Quotable quotes ...
"A woman drove me to drink and I didn't even have the decency to thank her." -- W.C. Fields
"Anti-Catholicism is as American as Thanksgiving, apple pie à la mode, and chocolate malts with two butter cookies. It has been part of American culture from the very beginning and ... it persists even today." -- Andrew Greeley
"Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty." -- St. Thomas Aquinas
"Serving God does not give us the same kind of here-and-now pleasure that sin gives. To eyes as little trained to reality as ours, there is a color and energy in sin, by comparison with which virtues look pallid and half-alive." -- Frank Sheed
“Peter has no need of our lies or flattery. Those who blindly and indiscriminately defend every decision of the Supreme Pontiff are the very ones who do most to undermine the authority of the Holy See—they destroy instead of strengthening its foundations” -- Fr. Melchior Cano O.P., Bishop and Theologian of the Council of Trent.
[Hat tip to NOR, ST, JM, SS]
ReplyDelete"Anti-Catholicism is as American as Thanksgiving, apple pie à la mode, and chocolate malts with two butter cookies. It has been part of American culture from the very beginning and ... it persists even today." -- Andrew Greeley "
"chocolate malts with two butter cookies" sounds about what like is served in Rome these days, so I think Greeley is a bit... well, dated. Catholics have to be *Catholic* for Americanism to be anti-Catholic. But who can be so sure what that even means? Check out George Weigel at First Things opining that the Bernadin era is dead, incredibly while in the shadow cast by Francis. If there is a common understanding of things like Church and State, I have yet to hear it. In fact, when Schonborn as author of the CCC can turn its statements on its head with Muller quietly tut-tutting in the background, whose to say what ANYTHING of pastoral significance means. Well, at least we have those infallible Marian doctrines... all subverted by Raymond Brown even as he is praised by the rotweiller named Ratzinger. Anti-Catholicism is hardly an easily identifiable or a uniquely American thing this century.
Anonymous,
ReplyDeletePoints well taken here. What Greeley certainly meant, though he was a liberal, was Catholicism as historically understood. Today most Catholics are cultural liberals and therefore in many ways more sympatico with what prevails in contemporary culture than what prevails in the legacy of Church tradition. In fact -- irony of ironies! -- one probably finds as much hostility to historic Catholicism in the Church as outside of it these days. How else do we explain and understand many recent phenomena in the Church news these days?