clergy-from-italy

"Castracane was a devout priest as well as an enthusiastic investigator."

"However great this addition to the number of facts serving to elucidate the natural history of these most interesting organisms may have been, the same cannot, unfortunately, be said regarding our knowledge of their organic development and general economy. This lamentable condition of things must be attributed to the too natural desire which observers entertain to associate their name with the discovery of a new form, to which end, consequently, the majority devote themselves. And an additional reason may be found in the difficulties which are met with in the investigation of the mode of development of organisms of such astonishing minuteness, which renders it almost a matter of chance when we are able to observe the various phases of the organic life of the Diatomacae. Whence arises the necessity of examining with the utmost attention everything that is presented in the field of the microscope, and especially in the case of living diatoms, which should be daily observed at all seasons to enable us to watch all the epochs of their development."

"The apparent function of the Diatomacae in the economy nature, viz. to vivify, as it were, the immensity of the ocean, as well as all fresh and brackish waters, decomposing, as they do, carbonic acid under the influence of light, and consequently giving off oxygen, is sufficient to show that organisms of such excessive minuteness must be endowed with an extraordinary reproductive capacity in order to supply, by their number, the vast scope of the office they are destined to fulfil."

"The best elements of humanism and Christianity were united in him."

"Seripando displayed burning zeal, working especially to bring about a thorough reform of his order and to purge it of the Lutheran elements which had penetrated into it. During the first period of the Council of Trent, Seripando had played a most distinguished part."

"He distinguished himself by his zeal for the purity of the text of Holy Writ, and also by his peculiar views concerning original sin and justification."

"Antonio Possevinus represented the literary, scientific, and diplomatic type of Jesuit, performing important political missions, establishing schools of science and letters, and applying himself to diplomatic protocols and classical authors with equal assiduity. Had he not met with insurmountable difficulties in Sweden and Russia, and in negotiating the treaties between Poland and the empire, he would have left a still deeper trace on the political history of the Church and of Europe."

"[When asked if he had ever experienced homosexual feelings] Certainly. And more than once. I experience friendship in a very strong way, even in these terms. After all, I believe that homosexuality can be a Christian fact [...] The Church can admit that two people of the same sex exchange affection and use purely erotic terminology [...] Pope Paul VI in the document Persona humana defines homosexuality as a ‘disordered condition’, not a sinful one. What does ‘disordered condition’ mean? This needs to be discussed."

"In the 20th century, Christian Democracy performed the function that the States of the Church had performed for fourteen hundred years"

"I have always noticed that the only figure defined as "unjust" in the Gospel is that of a judge: and it seemed to me an apt definition. Fascism was less hateful than this robed bureaucracy that used violence in the name of justice. In the history of Italy, if freedom had prevailed, as I now believe to be certain, the names of the magistrates of Milan, Antonio Di Pietro, Borrelli, Davigo, and Boccassini would have been forever signati nigro lapillo as figures to be remembered with horror, those of the unjust judge."

"(About the cultural roots of Umberto Bossi) A little bit of right-wing Fascism, a little bit of Marxism in slang."

"Craxi's politics have the present, they have the future, they have eternity."

"We are pleased to publish this article by Gianni Baget Bozzo, a member of the Christian Democracy party in the 1950s, now a priest and historian of the Catholic party."

"The primacy of personal freedom – writes Don Gianni, referring to the social order – indicates the transcendence of the person over society... this idea is a Christian legacy: it is divine life communicated to the person by the Incarnate Word, Jesus Christ: every person has become an end in relation to society because of the primacy of Jesus Christ as a person who lives in other people. (p. 136)"

"The Islamic God has nothing in common with man: he is a Presence without measure, blending personality and impersonality in himself. [...] For the Christian, it is clear here what the Trinity means to him, namely that God is a relationship between persons, that is, intrinsically human. [...] The Christian God is a person and can only be understood as a relationship between persons."

"I don't like Costanzo. We argued in 1994 when he presented Berlusconi with an audience of hostile people. Vespa, on the other hand, created Porta a Porta, a masterpiece. He has been more useful than Costanzo. “'Porta a Porta”' is the most useful thing there is for the centre-right."

"Andreotti did everything and the opposite of everything; Forlani did nothing and the opposite of nothing."

"On the front of anti-clericalism and aversion to the Church, we are witnessing a real drift, parallel to certain political battles. There is an anti-Christian tide rising in Europe, an anti-Catholic sentiment. It is difficult to predict exactly what will happen. Violence no longer affects only politics but also the symbolic part of society. Therefore, it also affects the Church. :*Quoted in Roberto Zuccolini, Baget Bozzo: è il segno dell' anticlericalismo dilagante (Baget Bozzo: it is a sign of rampant anticlericalism), Corriere della sera”', 30 April 2007, p. 3."

"Between us and the left lies the blood of Craxi, which cries out for vengeance before God."

"The West, the concept born in the struggle against Nazism and Communism [...] is the secular and liberal version of Christianity, thanks above all to the United States [...] by opposing the United States at all levels, the Church is fighting against the Christianity of which the West is the fruit."

"The transformation of the electorate into a television audience has raised the quality of democracy and brought direct democracy closer to parliamentary democracy, thus bringing Western democracy closer to its model, Athenian democracy, the original form of direct democracy."

"(About the possible successor to Silvio Berlusconi) The issue has not yet arisen, for the moment. However, the two most likely candidates are currently Gianfranco Fini and Giulio Tremonti. They are neck and neck. [...] I do not see any women as future leaders; no one in Forza Italia is ready, nor indeed in the entire centre-right."

"Europe has received from the United States the imprint of Christianity in freedom. (p. 137)"

"The West has lost its faith but not the wisdom and hope of faith [...], the Christian roots of the West appear precisely when they are no longer recognised."

"The horizon of our knowledge, even scientific knowledge, is open to being, to totality. And this is simply because knowledge is a dimension of our spirit, unlimited because it transcends matter. The material world may one day end, but our knowledge of it, insofar as it participates in the knowledge of God, never ends."

"In my opinion, those who believe that a weak science, aware of its own limitations and its own continuous provisional nature, dialogues better with faith because it is incapable of “challenging it” are mistaken. Quite the contrary is true: a science that recognizes itself as a quest for truth is more open to the questions that matter, the truly important ones, which point to the origin and meaning of things, thus making itself ready to listen with interest to the answers that theology and faith offer to these questions. The worst enemy of the Christian faith continues to be ignorance and superficiality, certainly not science."

"Interviewer: What is meant by “theology of credibility”? Tanzella-Nitti: By this expression we mean a theology that reflects on the reasonableness of believing in Revelation, first and foremost in the Revealer par excellence, Jesus of Nazareth. Classical apologetics, which accompanied us until the dawn of the Second Vatican Council, did not have a fully theological status, but developed its arguments mainly on the logical and philosophical side. The first theology of credibility is given to us by the Gospels, when they declare, with St. Luke, that they were written so that we might realize the solidity of the teachings received, or with St. John, that those things were transmitted to us so that we might believe in Jesus Christ and so that, by believing, we might have life in him."

"It is often believed that defending the dignity of the human person and his transcendent dimension requires revenge against the reasons for scientific progress, which should therefore be scaled back, slowed down, or even rejected. Little thought is given to the fact that the true subject of technical and scientific endeavour is the human person, and that this endeavour, in addition to expressing a vocation to seek the truth, has a value of promotion for man and for the whole society in which he lives."

"The standard model that organizes the properties of elementary particles is highly symmetrical and elegant, but it is not the only example. Just think of Mendeleev's Periodic Table of Elements, or Maxwell's equations describing electromagnetism. Good science seems to have a privileged relationship with order and symmetry: it is not a relationship that we only read about in our intellect, it must also have sufficient objective confirmation in things. The news that the Higgs boson seems to have finally been revealed confirms us in the same idea. We now know that the 24 fundamental particles and the four forces of nature can be brought together in a single grand theoretical framework. Some may wonder where this rationality and elegance come from and, more boldly, whether they have any connection with the idea that the physical universe is the reflection of a creative intelligence... Put this way, the question goes beyond what the scientific method can tell us, which is based on measurable quantities and does not question the ultimate causes of reality. It is nevertheless significant that scientists, as human beings, are surprised by this and seek an explanation. The question then becomes philosophical or perhaps even theological: we cannot answer it by asking for new measurements from the Large Hadron Collider, but it is interesting that, as a question, it is now also being raised by scientific research and is arising in our laboratories."

"Every step forward in our certain knowledge of nature is always a step toward the truth of things and, ultimately, toward Truth with a capital T."

"I believe that Darwin was good at helping us understand the past, but I wouldn't invoke him too much as a prophet of future scenarios. The biological evolution of human beings seems to have stopped precisely with the emergence of freedom and culture."

"The Christian faith does not seem to have any prejudicial arguments against the presence of life and intelligent life in the cosmos (how could it, since these are events that belong to the factual order?), but neither can it be considered anti-scientific to consider reasonable, in the absence of compelling data, the “classical solution” that envisages the uniqueness of the human being... Even the Incarnation of the Word has a revelatory value that is universal, not just local. Its primacy over angelic creatures may ultimately be an expression of its primacy over all possible creatures, a Christocentric primacy, not geocentric or anthropocentric, even if we do not know how it is exercised. The final word on the subject of life in the cosmos does not belong to theology, but to science. Theology, like the rest of humanity, can only wait."

"Most media outlets present us with the image of scientists as atheists or, at the very least, people who are not inclined to see nature as the work of a creator God. However, this image only partially corresponds to reality and is not representative of scientists as a whole."

"When Christians no longer live according to their faith, history will not fail to show the consequences, reserving for them a necessary purification."

"From the point of view of scientific analysis, the term “finalism” should not be too surprising, if it does not refer to an intentional purpose, but only to an interpretative strategy. The action of finalistic principles, in fact, is not new to other fields of science. Mathematical physics knows the principle of least action, which indicates how a physical system always takes the most advantageous path. The principles of classical thermodynamics are essentially finalistic principles, and chemistry also uses them when explaining chemical bonds, starting from the principle that each atom tends to complete its eight fundamental electron orbitals."

"I believe that fundamental theology should promote unity in the intellectual life of believers by helping them to reflect on the reasons for their faith—certainly with the help of pastoral care and catechesis. Secularism and secularization have an easy time of it when there is weakness of thought, even among believers. The fact that the Christian faith has its foundation in Jesus Christ does not exempt us from looking to philosophy, history or sciences to show our interlocutors that the Christian message does not contradict the knowledge of these other fields of knowledge, but rather reveals their ultimate meaning. A believer who works as an intellectual must be able to explain what Jesus Christ has to do with philosophy, history, medicine, economics, law, and even mathematics, as Monsignor Luigi Giussani loved to repeat."

"The story of Galileo Galilei, on closer inspection, was not an exegetical dispute but a great philosophical and cultural confrontation, which had a positive influence on the Catholic Church, spurring it to distance itself more and more from an instrumental and unenlightened use of the Scriptures.... If they are true knowledge of the world, Catholic theology has nothing to fear from scientific knowledge: it may be rightly challenged by it, but, for the sake of the one truth, it must accept the challenge with intellectual honesty and epistemological rigor."

"Saying that Christian theology provided the cultural and philosophical ‘humus’ for the birth of science is of little interest to anyone, while saying, impertinently, that science and theology are eternally at war, or that Christianity is irrational, sells books."

"The physical and mathematical sciences now have a mature epistemology, which protects them from ideological drifts because it has made them touch in a formally rigorous way on the foundations, and also the limits, of knowledge. The biological sciences, on the other hand, are younger and have not yet encountered the problems of formal and ontological incompleteness that the physical and mathematical sciences are well aware of. This can lead biology to want to offer its own exhaustive and sometimes self-referential “worldview,” considering any discussion of the foundations of being, and therefore of the origin of things, to be superfluous. In reality, when the problem of foundations is closely examined, and biology is beginning to do so as it strives to delve deeply into the origin of DNA, the problem of Logos, rationality, and the meaning of things reemerges, and with it the question of God. The career of a researcher such as Francis Collins is sufficient proof of this."

"Evolution, after all, is the way God creates."

"The idea of evolution is at home in Christian theology. For the cosmos and life to evolve, a positive amount of information is necessary. I do not believe that biological evolution is possible in a materialistic world, without information, without direction, without a plan."

"To do science, you need commitment and passion. You need to have at least an implicit belief that nature will not behave capriciously towards us, but will remain faithful to its laws. Above all, you need to believe that there is a truth out there, and that it is worth seeking. Every scientist has his or her own “worldview” and within that worldview employs the categories he or she finds most congenial. It is this personalistic aspect of scientific research, now highlighted by many authors, that deserves to be explored. The reasons why a scientist “embraces” one worldview rather than another also deserve to be explored."

"The Christian faith is a friend of reason, and a God without Logos cannot be the Christian God. The world responds to a creative plan, and this plan is in a certain way glimpsed by the man of science, who is capable of perceiving this Logos because his intelligence is the image of God. Theology must take an interest in scientific knowledge in order to be a better theology."

"Contemporary philosophy has considered the subject of God and the meaning of life too “strong” to be addressed, thus settling on positions of weak thought. Science, on the contrary, has not been afraid to address these questions, as can be easily seen in the popular works of many scientists. The fact that the scientific method cannot provide a comprehensive answer to these questions does not prevent them from arising and continuing to attract those who study nature."

"His own sanctity of life, severity of morals, and aversion to luxury made more resplendent his virtues and talents."

"God forgive you! What have you done?"

"A man of a spirit most pure and blameless. It was however remarked, half jestingly, that as he had come into the world too early — at seven months — and had pot been reared without difficulty, so there was upon the whole too little of the earthly element in his composition. Of the practices and intrigues of the Curia, he had never been able to comprehend anything."

"All the lands of the West have their eyes directed toward our humility; by them we are considered as a God upon earth."

"At the express wish of the pope, he became cardinal bishop of Palestrina, to the government of which he applied himself with untiring energy."

"We believe that it has been brought about by a special dispensation of Divine Providence, that the Frankish Princes should profess the orthodox faith; like the Roman Emperors, in order that they may help this city, whence it took its rise. Persuade them with all earnestness to keep from any friendship and alliance with our most unspeakable enemies, the Lombards."