Catholics From Italy

"Witness for Christ each day, and if necessary use words."

"St. Francis reportedly said, "Preach Jesus, and if necessary use words.""

"Hail, queen wisdom! May the Lord save thee with thy sister holy pure simplicity! O Lady, holy poverty, may the Lord save thee with thy sister holy humility! O Lady, holy charity, may the Lord save thee with thy sister holy obedience! O all ye most holy virtues, may the Lord, from whom you proceed and come, save you! There is absolutely no man in the whole world who can possess one among you unless he first die. He who possesses one and does not offend the others, possesses all; and he who offends one, possesses none and offends all; and every one [of them] confounds vices and sins. Holy wisdom confounds Satan and all his wickednesses. Pure holy simplicity confounds all the wisdom of this world and the wisdom of the flesh. Holy poverty confounds cupidity and avarice and the cares of this world. Holy humility confounds pride and all the men of this world and all things that are in the world. Holy charity confounds all diabolical and fleshly temptations and all fleshly fears. Holy obedience confounds all bodily and fleshly desires and keeps the body mortified to the obedience of the spirit and to the obedience of one's brother and makes a man subject to all the men of this world and not to men alone, but also to all beasts and wild animals, so that they may do with him whatsoever they will, in so far as it may be granted to them from above by the Lord."

"We must not be wise and prudent according to the flesh, but, instead, we must be simple, humble and pure."

"All those men and women … who in their body serve the world through the desires of the flesh, the concerns of the world and the cares of this life: They are held captive by the devil, whose children they are, and whose works they do."

"Such was the will of the Father that his Son, blessed and glorious, whom he gave to us, and who was born for us, should by his own blood, sacrifice, and oblation, offer himself on the altar of the cross, not for himself, by whom "all things were made," but for our sins, leaving us an example that we should follow his steps."

"When the spirit is lukewarm, and gradually growing cold as it moves from grace, flesh and blood inevitably seek their own interests. When the soul finds no delight, what is left except for the flesh to look for some? Then the base instinct covers itself with the excuse of necessity, and the mind of the flesh forms the conscience."

"Where there is charity and wisdom, there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility, there is neither anger nor vexation. Where there is poverty and joy, there is neither greed nor avarice. Where there is peace and meditation, there is neither anxiety nor doubt."

"Let every man abide in the art or employment wherein he was called. And for their labor they may receive all necessary things, except money. ... Let none of the brothers, wherever he may be or whithersoever he may go, carry or receive money or coin in any manner, or cause it to be received, either for clothing, or for books, or as the price of any labor, or indeed for any reason, except on account of the manifest necessity of the sick brothers. For we ought not to have more use and esteem of money and coin than of stones. And the devil seeks to blind those who desire or value it more than stones. Let us therefore take care lest after having left all things we lose the kingdom of heaven for such a trifle. And if we should chance to find money in any place, let us no more regard it than the dust we tread under our feet."

"Francis must rank with those creative personalities to which all the deepest developments of Christian consciousness are due."

"I saw St. Francis at first in his old age, at prayer and sickly, of an indescribable cheerfulness and purity and humility. Everything in him, everything that constituted his life, all his difficulties, are now transfigured and have become translucent. And this happened through prayer. The things that occupy him no longer contain anything at all that is purely personal, not a trace of annoyance or injury or resentment for the unjust things inflicted on him. God alone is left, as well as perfect service in the indescribable happiness of one who serves and in uninterrupted contemplation."

"St. Francis is not only the most attractive of all the Christian saints, he is the most attractive of Christians, admired by Buddhists, atheists, completely secular, modern people, Communists, to whom the figure of Christ himself is at best unattractive. Partly this is due to the sentimentalization of the legend of his life and that of his companions in the early days of the order. Many people today who put his statue in their gardens know nothing about him except that he preached a sermon to the birds, wrote a hymn to the sun, and called the donkey his brother. These bits of information are important because they are signs of a revolution of the sensibility — which incidentally was a metaphysical revolution of which certainly St. Francis himself was quite unaware. They stand for a mystical and emotional immediate realization of the unity of being, a notion foreign, in fact antagonistic, to the main Judeo-Christian tradition."

"Saint Francis is the outstanding exception to the rule that Catholicism discourages concern for the welfare of nonhuman beings. "If I could only be presented to the emperor," he is reported as saying, "I would pray him, for the love of God, and of me, to issue an edict prohibiting anyone from catching or imprisoning my sisters the larks, and ordering that all who have oxen or asses should at Christmas feed them particularly well." Many legends tell of his compassion, and the story of how he preached to the birds certainly seems to imply that the gap between them and humans was less than other Christians supposed. But a misleading impression of the views of Saint Francis may be gained if one looks only at his attitude to larks and the other animals. It was not only sentient creatures whom Saint Francis addressed as his sisters: the sun, the moon, wind, fire, all were brothers and sisters to him. His contemporaries described him as taking "inward and outward delight in almost every creature, and when he handled or looked at them his spirit seemed to be in heaven rather than on earth." This delight extended to water, rocks, flowers, and trees. This is a description of a person in a state of religious ecstasy, deeply moved by a feeling of oneness with all of nature. People from a variety of religious and mystical traditions appear to have had such experiences, and have expressed similar feelings of universal love. Seeing Francis in this light makes the breadth of his love and compassion more readily comprehensible. It also enables us to see how his love for all creatures could coexist with a theological position that was quite orthodox in its speciesism. Saint Francis affirmed that "every creature proclaims: 'God made me for your sake, O man!'" The sun itself, he thought, shines for man. These beliefs were part of a cosmology that he never questioned; the force of his love for all creation, however, was not to be bound by such considerations. While this kind of ecstatic universal love can be a wonderful source of compassion and goodness, the lack of rational reflection can also do much to counteract its beneficial consequences. If we love rocks, trees, plants, larks, and oxen equally, we may lose sight of the essential differences between them, most importantly, the differences in degree of sentience. We may then think that since we have to eat to survive, and since we cannot eat without killing something we love, it does not matter which we kill. Possibly it was for this reason that Saint Francis's love for birds and oxen appears not to have led him to cease eating them; and when he drew up the rules for the conduct of the friars in the order he founded, he gave no instruction that they were to abstain from meat, except on certain fast days."

"Once, Saint Francis of Assisi said to a young monk, 'Brother, let us go and preach in the city.' And so they left the monastery, and, talking of lofty subjects, they passed through the whole city and returned to the monastery. The young monk asked in amazement, 'Father, and when shall we preach?' And Saint Francis replied, 'Brother, did you not notice that we were preaching all the time? We walked with dignity, we discussed most lofty subjects, the passers-by looked at us and received peace and comfort. Indeed, preaching does not consist of words alone, but also of behavior itself.'""

"He is great because he is everything. He is a man who wants to do things, wants to build, he founded an order and its rules, he is an itinerant and a missionary, a poet and a prophet, he is mystical. He found evil in himself and rooted it out. He loved nature, animals, the blade of grass on the lawn and the birds flying in the sky. But above all he loved people, children, old people, women. He is the most shining example of that agape we talked about earlier."

"Nam in omni actione principaliter intenditur ab agente, sive necessitate naturae, sive voluntarie agat, propriam similitudinem explicare, unde fit, quod omne agens, in quantum huiusmodi, delectatur; quia, quum omne quod est appetat suum esse, ac in agendo agentis esse quodammodo amplietur, sequiturde necessitate delectatio... Nihil igitur agit, nisi tale existens, quale patiens fieri debet..."

"La moralitade è bellezza de la filosofia."

"Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona de la mia donna disiosamente... che lo 'ntelletto sovr'esse disvia."

"Sì lungiamente m'ha tenuto Amore e costumato a la sua segnoria"

"Amore e 'l cor gentil sono una cosa... e così esser l'un sanza l'altro osa com'alma razional sanza ragione."

"Ella è quanto de ben pò far natura; per essemplo di lei bieltà si prova."

"In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria, dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica, la quale dice: Incipit vita nova."

"ne le braccia avea madonna involta in un drappo dormendo. Poi la svegliava, e d'esto core ardendo lei paventosa umilmente pascea: appresso gir lo ne vedea piangendo."

"Dante's Inferno was the first book to give me a real thrill. I thought Doré's drawings in it remarkable, and I became exceedingly curious about his work."

"Sa réputation s'affermira toujours, parce qu'on ne le lit guère. II y a de lui une vingtaine de traits qu'on sait par cœur: cela suffit pour s'épargner la peine d'examiner le reste."

"Dante Alighieri wrote in the fourteenth century that the spirit of poetry abounds "in the tangled constructions and defective pronunciations" of vernacular speech where language is renewed and transformed. His vision resonates today with the faulty speech of migrants creating the sounds and intonations of the future."

"That great genius conceived, in his vast imagination, the mysteries of the invisible creation, and unveiled them to the eyes of the astonished world."

"His very words are instinct with spirit; each is as a spark, a burning atom of inextinguishable thought; and many yet lie covered in the ashes of their birth, and pregnant with the lightning which has yet found no conductor."

"In The Divine Comedy, Dante reserved a special place in the Seventh Circle of Hell for people who charged usurious interest rates. Today we don't need the hellfire, the pitchforks, or the rivers of boiling blood, but we do need a national usury law that caps interest rates on credit cards and consumer loans at 15 percent."

"Time in culture is capable of many arrangements. Dante read today sets up different relations, very likely, from Dante read in his own decades, but the change is not in Dante nor in his truth, although many will say so. These truths, the truth of the voyage, of the skull-grinding horror, the white chance, leopard, star, and belief, are present. There is no particular question of death, since we are in a life where imaginative experience is given and taken."

"Dante has not deigned to take his inspiration from any other. He has wished to be himself, himself alone; in a word, to create. He has occupied a vast space, and has filled it with the superiority of a sublime mind. He is diverse, strong, and gracious. He has imagination, warmth, and enthusiasm. He makes his reader tremble, shed tears, feel the thrill of honor in a way that is the height of art. Severe and menacing, he has terrible imprecations for crime, scourgings for vice, sorrow for misfortune. As a citizen, affected by the laws of the republic, he thunders against its oppressors, but he is always ready to excuse his native city. Florence is ever to him his sweet, beloved country, dear to his heart. I am envious for my dear France, that she has never produced a rival to Dante; that this Colossus has not had his equal among us. No, there is no reputation which can be compared to his."

"I love Dante almost as much as the Bible. He is my spiritual food, the rest is ballast."

"If instilling the fear of hell is a form of “child abuse” perhaps Dante’s “Comedy,” with its graphic depictions of hell, should be forbidden to minors in Japan, and Japanese travel agents should not take families with minors to the famous Medieval Cemetery of or to countless European cathedrals whose frescos or paintings show how devils will torment the sinners in the afterlife (Buddhist depictions of are not less terrifying, by the way)."

"Dante's corpus as a whole is in certain respects like a testament to the closing medieval age; it shows what the Western world would have been had it not broken from its tradition."

"Dante was the first to sing of heaven and of hell, not as the dreams of mythological fiction, but as the objects of a real faith. He was the first who lanched from this promontory on which we stand, into the vast immensity of the universe, traversed the abyss amidst demons and infernal tortures, and mounting afterwards through angelic hosts and undiscovered worlds, gazed with stedfast eye upon the glories of the Highest... Dante was the Columbus who discovered this new world of poesy... Dante probably surpassed even Homer himself."

"I would like to add my voice to those who consider Dante Alighieri an artist of the greatest universal esteem, who through his immortal works still has much to say and offer to those who desire to travel the way to true knowledge, to the authentic discovery of self, of the world, of life's profound and transcendent meaning. ... The Comedy can be read as a great itinerary, rather as a true pilgrimage, both personal and interior, as well as communal, ecclesial, social and historic. ... Dante is...a prophet of hope, a herald of humanity's possible redemption and liberation, of profound change in every man and woman, of all of humanity."

"Dante as a poet performs miracles in some of the openings of his lyrics or some of his verses in the Commedia. In an age of convention and formalism he went to Virgil to school; in an age when nothing gave reason to hope for the appearance of a masterpiece of form and structure, he produced such a masterpiece. His creative work is immensely superior in merit to his theorizing, but even these show how, in spite of the limitations of contemporary philosophy and rhetoric he was able to slip through the meshes of the network which encircled him, and to bring the vernacular poetry of Italy, when it was still in its infancy, to heights of perfection and finish that have seldom been equalled and never surpassed."

"Dante and Shakespeare divide the modern world between them; there is no third."

"For us Anishinaabe, Biskaabiiyang is a specific term that means “returning to the woods,” because we’re woodland peoples. For example, I grew up growing my “three sisters”—that is, corn, beans, and squash—along the edge of the forest, using what people now call sylvan culture or permaculture. It’s curious how this counters the perspective of classical authors like Dante in early modern Europe or, later, Edmund Spenser, an important Renaissance poet, who view the woods as this terrifying presence. Why is this decolonizing? Because through boarding schools and many other colonial experiences, that fear of the woods creeps in."

"Gilson criticizes attempts to trace Dante's position back to Thomism or Averroism. For St. Thomas, every hierarchy of dignity is at the same time a hierarchy of jurisdiction, while for Dante—except for God—a hierarchy of dignity is never the foundation of a hierarchy of jurisdiction, and this corresponds to Dante's specific philosophical problem, which is not so much to define the essence of philosophy as to determine functions and jurisdictions. The principle governing this determination is absolutely irreconcilable with Thomism. St. Thomas knows only one ultimate end: eternal bliss, which can only be attained through the Church; moreover, the spirituality of the ultimate end implies that between temporal and spiritual power there is a hierarchical subordination of the means to the end. For Dante, on the other hand, man can obtain, through the exercise of political virtues, a human happiness completely distinct from heavenly bliss, even if the latter represents a higher end. The thesis of the “duo ultima” legitimizes the complete distinction between the political order and the religious order, which is equally universal to that of the Church, but autonomous and pursuing an end of earthly happiness."

"I wanted my illustrations for the Dante to be like the faint markings of moisture in a divine cheese. This explains their variegated aspect of butterflies' wings. Mysticism is cheese; Christ is cheese, better still, mountains of cheese!"

"Ecce deus fortior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi."

"Redeth the grete poete of Itaille, That highte Dant, for he can al devyse Fro point to point, nat o word wol he faille."

"Dante does not come before us as a large catholic mind; rather as a narrow, and even sectarian mind: it is partly the fruit of his age and position, but partly too of his own nature. His greatness has, in all senses, concentred itself into fiery emphasis and depth. He is world-great not because he is world-wide, but because he is world-deep. Through all objects he pierces as it were down into the heart of Being. I know nothing so intense as Dante."

"Christianity has an admirable example of the natural union between faith and freedom in Dante Alighieri. Precisely his undoubted adherence to Catholic truth allows and illuminates his perfect autonomy of judgement, free from any fear or human conditioning. Dante is not afraid to criticize the work of the popes and their operational choices, to the point of placing several of them in the depths of hell. But in him "the reverence of the supreme keys" never diminishes and never diminishes in the slightest (Inf. XIX, 101). When it comes to expressing reservations or criticisms that he considers due, there are no discounts neither for lay people, nor for ecclesiastics, nor for monarchs, nor for ordinary citizens... all of whom are required, without exception, to abide by the law evangelical."

"Dante's relationship with women is very complex, because the range of real women in Dante's life and in Dante Alighieri's imagined life is very different. There is an idealization of women that occurs when he is nine years old. He lost his real mother when he was five years old, so he is the son of a father and a stepmother. The neighbors of the Portinari family had six daughters and one of these is Beatrice, a nine-year-old girl, his age. Dante meets her gaze and from that moment he becomes almost a prisoner of that gaze, which is why nine is Beatrice's magic number, because he meets her at nine years old. The Poet follows her to Florence for another nine years, without ever receiving encouragement from her, until at eighteen, before entering the church where the girl goes every evening in Santa Margherita dei Cerchi which is the Portinari church, suddenly she decides to stop, look at him, smile at him, and says "I greet you" which is the only phrase Dante will hear from Beatrice. Dante remains completely satisfied by this smile and considers it the sealing of a relationship that has had no other type of concretization, nothing else, just this look and this greeting. He tells this story in this wonderful diary which is the Vita Nova, a set of poems and prose writings that he wrote in the aftermath of Beatrice's death."

"And you, beloved children, whose lot it is to promote learning under the magisterium of the Church, continue as you are doing to love and tend the noble poet whom We do not hesitate to call the most eloquent singer of the Christian idea."

"The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crisis maintain their neutrality."

"Nel suo profondo vidi che s'interna, legato con amore in un volume, ciò che per l'universo si squaderna."

"E 'n la sua volontade è nostra pace."