Sunday, March 31, 2013

...the Resurrection was the greatest 'eucatastrophe' possible in the greatest Fairy Story- and produces that essential emotion: Christian joy...Of course I do not mean that the Gospels tell what is *only* a fairy-story; but I do mean very strongly that they do tell a fairy-story: the greatest. Man the story-teller would have to be redeemed in a manner consonant with his nature: by a moving story. *But* since the author of it is the supreme Artist and the Author of Reality, this one was also made to Be, to be true on the Primary Plane. So that in the Primary Miracle (the Resurrection) and the lesser Christian miracles too though less, you have not only that sudden glimpse of the truth behind the apparent Ananke of our world, but a glimpse that is actually a ray of light through the very chinks of the universe about us.

 -J.R.R. Tolkien, "Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien", Letter 89, To Christopher Tolkien, 7-8 November 1944

Tuesday, March 19, 2013

"Progressives hate the idea that Peter and the Apostles can bind. Traditionalists cannot fathom that Peter and the Apostles can loosen."

-reader of Mark Shea's blog

[Needless to say, those terms need qualification. For instance, for "Traditionalists" such as sedevacantists, such a saying would be applicable to, but a member of the FSSP would be different]

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Just reading through the comments on a blog, I came across a quote that (quite apart from its immediate context in the specific argument) is such that I have to remember. lol.

"[He] is a remarkable man. He has the rare gift of being able to build a straw man using straw that has already been through the horse."

-Tom Simon (commenter on John Wright's blog )

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

“A weak man can never be meek, because he is never self-possessed; meekness is that virtue which controls the combative, violent and pugnacious powers of our nature, and is therefore the best and noblest road to self-realization. The meek man is not a man who refuses to fight, nor is he a man who will never become angry. A meek man is a man who will never do one thing: he will never fight when his conceit is attacked, but only when a principle is at stake." 

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen (The Cross and the Beatitudes)

Monday, March 4, 2013

The Church has not been tried for three hundred years; it has not even been considered; it has only been ignored. The world knows less about her than about the man in the moon. It has never studied her claims, never searched out her secrets; and it dispenses itself from doing so for the same reason the first hearers of Christ dispensed themselves from hearing His message: 'Can anything good come out of Nazareth?' Ignorance can be accumulated just as well as wisdom, and during the last three hundred years the world has accumulated a tremendous amount of ignorance concerning her."

~ Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, 'The Prodigal World' January 1936, p 19. [GCStevenson 03.02.2013 - Gospel reading Lk 15:1-3, 11-32]


Found in a comment on a post on the official Facebook page for the Archbishop Fulton Sheen Foundation