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.”