“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)

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

The moral genius of Catholicism is that we can fail over and over again to live up to the ideals of the gospel...and it never occurs to us to lower our standards so that our failures earn us cheap blue ribbons for good conduct. We repent, receive God's mercy, and get on with doing what we promised to do.

-Fr. Philip Powell, O.P.

Neuhaus' Law: Where orthodoxy becomes optional, orthodoxy will sooner or later be proscribed.

Why God wishes us to worship him.

Perhaps you should contemplate the difference between Christ crucified and Kim Jong Il. A God who calls us to worship him is, by definition, giving us the best he has, which is himself. A man who demands worship is substituting himself for the best there is, which is God. Jesus didn’t exactly get the royal treatment when he came.

-Mark Shea (in a comment on his blog)

God is no more a “factor” in the mechanics of evolution than in the mechanics of automobiles. My auto mechanic takes neither God nor Darwin into account when repairing a transmission. There is no mention of God in the postulates of Euclidean geometry, either. I don’t know why anyone thinks this is astonishing. It all depends on the nature and depth of our considerations. I don’t take my laundry into account when mowing the lawn.

 Creation and evolution are simply not the same sort of thing; and God cannot be reduced to a mere efficient cause in the World among other efficient causes. The workings of Nature are not somehow independent of God’s giving existence to Nature. Otherwise, gravity and electromagnetism would be as upsetting as evolution.

 “You poor fools,” said William of Conches back in the day. “God can turn a cow into a tree. But has he ever done so? Therefore, give reasons why a thing is so or cease to hold that it is so.”

Or to quote St. Albertus Magnus: “In studying nature we have not to inquire how God the Creator may, as He freely wills, use His creatures to work miracles and thereby show forth His power; we have rather to inquire what Nature with its immanent causes can naturally bring to pass.”

(That is, methodological naturalism in the sciences was a medieval Christian invention.)

-"Ye Olde Statistician" (Mike Flynn) in a comment on Mark Shea's blog)

Religion is not the opium of the people. Opium is the drug of deserters who are afraid to face the Cross-the opiate that gives momentary escape from the Hound of Heaven in pursuit of the human soul.

-Archbishop Fulton Sheen, The Rainbow of Sorrow

Fidelity to Christ cannot be separated from faithfulness to his Church.

-Presbyterorum Ordinis

We're a Paris Hilton people in an apocalyptic world

-Mark Shea

No group is as rigidly conformist as a bunch of college freshmen. They have been introduced into a new society – college – different from and presumed superior to their home. They MUST fit in – it’s a human drive as powerful in most people as sex and hunger. The keepers of this society are largely the professors, and those who can play the professors’ games. So, college freshmen are exceedingly unlikely to question anything their professors and peers tell them – they are painfully aware that they are the provisional junior members of this tribe. So, they not only accept Power Dynamic analysis, deconstruction and relativism without question, they become their staunchest defenders. Problem is, their defense consists entirely of pointing out that any questioner is not a member of their tribe – no argument is made (in fact, it’s difficult to imagine a 19 year old traditionally educated college freshman having the intellectual chops to even make a rudimentary argument about anything at all. Assuming they’d want to, which they don’t). Mockery, insult and presumed intellectual and moral superiority are the tools.

-Ishmael Alighieri

(h/t Mike Flynn)

Gone fishing

"It is said that Charles II., wishing to make sport with the Royal Society, at its first establishment, proposed to the Members to inquire the reason why a dead fish was so much heavier than the same fish when alive just before. Many learned essays were immediately written to prove that the thing was a matter of course, and showing the reasons why it was so; but at length it occurred to one of the disputants to verify the fact, and he soon found that the dead fish and the living one were both of the same weight!"

-Mechanics' Magazine - Vol. XV, No. 395, March 5, 1831

Without supernatural aid...

Once, when he had behaved with particular rudeness to a young French intellectual at a dinner party in Paris at the home of Nancy Mitford, Miss Mitford, angry at his social brutality, asked him how he could behave so meanly and yet consider himself a believing and practicing Catholic.

"You have no idea," Waugh returned, "how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic. Without supernatural aid I would hardly be a human being."

-Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes (quoting a story about Evelyn Waugh related by Joseph Epstein)

[Something to remember when we see Christians not acting so Christlike is that perhaps they are still much, much better than they otherwise would be if they had not God's grace working in their lives so much.]