We sometimes do not love those people or those things we think we love. We may also love and not be aware of it. But the human heart, without grace, hardly beats at all. It is a tangle of vipers, and when it beats, it squeezes out its poison.
Every closing of a church is a knife to the heart of a real human community. In Canada the people feel it more keenly perhaps than in America. You did more than meet your neighbors at Mass; you met fellow travelers on the way to the four last things.
Intellectuals often suffer from a deep vanity, the emptiest of all manifestations of envy or pride. But their intellect often leads them to accept the most stupid of ideas.
As the storm approaches, I have a strange kind of calm. I know that my wife and my children love me, so that’s all right; and I do trust that they know I love them. But a man wants something other than that. We need to be needed.
What we want are all the habits and customs that teach boys and girls from the beginning that they are meant for one another and that bring them together in merriment. Which means rules.
Archbishop Weakland, sworn by his office to teach what the Church teaches, did his best to undermine it, to sow indifference or contempt whenever the teachings touched upon his own most precious field of sin.
The pope has not bothered to call upon those faithful who love the old rite to speak with them. He has spent less time critiquing the old rite than he has spent belittling that small portion of the faithful who will not go along with his disdain.
The Holy Spirit at Vatican II protected the Church from casting its lot with what has been a colossal failure. But now it appears that that connection is going to be made, nearly sixty years later.
The pope warns against aestheticism. Rightly so. Aestheticism is to a full experience of beauty as sentimentality is to profound and genuine feeling. But it is not aestheticism to long for beauty, as it is not sentimental to long for love.
There is a good reason why things get worse and not better for them who celebrate the abnormal.
I have read too much, I have beheld too much, I have heard and sung too much. I am a restorationist. I am like someone who knows there are riches around a corner, and I want everyone to come and see. I can’t help it anymore.
Most politicians are looking at the means or the opportunity behind mass shootings. Instead we need to change a culture that motivates such shootings.
The unborn child is strange and familiar at once. Set aside all the muddle of your fears and desires, your resentment, your self-opinion, your politics, whatever. Look at that child. That was you, that was me.
The cancerous growth of the State has come at the expense of the home, and the unholy has grown at the expense of the holy.
The Church’s strategy of evangelization has been to accommodate ourselves to the culture, reversing the words of St. Paul; we grow old and stale, conforming to the world.
Governments in general are very good at giving you the shirt off your neighbor’s back while causing the conditions that make you need the shirt in the first place.
“Men without chests” are those who lack any sense of the sublime, the beautiful, the homely, or the slovenly, the ugly, and the perverse. What is a Church without a chest?
The only way to approve of or even condone any form of mock-marriage, homosexual or otherwise, is to deny that we have access to objective reality outside of our feelings about it.
Since Gregorian chant has not been banned, and since most people actually enjoy dabbling in another language once in a while, we might well inject the germs of beauty into our Masses.
Modernism, as an ideological stance, is essentially iconoclastic. It exists principally by standing in judgment against what has existed, even when what has existed is profoundly and naturally human.