"...nothing would be done at all, if a man waited till he could do it so well that no one could find fault with it."

-Bl. John Henry Newman, Lectures on Present Position of Catholics in England (1851)

[I]t may be said that the chief purpose of life, for any one of us, is to increase according to our capacity our knowledge of God by all the means we have, and to be moved by it to praise and thanks. To do as we say in the Gloria in Excelsis: Laudamus te, benedicamus te, adoramus te, glorificamus te, gratias agimus tibi proper magnam gloriam tuam. We praise you, we call you holy, we worship you, we proclaim your glory, we thank you for the greatness of your splendour.

And in moments of exaltation we may call on all created things to join in our chorus, speaking on their behalf, as is done in Psalm 148, and in The Song of the Three Children in Daniel II. PRAISE THE LORD...all mountains and hills, all orchards and forests, all things that creep and birds on the wing.

-Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 310

[The Church] was not intended by Our Lord to be static or remain in perpetual childhood; but to be a living organism (likened to a plant), which develops and changes in externals by the interaction of its bequeathed divine life and history- the particular circumstances of the world into which it is set. There is no resemblance between the 'mustard-seed' and the full-grown tree. For those living in the days of its branching growth the Tree is the thing, for the history of a living thing is part of its life, and the history of a divine thing is sacred. The wise may know that it began with a seed, but it is vain to try and dig it up, for it no longer exists, and the virtue and powers that it had now reside in the Tree. very good: but in husbandry the authorities, the keepers of the Tree, must look after it, according to such wisdom as they possess, prune it, remove cankers, rid it of parasites, and so forth. (With trepidation, knowing how little their knowledge of growth is!) But they will certainly do harm, if they are obsessed with the desire of going back to the seed or even to the first youth of the plant when it was (as they imagine) pretty and unafflicted by evils.

-Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter 306

"But in fact Our Lord has never made any promises regarding the triumph of Christianity on earth- on the contrary. If we expect to see His cause triumph here , His own words should warn us: 'The Son of Man, when He cometh, shall He find, think you, faith on earth?' He did not tell us the answer."

-Sigrid Undset, St. Catherine of Siena

(H/T Leila Miller)

"Writing is the best way of working out your ideas; so if you wait until you know exactly what you want to say before writing, you will miss the best way of determining exactly what you want to say."

-The Maverick Philosopher

(H/T Mike Flynn)

"The Mass isn't boring; you're boring!"

"The Mass isn't boring; you're boring! Guess what? If you're not paying attention and have no interest in anything that's going on, you're going to be bored. What a surprise! Think about your own boredom. Yes, you're boring."

-Tom Wilson (aka "Biff Tannen" from Back to the Future)

[Said in a light-hearted way (though making a serious point) in this episode of Catholic Answers Live ("The Healing Power of Laughter") in an interview with Patrick Coffin (starting about the 21:26 mark)]

Rock and Roll Hall of Famer Dion DiMucci in a recent interview to Forbes Magazine

Clash: What does fame do to somebody?

DiMucci: I'll give you a real true answer. It's a little long. I'm going to say it in a Bronx way, because I'm not an academic or intellectual. I started reading St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. If you don't have God in your life, you have to fill up on something. And you usually reach for the four great substitutes, the classical addictions: wealth, pleasure, power and honor. So you try to fill yourself up. You can see that there are some people who have all of that, and I'm one of them. I acquired the wealth, I have the girl of my dreams, I have position, I had a contract with Columbia Records for half a million dollars - guaranteed. That's 1961, that's a lot of money for a kid from the Bronx. And honor. I'm from the streets. It's all about reputation and respect. But those things, if you acquire them, still make you feel an emptiness - you want more. Because it's not God. Those things - fame included - don't satisfy the soul, the center of your being. Not that they're not good - we're not Puritans here - but once you have God in your life, he shapes your desire for those things. With God, you have this healthy detachment from thinking those things will make you happy. Does that make sense?

It is stupid of modern civilization to have given up believing in the devil, when he is the only explanation of it.

-Msgr. Ronald Knox

The typical modern man practically never thinks about sex. He dreams of it, of course, by day and by night; he craves for it; he pictures it, is stimulated or depressed by it, drools over it. But this frothing, steaming activity is not thinking. Drooling is not thinking, picturing is not thinking, craving is not thinking, dreaming is not thinking. Thinking means bringing the power of the mind to bear: thinking about sex means striving to see sex in its innermost reality and in the function it is meant to serve.

-Frank Sheed

Mike Flynn, on religious violence:

This raises the interesting question of what is religious violence. This is not as easy as it sounds. Pinker notes (with an apparent rhetorical smirk):

World War I, as I recall, was a war fought mostly by Christians against Christians.

That "as I recall" bit is pretty cute, and he seems to have written it as if it were meant seriously. But if that is his criterion then gandersauce requires us to count all the black men who were lynched by Democrats in the 1910s-1940s. World War I was also fought mostly by modern scientific Europeans against modern scientific Europeans. So what? It remains to be shown that Imperial Germany, Austro-Hungary, France, England, et al. went to war because they were Christian or modern scientific Europeans, or that mobs of Democrats lynched black men because the lynch mob were Democrats.

Pinker seems impressed with what people call themselves or he would not have made that fatuous remark about WW1. North Korea calls itself a democratic republic, but need we take the claim seriously? If the Europeans of 1914 were Christians, they were simply members of the State Established Churches. Worship of the Nation had by then long submerged worship of God. War posters like the one on the left cited the State or the Folk, but not the Church.

Or as our old buddy Tommy Aquinas put it, there is a difference between a human act and the act of a human. The former is what a man does because he is a human; the latter is merely something that he does. In the same way, a scientist (e.g., Fritz Haber) might devise a new means of mass murder (poison gas) for the Great War; but does he do it because he is a scientist or because he is a patriotic German? I don't mean his technical skills, but his motives. 

Even when there seems to be a "because-ness," closer inspection reveals greater complexity. Sure, there was a time when you could gin up a crowd to lynch someone because he was a dirty stinking Calvinist and this here is Lutheran land. But there are times and places when you could do the same thing using race or ethnicity or even economic commitments. If human beings are prone to violence, then it may not matter much what is used to incite them.

Thus when we examine the Huguenot wars in France, what we discover is that three Great Houses were fighting for control of the French throne, and they swung back and forth between Calvinism and Catholicism as the needs of state dictated. "Paris is worth a Mass," Hank Bourbon famously declared as he shed his Calvinism for convenience. A more accurate title would be the War of the French Succession.

Even the Thirty Years War is iffy. The German princes did not declare themselves independent of the Empire because they had become Protestant; they became Protestant because they wanted to declare their independence of the Empire. And can a war in which the Pope and the French crown supported the "Protestant" side really be called a religious war? It was really a war between Bourbon and Hapsburg, with both Protestant and Catholic princes on both sides.

Heresy was often a surrogate for political disloyalty, which is why heretics were more severely persecuted by the secular power. The church authorities were derided as "soft-hearted" (clericalem verens mollitiem) because they preferred persuasion.

Take another look at Pinker's list of the top nine [destructive atrocities of all time], above. Note that the top six are all pre-Christian and non-Christian events. And the last three date from after the subordination of the Church to the secular State; that is, after the Concordances, the English nationalization, and cuius regio, eius religio.

To read the whole post (on a more general topic) that this is extracted from, click here

The devil Screwtape on prayer:

Whenever they are attending to the Enemy Himself we are defeated, but there are ways of preventing them from doing so. The simplest is to turn their gaze away from Him towards themselves. Keep them watching their own minds and trying to produce feelings there by the action of their own wills. When they meant to ask Him for charity, let them, instead, start trying to manufacture charitable feelings for themselves and not notice that this is what they are doing. When they meant to pray for courage, let them really be trying to feel brave. When they say they are praying for forgiveness, let them be trying to feel forgiven. Teach them to estimate the value of each prayer by their success in producing the desired feeling; and never led them suspect how much success or failure of that kind depends on whether they are well or ill, fresh or tired, at the moment.

-The Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis (Letter IV)

Many otherwise well-educated people have long taken this picture for granted. [Complete lack of science in the Middle Ages] No one has diffused it more widely than astronomer Carl Sagan (1934–1996), whose television series Cosmos drew an audience estimated at half a billion. In his 1980 book by the same name, a timeline of astronomy from Greek antiquity to the present left between the fifth and the late fifteenth centuries a familiar thousand-year blank labelled as a “poignant lost opportunity for mankind.” The timeline reflected not the state of knowledge in 1980 but Sagan’s own “poignant lost opportunity” to consult the library of Cornell University, where he taught. In it, Sagan would have discovered large volumes devoted to the medieval history of his own field, some of them two hundred years old. He would also have learnt that the alleged medieval vacuum spawned the two institutions in which he spent his life: the observatory as a research institution (Islamic civilization) and the university (Latin Europe).

-The Cambridge History of Science: Volume 2 Medieval Science, ed. David C. Lindberg & Michael H. Shank, CUP, New York, ppb. 2015 pp.9-10

H/T Mike Flynn