Culture

Kimball’s survey articulates his two great themes. The first is the need to battle what he has elsewhere called “cultural amnesia". [I would say "religious amnesia"].

Liberal charity

Where people are encouraged to think that solving society's ills is primarily a job for government, charity tends to evaporate.

Orwell

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Rogue clerics

CRS now joins hands with CCHD as a rogue Catholic charity.

Baby Episcopalians

(In a 2005 interview, the Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop explained that her communion’s members valued “the stewardship of the earth” too highly to reproduce themselves.)

Reinhold Niebuhr

"A God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross." The virtual collapse of those institutions on Morningside Heights, is mute testimony to the truth of his irony.

Msgr Kelly on Fr. Richard Brown

"The new biblical theories — guess-work with footnotes".

Church of England

For rent. Wells Cathedral. Barely used.

Ezechiel

“I have appointed you as a sentinel. If I say to the wicked, ‘You will surely die’ — and you do not warn them or speak out to dissuade them … I will hold you responsible for their blood” (Ezekiel, 3:17-21).

Freedom

True freedom knows no attachments other than Jesus Christ. It has no love of riches or the appetites they try to satisfy. True freedom can walk away from anything — wealth, honor, fame, pleasure. Even power. It fears neither the state, nor death itself.

Murders by science

The rise of atheist ideologies that murdered tens of millions of innocent people using the vocabulary of science

Christian

In the end, we’re missionaries of Jesus Christ, or we’re nothing at all,” he said. “And we can’t share with others what we don’t live faithfully and joyfully ourselves.”

Christian faith

Christian faith is always personal but never private.

Freedom of the press

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

New York Times

All the news that fits our views.

Our bishops

ORDAINED POLITICIANS

Faith

Faith is what you have in the absence of knowledge.

Augustine and Aquinas

All classicism [Aquinas] depends on a previous romanticism [Augustine].

Homosexuality

The real offense of homosexuality brings the confusion of passion into the domain where one ought to be able to practice calmly the art of friendship…

College

An inevitable consequence of capitalist enterprise is the creation of bourgeois youth demanding university education and employment in a bureaucracy

Wonderfulness

We live in a society oriented around our inner wonderfulness.

Village Voice for Nazism

[Jewish?] Michael Feingold in the VILLAGE VOICE: "I personally think [Republicans] should be exterminated before they cause any more harm".

College life

"What students are getting is four or five years of country club living." With campuses looking more and more like resorts and the undergraduate experience feeling more like a four or five year vacation on a luxury cruise liner or at Disneyland, The Motley Monk would observe the culture has moved away from an "academic intensive" experience.

PM Tony Blair

"Having Blair as a Catholic is like having a vegetarian in a meat-eating club"

Famine in India 2

Lyndon Johnson’s withholding of food aid to India during the 1966 famine.

Famine in India

Thirty years later, the same policy of neglect contributed to a famine that killed as many as 10 million people in India, again because of the Malthusian fallacy that, as Sir Evelyn Baring told Parliament, “every benevolent attempt made to mitigate the effects of famine and defective sanitation serves but to enhance the evils resulting from overpopulation.”

Left and right

Ann Post is another one of those directionally-challenged Episcopalians for whom left is always right.

Expectations

"The disconnect between legions of inexperienced college graduates expecting managerial jobs" which is to say, jobs in a bureaucracy.

Verbicide

Verbicide always precedes homicide.

Foolishness

When somebody wants to make a complete fool of himself, the best thing to do is to get out of his way.

Elite schools

A shorthand job description for faculty at this school would be, Enabling the Entitled.

Research

The problem in research always comes back to, if you stay within the accepted mainstream, you will only know the already known.

Hahnemann

Hahnemann founded his subject on the principles of the Law of Similars (like cures like), the Law of Infinitesimal Dose (the more dilute, the stronger the potency), and that illness was always specific to the individual.

Iatrogenic

It is a published statistic that 56 people die in the U.S. each hour from iatrogenic causes [death caused inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment [pharmaceutical drug] or diagnostic procedure); that’s approximately 1,300 each day, 490,000 each year. Forget about cancer and heart disease. These are preventable deaths. In illness, about 15 percent of the time, especially in the treatment of trauma and life-threatening situations, your life depends upon the near-miracles of modern medicine. What you need to avoid like the plague is the marketing science form of medicine.

Hypocrisy in medicine

Any good scientist (as I consider any good physician) at some point in his or her career begins to “feel” this element of hypocrisy.

DNA

In comparison to the volume of information stored in a single strand of DNA, it would be like comparing one glass of water to all of the oceans on Earth.

Committees

I've searched all the parks in all the cities and found no statues of committees. Gilbert K. Chesterton

Democracy

Democracy means government by the uneducated, while aristocracy means government by the badly educated. Gilbert K. Chesterton

Buddhism

Buddhism is not a creed, it is a doubt. Gilbert K. Chesterton

Germany

As Henry Kissinger succinctly put it: “Poor old Germany. Too big for Europe, too small for the world.”

NYTimes [again]

The [NY] Times' obsession with the Catholic Church has clearly become pathological.

Economics

"Normal people solve crosswords; economists write papers (of which 80 percent are never read)."

My Lord of Canterbury on "gay marriage"

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

Political gaffes

A gaffe in Washington is when a politician accidentally tells the truth.

Diplomats and journalists

"Diplomats tell lies to journalists, then believe what they read".

Italian Jews

Great numbers of Italian Jews had joined the Fascists

Cafeteria Catholics

Better named: renegade Catholics.

Gay pride parades

Chapter 21.— Concerning the Shamefulness of the Rites Which are Celebrated in Honor of Liber. Now as to the rites of Liber, whom they have set over liquid seeds, and therefore not only over the liquors of fruits, among which wine holds, so to speak, the primacy, but also over the seeds of animals:— as to these rites, I am unwilling to undertake to show to what excess of turpitude they had reached, because that would entail a lengthened discourse, though I am not unwilling to do so as a demonstration of the proud stupidity of those who practise them. Among other rites which I am compelled from the greatness of their number to omit, Varro says that in Italy, at the places where roads crossed each other the rites of Liber were celebrated with such unrestrained turpitude, that the private parts of a man were worshipped in his honor. Nor was this abomination transacted in secret that some regard at least might be paid to modesty, but was openly and wantonly displayed. For during the festival of Liber this obscene member, placed on a car, was carried with great honor, first over the crossroads in the country, and then into the city. But in the town of Lavinium a whole month was devoted to Liber alone, during the days of which all the people gave themselves up to the must dissolute conversation, until that member had been carried through the forum and brought to rest in its own place; on which unseemly member it was necessary that the most honorable matron should place a wreath in the presence of all the people. Thus, forsooth, was the god Liber to be appeased in order to the growth of seeds. Thus was enchantment to be driven away from fields, even by a matron's being compelled to do in public what not even a harlot ought to be permitted to do in a theatre, if there were matrons among the spectators. For these reasons, then, Saturn alone was not believed to be sufficient for seeds—namely, that the impure mind might find occasions for multiplying the gods; and that, being righteously abandoned to uncleanness by the one true God, and being prostituted to the worship of many false gods, through an avidity for ever greater and greater uncleanness, it should call these sacrilegious rites sacred things, and should abandon itself to be violated and polluted by crowds of foul demons". Augustine. City of God. Bk. 7. ch. 21

Sex and the city

“We want New York City to be the safest city in the world to have sex,” announced Dr. Monica Sweeney, the city’s assistant health commissioner.

Rumors

No rumor is confirmed until it is officially denied.

The aborting mother

The bumper sticker read, “Having an abortion does not make you un-pregnant, it makes you the mother of a dead baby”.

Of Pinker [again]

"tantalizing intimations of a fairly large ignorance"

Pinker

"The effort to put our lives beyond the reach of love".

Tyranny

The essential of the tyrant is pride ... That evil of egomania, or making the self the centre of the universe, is a purely spiritual evil. GKC

Original sin

Not only all that is best in man, but rather especially and emphatically all that worst in man, springs from some mysterious root that is only found in man. GKC

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.

Joyce

On being asked if he'd become a Protestant, James Joyce replied: "I may have lost my faith; but I have not lost my mind."

Planned Praenthood

Planned Genocide

Liberalism

The liberal's main goal in life is to annoy his neighbors.

Abp Chaput

“Instead of Catholics converting the culture, the culture too often bleached out the apostolic zeal in Catholics while leaving the brand label intact.”

Kolakovski

L.K.'s "The Law of the Infinite Cornucopia asserts that, for any given doctrine one wants to believe, there is never a shortage of arguments by which one can support it".

Watergate

Woodward and Bernstein were glorified stenographers.

USCCB

“The future Benedict XVI told me that among the unforeseen and contradictory effects of Vatican-II was the diminution in the importance of bishops, which on the contrary, the Council wished to re-emphasize. In fact, however, the autonomy and the freedom itself of a bishop over his own diocese were caged in and co-opted by the establishment of national bishops’ conferences. These conferences, Ratzinger pointed out, have no theological basis; they are not part of the Church structure as are parishes, dioceses and the papacy. They are simply institutions, of recent origin, which were created for practical reasons but which have gradually created a weighty structure of their own, becoming in effect ‘little Vaticans.’”

Reform Judaism

An old joke about Reform Judaism had it that the movement's concept of the faith was merely the Democratic Party Platform with holidays thrown in.

Abp. Chaput

“Instead of Catholics converting the culture, the culture too often bleached out the apostolic zeal in Catholics while leaving the brand label intact.”

The Left

America, meet Laurie Penny, described by New York magazine as “one of those Leftie-types who are so sanctimonious they make you want to vote Republican out of sheer spite”.

Abp Sheen

Abp. Fulton Sheen:

Minds no longer object to the Church, because of the way they think, but because of the way they live. They no have difficulty with the Creed, but with her Commandments; they remain outside her saving waters, not because they cannot accept the doctrine of Three Persons in One God, but because they cannot accept the moral of two persons in one flesh; not because Infallibility is too complex, but because the veto on Birth Control is too hard; not because the Eucharist is too sublime, but because Penance is too exacting. Briefly, the heresy of our day is not the heresy of thought; it is the heresy of action.

Bishops, unworthy

Guy [of Pomposa] finally handed off the administrative elements of his position to concentrate on spiritual direction. He periodically retreated to a hermitage near Ferrara to spend his days in prayer and fasting. Near the end of his life he was unjustly persecuted for personal reasons by archbishop Heribert of Ravenna.

The Church

The Church is more a hospital for sinners than a hotel for saints

Liberation theology

liberation theology is not originally a "grass-roots" movement among the poor. Instead, Ratzinger called it a creation of Western intellectuals and a form of "cultural imperialism" in reaction to the demise or near-demise of the "Marxist myth" in the West.

Schopenhauer on journalism

Exaggeration of every kind is as essential to journalism as it is to the dramatic art; for the object of journalism is to make events go as far as possible. Thus it is that all journalists are, in the very nature of their calling, alarmists; and this is their way of giving interest to what they write. Herein they are like little dogs; if anything stirs, they immediately set up a shrill bark.

Arthur Schopenhauer, On Some Forms of Literature (1851)

Rowan Williams

A … woolly-minded, wordy man of inconsistent and incoherent views presiding over a miserably divided church”.

Anglican rite

All Archbishops of Canterbury fail, quite simply because the Church of England isn’t a Church at all, it’s a theme park: you wander about and choose the rides you want to go on.

Bureaucracies

For bureaucrats procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.

Fashions

It is little wonder that any fashion should grow popular by which idleness is favoured and imbecility assisted.

Modernity

The comedians of modernity [Nietzsche]

Bureaucracy

The distinctively American wrinkle: the Republic of Paperwork

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. 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. Dreadful it is to fall into the hands of the living God. Yes, it is even dreadful to be alone with the New Testament.”

Federal Reserve

The Fed is a patsy. It is a pathetic dependent of the big Wall Street banks, traders and hedge funds. Everything (it does) is designed to keep this rickety structure from unwinding.

Midgely on Dawkins

"The ideology Dawkins is selling is the worship of competition. It is projecting a Thatcherite take on economics on to evolution. It's not an impartial scientific view; it's a political drama."

St. Paul on bishops

St. Paul's letters to Bishop Timothy, specifically 2 Timothy 4.

... I solemnly urge you: proclaim the message; be persistent whether the time is favorable or unfavorable; convince, rebuke, and encourage, with the utmost patience in teaching. For the time is coming when people will not put up with sound doctrine, but having itching ears, they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own desires, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander away to myths. As for you, always be sober, endure suffering, do the work of an evangelist, carry out your ministry fully.

America

"Catholics need to wake up from the illusion that the America we now live in – not the America of our nostalgia or imagination or best ideals, but the real America we live in here and now – is somehow friendly to our faith". Abp Chaput

Votes

America has gone from “one propertied man, one vote; to one man, one vote; to one person, one vote; trending to one dollar, one vote.”

Liturgists

Christopher Derrick's definition of a liturgist:

A man sent by God so that in times when there is no direct persecution, the people of God may not be denied the opportunity of suffering for their faith.

Msgr. Knox

“When suave politeness, tempering bigot zeal, corrected ‘I believe’ to ‘one does feel.’”

Our clergy

aging trendy clergy

Hitler on the Vichy clergy

Hitler on Vichy Catholics:

“Do you really believe the masses will ever be Christian again? Nonsense. The tale is finished but we can hasten matters. The parsons will be made to dig their own graves. They will betray their God to us. They will betray anything for the sake of their miserable little jobs and incomes.”

U.S. Bishops

"For generations, many Bishops of the U.S. have been partners, cheerleaders, and enablers of the soft tyranny of big government now turned hard".

Dancing with wolves

The U.S. Catholic bishops have finally awakened to the fact that their "cotillion" with President Obama...

The U.S. church

"The church milquetoast of past decades".

Sebelius

Bishop Bruskewitz described Secretary Sebelius as a “bitter fallen-away Catholic”.

Organic farming

Various recent studies have found that land devoted to organic farming produces 50 percent less wheat, 55 percent less asparagus and lettuce, and 23 percent less corn than conventionally farmed land of the same acreage does.

Episcopal skullduggery

By a 2007 survey by Villanova concluding that 85 percent of responding dioceses in the United States had suffered some form of embezzlement.

Stupidity

Addams "was known as gentle, not confrontational, but one of her favorite words was 'stupid.'

The Obamas

Michelle Obama — the president's 'bitter half

Hypothetical

“What if there were no such thing as a hypothetical situation?”

Languages of India

Tamil -- it's one of India's approximately 20 official languages

Liturgy

Even in the USA in some older churches which haven’t been entirely crucified by liturgists...

Talking

He'll talk the head off a penny.

Liberalism

Liberals only want to be judged on their intentions, never the consequences. It allows them to maintain the illusion of occupying the high ground.

Vocations

The Texas A&M Catholic chaplaincy has produced more priests and nuns than Notre Dame in the last 20 years.

Seeing

There are none so blind as those who want sees.

The future

The veil that hides the future is woven by an angel of mercy.

Switzerland

The Swiss who barely tolerated one another.

Heaven and hell

In 16th Century Santo Domingo, the Taino chief on his deathbed was resisting baptism: "Do Christians go to heaven?" he asked.
The priest answered "Yes".
"I'd rather go to hell".