5. The Nominal Christian
No decent person wants free love; no decent person wants race suicide. They live, therefore, not by principle but by a compromise between principles; they are in favour of divorce, but not of easy divorce, of small families but not of too small families. Consequently, they feel themselves responsible for the decision where exactly the line shall be drawn, within the generous limits which our legal system allows. They do not like the responsibility; who would? Who, in tampering with institutions so sacred as those of the family, would not like to feel that he had an authority behind him, a "warrant" from somewhere to ratify his behaviour? If only there were some great spiritual institution which would act, in these matters, as a sort of public conscience, guiding, from a higher point of vision, the moral choice made by the individual!
So, naturally, he feels; unfortunately, he does not feel that the views of any non-Catholic denomination are worth having, even if they are discoverable. He knows that the advice of an individual clergyman will be unofficial and inexpert. He knows, if he has followed the course of recent ecclesiastical deliberations, that representatives of Christian thought speak with an uncertain voice on such subjects. He respects our Church for having, at least, definite opinions and fixed rules. He respects it, although he disagrees with it. He thinks us far too severe in forbidding remarriage after divorce, in forbidding the artificial restriction of the family; but although he disagrees with us for the rules we have, he respects us for having rules. If only the people whom we value as advisers would give us the advice we want!
--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927
4. Gaia Worship
I am in the habit of walking on the earth, not of worshipping it.
--St. Clement of Alexandria
3. Social Justice
It is too clear that social justice means different things to different
people. One essential point that distinguishes the Catholic Church's
notion of social justice from its secular counterpart has to do with the
concept of personal virtue ... The secular world compartmentalizes the
personal and the social, holding that what one does in his personal life
-- whether as a private citizen or as the president of a nation -- has
little or no relevance to what he does on a social level. The Church
understands social justice as a continuity of the personal and the
social, the secular world does not ... The Church maintains that, in
order to have social justice, we must first have virtuous people. The
secular world maintains that social justice does not require virtuous
people, only good programs. For the Church, social justice is a personal
virtue; for the secular world, it is a political accomplishment. The
Church believes that good people make good social programs; the secular
world believes that good social programs make good people. Concerning
social justice, the Church and the secular world have very little in
common.
2. Happiness
God cannot give us happiness and peace apart from Himself because it is not there. There is no such thing.
--C.S. Lewis
1. Pedophilia in the Middle Ages
Any cleric or monk who seduces young men or boys, or who is apprehended in kissing or in any shameful situation, shall be publicly flogged and shall lose his clerical tonsure. Thus shorn, he shall be disgraced by spitting in his face, bound in iron chains, wasted by six months of close confinement, and for three days each week put on barley bread given him toward evening. Following this period, he shall spend a further six months living in a small segregated courtyard in custody of a spiritual elder, kept busy with manual labor and prayer, subjected to vigils and prayers, forced to walk at all times in the company of two spiritual brothers, never again allowed to associate with young men.
--St. Peter Damian, Letter 31:38. To Pope Leo IX, A.D. 1049.
