great Experiment” in public education.

Texas Rangers

The unofficial motto of the Texas Rangers: “No man in the wrong can stand up against a fella that’s in the right, and keeps a-comin.

Flannery

Flannery O'Connor's warning that tenderness leads to the gas chambers.

Art history

Meanwhile, some of my peers were taking courses in art history so they'd be prepared to remember what art looked like just in case anyone asked.

Nelson R & abortion

“The New York activists knew one another because they had all fought against abortion in Albany, ultimately securing the passage of a pro-life bill, only to have it vetoed by New York Gov. Nelson Rockefeller"

Was he not the man who a heart attack copulating with a secretary?

Fr. Greeley

It was said of Andrew Greeley - "he never had a thought that went unpublished!"

Suttee

So, yes, ladies, members of the National Council of Churches, believers in the one God, mourners for that holy India before it was despoiled by those brutish British, remember suttee, that interesting, exotic practice in which Hindus, over the centuries, burned to death countless millions of helpless women in a spirit of pious devotion, crying for all I know, Hai Rama! Hai Rama!

Galbraith and Gandhi

J.K. Galbraith (who found the film’s Gandhi “true to the original” and endorsed the movie wholeheartedly)

Massacres in Calcutta

But toward the end, during the hideous paroxysms that accompanied independence, with some of the most unspeakable massacres taking place in Calcutta, he declared, “And if . . . the whole of Calcutta swims in blood, it will not dismay me. For it will be a willing offering of innocent blood.” And in his last days, after there had already been one attempt on his life, he was heard to say, “I am a true Mahatma.”

Violence in India

Jaya Prakash Narayan, the late opposition leader, once admitted, “We often behave like animals. . . . We are more likely than not to become aggressive, wild, violent. We kill and burn and loot. . . .”

Nehru & Beatrice Webb

And yet this same Mahatma Gandhi hand-picked as the first Prime Minister of an independent India Pandit Nehru, who was committed to a policy of industrialization and for whom the last word in the politico-economic organization of the state was (and remained) Beatrice Webb.

Krishna Menon

Decades later, Krishna Menon, a Gandhian and one-time Indian Defense Minister, was still fortifying his sanctity by drinking a daily glass of urine.

Gandhi and Hitler

He wrote furiously to the Viceroy of India: “This manslaughter must be stopped. You are losing; if you persist, it will only result in greater bloodshed. Hitler is not a bad man. . . .” Gandhi also wrote an open letter to the British people, passionately urging them to surrender and accept whatever fate Hitler had prepared for them. “Let them take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds.”

Indian independence

The fact is that we will never know how many Indians were murdered by other Indians during the country’s Independence Massacres, but almost all serious studies place the figure over a million, and some, such as Payne’s sources, go to 4 million.

Amritsar

At the famous Amritsar massacre of 1919, shot in elaborate and loving detail in the present movie and treated by post-independence Indian historians as if it were Auschwitz, Ghurka troops under the command of a British officer, General Dyer, fired into an unarmed crowd of Indians defying a ban and demonstrating for Indian independence. The crowd contained women and children; 379 persons died; it was all quite horrible. Dyer was court-martialed and cashiered, but the incident lay heavily on British consciences for the next three decades, producing a severe inhibiting effect. Never again would the British empire commit another Amritsar, anywhere.

India

Although the movie sneers at this reasoning as being the flimsiest of pretexts, I cannot imagine an impartial person studying the subject without concluding that concern for Indian religious minorities was one of the principal reasons Britain stayed in India as long as it did. When it finally withdrew, blood-maddened mobs surged through the streets from one end of India to the other, the majority group in each area, Hindu or Muslim, slaughtering the defenseless minority without mercy in one of the most hideous periods of carnage of modern history.

Gandhi

Gandhi was crying, “I would not flinch from sacrificing a million lives for India’s liberty!” The million Indian lives were indeed sacrificed, and in full. They fell, however, not to the bullets of British soldiers but to the knives and clubs of their fellow Indians in savage butcheries when the British finally withdrew.

Will Rogers

"Be thankful we're not getting all the government we're paying for."
~Will Rogers

Emancipation

Seward snorted. “Yes,” he said, “we have let off a puff of wind over an accomplished fact.”

“What do you mean, Mr. Seward?” the officer asked.

“I mean,” the secretary replied, “that the Emancipation Proclamation was uttered in the first gun fired at Sumter, and we have been the last to hear it.”

Lincoln and slavery

President Abraham Lincoln had begun his inaugural address by making this clear, pointedly and repeatedly. “I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states where it exists,” the president said. “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so.”

The disappearing Church

A famous theologian wrote this assessment about the Church: “People look upon the Church and say, ‘She is about to die. Soon her very name will disappear. There will be no more Christians; they have had their day.’”

[Augustine]

Sparrows

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the parable of the farmer walking down a rural road who came across a tiny sparrow, lying along side the road on his back, with his little feet up in the air.
“What are you doing?” said the farmer to the sparrow. “I heard that the sky is falling and I want to do my best to hold it up,” responded the little bird. “That’s ridiculous,” declared the farmer. “First of all, the sky isn’t falling . . . And secondly, even if it is, your tiny feet won’t help very much.” “Well,” said the sparrow with determination, “One does what one can.”

World Council of Churches

World Council of Churches Nobody Goes To Anymore

Bureaucracy

An administrative class that increasingly only knows what it must think rather than how to do so.

Cardinal Baronius

"The Bible was written to show us how to go to heaven, not how the heavens go."
- Cardinal Baronius (1598), a quote cited by Galileo

College

Remember Matt Damon's character in "Good Will Hunting" who taunts a Harvard student by saying in 50 years he'll realize he "dropped a hundred and fifty grand on a (bleeping) education you coulda got for a dollar fifty in late charges at the public library"?

Hannah Arendt

The frigid pity Hannah Arendt thought characteristic of the social state.

Talmud

The Talmud states: "G-d says, 'I created the evil inclination and I created Torah as its antidote.'"

Torah

There are Torah laws that do not express the ideals of Judaism but exist as a way to reach those ideals.

Economics

Economics is the study of the use of limited resources that have alternative uses

Scientific concern

Union of Concerned Scientists (original name, "Union of Concerned Activist Lawyers Who Took a Science Course in High School").

Good taste - GKC

Good taste, the last and vilest of human superstitions,

Down South

He sounds like what we used to call down South “an old maid in britches”.

Frederick Taylor

Taylor, as Robert Kanigel makes clear in his excellent biography, "The One Best Way," was something of a charlatan. He faked a lot of his time and motion studies.

Principles, not prescriptions.

In the social arena, the Church has principles, not prescriptions.

Thomas Reese, SJ

Alas, one can all too often count on Fr. Reese, S.J., to defend Catholics from the teachings and requirements of the Catholic Church.

Michael Sean Winters

Michael Sean Winters' column “Peters v. Cuomo”: a reply (Feb. 25, 2011). This is an especially exceptional reply to an especially condescending progressive pundit who unwittingly, in his arrogance, brings a broken plastic knife to a gun fight.

Life in India

India's senior anti-corruption official resigned yesterday after the Supreme Court ruled that his appointment was inappropriate because he faces graft charges in a decades-old case.

Humanism

In England, the Humanist Society suggests answering the census form "If you're not religious, for God's sake say so".

Hiroshima

An aspect of the bombing not mentioned by Western critics is mentioned in a letter in the Homiletic & Pastoral Review from a resident of Japan. Had the bombs not been used, the result would have been the deaths of millions, defending and attacking the Japanese islands.

DeGaulle

Charles de Gaulle didn't say much I liked, but this he did say: "Graveyards are full of indispensable men."

Democracy

All too often, exported democratic institutions have meant "one man, one vote-- one time."

Death in Russia

After Russia's czars were replaced by the Communists, the government executed more people in a day than the czars had executed in half a century.

Wells and Stalin

H. G. Wells visited Stalin in 1934 and chatted with him about the theory of socialism, noting that though he’d only just touched down in Moscow, “I have already seen the happy faces of healthy men and women and I know that something very considerable is being done here.”

Fashions in churches

Recently, a leader of one of the Protestant Churches in Dublin said to me that all our Churches were now wearing clothes which do not fit well because they had been tailored for us when we were fatter.

Atheism and baby killing

An atheist female friend of mine admitted to having two abortions, after which she said, "God will never forgive me."

Belloc on modernists

As Hilaire Belloc said, "Do not, I beseech you, trouble yourself about forces already in disarray. They have mistaken the hour; it is not the middle of the night, but the coming of the dawn."

Aquinas on "ensoulment"

Aquinas makes it quite clear:
We are NOT ensouled bodies - rather we are embodied souls

Didache

The Didache
"The second commandment of the teaching: You shall not murder. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not seduce boys. You shall not commit fornication. You shall not steal. You shall not practice magic. You shall not use potions. You shall not procure [an] abortion, nor destroy a newborn child" (Didache 2:1–2 [A.D. 70]).

Usury

Dante, following as always Thomist theology, put the moneylenders in Hell in the same circle as the sodomites -- each was perverting nature. I think of this every time I drop by my bank, St. Mary's Credit Union, here in Manchester, New Hampshire, which was founded by a French Canadian priest. (It charges interest.)

New heresy

My friend is a seminarian whose Professor told the class he would give them all an A+ if they could come up with a brand new heresy that nobody had thought of before. None of them could come up with one.

Army unions

I mean, what if the army had a union, and the soldiers went on strike every time there's a war?

Lawyers

99% of lawyers give the others a bad name.

Newman

Newman did not give weight to “paper arguments” about God’s existence; as he wrote: “Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion. . . . No one, I say, will die for his calculations: he dies for realities.”

Scientology

After the war, Hubbard’s marriage dissolved, and he moved to Pasadena, where he became the housemate of Jack Parsons, a rocket scientist who belonged to an occult society called the Ordo Templi Orientis. An atmosphere of hedonism pervaded the house; Parsons hosted gatherings involving “sex magick” rituals.

Government

On his birthday (February 22), quote George Washington as a reminder that, from first to last, all of America's greatest presidents have believed above all in liberty:
"Government is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."

Psychoanalysis

I have never seen a psychoanalyst who had quiet eyes.

Unsympathetic biographies

The curious modern fashion of books about people one detests apparently to show how much out of sympathy it is possible to be with one's subject, seems to me to have little to recommend it. (Though I know why they do it, and it is not a pretty reason)

Religious people

All you religious people trust God so little. [DLS to CSLewis]

Technique

Studying the technique makes clear the sense.

Saints

"Perhaps when we stopped bothering saints about lost railway tickets that we came over so spiritual about them and our religion went all "other worldly" and "spiritual" too

Orange County

In early 2004, in front of dozens of reporters and parishioners, Bishop Tod D. Brown of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange nailed a "Covenant with the Faithful" to the door of the Holy Family Cathedral in the city of Orange. This publicist-cooked document contained seven "theses" vowing to create a new era of openness in a diocese long plagued by leaders who protected pedophile priests at the expense of innocents.

NB: Publicist cooked document.

Morality

Moral stupidity comes in two opposite forms: relativism and legalism. Relativism sees no principles, only people; legalism sees no people, only principles.

PhD

“That idea is so stupid that you have to have a Ph.D. to believe it.”

Man on the moon

“Americans make up six percent of the world’s population, but they account for 100 percent of the men on the moon".

Universities

From the Las Vegas Sun: "In what must have been one of his most painful tasks in office, UNLV President Neal Smatresk warned faculty leaders Tuesday to prepare for a budget catastrophe -- news that left some in tears. Smatresk at times sounded almost in mourning as he spoke to the Faculty Senate, saying he had instructed his provosts to start planning for more cuts in staff, departments and programs. The faculty was angry and indignant.
'I’m sick we are destroying much of what we’ve built,' said Cecilia Maldonado, an educational-leadership professor and chairwoman of the Senate." Well, Cecilia, the taxpayers in Nevada feel much, much worse. Have you checked their unemployment numbers lately, Cecilia? Have you checked to see how many people in Nevada are out of work? They've been given a bill for all the reckless spending at the university.

"'This amounts to foreclosure,' said Greg Brown, a history professor and president of the Nevada Faculty Alliance, a professor group." This amounts to foreclosure, he said. Well, you know, there are millions of Americans who have suffered through real foreclosures, Mr. Brown. They've lost their jobs. They've lost their homes. You're worried about cutbacks. You're not gonna get a whole lot of sympathy. Fantasy land has come to a screeching halt. You just got transferred to Literalville. Same place I live. And you people in Wisconsin, you better come to grips with the fact that you live in Literalville as well.

"Michael Bowers, UNLV’s provost, noted that UNLV is 54 years old and that he has worked there 27 years. 'I never thought this day would come, but we have to plan,' he said. The emotional display was unprecedented, Bowers said after the meeting, 'because we’ve never had a situation like this before.'" Well, you've never run out of other people's money before. This is just the beginning. This is what happens when you run out of other people's money. But if you notice the tone of this story, these are like war heroes, people losing their jobs or may be downsized. I don't want to come off as insensitive here, but being that I live in Literalville, since when did state employees take on the status of war veterans? Since when did their jobs and benefits take precedence over everything else?

Borders books just went into Chapter 11. Look at the number of people looking for work at Borders. What did they get undercut by? Internet. Store employees at Borders are gonna lose their jobs, others will get fewer hours, a lot of stores are gonna close. I haven't seen the stories about all the employees there shedding tears. How about we get a story of all of the taxpayers crying 'cause they're watching their hard-earned money get thrown down rat holes by this administration? My point is the sympathy is selective. Somehow there's a valor involved if you are a state employee and you have your salary cut back or you lose your job.

We're not getting any stories about how unemployed state workers and union workers are benefiting from their new status. We're not getting the stories about how they're coming together and getting closer to their families and closer to nature and finding more productive uses of their time. But when average, ordinary Americans were laid off and losing their jobs, we got all kinds of stories about how good it was for them. Now we get stories from New Jersey to Wisconsin to Nevada about the sorrow, the unfairness, and the insensitivity involved. It's now state, federal workers facing the same thing private sector workers face every day. It's just what happens when you run out of other people's money.

Planned Unparenthood

Too many liberal women with checkbooks remember how Planned Parenthood clinics helped them abort their way through law school, while too many racist right-wingers secretly hope that the organization's efforts will help keep the welfare rolls under control.

Religious orders

“Religious life is in difficulty today and this must be recognized,” said the cardinal.

It also threatens to turn works of charity into pure social service, which he said causes harm to the proclamation of the Gospel.

In such an atmosphere, “a society of well-being” is pursued over questions of eternity, explained Cardinal Rode.

Doctrine

True doctrine was to be “received and not invented.”

Caring for parents in England

“As this ageing population emerges, the working population is shrinking. My kids regularly remind me that it's not for them to keep me in the style to which I have become accustomed".

Tolerance

“The Church is intolerant in principle because she believes; she is tolerant in practice because she loves. The enemies of the Church are tolerant in principle because they do not believe; they are intolerant in practice because they do not love.” Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, OP

Groucho

I was married by a judge. I should have asked for a jury.
Groucho Marx

Egypt

For those who are prone to be prone to such things, recent events in Egypt are further evidence of declining American global influence.
President Hosni Mubarak, having taken a lot of American aid, now seems immune to both American advice and pressure. The protesters, one article complained, didn't even bother to burn our flag.

Weimar and abortion

The year 1931 also saw the birth of the Committee of Self-Incrimination Against §218, which encouraged celebrities to come out and admit to having had, or having aided in, an abortion. Among those who came out was Albert Einstein.

Weimar and abortions

No wonder the Weimar Republic was distinguished by "the lowest birth rate in the Western world." With this fall in birthrate came "a new hedonism in women's sexuality."

Contraception, of course, was not foolproof, so abortions multiplied and "official disapproval" of them faltered. In 1917 new guidelines set forth by the Reich Health Council allowed abortions "on the strictest health grounds," only if approved by two doctors. In 1926 the law on abortions was mollified, and in 1927 the Supreme Court allowed doctors to perform "therapeutic" abortions. German law on abortion became "one of the most liberal in the world" because doctors could easily convince officials that any abortion was necessary for "health" reasons.

Catholic colleges

Notre Dame may have been but is certainly not the flagship of American Catholic Universities nor is Georgetown. Father Corapi said to an audience in MA that he loved them deeply but would not go to hell for them.

Notre Dame, again

The hard, cold reality is that only the force of will can quell the crisis at Notre Dame. Reason may work tirelessly to adjudicate the conflict, but it will ultimately fail. Specific "reasons" will function, after the fact, mainly to package the decisions that are made by those who are either in charge or who take charge of the crisis.

Relativism

If we assume that truth is relative, then we must affirm as an absolute truth that this is the case.

Eating

Many people have eaten in this kitchen and lived to tell about it.

Progress

Progressivism or 'chronological snobbery,'

California

So in truth, the state's problems involve a larger "California philosophy" that is relatively new in its history, one that now curbs production but not consumption.

Boys

Growing up, my mom had an effective method to curtail fighting, especially among us boys. She would force us to “kiss and make up” - believe me, that was a deterrent.

F. S. Fitzgerald

Lois confesses to Keith “how inconvenient being a Catholic is.”

Reagan

Ronald Reagan famously summarized the federal government's attitude toward the economy this way: "If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it."

Professors

College professors are really important role models for their students. They don’t just come and deliver their lecture and go away. They aren’t just hired entertainment.

Modern theologians

Ist die kalte Professorenreligion der 70er Jahr wirklich modern?

[Is the cold professoriat religion of the 70s really modern?]

The dissenters

Zudem wurde soeben Benedikts Interviewbuch „Licht der Welt“ weltweit millionenfach nachgefragt. Der Papst auf der Bestsellerliste, das schmerzt.

[The pope on the bestseller list, that hurts].

Jesuits

Genauso unerhört, wenn Obere der Jesuiten jetzt gegen die katholische „Sexualmoral“ wüten, als wäre der Vatikan und nicht sie selbst verantwortlich für die unglaublichen Schweinereien, die in ihren Häusern passiert sind, von Priestern, die ihre Berufung verraten haben.

[Precisely unheard of, when heads of the Jesuits now arise against Catholic sexual morality, as if it were the Vatican and not themselves responsible for the unbelievable schweinereien which went on in their houses, by priests who betrayed their vocations].

Paul on dissent

St. Paul’s words (2 Tim 4:3):

For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachings to suit their own likings, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander into myths.

German dissent

The journalist whose in-depth interview with Pope Benedict XVI became the book Light of the World has dismissed a public protest by German-speaking theologians as “a rebellion in the nursing home.”

Jesuits & Dominicans

The Dominicans were founded by St Dominic to fight the heresy of Albigensianism. The Jesuits were founded by St Ignatius Loyola to fight Protestantism... So when did you last meet an Albigensian?

Government programs

"For every action there is an equal and opposite government program."

Niceness

I just picture a sledgehammer with the words "Be Nice!" written on it and it makes me laugh!

Relative unemployment

Cleveland's unemployment rate rose slightly in 2010 to an average of 9.3%, but the city's unemployment rank improved relative to other cities, thanks to soaring job losses across the U.S.

ARCIC

The trouble with ARCIC always was (as a former Catholic member of it once explained to me) that on the Catholic side of the table you have a body of men (mostly bishops) who represent a more or less coherent view, being members of a Church which has established means of knowing and declaring what it believes. On the Anglican side of the table you have a body of men (and it was only men, on both sides, in those days) the divisions between whom are just fundamental as, and sometimes a lot more fundamental than, those between any one of them and the Catholic representatives they faced: they all represented only themselves.

Socialism

Using taxpayers' money to prop up failing industries that the market no longer deems viable is a classic socialist error.

Eric Hoffer

Consider this quote from social writer and philosopher Eric Hoffer and decide for yourself: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.”

The NYTimes flops again

The New York Times ran a glowing profile of Mr Wisner in its pages two weeks ago – but mysteriously did not mention his ties to Egypt.

IQ

Wissler's doctoral dissertation used the new Pearson Correlation Coefficient formula to show that there was no correlation between scores on Cattell's IQ tests and academic achievement. Wissler's dissertation eventually led the psychology movement to lose interest in psychophysical testing of intelligence.

Going native

In the 17th Century the Jesuit Fathers were reprimanded for "going native" in their attempts to adapt to the customs of the various native peoples they encountered in their missionary work. This habit has not died out in modern times. For we may say that they attempt to go native in countries that have fallen into missionary status.
One has only to consider the Americas and the European countries. They attempt to flatter the locals by adopting, and even encouraging, their practices. But they fail to realize that the practices are those of a decadent civilisation. Consider but the rampaging of sexual practices which would have shamed the Romans in their decadence. I wonder of this be not a result of their sexual ignorance. For there is no female order attached to the Society of Jesus as there is to almost all the other male orders. They certainly do not have schools for girls as they have for boys. Whence arises, I believe, a sheer plain ignorance of the feminine mind and spirit.

Government Statistics

....To ease the awful squeeze on the middle class (policy makers never talk about the poor), to reform education, and so on.

Churchill & Gandhi

(You can see there how empty and bombastic Churchill's style can sound when he's barking up the wrong tree; never forget that he once described himself as the lone voice warning the British people against the twin menaces of Hitler and Gandhi.)

Friend of the USA

"In this world, it is often dangerous to be an enemy of the United States," said Henry Kissinger, "but to be a friend is fatal."

Jews in Iraq : A new definition of chutzpah

Shortly after they overthrew Saddam, US forces found the archives of the Jewish community submerged in a flooded basement of a secret police building in Baghdad. The archive was dried and frozen and sent to the US for preservation. Last year, despite the fact that Saddam's secret police only had the archive because they stole it from the Jews, the Iraqi government demanded its return as a national treasure.

Jews in Tunisia

Then on Monday night unidentified assailants set fire to a synagogue in the town of Ghabes and burned the Torah scrolls. In an interview with AFP, Trabelsi Perez, President of the Ghriba synagogue said the crime was made all the more shocking by the fact that it occurred as police were stationed close by.

The day after the attack Roger Bismuth, President of Tunisia's Jewish community disputed the view that the scorching of Torah scrolls had anything to do with anti-Semitism. The man responsible for representing Tunisia's Jewish community before the evolving new regime told The Jerusalem Post that the attack was the fault of the Jews themselves, "because they left [the synagogue] open…This is not an attack on the Jewish community."

Unread laws

The posture and policies of the Obama presidency, using temporary majorities and legislative trickery to shove through massive unread bills

Sputnik

The Soviets stunned America by launching the utterly useless satellite called "Sputnik."
(We could have launched a satellite much earlier, but we wanted the Soviets to go first so they would establish the right to launch satellites over other nations.)

Monsignors

At a confirmation he once said, in his booming voice, “Now children, the bishop has been asking you questions. Do have any questions for the bishop?” Always dangerous. One lad piped up, “What’s a Monsignor?” The priest at the place was a Monsignor. Without missing a beat the old bishop said “Why, sonny, a Monsignor is the Cross that hangs around the bishop’s neck!”

Bishops out of line

John Paul II: "You are priests, not social or political leaders. Let us not be under the illusion that we are serving the Gospel through an exaggerated interest in the wide field of temporal problems."

Church of England

Newman could write (in a note in the French edition of his Apologia pro Vita Sua, explaining Anglicanism) that: “This remarkable Church has always been in the closest dependence on the civil power and has always gloried in this.” Newman went on to explain that “it has ever regarded the papal power with fear, with resentment and with aversion, and it has never won the heart of the people”. It has, said Newman “either had no opinions, or has constantly changed them… The great principle of the Anglican Church [is] its confidence in the protection of the civil power and its docility in serving it, which its enemies call its Erastianism.”

The Mass of Trent

The Tridentine Mass is a majestic and sacred experience -- for priest and parishioner alike. Its impact is often profound. It can shake even hardened progressives out of our post-Vatican II liturgical torpor.

Cost of government

Only in government is any benefit, however small, considered to be worth any cost, however large.

Liberal insecurity

Of course, today’s “liberal” professor will agree to neither of those suggestions. He uses affirmative action to promote his self-esteem not to promote “a diversity of perspectives.” And he uses the word “diversity” only to hide his deep-seated intellectual insecurity.