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]

Guy Noir again!

[Advisory: See Da Rulz #9]

Some of you will remember the undercover detective from one of our eastern seaboard states whom I kept on retainer in the past, who provided timely and sometimes scandalously-amusing reports for us sent to us by carrier pigeon. Well, it seems that our erstwhile undercover detective has now taken a job somewhere as a professor, which is likely as amusing as it may be scandalous if his students only knew his previous employment. In any case, here's your chance to read at your own risk yet another report from Guy Noir - Private Eye:

This week my public speaking students have to choose an informative speech topic. The parameters are the topic must be someone or something commemorated on a U.S. Postage Stamp, because, well, you have to be dead and significant to land yourself on a stamp, right? 

Wrong, apparently, since 2011. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/us/postal-service-will-begin-honoring-living-people-on-stamps.html

Because "Having really nice, relevant, interesting, fun stamps might make a difference in people’s decisions to mail a letter,” said Stephen Kearney, the Postal Service’s manager of stamp services. “This is such a sea change.”

One point one, he was wrong: letter-sending continues to drop, even with Michael Jordan (and Harry Potter, a Brit!) now on envelopes. On point two, he’s right: we continue to tread water in a cultural sea change that has elapsed in the last 61 years.

61? Yes, that is how old I am.  And when I was born, Vatican II was just convening. Even when I was 12, the old-school Catholic vibe prevailed to such an extent that my Catholic best friend was not allowed to follow me to a Methodist potluck (though his mother let me take communion with them once at Mass).

All of which makes me think of Vatican II on its anniversary:

'https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-of-second-vatican-council/2022/10/11/9f8507f0-4937-11ed-8153-96ee97b218d2_story.html">https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pope-marks-60th-anniversary-of-second-vatican-council/2022/10/11/9f8507f0-4937-11ed-8153-96ee97b218d2_story.html>

As the dust finally begins to settle, despite the current and last few popes’ determined propaganda campaigns to keep the Council’s relevance alive, some surprising counter-verdicts are in:

Blogger Amy Welborn muses, "It doesn’t seem to me to be unreasonable to label the Second Vatican Council as a failure.” How very different from the genial attempts in the 1980s by guys like Steubenville charismatic Alan Schrenk to claim it as part of glorious arc. 

Read all of Welborn’s thoughts:

https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/06/expression-formulated/>

And her remembrance of the all-but-forgotten pop icon Jonathan Livingston Seagull.

https://amywelborn.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/jesus-livingston-seagull/>

Or hear the NYT’s Ross Douthat also flatly declaring. "The council was a failure.” His concluding note is a bit depressing, sort of like saying even when you regain civility with an ex-wife, damage done remains. That’s nice. 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/12/opinion/catholic-church-second-vatican-council.html>

At National Review, MBD says this:

"Catholic theologians and bishops have been turned into sponges, soaked in metaphors that have no precise theological content but which retain an acid-wash quality, an iconoclasm aimed at a church and a theology of the past that is half understood, at best. So modernists such as Hans Kung could say that Vatican II promoted a “communio model of the church” over and against an “absolutist pyramidal model.

None of this was meant with any real conviction. It was an ad hoc theology developed for the sole purpose of legitimating dissent on moral issues touching sexuality. In Kung’s model, if the pew sitters could be shown to not be following this teaching, then the teaching itself should be jettisoned. But this has lately been junked for more papal primacy, because the current pope is seen as more progressive than some of the pew sitters.

The church has thus proceeded from slogan to slogan, as if theological reflection or — more ominously — the development of doctrine were mere rumination on the latest sets of buzzwords, usually coming from bishops or the pope. The people of God in transit, the listening church, the new evangelization, the field hospital. The synodal church. Catholics used to be known by their distinctive devotional life — prayers to the saints, rosaries, abstaining from meat on Fridays. Now, devoted Catholics spend their time reading papal encyclicals and mastering this pseudo-theological jargon."

https://www.nationalreview.com/2022/10/60-years-since-vatican-ii/>

Rod Dreher provides illustration of those thoughts by sharing a painfully crass but on-point video (at least the fictional priest avoids mentioning the ‘evidential power of beauty’).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUeShUhnZnk&t=126s

Part of me wonders if we could ever have a pope or council again who flatly declares anything dogmatic to be true. There seems to be a lack of confidence in dogma as even a possibility if it attempts to narrow the confines of belief. We know something has to be true, but what that something is, well ... ‘Love and let live!’  In all of this, today’s American Church has become just like the mainlines, the faded guardian of a tradition that remains in dusty volumes no one reads, but not much in parishes people attend. Everyone manifests strong symptoms reflecting Unitarianism and Quakerism, and endures settings animated by American Idol- and YoungLife-like liturgics. 

Which is why Robert Barron’s interview with Shia LeBouf was like an episode of Quantum Leap.

Top 10 quotations from St. John Paul II

Now for a bit of sunshine, here are the all-time top ten favorite quotes of Dr. Taylor Marshall from St. John Paul II (comments his):

1. “Faith and Reason are like two wings of the human spirit by which is soars to the truth.” (my personal favorite JP2 quote!)
2. “Do not abandon yourselves to despair. We are the Easter people and Alleluia is our song.”
3. “Do not be afraid. Do not be satisfied with mediocrity. Put out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.”
4. “I plead with you! Never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged. Be not afraid.”
5. “The worst prison would be a closed heart.”
6. “A person’s rightful due is to be treated as an object of love, not as an object for use.”
7. “As the family goes, so goes the nation and so goes the whole world in which we live.”
8. “It is the duty of every man to uphold the dignity of every woman.” (this is a great one, gentlemen!)
9. “If He asks much of you, it is because He knows you can give much.”
10. “Love between man and woman cannot be built without sacrifices and self-denial.”

Quotable

"Catholicism is the law of life, the life of the intelligence, the solution of all problems. Catholicism is the truth, and everything that departs from it one iota, is disorder, deception, and error."

-- Juan Donoso Cortés, Marquis of Valdegamas (1809-1843)in Essays on Catholicism, Liberalism, and Socialism (PDF 2010)

[Hat tip to M. Voris]

Soft censorship and intellectual freedom

1. "Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevent independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life."
   

   Alexander Solzhenitsyn addressing Harvard students, Thursday, June 8, 1978

   
   
2. "The Catholic Church is the only thing that frees a man from the degrading slavery of being a child of his age."
   

   G.K. Chesterton, The Collected Works of G.K. Chesterton, Volume 3: The Catholic Church and Conversion, Ch. 5: "The Exception Proves the Rule," p. 110.

[Hat tip to G. Heenan for the Solzhenitsyn quote]

Quotes from a most quotable Deist

From John Petrie's Collection of Thomas Jefferson Quotes:

• I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work the more I have of it.
• An elective despotism was not the government we fought for.
• The natural progress of things is for liberty to yield and government to gain ground.
• I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.
• I predict future happiness for Americans if they can prevent the government from wasting the labors of the people under the pretense of taking care of them.
• I think myself that we have more machinery of government than is necessary, too many parasites living on the labor of the industrious.
• “Laws that forbid the carrying of arms...disarm only those who are neither inclined nor determined to commit crimes... Such laws make things worse for the assaulted and better for the assailants; they serve rather to encourage than to prevent homicides, for an unarmed man may be attacked with greater confidence than an armed man.” (Quoting Cesare Beccaria)
• The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

I'm sure most readers are familiar with Jefferson's ideas. Despite the fact that he was merely a Deist and believed a great deal of nonsense he acquired from representatives of the French Enlightenment, or Endarkenment, in Paris -- e.g., "I do not find in orthodox Christianity one redeeming feature"; and "In every country and every age, the priest has been hostile to Liberty" -- and owned slaves, and so forth, I am always amazed at the genius of the man -- the fact that he studied Latin, Greek and French at age 9; entered the College of William and Mary at age 16; started his own law practice at age 23; was elected to the Virginia House of Burgesses at age 25; wrote the Declaration of Independence (a literary masterpiece) at age 33; served as Governor of Virginia, and in Congress in his early 40s, and as Secretary of State under Washington, and as Vice President and President of the American Philosophical Society; became the head of the Republican Party at age 55, and was elected the third president of the U.S. two years later (then for a second term when he was 61); obtained the Louisiana Purchase, effectively doubling the nation's size; created the University of Virginia and served as its first president.

You may recall the quip by John F. Kennedy at a dinner he held at the White House for some of the brightest minds of the nation during his administration: "This is perhaps the assembly of the most intelligence ever to gather at one time in the White House with the exception of when Thomas Jefferson dined alone."

The transvaluation of liturgical values

[Regarding the suppression of the traditional Mass by Paul VI]

"A community is calling its very being into question when it suddenly declares that what until now was its holiest and highest possession is strictly forbidden, and when it makes the longing for it seem downright indecent."

-- Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger
Salt of the Earth, tr. Adrian Walker
(San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1997), p. 176.

Brave scholars, wise warriors

The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools.

--Thucidides (Θουκυδίδης) (ca. 460 - 395 BC)

'Impartiality' -- a pompous name for indifference, ignorance

Michael Barber, Professor of Theology, Scripture and Catholic Thought at John Paul the Great Catholic University, in San Diego, CA, writes (in "Chesterton on Impartiality," Singing In The Reign, April 17, 2007) that he was thinking about the hesitance of scholars to take a stand on the question of the genre of the Gospels, which has crucial implications for historical Jesus work. He writes:

I was thinking about this today when I came across this quote from G. K. Chesterton: "Impartiality is a pompous name for indifference, which is an elegant name for ignorance." - The Speaker

[Hat tip to Tom]

Political quote for the day

"It appears we have appointed our worst generals to command forces, and our most gifted and brilliant to edit newspapers! In fact, I discovered by reading newspapers that these editor/geniuses plainly saw all my strategic defects from the start, yet failed to inform me until it was too late.

"Accordingly, I’m readily willing to yield my command to these obviously superior intellects, and I’ll, in turn, do my best for the Cause by writing editorials - after the fact."

- Robert E. Lee, 1863

[See Snopes.com for details.]

Enjoy your weekend!

Higher education: ". . . the professional training of clever and sybaritic animals, who drink, vomit, and fornicate in the dorms by night while they posture critically and ironically by day."

-- R.R. Reno, Professor, Creighton Univ.2007

"Reading this blog is more entertaining and funny than eating grits with Larry the Cable Guy!"

-- Mater, Musings commentator 2007

Thanks, Mater!

Thoughts for the day

The government is like a baby's alimentary canal, with a happy appetite at one end and no responsibility at the other.

-- Ronald Reagan

If you think health care is expensive now, wait until you see what it costs when it's free!

-- P.J. O'Rourke

Quotable

Suppose you were an idiot.
And suppose you were a member of Congress....
But then I repeat myself.

-- Mark Twain