catholics-from-the-united-states

"Enjoying an extraordinary knowledge of languages (ancient and modern), literature, and art, by his cultured personality and reflective conversation he greatly influenced all who knew him. Though naturally a questioner he venerated the traditions of religious art, and preserved always his childlike Catholic Faith and reverence."

"When young persons are summoned from this world ere they have mingled in its sinful pursuits, they can be readily yielded into the hands of God, whose merciful providence is then rather a cause for joy and thanksgiving than an occasion of sorrowing and regret; because there is a well-founded hope of their having attained the great end of their existence — the enjoyment of eternal happiness."

"• Let the future historian, if he will, add beauty of expression and the charm of polished diction to this plain, unpretentious narrative. The beauty of truth satisfied the author's wish; he strove for nothing more."

"The memory of one who is taken into the heart of a little child is kept forever green."

"All social schemes based on the assumption that man's good lies in the natural order alone must fail. The brotherhood of man is a dream unless it be founded in the Fatherhood of God. In the Christian dispensation in which we live the natural order cannot stand without the support of the supernatural order."

"At the heart of her doubts about secular liberalism (and what she described as "radical, upscale feminism") was its embrace of abortion and its (continuing) dalliance with euthanasia. At first, she went along with abortion, albeit reluctantly, believing that women's rights to develop their talents and control their destinies required its legal availability. But Betsey (as she was known by her friends) was not one who could avert her eyes from inconvenient facts. The central fact about abortion is that it is the deliberate killing of a developing child in the womb. For Betsey, euphemisms such as "products of conception," "termination of pregnancy," "privacy," and "choice" ultimately could not hide that fact. She came to see that to countenance abortion is not to respect women's "privacy" or liberty; it is to suppose that some people have the right to decide whether others will live or die."

"One can live there and feel quite at home because one can lose his heart to any country, and it is a commonplace that "home is where the heart is.""

"No amount of past oppression can justify women's oppression of the most vulnerable among us."

"The Church needs men and women to offset the irreligious tendency which is taking the soul out of charity, by secularizing it; men and women who will preserve religion among the poor and neglected ones, and thus add to the great influence for good of the Church in this country in preserving law and order."

"To understand a great movement in the world of thought or action, it is usually necessary to approach it on its historic side. It is difficult to grasp its inner spirit and purpose, or gauge aright its possibilities and power, except one. bring to the study of its present condition a thorough knowledge of its past. The larger and more complex the movement is, the more important the study of its past becomes. Only in its history are we able to discern, in clear perspective, the principles that gave it birth, presided over its development, and form the mainspring of its present activity."

"The extraordinary measure of self-government granted to the colonists by the charter fostered in them a spirit of loyalty toward the mother country, substantially and energetically manifested on every occasion; but which, nevertheless, when the danger from the foreign foe was no longer imminent, was supplanted by a feeling of jealous apprehension of the encroachments on that the colonists had now learned to regard as their natural rights. Rhode Island heartily joined the other colonies in making the Revolution her cause."

"Any group which makes a claim to infallibility must be very careful not to make any mistakes, and the mistakes that will inevitably occur must be kept secret or explained away—by lies, subterfuges and distortions. And that will eventually cause the collapse of the entire edifice."

"“You intend to pray for answers to those questions, my lord?” “That, yes. But I have found that the best way to ask God about questions like these is to go out and dig up the data yourself.”"

"Amidst all the hubbub, wine and beer crossed the bar in one direction, while copper and silver crossed it in the other, making everyone happy on both sides."

"All that was necessary was to use one’s imagination to see how it might have happened, and then check the evidence to see if it did happen that way. The final step is to check the evidence to make sure it could not have happened any other way."

"In general he doesn’t know any more about magic than an ostrich knows about icebergs."

"It had been one of those warm late spring days when no air moves and nothing else wants to. Not oppressively hot—just warm enough to enervate and to cause attacks of acute vernal inertia."

"One of the things that had led me to be skeptical about reincarnation had been a uniform quality of silliness in the Westerners I had met who professed to “remember” past lives. The Hindu or the Buddhist of eastern Asia bears his belief with dignity. It is part of a religion. To so many Westerners, it was a topic for discussion at cocktail parties."

"There were people, Malone had always understood, who bounced out of their beds and greeted each new day with a smile. It didn’t sound possible, but then again there were some pretty strange people."

"His personality won friends for the Church on all sides, whilst his vigorous defence of Catholic doctrine, as well as his clean-cut, outspoken advocacy of American rights and duties, gave to the Church in southern California a great onward movement."

"What does it matter? I asked myself. If you’re writing a fairy tale, don’t quibble over talking bears."

"The surface of the state generally is broken and diversified, the mountain slopes being densely covered with forest growths, principally of spruce and other evergreen trees. The scenery is everywhere attractive, and in many districts very beautiful."

"I’m not a hard man to convince. And when I see the truth, I’m the first one to admit it, even if it makes me look like a nut."

"Malone, meanwhile, put in two weeks sitting glumly at his Washington desk and checking reports as they arrived. They were uniformly depressing. The United States of America contained more sub-normal minds than Malone cared to think about. There seemed to be enough of them to explain the results of any election you were unhappy over."

"Miss Thompson may be off her trolley, but the others haven’t even got any tracks."

"Boyd looked up. “Rome,” he said in an absent fashion, “wasn’t built in a daze.”"

"Are you an accessory to this imbecilic tomfoolery?"

"One of the troubles with the world is that so few laymen take an interest in science."

"The plans of men do not necessarily coincide with those of the Universe."

"Master Sean O’Lochlainn had always been partial to mules. “The mule,” he was fond of saying, “is as much smarter than a horse as a raven is smarter than a falcon. Neither a raven nor a mule will go charging into combat just because some human tells him to.”"

"No, I had kept an open mind about reincarnation—in spite of those people, not because of them."

"To crave power is to be ruled by madness."

"“I’m sure,” Malone said. “When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.” “Oh,” Blake said. After a second he added: “What does that mean?” Malone shrugged. “It’s an old saying,” he told the doctor. “It doesn’t have to mean anything. It just sounds good.” “Oh,” Blake said again."

"I have always contended that the true connoisseur is to be pitied, for he has trained his taste to such perfection that he enjoys almost nothing."

"Philosophically, Nirvana and the Final Blackout were equally unappealing to me. Reincarnation—well, it seemed like wishful thinking to me. The defining factor for my entire attitude toward an afterlife of any kind was the total absence of objective evidence."

"I had been ready to die. In the only way I could reckon it, less than two days ago I had come to terms with the fact that I would be dead within a year. To face such a truth, to let it penetrate down to the core of your being, demands incredible effort and indescribable pain. No matter how much life you’ve had, you want more. There are things undone, words unsaid, potentials unexplored. You know you could have done more with your life, and you beg fate, or whatever god you believe in, to give you more time. You know in your heart that another entire lifetime would not be sufficient, yet you pray for just a few more years."

"The “remembered” lives had always been exciting and ended in murder, execution, or dramatic suicide. Not one of them had been a potato farmer who died quietly in his bed after seventy years of monotonous hard work. I had heard the argument that only violent personalities survived intact, but I frankly saw more late-night television than actual memory in the “past lives” I heard retold."

"Under his careful and prudent administration the diocese has prospered and acquired order and solidity."

"The labels liberal and conservative used to mean something fairly clear. A liberal used to mean somebody who believed in the individual, who believed in the free market, who believed that you should break down all the barriers toward individual self-expression. If this meant destroying the church or weakening the power of parents within their family, destroying social classes, all sorts of conventions, this is what liberals were in favor of. What conservatives were interested in doing was preserving a kind of cultural order, preserving a tradition, preserving a sense of sacredness—even if they weren’t particularly religious themselves, they had to preserve that sense of the sacred. And what happened in the 1940s and 50s is that conservatism got defined as what used to be called liberal. In other words, the free market is everything, the individual is everything. Forget family—forget everything, essentially, but the marketplace and the defense of the nation, because the old liberals were also great colonialists. And the people who called themselves liberals were in fact socialists or worse. What was somebody with something like a conservative worldview going to do? There was no place. There was no label. There was no party. There was no movement. It’s like being a conservative environmentalist today. The greatest environmental thinker, the most powerful philosopher of conservation today, is Wendell Berry, who is a conservative. He lives on his little farm in rural Kentucky. He writes books about managing his own little family farm. He’s a Christian, he’s a traditionalist, but he’s on the board of the Sierra Club. Why? Because there’s no conservative organization that would welcome Wendell Berry; they think he’s the devil incarnate. And that, in a nutshell, is the failure of American conservatism—not to make a place for the real social, cultural, and moral conservatives who have surfaced from time to time. Jack Kerouac was a conservative and nobody knew that at the time. Why was he a conservative? He thought of himself as a man of the right. He thought he was a patriot. He was a rugged, old-fashioned individualist, but he loved America. He hated this rise of America-bashing of the 60s, and he’s quite an interesting person. Obviously, he was a moral anarchist in some sense, but way down deep he had the...impulses of a Baudelaire, who was also a conservative."

"As with the individual, so with the nation dost Thou deal most mercifully. With the breath of Thy love Thou hast called it into existence. Thou didst bless it with wise and prudent founders. Thou hast implanted in the breasts of its citizens a sense of right, a love of justice. Thou hast watched over its beginnings. Thou hast brought it, in a brief space of time, to a height of unparalleled prosperity. Thou hast, when its existence was endangered, either by attacks from without or by dissensions within, filled the hearts of its faithful children with love and devotion, and Thou hast raised from among them valiant men to defend its interests. Thou hast led them to victory, and when Thou didst make them victorious, Thou didst, too, inspire them with mercy and compassion for the vanquished. For all this, Oh Heavenly Father, we return loving thanks."

"Grateful to Almighty God for the blessings which, through Jesus Christ our Lord, he has conferred on my beloved country in her emancipation, and upon myself in permitting me, under circumstances of mercy, to live to the age of eighty-nine years, and to survive the fiftieth year of American independence, and certifying by my present signature my approbation of the Declaration of Independence, adopted by Congress on the Fourth of July, in the year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and seventy-six, which I originally subscribed on the second of August of the same year, and of which I am now the last surviving signer, I do hereby recommend to the present and future generations the principles of that important document, as the best earthly inheritance their ancestors could bequeath to them; and pray that the civil and religious liberties they have secured to my country may be perpetuated to the remotest posterity and extended to the whole family of man."

"A people who are to govern themselves need virtue and morality much more than intellectual knowledge to appreciate and preserve the form of self-government. Hence it is so truly said that a Republic needs moral and virtuous citizens."

"Each century saw its zealots striving for the preservation of ecclesiastical life in the monasteries and the canonicates, eager for the restoration and perfection of the schools, and endeavoring to provide for the moral and spiritual enlightenment of the people. Through the unselfish efforts of these leaders of society, whether the Pope, the emperor, a bishop or a prince, the modern world can see the educational ideal of the age, and obtain a fair view of the actual conditions which existed."

"When declaring the infallibility of the pope, the Vatican Council did not have in mind a situation in which, his papal prerogative acknowledged, the faithful might have a wider field of thought and action in religious matters; rather the infallibility was declared in order to provide against the special evils of our times, of license which is confounded with liberty, and the habit of thinking, saying, and printing everything regardless of truth. It was not intended to hamper real serious study or research, or to conflict with any well-ascertained truth, but only to use the authority and wisdom of the Church more effectually in protecting men against error."

"The glorious achievements of the Society are blended with the archives of universal history, identified with the civilization, learning, conversion, and prosperity of innumerable countries. She has had her alternations of adversity and triumph, she has passed through the deep shades of night as well as the bright beams of day. She has had friends — devoted and true — in every class and grade of life; she has encountered, too, the fiercest and most formidable enemies, in the same."

"The way has been prepared: the Navajos are well-disposed toward the Catholic missionaries and give founded hopes for an abundant harvest of souls."

"We fear not science. We deplore ignorance. If the men of science will be true to their reason, we will meet them on every field and teach them the harmonies of nature and of faith. We will show them how the human mind turns from the creature in all its variety and beauty to the creature's God."

"After the insurrection of 1898, and the Spanish-American War that followed, the people suffered greatly, not only from the evils of war, but also from the loss of their cattle and horses by epidemics. Many of their churches were destroyed, not only by the insurrectos, but also by United States troops. The chief evil, however, was the lack of priests."

"How truly striking is this when we remember the anti-Catholic spirit of the first years of the Revolt against oppression and think of the freedom of action that came to the Church."

"Even under our liberal form of government the State cannot afford to allow unbridled religious liberty. The utmost that is consistent with the very existence of the civil government is a limited religious liberty. Nor can we agree with those who seem to hold that a multiplicity of warring religious beliefs is the ideal of social perfection. The conditions that necessitate even a limited toleration of all beliefs will ever prove more or less dangerous to the welfare of the people according as religious convictions are more or less strong, or according as they are maintained by men more or less ignorant and narrow. When it is needlessly proclaimed it is an invitation to sectarianism, with its inevitable disunions and discussions; it is perilous to the peace of a community. The closer the union between the civil and religious authority, as long as each aids the other, and neither encroaches upon the domain of the other, the better will it be for both and the more secure will be the peace of the people."