Every now and then someone boasts "I have an absolutely new idea." Three answers may be given. One is "Treat it kindly, it is in a strange place." The other is "Beginner's luck." And the third and best answer is "Go back and see how the ancients put it."

-Fulton Sheen, Life is Worth Living (1953)

 A fashion is something that goes in one year and out another.

-Fulton Sheen, Life is Worth Living, Fourth Series (1956)

One "Blessed be God" in times of adversity, is worth more than a thousand acts of gratitude in times of prosperity

-St. John of Avila (as quoted in St. Alphonsus Liguori's booklet Uniformity with God's Will)

I prefer traditional Church music in the liturgy. I believe that just as we conduct ourselves and dress in a reverent manner when we go to Mass, we should also have music to reflect that, oriented vertically, ad orientam, towards God. Rock music, to me, is oriented horizontally. It's strictly entertainment. I love rock and roll music, and jazz, etc., but they're forms of entertainment, and they draw the eye and attention towards the performers. We as Catholics are asked that while we live IN this world, we shouldn't be OF the world. What other place on earth should that phrase ring true but in the presence of the Eucharist? The music in church should be set apart, as a break from "the World," so we can focus on the fact that we're receiving Christ's body and blood and this isn't some kind of causal party.

-Matthew Kelly (drummer for the "Dropkick Murphys")
Gilbert, January/February 2023, pp. 14-15

It’s easier and more enjoyable to fantasize about the moral improvements one would bring about with more power than to bring about the actual moral improvements over which one has power.

-James Chastek

[H/T Mike Flynn]

YouTube: We fight misinformation by censoring videos we disagree with.
Every YouTube Ad: This crazy new discovery melts belly fat while you sleep.

-Brian Holdsworth

Of all forms of stupidity the most crass, the most tedious, and yet the most exasperating is learned stupidity; a pompous furniture of accumulated facts unrelated by the intelligence. We all know the symptoms. There is the use of a jargon to impress the gaping public and the substitution of specialist unfamiliar terms for plain English. There is the constant respectful allusion by one pedant to this, that and the other pedant, so as to present the whole herd of them as a sort of sacred college....

The soul of the error is a substitution of hypothesis for fact: the putting forward of what is in truth mere guesswork as affirmations, and the spinning of endless theories, any one of which is held respectable on condition that it contradicts traditional knowledge and the plain statements of the past. 

The Bible has been made a playground, apparently inexhaustible in its resources for people of this kind. They are so lost to common sense that they solemnly present great poems as being the products not of poets but of committees. Splendid passages of descriptive prose they imagine to have been pierced together out of discordant fragments. They will talk in the most familiar way of wholly imaginary documents and by their aid dissolve all straightforward narrative, and incidentally all the dignity of just expression.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Battleground

The Dangers of National Repentance

Young Christians especially last-year undergraduates and first-year curates are turning to it in large numbers. They are ready to believe that England bears part of the guilt for the present war, and ready to admit their own share in the guilt of England…. Are they, perhaps, repenting what they have in no sense done?

If they are, it might be supposed that their error is very harmless: men fail so often to repent their real sins that the occasional repentance of an imaginary sin might appear almost desirable. But what actually happens (I have watched it happening) to the youthful national penitent is a little more complicated than that. England is not a natural agent, but a civil society. When we speak of England’s actions we mean the actions of the British Government. The young man who is called upon to repent of England’s foreign policy is really being called upon to repent the acts of his neighbour; for a Foreign Secretary or a Cabinet Minister is certainly a neighbour. And repentance presupposes condemnation. The first and fatal charm of national repentance is, therefore, the encouragement it gives us to turn from the bitter task of repenting our own sins to the congenial one of bewailing but, first, of denouncing the conduct of others. If it were clear to the young that this is what he is doing, no doubt he would remember the law of charity. Unfortunately the very terms in which national repentance is recommended to him conceal its true nature. By a dangerous figure of speech, he calls the Government not ‘they’ but ‘we’. And since, as penitents, we are not encouraged to be charitable to our own sins, nor to give ourselves the benefit of any doubt, a Government which is called ‘we’ is ipso facto placed beyond the sphere of charity or even of justice. You can say anything you please about it. You can indulge in the popular vice of detraction without restraint, and yet feel all the time that you are practising contrition. A group of such young penitents will say, ‘Let us repent our national sins’; what they mean is, ‘Let us attribute to our neighbour (even our Christian neighbour) in the Cabinet. whenever we disagree with him, every abominable motive that Satan can suggest to our fancy.’

-C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock

[H/T to this blog]

Remember: everything is class warfare these days. Especially so-called identity politics, the most clever divide-and-conquer scheme devised in this century. Always be aware that those who thunder most about "privilege" have done and will do nothing to divest themselves of it. Acknowledging privilege absolves them and authorizes the wielding all of privilege's prerogatives. It's a topical cream: for external use only.

-Dale Price

"You ought to say plainly that you do not believe the gospel of Christ. For to believe what you please, and not to believe what you please, is to believe yourselves, and not the gospel.

-St. Augustine of Hippo, Contra Faustum, Book XVII, 3 (written about the year 400)

Half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. They don’t mean to do harm; but the harm does not interest them. Or they don’t see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves.

-T.S. Eliot (apparently from "The Cocktail Party")

[H/T Dale Price]

The charge then that a world with evil in it cannot come from God is based on misunderstanding and false sentiment. The misunderstanding lies in thinking that only one form of creation is possible to Him; the creation, that is, of the best of all possible worlds. On this supposition any universe with various levels of beauty and goodness would be forbidden; there must be no flowers because an animal is more perfect; there must be no animal, no human being, not even, perhaps, an angel, because they are all inferior to the best God might do. Nor let it be said that the argument fails because a flower can do no wrong, but a man can and does. It is of a man’s essence that he should grow and struggle by his own efforts to his end. He cannot enjoy and appreciate his special form of goodness which constitutes his perfection without the risk of failure. One might as well invite the athlete to enjoy a certain peculiar glow of bodily health without the preceding exercise, or expect the pedestrian on Ludgate Hill to have the sensations of a climber in the Himalayas. The only retort possible to this is that the gift of freedom is not worth the pain; to which the whole world makes answer that it is freedom and adventure which make life worth living. Only the tactics of the ostrich can prevent us from drawing the obvious moral from the facts that men have braved revolutions and given their lives for freedom.

-Martin D'Arcy, S.J., The Problem of Evil (1935)

[H/T Jeff Miller, aka "Curt Jester"]