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?