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NOTABLE
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Friday, 11 June 2010 |
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She knew in '72
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By Elizabeth Anscombe
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And if there is nothing intrinsically wrong with contraceptive intercourse, and if it could become general practice everywhere when there is intercourse but ought to be no begetting, then it's very di... |
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Thursday, 10 June 2010 |
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Holy Church
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By Kenneth D. Whitehead
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One of the things implicit in the appellation “holy” as applied to the Church . . . is that the Church from the beginning has been endowed with the sacramental mean... |
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Wednesday, 09 June 2010 |
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Teaching
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By Etienne Gilson
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No one, nor anything, obliges the Christian to busy himself with science, art, or philosophy, for other ways of serving God are not wanting; but if that is the way of serving God that he has chosen, t... |
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Tuesday, 08 June 2010 |
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Only in modern Europe
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By Joseph Ratzinger
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We should say straightaway that only in modern Europe has a concept of culture been developed that portrays it as a sphere separate from religion, or even in opposition to it. In all known historical ... |
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Monday, 07 June 2010 |
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An immensely formidable unity
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By C.S. Lewis
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We are all rightly distressed, and ashamed also, at the divisions of Christendom. But those who have always lived within the Christian fold may be too easily dispirited by them. They are bad, but such... |
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Friday, 04 June 2010 |
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To one who misunderstands the Church
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By Hilaire Belloc
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I will content myself by concluding with this: that there wholly escapes you the character of the Catholic Church. You judge it by indications dead and valueless; you have not – for all your d... |
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I myself was first led into reading the Christian classics, almost accidentally, as a result of my English studies. Some, such as Hooker, Herbert, Traherne, Taylor and Bunyan, I read because they are ... |
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Wednesday, 02 June 2010 |
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We have to do more
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By Fulton J. Sheen
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Really, most of us live below the level of our energy. And in order to be happy, we have to do more. Now, we can do more, spiritually and every other way. . . so you see how important it i... |
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Tuesday, 01 June 2010 |
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Ipsa dixit
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By Elena Kagan
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When the Senate ceases to engage nominees in meaningful discussion of legal issues, the confirmation process takes on an air of vacuity and farce, and the Senate becomes incapable of either properly e... |
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Monday, 31 May 2010 |
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What could God do?
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By St. Athanasius
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What was God to do in face of this dehumanising of mankind, this universal hiding of the knowledge of Himself by the wiles of evil spirits? Was He to keep silence before so great a wrong and let men g... |
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Friday, 28 May 2010 |
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Holy art
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By The Council of Trent (1582)
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Images of Christ, of the Virgin Mother of God, and of the other saints, are to be had and retained particularly in temples, and that due honor and veneration are to be given them; not that any divin... |
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Thursday, 27 May 2010 |
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Covenant with wisdom
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By John Paul II
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Modern culture must be led to a more profoundly restored covenant with divine Wisdom. Every man is given a share of such Wisdom through the creating action of God. And it is only in faithfulness to th... |
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Wednesday, 26 May 2010 |
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The Christian past
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By Christopher Dawson
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It was the coming of the Renaissance and the whole-hearted acceptance by the Papacy of the new humanist culture that stretched the mediaeval synthesis to breaking-point and produced a new outburst of ... |
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Tuesday, 25 May 2010 |
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Renewing the mind
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By Saint Augustine
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Thus, O Lord, our God, our Creator, when our affections have been turned from the love of the world, in which we died by living ill; and when we began to be “a living soul&rdqu... |
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Monday, 24 May 2010 |
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Of wisdom and foolishness
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By Saint Augustine
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In a matter of religion (that is, of the worship and knowledge of God), they are less to be followed who forbid us to believe, making most ready professions of reason. For no one doubts that all men a... |
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Friday, 21 May 2010 |
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What Is a University?
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By John Henry Newman
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If I were asked to describe as briefly and popularly as I could, what a University was, I should draw my answer from its ancient designation of a Studium Generale, or “School of Universal Lear... |
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Thursday, 20 May 2010 |
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Measure of the political order
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By International Theological Commission
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Society organized for the common good of its members corresponds to a requirement of the social nature of the person. The natural law appears then as the normative background in which the political or... |
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Wednesday, 19 May 2010 |
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A living, lifegiving whole
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By Romano Guardini
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The Church is the original principle from which the life of the individual comes; She is the ground that supports him, the atmosphere that he breathes. . . . The Church is a living whole that penetrat... |
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Tuesday, 18 May 2010 |
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Satisfying the heart’s yearnings
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By Benedict XVI
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“It is written in the book of Psalms . . . ‘His office let another take’. One of these men, then [. . .] must become a witness with us to his resurrection” (Acts 1:20-22). Thes... |
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Monday, 17 May 2010 |
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Against the severe and terrible
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By John Henry Newman
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I say then, that, even though the case could be so that the whole system of Catholicism was recognized and professed, without the direct presence of the Church, still this would not at once make such ... |
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Friday, 14 May 2010 |
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Consecrated to Mary
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By John Paul II
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Above all creatures, may you be blessed, you, the Handmaid of the Lord, who in the fullest way obeyed the divine call!
Hail to you, who are wholly united to the redeeming consecration of your So... |
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Thursday, 13 May 2010 |
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The purposes of law
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By Thomas Aquinas
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Whether it was necessary that there should be a divine law
It was necessary for the direction of human life that, beyond natural and human law, there should be a divine law. There are four reasons ... |
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Wednesday, 12 May 2010 |
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True Peace
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By From "Lord of the World", Robert Hugh Benson
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. . . true peace, passing understanding, concerns not only the relations of men between themselves, but, supremely, the relations of men with their Maker; and it is in this necessary point tha... |
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Tuesday, 11 May 2010 |
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Catholic immigration
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By Julie Byrne
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The story of Roman Catholicism in the nineteenth century IS the story of immigration. Until about 1845, the Roman Catholic population of the United States was a small minority of mostly English Cathol... |
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Monday, 10 May 2010 |
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The eternal offering
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By Christopher Dawson
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The Church itself, though it bears a Greek name, Ecclesia, derived from the Greek civic assembly, and is ordered by the Roman spirit of authority and law, is the successor and heir of an Oriental peop... |
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Friday, 07 May 2010 |
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The aboriginal Vicar of Christ
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By John Henry Newman
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The rule and measure of duty is not utility, nor expedience, nor the happiness of the greatest number, nor State convenience, nor fitness, order, and the pulchrum. Conscience is not a long-sighted sel... |
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Thursday, 06 May 2010 |
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If we really believe . . .
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By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
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[I]f we really believe that abortion is an intimate act of violence – and of course, it is – then we can’t aim at anything less than ending abortion. It doesn’t mat... |
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Wednesday, 05 May 2010 |
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War on the weak
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By John Paul II
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In fact, while the climate of widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity of today's social problems, and these can sometimes mitigate the subject... |
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Tuesday, 04 May 2010 |
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Oh, how I love humanity
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By G. K. Chesterton
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Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French.
Who never will be English!
The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,
Is welding all the na... |
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Monday, 03 May 2010 |
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For comprehensive reform
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By Archbishop Gomez and Bishop Cantu
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We believe what happened in Arizona points to the need for national leadership to craft a comprehensive reform bill that will protect the dignity of the human person while preserving the integrity and... |
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Friday, 30 April 2010 |
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Openness to life
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By Benedict XVI, Caritas in veritate
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Some non-governmental Organizations work actively to spread abortion, at times promoting the practice of sterilization in poor countries, in some cases not even informing the women concerned. Moreover... |
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Thursday, 29 April 2010 |
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Antigone's complaint
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By Sophocles
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For me it was not Zeus who made that order,
Nor did that Justice who lives with the gods below
mark out such laws to hold among mankind.
Nor did I think your orders were so strong
that ... |
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Wednesday, 28 April 2010 |
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The forger's art
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By Unknown
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What all skeptics do not notice is the fact that a forger only fakes something either preexisting or something which is known throughout history. He will never fake something which was invented by h... |
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Tuesday, 27 April 2010 |
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Newman on conversion
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By John Henry Newman
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I am afraid to make hasty converts of educated men lest they should not have counted the cost & should have difficulties after they have entered the Church. . . . The Church must be prepared for c... |
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Monday, 26 April 2010 |
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Faith stirs reason
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By John Paul II, Fides et ratio (1998)
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[T]here are signs of a widespread distrust of universal and absolute statements, especially among those who think that truth is born of consensus and not of a consonance between intellect and objectiv... |
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Friday, 23 April 2010 |
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Earth Day
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By Benedict XVI
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The Church has a responsibility towards creation and she must assert this responsibility in the public sphere. In so doing, she must defend not only earth, water and air as gifts of creation that... |
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Thursday, 22 April 2010 |
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Keep on rejoicing
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By 1 Peter 4: 12-19
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Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal among you, which comes upon you for your testing, as though some strange thing were happening to you; but to the degree that you share the sufferings... |
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Wednesday, 21 April 2010 |
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Salt of the earth
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By John Henry Newman
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Popes, then, though they are infallible in their office, as Prophets and Vicars of the Most High, and though they have generally been men of holy life, and many of them actually saints, have the trial... |
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Tuesday, 20 April 2010 |
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The capstone
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By Psalm 118
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Open for me the gates of righteousness;
I will enter and give thanks to the LORD.
This is the gate of the LORD
through which the righteous may enter.
I will give you thanks, for you answ... |
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Monday, 19 April 2010 |
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Father of many peoples
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By Joseph Ratzinger
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Our greatest need in the present historical moment is people who make God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live. The negative testimony of Christians who spoke of God bu... |
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Friday, 16 April 2010 |
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Humility
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By Rafael Cardinal Merry del Val
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O Jesus! meek and humble of heart, hear me.
From the desire of being esteemed, From the desire of being loved,
From the desire of being extolled,
From the desire of being honored,
From the desire ... |
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Thursday, 15 April 2010 |
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Good and bad zeal
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By Saint Benedict
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Just as there is an evil zeal of bitterness which separates from God and leads to hell, so is there a good zeal which separates from evil and leads to God and life everlasting.
Let monks, therefo... |
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Wednesday, 14 April 2010 |
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan, revisited
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By Charles Krauthammer
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Daniel Patrick Moynihan [offered] an arresting view . . . in The American Scholar entitled “Defining Deviancy Down.” His point is that deviancy – crime, broken homes, mental illness ... |
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Tuesday, 13 April 2010 |
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On Angels
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By Czeslaw Milosz
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All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.
There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
... |
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Monday, 12 April 2010 |
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Imagination and reality
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By Simone Weil
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Imaginary evil is romantic and varied; real evil is gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring. Imaginary good is boring; real good is always new, marvelous, intoxicating. |
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Friday, 09 April 2010 |
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A proclamation of trust
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By John Paul II
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O incomprehensible and Limitless Mercy Divine,
Who can extol and adore You worthily?
Supreme attribute of Almighty God,
You are the sweet hope for sinful man. (Saint Faustina, Diary, 95... |
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Thursday, 08 April 2010 |
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Two sources of discontent
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By George Cardinal Pell
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Modernity and its unhelpfully named sequel postmodernism regard humans as being above and beyond both nature and transcendence. Beginning in the eighteenth century, the two traditional lodestars of Go... |
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Wednesday, 07 April 2010 |
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Private and public
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By Francis Cardinal George
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Like Jesus, the church which is his Body has both a private life and a public life. The church lives quietly when her members understand their faith, practice it together by worshiping God and working... |
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Tuesday, 06 April 2010 |
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A thing, not a theory
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By Hilaire Belloc
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I am by all my nature skeptical. But when religious doubt assails me, I discover it to be false; a mood, not a conclusion. My conclusion is the Faith. Corporate, organized, a personality, teaching. A ... |
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Monday, 05 April 2010 |
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Either-or
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By Romano Guardini
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We are faced with an either-or that reaches to the bottom of existence. If we take ourselves as measuring-rod, our human lives, the world as it appears to us, our thoughts and reactions and attempt to... |
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Friday, 02 April 2010 |
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United against Jesus
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By Romano Guardini
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Apart from the cold calculation with which men responded to the holiest Being that ever walked on earth, what is most disquieting about the whole account of the end is the sudden unanimousness of Jesu... |
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Thursday, 01 April 2010 |
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Peace after struggle
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By Romano Guardini
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The peace of Christ comes after the struggle. First the conflict. Even as we consider this, we feel the conflict he has brought into our own lives, we fight it off, though we know it comes for our goo... |
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Wednesday, 31 March 2010 |
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Better than "great"
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By Romano Guardini
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None of the Apostles is as sharply characterized in the Gosepls as Peter. He was better than “great” . . . his was a deep and warm humanity. His heart was honest, ardent, and generous, if ... |
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Tuesday, 30 March 2010 |
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On forgiveness
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By Martin Luther King, Jr.
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We must develop and maintain the capacity to forgive. He who is devoid of the power to forgive is devoid of the power to love. It is impossible even to begin the act of loving one’s enemies... |
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Monday, 29 March 2010 |
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Homosexuality: the Biblical view
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By Dennis Prager
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Jews or Christians who take the Bible's views on homosexuality seriously are not obligated to prove that they are not fundamentalists or literalists, let alone bigots (though, of course, people have u... |
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Friday, 26 March 2010 |
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The abortion issue
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By Peter Kreeft
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I used to call myself a liberal, back in the days of the Civil Rights Movement, because I was on the side of the poor, the oppressed. Blacks and women and the poor, and they had to be liberated. They ... |
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Thursday, 25 March 2010 |
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True love
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By Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est
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Nowadays Christianity of the past is often criticized as having been opposed to the body; and it is quite true that tendencies of this sort have always existed. Yet the contemporary way of exalting th... |
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Wednesday, 24 March 2010 |
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I Am Of Ireland
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By William Butler Yeats
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'I am of Ireland,
And the Holy Land of Ireland,
And time runs on,' cried she.
'Come out of charity,
Come dance with me in Ireland.'
One man, one man alone
In that outlandish gear,
One solitar... |
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Tuesday, 23 March 2010 |
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Exec order not enough
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By Richard Doerflinger, USCCB
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One proposal to address the serious problem in the Senate health care bill on abortion funding, specifically the direct appropriating of new funds that bypass the Hyde Amendment, is to have the Presid... |
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Monday, 22 March 2010 |
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The art of faith
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By Pius XII, Mediator Dei
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What we have said about music, applies to the other fine arts, especially to architecture, sculpture and painting. Recent works of art which lend themselves to the materials of modern composition, sho... |
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Friday, 19 March 2010 |
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Pornified
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By Pamela Paul
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“Pornography wrecks marriages,” says Marcia Maddox, a Vienna, Virginia-based attorney. The five attorneys in her office are always working on at least one case involving pornography. In on... |
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Thursday, 18 March 2010 |
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The mouths of babes
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By Christoph Cardinal Schoenborn
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Although a handicapped child is doubtless a heavy burden on a family, the child can also be a great blessing. The sixth and last child of friends of mine has Down Syndrome, and the whole family agrees... |
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Wednesday, 17 March 2010 |
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Donum vitae
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By Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
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There are those who say that the moral teaching of the Church contains too many prohibitions. In reality, however, her teaching is based on the recognition and promotion of all the gifts which the C... |
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Tuesday, 16 March 2010 |
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We're talking LIFE
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By Bart Stupak
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If you pass the Stupak amendment, more children will be born, and therefore it will cost us millions more. That’s one of the arguments I’ve been hearing. . . . Money is their hang-up. Is t... |
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Monday, 15 March 2010 |
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Scandal
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By Sir Thomas Browne
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Be deaf unto the suggestions of tale-bearers, calumniators, pick-thank or malevolent detractors, who, while quiet men sleep, sowing the tares of discord and division, distract the tranquillity of char... |
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Friday, 12 March 2010 |
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The true end of humility
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By C. S. Lewis
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MY DEAR WORMWOOD, The most alarming thing in your last account of the patient is that he is making none of those confident resolutions which marked his original conversion. No more lavish promises of ... |
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Thursday, 11 March 2010 |
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Contemplation and love
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By Hans Urs von Balthasar
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The long controversy as to whether eternal blessedness consists in contemplation or in love ends quite simply: it can only consist in a loving contemplation; for what else is there to contemplate in G... |
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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 |
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The perpetually dying Church
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By St. Augustine
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Her enemies look upon her and say, "She is about to die". . . whilst they are thus speaking, I see these very men die themselves, day by day, but the Church lives on, and reaches the power... |
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Tuesday, 09 March 2010 |
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Lucifer in Starlight
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By George Meredith
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On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his h... |
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Monday, 08 March 2010 |
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The idol of truth
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By Blaise Pascal
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We make an idol of truth itself; for truth apart from charity is not God, but His image and idol, which we must neither love nor worship; and still less must we love or worship its opposite, namely, f... |
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Friday, 05 March 2010 |
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Overcoming lust
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By St. Bernard of Clairvaux
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Absolutely every person, no matter how enmeshed in vice, ensnared by the allurements of pleasure, a captive in exile . . . fixed in mire . . . distracted by business, afflicted with sorrow . . . and c... |
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Thursday, 04 March 2010 |
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Mankind and nature
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By Catechism of the Catholic Church
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339 Each creature possesses its own particular goodness and perfection. For each one of the works of the “six days” it is said: “And God saw that it was good.” “By the ve... |
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Wednesday, 03 March 2010 |
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Who is the man?
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By Francois Mauriac
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Who is the thinking. loving creature who is on the point of landing on the stars and who will thus become a god in accordance with the promise made to Eve by the serpent? How close I feel to Nicodemus... |
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Tuesday, 02 March 2010 |
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We hold these truths
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By John Courtney Murray, S.J.
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The first truth to which the American Proposition makes appeal is stated in…the Declaration of Independence. It is a truth that lies beyond politics; it imparts to politics a fundamental h... |
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Monday, 01 March 2010 |
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At the movies
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By Pius XI
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[S]tories and actions are presented, through the cinema, by men and women whose natural gifts are increased by training and embellished by every known art, in a manner which may possibly become an add... |
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Friday, 26 February 2010 |
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At first glance
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By St. Thomas Aquinas
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It sufficiently appears at the first glance, according to what precedes (1), that to create can be the action of God alone. For the more universal effects must be reduced to the more universal and pri... |
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Thursday, 25 February 2010 |
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The science of religion
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By John Henry Newman
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All sciences, except the science of Religion, have their certainty in themselves; as far as they are sciences, they consist of necessary conclusions from undeniable premises, or of phenomena manipulat... |
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Wednesday, 24 February 2010 |
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In defense of the Church
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By Albert Einstein
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Being a lover of freedom, when the revolution came in Germany, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but, no, the uni... |
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Tuesday, 23 February 2010 |
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Reconciliation
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By St. Isidore of Seville
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Confession heals, confession justifies, confession grants pardon of sin. All hope consists in confession. In confession there is a chance for mercy. Believe it firmly. Do not doubt, do not hesitate, n... |
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Monday, 22 February 2010 |
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Necessary limits
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By John Paul II
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If Pope Leo XIII calls upon the State to remedy the condition of the poor in accordance with justice, he does so because of his timely awareness that the State has the duty of watching over the c... |
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Friday, 19 February 2010 |
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Prayer
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By Czeslaw Milosz
|
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You ask me how to pray to someone who is not.
All I know is that prayer constructs a velvet bridge
And walking it we are aloft, as on a springboard,
Above landscapes the color of ripe gold
Transf... |
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Thursday, 18 February 2010 |
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This was a man
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By Shakespeare
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This was the noblest Roman of them all.
All the conspirators, save only he,
Did that they did in envy of great Caesar;
He only, in a general honest thought
And common good to all, made one of t... |
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Wednesday, 17 February 2010 |
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Ash Wednesday
|
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By T. S. Eliot
|
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Because I do not hope to turn again
Because I do not hope
Because I do not hope to turn
Desiring this man's gift and that man's scope
I no longer strive to strive towards such things
(Why should ... |
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Tuesday, 16 February 2010 |
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More adulterer than thief
|
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By Thomas Aquinas
|
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Certain actions are called human, inasmuch as they are voluntary, as stated above (Question 1, Article 1). Now, in a voluntary action, there is a twofold action, viz. the interior action of the will, ... |
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Monday, 15 February 2010 |
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True hope
|
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By Georges Bernanos
|
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Hope is a heroic virtue. People think it is easy to hope. But the only people who hope are those who have had the courage to despair of illusions and lies in which they had once found a security ... |
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Friday, 12 February 2010 |
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A day in the life of a Dominican nun
|
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By Sisters of Mary
|
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5:00 Rise
5:30 Eucharistic Holy Hour
Office of Readings
Meditation
Lauds
Marian Consecration
6:30 Holy Sacrifice of the Mass
7:05 Breakfast
Professed
7:30 - 4:00 Apostolate
... |
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Thursday, 11 February 2010 |
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End-of-life issues
|
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By William Cardinal Levada
|
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First question: Is the administration of food and water (whether by natural or artificial means) to a patient in a "vegetative state" morally obligatory except when they cannot be assimilate... |
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Wednesday, 10 February 2010 |
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Misunderstanding man
|
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By Georges Bernanos
|
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There is something more in man than those deceivers think who believe him inspired only by self-interest. There is in man a secret and incomprehensible hatred, not only of his fellow men but of himsel... |
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Tuesday, 09 February 2010 |
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Fight courageously
|
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By Lorenzo Scupoli
|
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It does not matter how weak you are - how strong the enemy may seem, either in number or in power. Do not be discouraged. The help you have from heaven is more powerful than all that hell can send to ... |
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Monday, 08 February 2010 |
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Stark staring mad
|
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By William Golding
|
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Utopias are presented for our inspection as a critique of the human state. If they are to be treated as anything but trivial exercises of the imagination. I suggest there is a simple test we can apply... |
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Friday, 05 February 2010 |
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Prayer for the Saints (1968)
|
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By Philip M. Hannan, former archbishop of New Orleans
|
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God, we ask your blessing upon all who participate in this event, and all who have supported our Saints. Our heavenly father, who has instructed us that the “saints by faith conquered kingdoms..... |
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Thursday, 04 February 2010 |
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Real growth
|
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By E. F. Schumacher
|
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Our ordinary mind always tries to persuade us that we are nothing but acorns and that our greatest happiness will be to become bigger, fatter, shinier acorns; but that is of interest only to pigs. Our... |
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Wednesday, 03 February 2010 |
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Jerusalem
|
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By William Blake
|
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AND did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth... |
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Tuesday, 02 February 2010 |
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"No longer mourn for me. . ."
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By Ralph McInerny
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No longer mourn for me when I am dead
Nor dirges play nor toll the dismal bell,
For when in earth I’m laid at last to bed
My spirit will in a better country dwell,
Where then what is will be... |
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Monday, 01 February 2010 |
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Heaven
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By John Paul II
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In the context of Revelation, we know that the “heaven” or “happiness” in which we will find ourselves is neither an abstraction nor a physical place in the clouds, but a livin... |
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Friday, 29 January 2010 |
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Bought with a Price
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By Bishop Paul S. Loverde
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Artists have often portrayed the human body, clothed and unclothed, in various depictions and poses. While the danger of immodesty exists even with regard to works of art, the evil of pornography is g... |
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Thursday, 28 January 2010 |
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Priesthood
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By Father William Saunders
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The restriction of holy orders to men alone does not denigrate the role of women in the Church. Think of some of the great female saints like St. Clare, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Catherine of Siena... |
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Wednesday, 27 January 2010 |
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How John Paul II ended communism
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By Anne Applebaum
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Marxism, as it was practiced in Eastern Europe, was a cult of progress. We are destroying the past in order to build the future, the communist leaders explained: We are razing the buildings, eradicati... |
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Tuesday, 26 January 2010 |
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The Lost Tools of Learning
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By Dorothy L. Sayers
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What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the close the chief object is left unattained? It is not the fault of the teachers—they work only too hard already. The c... |
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Monday, 25 January 2010 |
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Affliction
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By C.S. Lewis
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Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith but they are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the passion ... |
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Friday, 22 January 2010 |
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Satan's winning ways
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By William F. Buckley Jr.
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There isn't any reason why President Bush has to renounce a friendship with Ted Kennedy, just so long as he makes it clear to the American public that Mr. Kennedy is an utter ass when prescribing poli... |
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Thursday, 21 January 2010 |
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Yearning for salvation
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By Benedict XVI
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There is so much suffering in our world, and human selfishness continues in many ways to harm creation. For this reason, the yearning for salvation which affects all creation is that much more intense... |
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Wednesday, 20 January 2010 |
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The paradox of Islam
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By G.K. Chesterton
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There is in Islam a paradox which is perhaps a permanent menace. The great creed born in the desert creates a kind of ecstasy out of the very emptiness of its own land, and even, one may say, out of t... |
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Tuesday, 19 January 2010 |
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Memorial and Remonstrance
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By James Madison
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. . . [W]e hold it for a fundamental and undeniable truth, “that religion or the duty which we owe to our Creator and the manner of discharging it, can be directed only by reason and conviction,... |
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Monday, 18 January 2010 |
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Creative suffering
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By Leon Bloy
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Man has places in his heart which do not yet exist, and into them enters suffering, in order that they may have existence. |
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Friday, 15 January 2010 |
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Torn out with irons
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By Georges Bernanos
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We are not those rosy-cheeked saints with golden beards whom pious folk behold in pictures, whose eloquence and perfect health even philosophers would envy. Our task is not as the world imagines it. C... |
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Thursday, 14 January 2010 |
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Do we all know?
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By St. Thomas Aquinas
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A thing may be known in two ways: first, in itself; secondly, in its effect, wherein some likeness of that thing is found: thus someone not seeing the sun in its substance, may know it by its rays. So... |
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Wednesday, 13 January 2010 |
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Lying logic
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By Dostoyevsky
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Man has such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that he is ready to distort the truth intentionally, he is ready to deny the evidence of his senses only to justify his logic. |
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Tuesday, 12 January 2010 |
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Time
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By Peter Kreeft
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Time is like the setting of a play. The setting is really part of the play, contained by the play, determined by the play. But we often think the opposite: we think the play is contained by the settin... |
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Monday, 11 January 2010 |
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In no name
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By Isaiah 63: 17-20
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O Lord, why do you make us wander from your ways,
and harden our heart, so that we fear you not?
Return for the sake of your servants,
the tribes of your heritage.
Your holy people held possession... |
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Friday, 08 January 2010 |
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Duties never end
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By Simone Weil
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It makes nonsense to say that men have, on the one hand, rights, and on the other hand, obligations. Such words only express differences in point of view. The actual relationship between the two is as... |
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Thursday, 07 January 2010 |
|
Just war, in a nutshell
|
|
By Thomas Aquinas
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In order for a war to be just, three things are necessary. First, the authority of the sovereign by whose command the war is to be waged. For it is not the business of a private individual to decl... |
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Wednesday, 06 January 2010 |
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Beware!
|
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By John of Salisbury
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Interdum sibi laesit nasum vel eruit oculum, qui salutifer signo faciem munire disponit.
(Sometimes a man who seeks to protect his face by making the sign of the cross injures his nose or puts out ... |
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Tuesday, 05 January 2010 |
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The heavens hold no terrors
|
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By Paul Claudel
|
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We have conquered the world and found that your creation is complete,
And that the imperfect has no place among your perfected works, and
that our imaginations cannot add
A single term to t... |
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Monday, 04 January 2010 |
|
Poetic intuition
|
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By Jacques Maritain
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Poetic intuition makes things which it grasps diaphanous and alive, and populated with infinite horizons. As grasped by poetic knowledge, things abound in significance and swarm with meanings. T... |
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Friday, 01 January 2010 |
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Something greater always lies ahead
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By Joseph Ratzinger
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If God exists, then there is no meaningless time, no time devoid of significance. Every moment has its value, even if all I can do is to endure my illness in silence. If God exists, then there is alwa... |
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Thursday, 31 December 2009 |
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Christmas Silence
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By Joseph Ratzinger
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Christmas invites us into this silence of God, and his mystery remains hidden to so many people because they cannot find the silence in which God acts. How do we find it? Mere silence on its own doe... |
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Wednesday, 30 December 2009 |
|
The ox and the ass
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By Joseph Ratzinger
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The ox and the ass are not simply products of the pious imagination: the Church's faith in the unity of the Old and New Testaments has given them their role as an accompaniment of the Christmas event.... |
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Tuesday, 29 December 2009 |
|
A Becket Letter
|
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By Thomas Becket
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There are a great many bishops in the Church, but would to God we were the zealous teachers and pastors that we promised to be at our consecration, and still make profession of being. The harvest is g... |
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Monday, 28 December 2009 |
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Don't disappoint him
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By Joseph Ratzinger
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The tree of life is not far from us, somewhere in a world we have lost. It has been established in our midst, not only as an image and sign, but as a reality. Jesus, who is himself the fruit of the ... |
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Friday, 25 December 2009 |
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Seeing in this world
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By Joseph Ratzinger
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Our Gospel [today] closes with the words: "We have beheld his glory. . ." (John 1.14) These could be the words of the shepherds as they return from the stable and sum up what they have exper... |
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Thursday, 24 December 2009 |
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True Christian waiting
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By Benedict XVI
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When the time is not filled with a meaningful presence, waiting becomes unbearable. When the present moment remains completely empty—when all we can do is look for something to come, amd there i... |
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Wednesday, 23 December 2009 |
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For Mary and Joseph
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By W. H. Auden
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Blessed Woman,
Excellent Man,
Redeem for the dull the
Average Way,
That common ungifted
Natures may
Believe that their normal
Vision can
Walk to perfection. |
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Tuesday, 22 December 2009 |
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A Catholic faith
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By Avery Dulles, S.J.
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Faith is by its nature a commitment, and without firmness there is no commitment. The biblical idea of faith is clearly opposed to doubt, as appears from the story of Zachary (Luke 1: 18-20) and the w... |
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Monday, 21 December 2009 |
|
The Journey of the Magi
|
|
By T.S. Eliot
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"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The was deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels galled,... |
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Friday, 18 December 2009 |
|
The burden of Christmas presents
|
|
By P. G. Wodehouse
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|
The burden of Christmas-present giving has of late years been grievously increased by the growing sophistication of the modern child. In the good old days it was possible to give a child practically a... |
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Thursday, 17 December 2009 |
|
En garde
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|
By St. Francis de Sales
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We must be on guard against deception in friendships, especially when they are contracted between persons of different sexes, no matter what the pretext may be. Satan often tricks those (who) begin wi... |
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Wednesday, 16 December 2009 |
|
Hail Mary
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By Saint Bernard of Clairvaux
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In dangers, in doubts, in difficulties, think of Mary, call upon Mary. Let not her name depart from your lips, never suffer it to leave your heart. And that you may obtain the assistance of her prayer... |
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Tuesday, 15 December 2009 |
|
Thanks to the Word
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By John Paul II
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The fact that in the fullness of time the Eternal Word took on the condition of a creature gives a unique cosmic value to the event which took place in Bethlehem two thousand years ago. Thanks to th... |
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Friday, 11 December 2009 |
|
The Christ child
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By Benedict XVI
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God’s sign is simplicity. God’s sign is the baby. God’s sign is that he makes himself small for us. This is how he reigns. He does not come with power and outward splendor. He comes ... |
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Thursday, 10 December 2009 |
|
On Galileo
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By John Paul II
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Thanks to his intuition as a brilliant physicist and by relying on different arguments, Galileo, who practically invented the experimental method, understood why only the sun could function as the cen... |
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Wednesday, 09 December 2009 |
|
Winning audience share
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By Fulton Sheen
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The only way to win audiences is to tell people about the life and death of Christ. Every other approach is a waste. |
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Tuesday, 08 December 2009 |
|
Conceived Without Sin
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By Blessed John Henry Newman
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A Protestant is apt to say: “Oh, I really never, never can accept such a doctrine from the hands of the Church, and I had a thousand thousand times rather determine that the Church spoke falsely... |
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Monday, 07 December 2009 |
|
Ecclesia docens
|
|
By Cardinal Newman
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|
I think I am right in saying that the tradition of the Apostles, committed to the whole Church in its various constituents and functions per modum unius, manifests itself variously at various times: s... |
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Friday, 04 December 2009 |
|
From “The Road”
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By Cormac McCarthy
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|
The frailty of everything revealed at last. Old and troubling issues resolved into nothingness and night. The last instance of a thing takes the class with it. Turns out the light and is gone. Look ar... |
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Thursday, 03 December 2009 |
|
The yearning for completion
|
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By Allan Bloom
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|
Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.... |
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Wednesday, 02 December 2009 |
|
For the Time Being
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By W. H. Auden
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|
Alone, alone, about a dreadful wood
Of conscious evil runs a lost mankind,
Dreading to find its Father lest it find
The Goodness it has dreaded is not good:
Alone, alone, about our dreadful wood.... |
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Tuesday, 01 December 2009 |
|
The World's Desire
|
|
By G. K. Chesterton
|
|
The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
His hair was like a star.
(... |
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Monday, 30 November 2009 |
|
The Spirit of the Liturgy
|
|
By Joseph Ratzinger
|
|
For fostering a true consciousness in liturgical matters, it is also important that the proscription against the form of liturgy in valid use up to 1970 should be lifted. Anyone who nowadays advocates... |
|
Friday, 27 November 2009 |
|
By the Bivouac's Fitful Flame
|
|
By Walt Whitman
|
|
By the bivouac's fitful flame,
A procession winding around me, solemn and sweet and slow—but
first I note,
The tents of the sleeping army, the fields' and woods' dim outline,
The darkness ... |
|
Thursday, 26 November 2009 |
|
Thanksgiving Proclamation
|
|
By Ronald Reagan
|
|
America has much for which to be thankful. The unequaled freedom enjoyed by our citizens has provided a harvest of plenty to this nation throughout its history. In keeping with America’s heritag... |
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Wednesday, 25 November 2009 |
|
A traitor to the ship
|
|
By G. K. Chesterton
|
|
I do not know whether an animal killed at Christmas has had a better or a worse time than it would have had if there had been no Christmas or no Christmas dinners. But I do know that the fighting and ... |
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Tuesday, 24 November 2009 |
|
The incomparable worth of the human person
|
|
By John Paul II, Evangelium vitae
|
|
In a special way, believers in Christ must defend and promote this right, aware as they are of the wonderful truth recalled by the Second Vatican Council: "By his incarnation the Son of ... |
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Monday, 23 November 2009 |
|
Faithful to previous councils
|
|
By Second Vatican Council
|
|
Christ is the Light of nations. Because this is so, this Sacred Synod gathered together in the Holy Spirit eagerly desires, by proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, to bring the light of Christ to... |
|
Friday, 20 November 2009 |
|
Charity misconstrued
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
I am aware of the ways in which charity has been and continues to be misconstrued and emptied of meaning, with the consequent risk of being misinterpreted, detached from ethical living and, in any eve... |
|
Thursday, 19 November 2009 |
|
Comic Agape
|
|
By W.H. Auden
|
|
(P. G. Wodehouse's) Bertie Wooster. . .not only knows that he is a person of no account, but also never expects to become anything else; till his dying day he will remain, he knows, a footler who requ... |
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Wednesday, 18 November 2009 |
|
Insuffienctly progressive
|
|
By Charles Peguy
|
|
Some people want to insult and abuse the army, because it’s a good line these days. . . . In fact, at all political demonstrations it is a required theme. If you don’t take that line you d... |
|
Tuesday, 17 November 2009 |
|
Enjoying Christmas
|
|
By G.K. Chesterton
|
|
People are losing the power to enjoy Christmas through identifying it with enjoyment. When once they lose sight of the old suggestion that it is all about something, they naturally fall into blank pau... |
|
Monday, 16 November 2009 |
|
A perennial truth
|
|
By Mark Twain
|
|
If you don't read the newspaper, you are uninformed; if you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed. |
|
Friday, 13 November 2009 |
|
Reeling but erect
|
|
By G.K. Chesterton
|
|
It is always easy to let the age have its head; the difficult thing is to keep one's own. It is always easy to be a modernist; as it is easy to be a snob. To have fallen into any of those open traps... |
|
Thursday, 12 November 2009 |
|
Mary and mystagogy
|
|
By John Paul II, Rosarium Virginis Mariae
|
|
The Rosary is one of the traditional paths of Christian prayer directed to the contemplation of Christ's face. Pope Paul VI described it in these words: “As a Gospel prayer, centred on the myste... |
|
Wednesday, 11 November 2009 |
|
Benediction
|
|
By Charles Baudelaire
|
|
Blessèd be You, O God, who give us pain,
As cure for our impurity and wrong —
Essence that primes the stalwart to sustain
Seraphic raptures that were else too strong.
I know ... |
|
Tuesday, 10 November 2009 |
|
To the reader
|
|
By Charles Baudelaire
|
|
Folly and error, sin and avarice,
Labor our minds and bodies in their course,
Blithely we nourish pleasurable remorse
As beggars feed their parasitic lice.
Our sins are stubborn, our repent... |
|
Monday, 09 November 2009 |
|
The human ‘project’
|
|
By Joseph Ratzinger
|
|
We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God . . . does not in fact explain how human... |
|
Friday, 06 November 2009 |
|
A dangerous aversion
|
|
By Benedict XVI, The Regensburg Address
|
|
I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable ... |
|
Thursday, 05 November 2009 |
|
The one, true Church
|
|
By Venerable John Henry Newman, A Grammar of Assent
|
|
The “One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church” is an article of the Creed, and an article, which, inclusive of her infallibility, all men, high and low, can easily master and accept with a r... |
|
Wednesday, 04 November 2009 |
|
The acceptable time
|
|
By Thomas a Kempis, Imitation of Christ
|
|
The present is very precious; these are the days of salvation; now is the acceptable time. How sad that you do not spend the time in which you might purchase everlasting life in a better way. The time... |
|
Tuesday, 03 November 2009 |
|
Better indirectly
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
I would go so far as to say that if there was no purgatory, then we would have to invent it, for who would dare say of himself that he was able to stand directly before God. |
|
Monday, 02 November 2009 |
|
Real courage
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
Speaking against the Magisterium of the Church is presented as courageous. In reality, however, it does not take courage for this, since you can always be sure of audience applause. . . .Rather it tak... |
|
Friday, 30 October 2009 |
|
War and peace
|
|
By Cardinal Francis George
|
|
For eighty years we were a slave republic, and it took a terrible war to end that. And now for forty years we're in an abortion regime, and I'm not sure how that's going to end. |
|
Thursday, 29 October 2009 |
|
Tell God all
|
|
By Fenelon
|
|
Tell God all that is in your heart, as one unloads one's heart, it's pleasures, and it's pains, to a dear friend. Tell him your troubles, that he may comfort you; tell him your joys, that he may sober... |
|
Wednesday, 28 October 2009 |
|
The other China
|
|
By Confucius, Analects, 2:4
|
|
At fifteen, I set my heart on learning. At thirty, I was firmly established. At forty, I had no more doubts. At fifty, I knew the will of heaven. At sixty, I was ready to listen to it. At seventy, I c... |
|
Tuesday, 27 October 2009 |
|
Dear Member of Congress
|
|
By Bishop William F. Murphy, Cardinal Justin Rigali, Bishop John Wester
|
|
On behalf of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB), we are writing to express our disappointment that progress has not been made on the three priority criteria for health care refor... |
|
Monday, 26 October 2009 |
|
Better the angels
|
|
By Anne Rice
|
|
Vampires for me were always like feeling grief for my lost childhood faith, being cut off from that life. I reached the point where I didn’t have any more stories to tell from that point of view... |
|
Friday, 23 October 2009 |
|
Either/or
|
|
By Ronald Knox
|
|
I can't feel that the Church of England is an ultimate solution: in fifty or a hundred years I believe we Romanizers will either have got the Church or been thrown out of it. |
|
Thursday, 22 October 2009 |
|
On the road
|
|
By Archbishop Timothy Dolan, installation homily
|
|
[A]re we not at times perhaps like those two dejected disciples on the road to Emmaus? They were so absorbed in their own woes, so forlorn in their mistaken conclusion that the one in whom they had pl... |
|
Wednesday, 21 October 2009 |
|
Trusting God
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
The awareness of being saved by the love of Christ, which every Mass nourishes in the faithful and especially in priests, cannot but arouse within them a trusting self-abandonment to Christ who gave h... |
|
Tuesday, 20 October 2009 |
|
Mostly rascals
|
|
By Søren Kierkegaard
|
|
Luther set up the highest spiritual principle: pure inwardness. It may become so dangerous that we can sink to the lowest of lowest paganism (however, the highet and the lowest are like one another) w... |
|
Monday, 19 October 2009 |
|
Divining the gist
|
|
By St. Thomas Aquinas
|
|
Not merely learning about divine things but also experiencing them - that does not come from mere intellectual acquaintance with the terms of scientific theology, but from loving the things of God and... |
|
Friday, 16 October 2009 |
|
Mad Science
|
|
By G.K. Chesterton
|
|
The obvious truth is that the moment any matter has passed through the human mind it is finally and for ever spoilt for all purposes of science. It has become a thing incurably mysterious and infinite... |
|
Thursday, 15 October 2009 |
|
Real Presence
|
|
By Paul VI
|
|
While Eucharistic symbolism is well suited to helping us understand the effect that is proper to this Sacrament – the unity of the Mystical Body – still it does not indicate or explain wha... |
|
Wednesday, 14 October 2009 |
|
The Maine answer
|
|
By StandforMarriageMaine.com
|
|
Yes on Question 1- the People’s Veto - does not discriminate against gays; it simply restores the meaning of marriage and protects it as an essential institution that has benefited mankind since... |
|
Tuesday, 13 October 2009 |
|
All wolves
|
|
By Thomas Jefferson
|
|
We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest—which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive. If they once become inattentive to p... |
|
Monday, 12 October 2009 |
|
The Gospel truth
|
|
By Saint Augustine
|
|
If you believe what you like in the Gospel, and reject what you don't like, it is not the Gospel you believe, but yourself. |
|
Friday, 09 October 2009 |
|
Gay marriage?
|
|
By U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops
|
|
What are called 'homosexual unions,' because they do not express full human complementarity and because they are inherently non-procreative, cannot be given the status of marriage. |
|
Thursday, 08 October 2009 |
|
Tribulations
|
|
By Saint Thomas More
|
|
We may not look at our pleasures to go to heaven in featherbeds; it is not the way, for our Lord Himself went thither with great pain, and by many tribulations, which was the path wherein He walked th... |
|
Wednesday, 07 October 2009 |
|
The civil authority
|
|
By Pius XII, Summi Pontificatus
|
|
Once the authority of God and the sway of His law are denied in this way, the civil authority as an inevitable result tends to attribute to itself that absolute autonomy which belongs exclusively to t... |
|
Tuesday, 06 October 2009 |
|
A prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas
|
|
By Thomas Dillon
|
|
It is my practice to direct the graduating seniors each year to the prayer of St. Thomas Aquinas for after Holy Communion, since it contains great wisdom about the Christian life. St. Thomas prays, &l... |
|
Monday, 05 October 2009 |
|
Liberty and Law
|
|
By G. K. Chesterton
|
|
I have been in many churches, chapels, and halls where a confident pride in having got beyond creeds was coupled with quite a paralysed incapacity to get beyond catchwords. But wherever the falsity ap... |
|
Friday, 02 October 2009 |
|
The Book of nature
|
|
By Benedict XVI, Caritas in Veritate
|
|
In order to protect nature, it is not enough to intervene with economic incentives or deterrents; not even an apposite education is sufficient. These are important steps, but the decisive issue is the... |
|
Thursday, 01 October 2009 |
|
Confirmation prayer
|
|
By Catechism of the Catholic Church
|
|
All-powerful God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ,
by water and the Holy Spirit
you freed your sons and daughters from sin
and gave them new life.
Send your Holy Spirit upon them
to be their ... |
|
Wednesday, 30 September 2009 |
|
An apostolic institution
|
|
By James Boswell
|
|
BOSWELL: " So, Sir, you are no great enemy to the Roman Catholic religion."
JOHNSON: "No more, Sir, than to the Presbyterian religion."
BOSWELL: " You are joking."... |
|
Tuesday, 29 September 2009 |
|
Radical secularism
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
While the period of interference from political totalitarianism has passed, is it not the case that frequently, across the globe, the exercise of reason and academic research are – subtly and no... |
|
Monday, 28 September 2009 |
|
Shameful lukewarmness
|
|
By St. Bernard of Clairvaux
|
|
When I reflect, as I often do, on the ardor with which the patriarchs longed for the incarnation of Christ, I am pierced with sorrow and shame. And now I can scarcely contain my tears, so ashamed am I... |
|
Friday, 25 September 2009 |
|
Genesis not Leviticus
|
|
By Maggie Gallagher
|
|
Same-sex marriage is quite different from bans on interracial marriage in one powerful respect: It asks religious Americans to surrender a core belief – no, not Leviticus (disapproval of gay s... |
|
Thursday, 24 September 2009 |
|
Learning in War-Time
|
|
By C. S. Lewis
|
|
War makes death real to us, and that would have been regarded as one of its blessings by most of the great Christians of the past. . . . All the animal life in us, all schemes of happiness that center... |
|
Wednesday, 23 September 2009 |
|
Corruption limited
|
|
By Joseph P. Kennedy
|
|
Don't buy a single vote more than necessary. I'll be damned if I'm going to pay for a landslide. |
|
Tuesday, 22 September 2009 |
|
The path to zero
|
|
By Archbishop Edwin O'Brien
|
|
Nuclear weapons can be dismantled, but both the human knowledge and the technical capability to build weapons cannot be undone. A world with zero nuclear weapons will need robust measures to monitor, ... |
|
Monday, 21 September 2009 |
|
True generosity
|
|
By Albert Camus
|
|
Real generosity toward the future lies in giving all to the present. |
|
Friday, 18 September 2009 |
|
Marry young
|
|
By Frederica Mathewes-Green
|
|
A pattern of late marriage may actually increase the rate of divorce. During that initial decade of physical adulthood, young people may not be getting married, but they’re still falling in love... |
|
Thursday, 17 September 2009 |
|
Politics and religion
|
|
By James Carroll of Carrollton
|
|
Without morals a republic cannot subsist any length of time; they therefore who are decrying the Christian religion, whose morality is so sublime and pure (and) which insures to the good eternal happi... |
|
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 |
|
On the New Knighthood
|
|
By Bernard of Clairvaux
|
|
When the battle is at hand, they arm themselves interiorly with faith and exteriorly with steel rather than decorate themselves with gold, since their business is to strike fear in the enemy rather th... |
|
Tuesday, 15 September 2009 |
|
A valuable commodity
|
|
By James Cardinal Gibbons
|
|
Like all valuable commodities, truth is often counterfeited. |
|
Monday, 14 September 2009 |
|
Declaration on Euthanasia
|
|
By Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith
|
|
It is necessary to state firmly once more that nothing and no one can in any way permit the killing of an innocent human being, whether a fetus or an embryo, an infant or an adult, an old person, or o... |
|
Friday, 11 September 2009 |
|
The World State
|
|
By G. K. Chesterton
|
|
Oh, how I love Humanity,
With love so pure and pringlish,
And how I hate the horrid French,
Who never will be English!
The International Idea,
The largest and the clearest,... |
|
Thursday, 10 September 2009 |
|
Late Ripeness
|
|
By Czeslaw Milosz
|
|
. . . .We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.
For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.
We were miserable, we used no mo... |
|
Wednesday, 09 September 2009 |
|
Liberalism
|
|
By John Henry Newman
|
|
Ye cannot halve the Gospel of God's grace;
Men of presumptuous heart! I know you well.
Ye are of those who plan that we should dwell,
Each in his tranquil home and holy place;
Seeing the Word refi... |
|
Tuesday, 08 September 2009 |
|
Pascal's Memorial
|
|
By Blaise Pascal
|
|
The year of grace 1654, Monday, 23 November, feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.
Vigil of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others.
From about half past ten at night u... |
|
Monday, 07 September 2009 |
|
On Human Work
|
|
By John Paul II, Laborem Exercens
|
|
THROUGH WORK man must earn his daily bread and contribute to the continual advance of science and technology and, above all, to elevating unceasingly the cultural and moral level of the society w... |
|
Friday, 04 September 2009 |
|
Avoid Grave Sin
|
|
By The Didache
|
|
And the second commandment of the Teaching; You shall not commit murder, you shall not commit adultery, you shall not commit pederasty, you shall not commit fornication, you shall not steal, you shall... |
|
Thursday, 03 September 2009 |
|
The Idea of a University
|
|
By Michael Novak
|
|
A university is a blessed place, a sacred space in which persons converse in the pursuit of universal knowledge. In universities, mind speaks to mind, and (over time) heart speaks to heart. For what w... |
|
Wednesday, 02 September 2009 |
|
Love's not time's fool
|
|
By William Shakespeare
|
|
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever... |
|
Tuesday, 01 September 2009 |
|
The Endurance of Saints
|
|
By John Paul II
|
|
73. Abortion and euthanasia are thus crimes which no human law can claim to legitimize. There is no obligation in conscience to obey such laws; instead there is a grave and clear obligation to oppose ... |
|
Sunday, 30 August 2009 |
|
The Religion of Cain
|
|
By John Henry Newman
|
|
Brothers! Spare reasoning; - men have settled long
That ye are out of date, and they are wise;
Use their own weapons; let your words be strong,
Your cry be loud, till each scared boaster flies.
Th... |
|
Friday, 28 August 2009 |
|
Moment of Truth
|
|
By Archbishop Charles Chaput
|
|
We're at a time for the Church in our country when some Catholics – too many – are discovering that they've gradually become non-Catholics who happen to go to Mass. That's sad and diff... |
|
Thursday, 27 August 2009 |
|
Prayer for life
|
|
By John A. Hardon, S.J.
|
|
Lord Jesus Christ, you are the Author of human life. You, with our God the Father and the Holy Spirit alone have the right to determine who should be conceived and how.
You are also the Destiny of ... |
|
Wednesday, 26 August 2009 |
|
Infusion of faith
|
|
By St. Thomas Aquinas
|
|
Through baptism a person is reborn to a spiritual life, one proper to Christ’s faithful, as the Apostle says (Gal 2:20), “the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God... |
|
Tuesday, 25 August 2009 |
|
Get it right
|
|
By St. Thomas Aquinas
|
|
The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.... |
|
Monday, 24 August 2009 |
|
Liberty and justice
|
|
By Edmund Burke
|
|
Whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither, in my opinion, is safe.
|
|
Friday, 21 August 2009 |
|
The True Dialogue
|
|
By Walter Kasper
|
|
Even revelation is a dialogical process. In revelation God addresses us and speaks to us as to his friends and moves among us in order to invite and receive us into his own company (Dei Verbum, 2). Th... |
|
Thursday, 20 August 2009 |
|
Rachel weeping
|
|
By Book of Jeremiah
|
|
Thus says the LORD: In Ramah is heard the sound of moaning, of bitter weeping! Rachel mourns her children, she refuses to be consoled because her children are no more.
Jeremiah 31:15
|
|
Wednesday, 19 August 2009 |
|
The World Made Just
|
|
By Joseph Ratzinger
|
|
For the early Christians, there was no difference between what today is often distinguished as orthodoxy and orthopraxis, as right doctrine and right action. Indeed, when this distinction is made, the... |
|
Tuesday, 18 August 2009 |
|
Dominion
|
|
By Book of Genesis
|
|
Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the cre... |
|
Monday, 17 August 2009 |
|
A sign of contradiction
|
|
By Piers Paul Read
|
|
I’m quite encouraged by the antipathy of the media towards the Catholic Church. Christ said that it would be a sign of contradiction.
|
|
Friday, 14 August 2009 |
|
The hidden rose
|
|
By John Henry Newman
|
|
Christians from the earliest times went from other countries to Jerusalem to see the holy places. And, when the time of persecution was over, they paid still more attention to the bodies of the Saints... |
|
Thursday, 13 August 2009 |
|
The divine and the human
|
|
By Pope Leo XIII
|
|
The Church is not something dead: it is the body of Christ endowed with supernatural life. As Christ, the Head and Exemplar, is not wholly in His visible human nature . . . nor wholly in the in... |
|
Wednesday, 12 August 2009 |
|
Ideology
|
|
By Kenneth Minogue
|
|
Ideology provides sham religion and sham philosophy, comforting in its way to those who have lost or never have known genuine religious faith, and to those not sufficiently intelligent to apprehend ... |
|
Tuesday, 11 August 2009 |
|
Against Liberal Religion
|
|
By John Henry Newman
|
|
"What is the world's religion now? It has taken the brighter side of the Gospel, its tidings of comfort, its precepts of love; all darker, deeper views of man's condition and prospects being comp... |
|
Monday, 10 August 2009 |
|
The Smallest Gift
|
|
By Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
|
|
The smallest gift of grace surpasses the natural good of the whole universe.
(Summa Theologiae, I-II, q. 113, a. 9, ad 2)
|
|
Friday, 07 August 2009 |
|
The Gift of Discernment
|
|
By John A. Hardon, S.J.
|
|
[D]ecadence, relative to truth, has depths. The least serious is just ignorance of the truth. Second, and a deeper level, is exclusion of the truth. . . . [Y]ou not only don't know, but you accept and... |
|
Thursday, 06 August 2009 |
|
Erring Reason
|
|
By Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae
|
|
The will of those who slew the apostles was evil. And yet it was in accord with the erring reason, according to John 16:2: "The hour cometh, that whosoever killeth you, will think that he do... |
|
Wednesday, 05 August 2009 |
|
The Collar
|
|
By George Herbert
|
|
I Struck the board, and cry’d, No more.
I will abroad.
What? shall I ever sigh and pine?
My lines and life are free; free as the rode,
Loose as the winde, as large as store.
Shall I be ... |
|
Tuesday, 04 August 2009 |
|
No You Can't
|
|
By Abraham Lincoln
|
|
You cannot strengthen the weak by weakening the strong. You cannot help small men by tearing down big men. You cannot help the poor by destroying the rich. You cannot lift up the wage earner by pullin... |
|
Monday, 03 August 2009 |
|
God's Grandeur
|
|
By Gerard Manley Hopkins
|
|
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Gener... |
|
Friday, 31 July 2009 |
|
Defining Deviancy Down
|
|
By Daniel Patrick Moynihan
|
|
I proffer the thesis that, over the past generation . . . the amount of deviant behavior in American society has increased beyond the levels the community can “afford to recognize” and tha... |
|
Thursday, 30 July 2009 |
|
The "sexual life"
|
|
By Graham Green
|
|
At the end of what is called the “sexual life” the only love which has lasted is the love which has everything, every disappointment, every failure and every betrayal, which has accepted e... |
|
Wednesday, 29 July 2009 |
|
Imagine
|
|
By Jane Susan Campbell
|
|
Believe me, it is a terrifying experience to lie in a hospital bed and hear your doctors—the very people you should trust most—calmly decide that your life isn't worth living.
And the a... |
|
Tuesday, 28 July 2009 |
|
Spirit of Wisdom
|
|
By Book of Wisdom
|
|
And I too, when born, inhaled the common air, and fell upon the kindred earth; wailing, I uttered that first sound common to all.
In swaddling clothes and with constant care I was nurtured.
For ... |
|
Monday, 27 July 2009 |
|
A standard of truth
|
|
By St. Thomas Aquinas
|
|
The truth of our faith becomes a matter of ridicule among the infidels if any Catholic, not gifted with the necessary scientific learning, presents as dogma what scientific scrutiny shows to be false.... |
|
Friday, 24 July 2009 |
|
Modernity on Endless Trial
|
|
By Leszek Kolakowski
|
|
With the disappearance of the sacred, which imposed limits to the perfection that could be attained by the profane, arises one of the most dangerous illusions of our civilization—the illusion th... |
|
Thursday, 23 July 2009 |
|
Care of the sick
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
The medical and human aspects must never be separated and it is the duty of every nursing and health-care structure, especially if it is motivated by a genuine Christian spirit, to offer the best of b... |
|
Wednesday, 22 July 2009 |
|
In the Beginning
|
|
By Joseph Ratzinger
|
|
The fate of all of us depends on whether this moral dignity of the human person can be defended in the world of technology, with all its possibilities. For here a particular temptation exists for our ... |
|
I am optimistic enough to believe that, one day, Stenberg v. Carhart will be assigned its rightful place in the history of this Court’s jurisprudence beside Korematsu and Dred Scott. The metho... |
|
Monday, 20 July 2009 |
|
Prayer to Our Lady of Guadalupe
|
|
By John Paul II
|
|
O Immaculate Virgin, Mother of the true God and Mother of the Church!, who from this place reveal your clemency and your pity to all those who ask for your protection, hear the prayer that we addres... |
|
Friday, 17 July 2009 |
|
Defending reason
|
|
By Remi Brague
|
|
Now, defending reason is not a strategic ploy, but belongs to the very essence of Christianity. Chesterton's Father Brown, when he is asked how he succeeded in unmasking a fake priest, answers: "... |
|
Thursday, 16 July 2009 |
|
Sorry, but your soul just died
|
|
By Tom Wolfe
|
|
I suddenly had a picture of the entire astonishing edifice (of modern scientific knowledge) collapsing and modern man plunging headlong back into the primordial ooze. He’s floundering, sloshing ... |
|
Wednesday, 15 July 2009 |
|
Fr. Damien goes home
|
|
By TIME
|
|
At Honolulu dignitaries representing Church and State boarded airplanes and a U. S. tug for the short trip to Kalaupapa. There, with a Japanese cameraman filming the proceedings an... |
|
Tuesday, 14 July 2009 |
|
The role of conscience
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
The pressures [in developing countries] to legalize abortion are increasing . . . also with recourse to the liberalization of new forms of chemical abortion under the pretext of safeguarding reproduct... |
|
Monday, 13 July 2009 |
|
Catholics and the Fourth Estate
|
|
By Archbishop Charles J. Chaput
|
|
Over the past 200 years, the power of the press in democratic societies has grown dramatically. The influence of the press led the 19th century poet and playwright Oscar Wilde to write that :
... |
|
Friday, 10 July 2009 |
|
La différence
|
|
By Sylvain Gouguenheim
|
|
To proclaim that Christians and Muslims have the same God, and to hold to that, believing thereby that one has brought the debate to its term, denotes only a superficial approach. Their Gods do not pa... |
|
Thursday, 09 July 2009 |
|
The Joy of Sports
|
|
By William J. Bennett
|
|
[Michael] Novak concedes that sports is “not the highest form of religion . . . and Jews, Christians, and others will want to put sports in second place” (emphasis added), but “when ... |
|
Wednesday, 08 July 2009 |
|
Caritas in Veritate
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
Charity in truth, to which Jesus Christ bore witness by his earthly life and especially by his death and resurrection, is the principal driving force behind the authentic development of ev... |
|
Tuesday, 07 July 2009 |
|
Contemplating abortion
|
|
By George Orwell
|
|
That pulled him up. For the first time he grasped, with the only kind of knowledge that matters, what they were really talking about. The words “a baby” took on a new significance. They di... |
|
Monday, 06 July 2009 |
|
The heart of subsidiarity
|
|
By Pope Leo XIII
|
|
The contention, then, that the civil government should at its option intrude into and exercise intimate control over the family and the household is a great and pernicious error. True, if a fa... |
|
Saturday, 04 July 2009 |
|
The American Proposition
|
|
By John Courtney Murray, S.J.
|
|
The first truth to which the American Proposition makes appeal is stated in that landmark of Western political theory, the Declaration of Indpendence. It is a truth that lies beyond politics; it impar... |
|
Thursday, 02 July 2009 |
|
Parochial and Plain Sermons
|
|
By John Henry Newman
|
|
Bread sustains us in this temporal life; the consecrated bread is the means of eternal strength for soul and body. Who could live this visible life without earthly food? And in the same general way th... |
|
Wednesday, 01 July 2009 |
|
Only the devil
|
|
By George William Rutler
|
|
In the nineteenth century a young man confessed his sins to a peasant priest in the village of Ars in France, Saint John Vianney. The floor began to shake, knocking the fellow over. Vianney picked him... |
|
Tuesday, 30 June 2009 |
|
The Third Revelation
|
|
By Ralph McInerny
|
|
He slipped his knife into the knapsack of the girl ahead of him as the line approached the security checkpoint at the entrance to St. Peter's Basilica. She wore her hair in a crew cut, and her shapele... |
|
Monday, 29 June 2009 |
|
Take Away America. . .
|
|
By Roger Scruton
|
|
Take away America, its freedom, its optimism, its institutions, its Judeo-Christian beliefs, and its educational tradition, and little would remain of the West, besides the geriatric routines of a n... |
|
Friday, 26 June 2009 |
|
Rights Talk
|
|
By Mary Ann Glendon
|
|
Discourse about rights has become the principal language that we use in public settings to discuss weighty questions of right and wrong, but time and time again it proves inadequate, or leads to a sta... |
|
Thursday, 25 June 2009 |
|
Two Kinds of Peacemakers
|
|
By G.K. Chesterton
|
|
There are two kinds of peacemakers in the modern world; and they are both, though in various ways, a nuisance. The first peacemaker is the man who goes about saying that he agrees with everybody. He... |
|
Wednesday, 24 June 2009 |
|
In Cameroon
|
|
By Benedict XVI
|
|
HIV/Aids is a tragedy that cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which can even increase the problem. |
|
Tuesday, 23 June 2009 |
|
The Bible on Marriage
|
|
By The Rev. Canon Dr. George Sumner
|
|
At the risk of belaboring the obvious, it may be pointed out that we are not talking about the introduction of a totally new doctrine, where nothing had existed before, but rather we are proposing t... |
|
Monday, 22 June 2009 |
|
The World and Sin
|
|
By John Henry Newman
|
|
Wickedness is sometimes called madness in Scripture -- so it is. As literal madness is derangement of the reason, so sin is derangement of the heart, of the spirit, of the affection. And as madness ... |
|
Friday, 19 June 2009 |
|
Founding faith
|
|
By James V. Schall, S.J.
|
|
"Nature's God," as Jefferson and the other founders conceived of Him, was the cause or source of a natural order that included a human order, a law of nature that applied to human affairs. M... |
|
Thursday, 18 June 2009 |
|
A fool and his money
|
|
By Thomas Aquinas
|
|
All material things obey money, so far as the multitude of fools is concerned, who know no other than material goods, which can be obtained for money. But we should take our estimation of human good... |
|
Wednesday, 17 June 2009 |
|
Democracy in America
|
|
By Alexis de Toqueville
|
|
It is therefore always necessary, however it happens, that we encounter authority somewhere in the intellectual and moral world. Its place is variable, but it necessarily has a place. Individual indep... |
|
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 |
|
About Job
|
|
By Archibald MacLeish
|
|
God believes it will be demonstrated that Job loves and fears God because He is God and not because Job is prosperous . . . that Job will still love God and fear him in adversity, in misfortune, in th... |
|
Monday, 15 June 2009 |
|
Shine, Perishing Republic
|
|
By Robinson Jeffers
|
|
While this America settles in the mould of its vulgarity, heavily thickening to empire And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and sighs out, and the mass hardens, I sadly smiling remember... |
|
Monday, 15 June 2009 |
|
The Mornings After
|
|
By Frederica Mathewes-Green
|
|
Everything you hear in ads and entertainment is telling you that your goal is to wake up next to someone gorgeous tomorrow morning. That's the rationale of consumer sex. But I think what humans really... |
|
Friday, 12 June 2009 |
|
The so-called right
|
|
By Blessed Teresa of Calcutta
|
|
America needs no words from me to see how your decision in Roe v. Wade has deformed a great nation. The so-called right to abortion has pitted mothers against their children and women against men. It ... |
|
Thursday, 11 June 2009 |
|
Jesus Saves
|
|
By Joseph Ratzinger
|
|
[T]he essence of Christianity is not an idea, not a system of thought, not a plan of action. The essence of Christianity is a Person: Jesus Christ himself. That which is essential is the One who is es... |
|
Wednesday, 10 June 2009 |
|
Death Be Not Proud
|
|
By John Donne
|
|
DEATH be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadfull, for, thou art not so,
For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow,
Die not, poore death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
... |
|
Tuesday, 09 June 2009 |
|
Reductio ad absurdum
|
|
By Robert Bork
|
|
Many court watchers believe that within five to ten years the U.S. Supreme Court will hold that there is a constitutional right to homosexual marriage, just as that court invented a right to abortion.... |
|
Sunday, 07 June 2009 |
|
The cult of celebrity
|
|
By Theodore Dalrymple
|
|
The cult of celebrity is not new, but it is increasing in its scope and effect. At one time, people wanted simply to gawp at the famous, and possibly dress like them. Now, many take their moral and po... |
|
Friday, 05 June 2009 |
|
Crushing buds and blossoms
|
|
By Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
|
|
Now there are those who would patrol life, not after it becomes a harvest but while it is seed in the granary. The new kind of vigilance would not wait until the fruit appeared on the tree, as did H... |
|
Thursday, 04 June 2009 |
|
Head-splitting logic
|
|
The poet only asks to get his head into the heavens. It is the logician who seeks to get the heavens into his head. And it is his head that splits. |
|
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 |
|
The peace of God
|
|
To those who believe in God, I say: let us be strong in his strength that infinitely surpasses our own; let us be united in the knowledge that he calls us to unity; let us be aware that love and shari... |
|
Tuesday, 02 June 2009 |
|
My way or thy way
|
|
There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, "Thy will be done," and those to whom God says, "All right, then, have it your way." |
|
God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission – I may never know it in this life, but I shall be t... |
|
Friday, 29 May 2009 |
|
Sterility and death
|
|
Statistics are the triumph of the quantitative method, and the quantitative method is the victory of sterility and death.
The Silence of the Sea |
|
Thursday, 28 May 2009 |
|
Shepherds' Play
|
|
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structure... |
|
From Vatican II until today, several documents of the Magisterium — and especially The Catechism of the Catholic Church — have confirmed the teaching of the Church on homosexuality. The Ca... |
|
In the pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world, Gaudium et Spes, the Second Vatican Council was already addressing scientists, urging them to join forces to achieve unity in knowledge ... |
|
OVER the carnage rose prophetic a voice,
Be not dishearten'd, affection shall solve the problems of freedom yet,
Those who love each other shall become invincible,
They shall yet make Columbia vict... |
|
The Catholic Church has taken a hardline position against right-wing dictatorships. But in Cuba, the Church has been silent - or worse - ever since 1960, when Fidel Castro expelled hundreds of Catho... |
|
Thursday, 21 May 2009 |
|
Doubt
|
|
Doubt must be no more than vigilance, otherwise it can become dangerous.
|
|
Wednesday, 20 May 2009 |
|
Hope
|
|
Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
that sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all thing you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a ga... |
|
Because of the integrative function of philosophy in the Catholic tradition, because of the way that philosophy has to open up and illuminate relations between theology and the whole range of secular ... |
|
I say then, that, even though the case could be so that the whole system of Catholicism was recognized and professed, without the direct presence of the Church, still this would not at once make such ... |
|
Friday, 15 May 2009 |
|
It could be worse
|
|
This movie, without being particularly good, is nonetheless far less hysterical than “Da Vinci.” Its preposterous narrative, efficiently rendered by the blue-chip screenwriting team of Aki... |
|
In the name of freedom, there has to be a correlation between rights and duties, by which every person is called to assume responsibility for his choices, made as a consequence of entering into r... |
|
Wednesday, 13 May 2009 |
|
A clarification
|
|
At first we [Joseph Ratzinger and his brother] weren't [members], but when the compulsory Hitler Youth was introduced in 1941, my brother was obliged to join. I was still too young, but later as a sem... |
|
Tuesday, 12 May 2009 |
|
Catholic Action
|
|
What can you do to promote world peace? Go home and love your family. |
|
One danger confronting philosophers is that they may forget that their enquiries begin from and extend the enquiries of plain persons and that they are exercising their philosophical skills on behalf ... |
|
Secularism is a partial ideology, which cannot respond to the decisive challenges of man. Suffice it to think of the damages caused by Communism or by the eradication of the moral fabric of ancestors ... |
|
Thursday, 07 May 2009 |
|
True North
|
|
from the life of Mother Teresa
By the age of 18, Agnes [Gonxha Bojaxhiu, Mother's name in the world] had decided to become a missionary nun.
Father Jambrekovic, S.J., her pastor, encouraged her ... |
|
It was an attempt to bring the justice and even the logic of the Catholic creed into a military system which already existed; to turn its discipline into an initiation and its inequalities into a hier... |
|
One hears so many bad, thoughtless, and even dangerous objections to the death penalty in the United States. That it is unconstitutionally "cruel and unusual," for instance, though the Const... |
|
Monday, 04 May 2009 |
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The Good Shepherd
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Let us never forget that Christ is our guide and guardian. He is "the Way, the Truth, and the Life." He is a light unto our ways, and a lantern unto our paths. He is our shepherd, and the sh... |
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Putting on priestly vestments was once accompanied by prayers that helped us understand better each single element of the priestly ministry.
Let us start with the amice. In the past — and in ... |
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All Christianity concentrates on the man at the crossroads. The vast and shallow philosophies, the huge syntheses of humbug, all talk about ages and evolution and ultimate developments. The true philo... |
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Toleration is good for all, or it is good for none. |
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The pre-eminence of prudence means that so-called "good intention" and so-called "meaning well" by no means suffice. Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are approp... |
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Monday, 27 April 2009 |
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Guarding our patrimony
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In the history of the liturgy there is growth and progress, but no rupture. What earlier generations held as sacred, remains sacred and great for us too, and it cannot be all of a sudden entirely forb... |
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Friday, 24 April 2009 |
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Suffer the Children
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By Mother Teresa of Calcutta
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Many people are very, very concerned with the children of India, with the children of Africa where quite a few die of hunger, and so on. Many people are also concerned about all the violence in this g... |
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The Church which our Lord came to establish had a two-fold mission to fulfill. Her system of doctrine, on the one hand, had to be defined and perpetually maintained. But it was also necessary that it ... |
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Actually, understanding the history of Iraq's churches should make us still more keenly aware of the tragedy we see unfolding. Not only are these churches — Chaldean, Assyrian, Orthodox — ... |
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May the members of your society in America, animated alone by the pure spirit of Christianity, and still conducting themselves as the faithful subjects of our free government, enjoy every temporal and... |
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Monday, 20 April 2009 |
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Religion and culture
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Like religion, culture is a matter of ultimate values, intuitive certainties, hallowed traditions, assured identities, shared beliefs, symbolic action, and a sense of transcendence. It is culture, not... |
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Friday, 17 April 2009 |
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Ashamed of Christ
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When He had called the people to Himself, with His disciples also, He said to them, "Whoever desires to come after Me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross, and follow Me. For whoever desi... |
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Thursday, 16 April 2009 |
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Teleology
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A life is either all spiritual or not spiritual at all. No man can serve two masters. Your life is shaped by the end you live for. You are made in the image of what you desire.
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Wednesday, 15 April 2009 |
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Chestertonian wisdom
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If we could destroy custom at a blow and see the stars as a child sees them, we should need no other apocalypse.
"A Defence of Baby-Worship" |
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Tuesday, 14 April 2009 |
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Judge making
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We must remember that we have to make judges out of men, and that by being made judges their prejudices are not diminished and their intelligence is not increased. |
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Monday, 13 April 2009 |
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God is the issue
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Moral posturing is part and parcel of temptation. It does not directly invite us to do evil - no, that would be far too blatant. It pretends to show us a better way, where we finally abandon our illus... |
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Saturday, 11 April 2009 |
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Kingdom Come
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By Romano Guardini
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We should remember this: God's kindom is on the way. It is not tied to a certain historical hour; any hour may be its hour; anyone may usher it in. It presses for entrance on the heart of each individ... |
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Friday, 10 April 2009 |
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Born to die
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The Eucharist brings Christmas and Easter together, actualizing the birth and death of Christ. A certain romantic tendency has succeeded in making Christmas a wholly human feast of maternity and child... |
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Thursday, 09 April 2009 |
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Strong as death
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A people who live for themselves will not die for each other; they become slaves of those who care so much for something greater than themselves that they will die for it, if not each other; and when ... |
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The Rosary, precisely because it starts with Mary's own experience, is an exquisitely contemplative prayer. Without this contemplative dimension, it would lose its meaning, as Pope Paul VI clearly poi... |
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Tuesday, 07 April 2009 |
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Salty saints
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The inrushing of faith, hope, and love - the life of Jesus within us - can so transfigure the natural moral form that the authentic saint is anything but gentlemanly, moderate, and refined in his mann... |
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When I come before the judgment throne, I will plead the promise of God in the shed blood of Jesus Christ. I will not plead any work that I have done, although I will thank God that he has enabled me ... |
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Saturday, 04 April 2009 |
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Coffee at the campfire
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The immediate (practical) purpose of drinking a cup of coffee is to wash the biscuit down; the proximate (ethical), the intimate communion of, say, cowboys standing around a campfire in a drenching ra... |
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Authentic democracy is possible only in a state ruled by law, and on the basis of a correct conception of the human person. It requires that the necessary conditions be present for the advancement b... |
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Thursday, 02 April 2009 |
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Be not afraid
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Be not afraid to welcome Christ and accept his power. Help the pope and all who wish to serve Christ and with Christ’s power to serve the human person and the whole of mankind.
Be not afraid... |
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Wednesday, 01 April 2009 |
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A tolerable chap
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Nothing is more ungentlemanly than
Exaggeration, causing needless pain,
It's worse than spitting, and it stamps a man
Deservedly with othen men's disdain.
Weigh human actions carefully. Explain
T... |
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Tuesday, 31 March 2009 |
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Slavery?
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What, then, is this foolish cry about the slavery of dogma? How can Truth make men anything except more free? Unless a man is prepared to say that the scientist enslaves his intellect by telling him f... |
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Monday, 30 March 2009 |
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True Dialogue
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Dialogue is more than just talking. It means a dialectical dispute. If you come into it without a truth, there's no dialogue. The goal of a dialogue is a victory, or at least changing your interlocuto... |
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Friday, 27 March 2009 |
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Witness
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In our own century the martyrs have returned, many of them nameless, "unknown soldiers" as it were of God's great cause. As far as possible, their witness should not be lost to the Church. T... |
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Regarding the grave sin of abortion or euthanasia, when a person's formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for... |
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Wednesday, 25 March 2009 |
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"I went home"
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The only office of state which I ever held, O men of Athens, was that of senator; the tribe Antiochis, which is my tribe, had the presidency at the trial of the generals who had not taken up the bodie... |
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Tuesday, 24 March 2009 |
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What is sin?
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The theologian considers sin mainly as an offence against God; the moral philosopher as contrary to reasonableness. |
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If the Catholic Faith is true, a University cannot exist externally to the Catholic pale, for it cannot teach universal knowledge if it does not teach Catholic Theology. This is certain; but still, th... |
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. . . St. Joseph was caught up at every moment by the mystery of the Incarnation. Not only physically, but in his heart as well, Joseph reveals to us the secret of a humanity which dwells in the prese... |
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What emanates from the figure of Saint Joseph is faith. Joseph of Nazareth is a “just man” because he totally “lives by faith.” He is holy because his faith is truly heroic. Sa... |
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Wednesday, 18 March 2009 |
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The Good Shepherd
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The Shepherd who sets off to seek the lost sheep is the eternal Word himself, and the sheep that he lovingly carries home on his shoulders is humanity, the human existence that he took upon himself.
... |
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I arise today through a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,
through belief in the Threeness, through confession of the Oneness of the Creator of creation.
I arise today through t... |
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Monday, 16 March 2009 |
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A dose of realism
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In the first place, everyone must be convinced that neither all natural or acquired abilities, nor all supernatural gifts or perfect knowledge of the Scriptures, nor even whole ages spent in the servi... |
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Friday, 13 March 2009 |
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Why we fast
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In our own day, fasting seems to have lost something of its spiritual meaning, and has taken on, in a culture characterized by the search for material well-being, a therapeutic value for the care of o... |
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Thursday, 12 March 2009 |
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Of vice and virtue
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For though the soul may seem to rule the body admirably, and the reason the vices, if the soul and reason do not themselves obey God, as God has commanded them to serve Him, they have no proper author... |
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Let me recall to your minds what the human situation was in the latter half of the nineteenth century - the period at which I ceased to be a practising Tempter and was rewarded with an administrative ... |
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Tuesday, 10 March 2009 |
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A continued torment
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In 1841 you and I had together a tedious low-water trip, on a Steam Boat from Louisville to St. Louis. You may remember, as I well do, that from Louisville to the mouth of the Ohio, there were, on boa... |
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Monday, 09 March 2009 |
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The vision in the bush
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Could Aurignacian man divine the coming of civilization? Could the men of the Mycenaean age foresee Hellenism? When the people of Israel came riding into Canaan, could they look forward to the future ... |
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Friday, 06 March 2009 |
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Good angels, good men
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Bear in mind what I am about to tell you: too often we spend a lot of our efforts trying to be good angels (of Heaven) and forget all about becoming good men and women (in this world). Our imperfectio... |
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Thursday, 05 March 2009 |
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Patience
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There are some people who, desiring to become perfect by the acquiring of virtues, want to acquire them all at once, as if perfection consisted merely in desiring it. Certainly it would be wonderful i... |
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Wednesday, 04 March 2009 |
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Holy hope, holy fear
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The consideration of sins committed is accompanied by a certain horror and consternation which terrifies the soul, so there is need to replace it with confidence in God...It is necessary to fear, but ... |
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Tuesday, 03 March 2009 |
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Have courage
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Do not get all worked up about the future disasters of this world, which may never occur anyway; when and if they do occur, God will give you the strength to bear them. Jesus commanded St. Peter to wa... |
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There is no clock, no matter how good it may be, that doesn't need resetting and rewinding twice a day, once in the morning and once in the evening. In addition, at least once a year it must be taken ... |
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Friday, 27 February 2009 |
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Where is my heart?
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"Where is my heart?" What is the prevailing disposition that determines its attitude, the real mainspring that keeps the rest of its movement going? It may, perhaps, be some long-existing te... |
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Thursday, 26 February 2009 |
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Grief - and hope
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Of necessity we must be sorrowful when those whom we love leave us in death. Although we know that they have not left us behind forever but only gone ahead of us, still when death seizes our loved one... |
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Wednesday, 25 February 2009 |
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Let my cry come unto Thee
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Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn
Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed... |
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The State has the further right to intervene when particular monopolies create delays or obstacles to development. In addition to the tasks of harmonizing and guiding development, in exceptional circu... |
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We are living in alienation, in the salt waters of suffering and death; in a sea of darkness without light. The net of the Gospel pulls us out of the waters of death and brings us into the splendour o... |
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Friday, 20 February 2009 |
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Prayer before study
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CREATOR ineffabilis, qui de thesauris sapientiae tuae tres Angelorum hierarchias designasti et eas super caelum empyreum miro ordine collocasti atque universi partes elegantissime distribuisti: Tu, in... |
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Thursday, 19 February 2009 |
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Crab grass and adultery
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A single sentence will suffice for modern man: he fornicated and read the newspapers.
The Fall |
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Wednesday, 18 February 2009 |
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Waiting on progress
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Nothing can have as its destination anything other than its origin. The contrary idea, the idea of progress, is poison. |
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About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully al... |
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My father was still well at the time of his becoming a Catholic. His reasons for converting are his to know. He did say to [his friend Ernest] Hemingway toward the end, "You know, that decision I... |
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Friday, 13 February 2009 |
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Salesian wisdom
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When we cannot excuse a sin, let us at least make it worthy of compassion by attributing the most favorable cause we can to it, such as ignorance or weakness. |
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Thursday, 12 February 2009 |
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How to be angry
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Anybody can become angry, that is easy; but to be angry with the right person, and to the right degree, and at the right time, and for the right purpose, and in the right way, that is not within every... |
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Wednesday, 11 February 2009 |
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Plus ca change . . .
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The literary cabal had some years ago formed something like a regular plan for the destruction of the Christian religion. This object they pursued with a degree of zeal which hitherto had been discove... |
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Tuesday, 10 February 2009 |
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A Binding
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There is no religion, the very word says it already, without a bond. If the willingness to be bound is not there, and if, above all, submission to the truth is not there, then in the end all of this w... |
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Monday, 09 February 2009 |
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Efficient for whom?
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In fact, while the climate of widespread moral uncertainty can in some way be explained by the multiplicity and gravity of today's social problems, and these can sometimes mitigate the subjective resp... |
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Friday, 06 February 2009 |
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The troubles of the world
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I have discovered that all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly alone in a room.
Pensees |
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Thursday, 05 February 2009 |
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Updike does God
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The inner spaces that a good story lets us enter are the old apartments of religion. |
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Wednesday, 04 February 2009 |
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A deathbed conversion
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"Now I will tell you an interesting thing. For a long time there was no appeal from the court of 'Hanging Judge' Parker at Fort Smith except to the President of the United States. . . . The judge... |
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Tuesday, 03 February 2009 |
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Fireside chat
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"Look, John's last-minute economic plan does nothing to tackle the number-one job facing the middle class, and it happens to be, as Barack says, a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S, jobs." |
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Monday, 02 February 2009 |
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The burning bush
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The liturgy is not a festivity; it is not a meeting for the purpose of having a good time. The liturgy is what makes the Thrice-holy God present amongst us; it is the Burning Bush; it is the alliance ... |
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Saturday, 31 January 2009 |
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No, yes, and think it over
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"Last month I spent two days and nights in Yankton, South Dakota, visiting a convent (Mount Marty) and had many talks with the sisters about how the Church is throwing too much of itself away. I ... |
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In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corre... |
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To sanction the taking of innocent human life is to contradict a primary purpose of law in an ordered society. A law or court decision allowing assisted suicide would demean the lives of vulnerable pa... |
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Every sin consists formally in aversion from God.... Hence the more a sin severs man from God, the graver it is. Now man is more than ever separated from God by unbelief, because he has not even true ... |
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There can be no "fabricating" a liturgical movement of this kind, just as there can be no "fabricating" something which is alive. But a contribution can be made to its development ... |
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Monday, 26 January 2009 |
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Where are the Hittites?
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Why does no one find it remarkable that in most world cities today there are Jews but no one single Hittite even though the Hittites had a great flourishing civilization while the Jews nearby were a w... |
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Friday, 23 January 2009 |
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Oremus
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Almighty God,
who has entrusted us with the care of this great land:
We humbly ask that we may always prove ourselves
a people worthy of this trust and pleased to do your will.
Bless our natio... |
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Thursday, 22 January 2009 |
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Restless hearts
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There is a God-shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus. |
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It is easy to think the State has a lot of different objects - military, political, economic, and what not. But in a way things are much simpler than that. The State exists simply to promote and to pr... |
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Man is the raison d'etre of the Universe (the final explanation and end of all other earthly beings) For: a) Nature cannot be ordained to God except through man; since the Universe has its end in God,... |
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There was a time when the church was very powerful - in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a t... |
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Friday, 16 January 2009 |
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"Go team, go!"
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This de-theologizing and de-sacramentalizing of our understanding of the Church is now very widespread. Consider a small but telling incident. An archbishop in the Northeast is addressing lay leaders ... |
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Thursday, 15 January 2009 |
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Why not?
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I have never found it in his writings, but a St. Louis professor who had been his student told me that the great confessional Lutheran theologian Peter Brunner regularly said that a Lutheran who does ... |
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Wednesday, 14 January 2009 |
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Spes mea
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Whatever little growth in holiness I have experienced, whatever strength I have received from the company of the saints, whatever understanding I have attained of God and his ways - these and all othe... |
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Tuesday, 13 January 2009 |
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Pax super Israel?
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Will there ever be peace between Israel and the Arabs? It is a question that, like many other questions of great moment, partakes of eschatological speculation.
(2008) |
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The new capitalism that the Holy Father describes in Centesimus Annus is intended, as I understand it, to distinguish what he is proposing from the capitalism at the early period of the industrializat... |
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Friday, 09 January 2009 |
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The Catholic Moment
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The word went forth from the Second Vatican Council, and I believe in the promise of Isaiah 55 that the word shall not return void. After more than three decades of confusion, contention, and conflict... |
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Thursday, 08 January 2009 |
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Freud's slip
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[Freud] never grasped that Nazi destructiveness was a complete mind in itself. Surely he was the victim of his own poetry, which was so vivid that he took it to be a map of reality. From the realm of ... |
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Wednesday, 07 January 2009 |
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Consider the Lilies
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Truth is power, but only when one has patience and requires of it no immediate effect. And one must have no specific aims. Somehow, lack of an agenda is the greatest power. Sometimes it is better not ... |
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Tuesday, 06 January 2009 |
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The Balfour Declaration
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"His Majesty's Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object... |
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Monday, 05 January 2009 |
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Q.E.D.
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"...I got set next to this woman...and she kept talkin' about the right wing this and the right wing that.... Finally told me, said: I don't like the way this country is headed. I want my grandda... |
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Friday, 02 January 2009 |
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Auld lang syne
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New Year's eve is like every other night; there is no pause in the march of the universe, no breathless moment of silence among created things that the passage of another twelve months may be noted; a... |
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Thursday, 01 January 2009 |
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Nunc dimittis
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Lord, now you let your servant depart in peace according to your word.
For my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you have prepared before the face of all people,
a light to lighten the Gentile... |
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Wednesday, 31 December 2008 |
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Little Gidding
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These things have served their purpose: let them be.
So with your own, and pray they be forgiven
By others, as I pray you to forgive
Both bad and good. Last season's fruit is eaten
And the ful... |
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Tuesday, 30 December 2008 |
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On the Poverello
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One cannot imagine St Francis of Assisi talking about rights.
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Monday, 29 December 2008 |
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The mission of the martyr
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"A Christian martyrdom is never an accident, for saints are not made by accident. Still less is a Christian martyrdom the effect of man's will to become a saint, as a man by willing and contrivin... |
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Friday, 26 December 2008 |
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"Holiday season" musings
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In the old days, it was not called the Holiday Season; the Christians called it 'Christmas' and went to church; the Jews called it 'Hanukkah' and went to synagogue; the atheists went to parties and dr... |
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Thursday, 25 December 2008 |
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Christmas wisdom
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I have always thought of Christmas time, when it has come round, as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem ... |
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Wednesday, 24 December 2008 |
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Of lies and myths
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The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. Belief in myths allows the comfort of opinion witho... |
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I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt ... |
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The expense of spirit in a waste of shame
Is lust in action; and till action, lust
Is perjured, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust;
Enjoy'd no sooner ... |
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Friday, 19 December 2008 |
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Ad gentium
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Human rights are increasingly being presented as the common language and the ethical substratum of international relations. At the same time, the universality, indivisibility, and interdependence of h... |
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Thursday, 18 December 2008 |
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Brotherhood
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The word "brotherhood" is, to be sure, a fine word, but we oughtn't to forget its ambiguity. The first pair of brothers in the history of the world were, according to the Bible, Cain and Abe... |
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Wednesday, 17 December 2008 |
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The Journey of the Magi
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"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter."
And the camels g... |
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Tuesday, 16 December 2008 |
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A Christmas Carol
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The Christ-child lay on Mary's lap,
His hair was like a light.
(O weary, weary were the world,
But here is all aright.)
The Christ-child lay on Mary's breast,
His hair was like a star.
(... |
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Monday, 15 December 2008 |
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Models of theology
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A theological proposal that weakens the life of worship or that draws people away from the path of holiness will be for that very reason theologically suspect.
1995 Seminar, The Catholic Theologica... |
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How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring ... |
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Thursday, 11 December 2008 |
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Bertie Wooster's Christmas
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The question, "What becomes of the Christmas presents?", is one which has long vexed thinking men. Every year a tidal wave of incredibly useless junk bursts upon the metropolis, and somehow ... |
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Wednesday, 10 December 2008 |
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Veritas
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"I'm happy to make an appointment, talk to you guys about that. But I feel real good about all the different things that we do because we follow the rules and we do things right and at the end of... |
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Tuesday, 09 December 2008 |
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Building on bedrock
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Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights, and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. To this day, we have no other options [than Chri... |
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Monday, 08 December 2008 |
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The limits of dialogue
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"I learned that is is impossible to discuss with terror and on terror, as there are no premises for discussion - and such a discussion becomes a collaboration with terror. . . .I think that in th... |
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Friday, 05 December 2008 |
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Engine trouble
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We have lost the power of clear action because we have lost the ability to believe. |
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[The U.N.'s Universal Declaration of Human Rights] was the outcome of a convergence of different religious and cultural traditions, all of them motivated by the common desire to place the human person... |
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Wednesday, 03 December 2008 |
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Nazi echoes
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[A Nazi schoolteacher in his home town once erected] a Maypole as a symbol of a life force perpetually renewing itself. The Maypole was supposed to bring back a portion of German religion and thus hel... |
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Tuesday, 02 December 2008 |
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St Helena's prayer
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Pray always for all the learned, the oblique, the delicate. Let them not be quite forgotten at the throne of God when the simple come into their kingdom.
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Monday, 01 December 2008 |
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E pluribus unum
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Although the essences or forms of things are many, yet the truth of the divine intellect is one, in conformity to which all things are said to be true.
Summa Theologiae, Ia, Q 16, a 6.
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Friday, 28 November 2008 |
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An ever-fixed mark
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Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That l... |
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Thursday, 27 November 2008 |
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The Mediterranean
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Where we went in the boat was a long bay
a slingshot wide, walled in by towering stone -
Peaked margin of antiquity's delay,
And we went there out of time's monotone:
Where we went in the bla... |
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Wednesday, 26 November 2008 |
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America's Destiny
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It has frequently been remarked that it seems to have been reserved to the people of this country, by their conduct and example, to decide the important question whether societies of men are really ca... |
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I am rather inclined to silence, and whether that be wise or not, it is at least more unusual nowadays to find a man who can hold his tongue than to find one who cannot. |
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[Benjamin Franklin] had grown accustomed to mediocrities in positions of power, but this particular mediocrity at this particular moment was more that he could stand. "[Lord Hillsborough's] chara... |
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Friday, 21 November 2008 |
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Desiderata
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One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words. |
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Thursday, 20 November 2008 |
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Wanted: placid inactivity
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If politicians and scientists were lazier, how much happier we should all be.
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Wednesday, 19 November 2008 |
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Who decides?
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Men decide far more problems by hate, love, lust, rage, sorrow, joy, hope, fear, illusion, or some other inward emotion, than by reality, authority, any legal standard, judicial precedent, or statute. |
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Tuesday, 18 November 2008 |
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Second thoughts
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It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience. |
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Monday, 17 November 2008 |
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"Decent fellows," 1943
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. . . Himmler, in a speech to the SS generals on October 4, 1943, praised them for the dedicated and self-sacrificing zeal with which they had applied themselves to the task of extermination.
... |
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Friday, 14 November 2008 |
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Faith in culture?
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A "faith in culture" is as bad as a faith in religion; both expressions imply a turning away from those very things which culture and religion are about. "Culture" as a collective ... |
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Thursday, 13 November 2008 |
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A whistling of a gentle air
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All of man’s misfortune comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room. |
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Tuesday, 11 November 2008 |
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Escape from skepticism?
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While, on the one hand, philosophical thinking has succeeded in coming closer to the reality of human life and its forms of expression, it has also tended to pursue issues — existential, hermene... |
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Monday, 10 November 2008 |
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The Cornetist
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Mark Van Doren reads this poem:
When the last freight, dusk-musical, had gone,
Groaning along the dark rails to St Louis,
When the warm night, complete across the cornfields,
Said there was noth... |
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Friday, 07 November 2008 |
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1932 it ain't
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Despite the rhetoric on both sides, this election isn't "historic" either, in the sense that it presented the American people with some kind of monumental choice between presidents who would... |
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If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still questions the power ... |
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Wednesday, 05 November 2008 |
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Fate?
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A man's character is his fate. |
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How small of all that human hearts endure,
That part which laws or kings can cause or cure!
Still to ourselves in every place consigned,
Our own felicity we make or find. |
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Friday, 31 October 2008 |
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Caelum et terra
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Some people are so heavenly-minded that they are no earthly good. |
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