Pondering Tidbits of Truth - January 12, 2017

(Photo©Michael Seagriff)

Pondering Tidbits of Truth is my simple and inadequate way of providing nuggets of spiritual wisdom for you to chew on from time to time.

Justice Antonin Scalia 

“[Christ’s] message was not the need to eliminate hunger or misery or misfortune, but rather the need for each individual to love and help the hungry, the miserable, and the unfortunate. To the extent that the State takes upon itself one of the corporal works of mercy that could and would have been undertaken privately, it deprives individuals of an opportunity for sanctification and deprives the Body of Christ of an occasion for the interchange of love among its members.

I wonder to what extent the decimation of women’s religious orders throughout the West is attributable to the governmentalization of charity. Consider how many orphanages, hospitals, schools and homes for the elderly used to be provided by orders of nuns. They’re almost all gone – as are the nuns who ran them. The State now provides or pays for these services through salaried social workers. Even purely individual charity must surely have been affected. ‘What need for me to give a beggar a handout? Do I not pay taxes for government food stamps and municipally run shelters and soup kitchens? The man asking me for a dollar probably wants it for liquor!’ There is, of course, neither love nor merit in the taxes I pay for those services. I pay them because I have to… The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.” 

 (Excerpted from How I Got Schooled by Scrooge and Antonin Scalia)

St. Vincent of Lerins

"...if one yields ground on any single point of Catholic doctrine, one will later have to yield to another, and again in another, and so on until such surrenders come to be something normal and acceptable. And, when one gets used to rejecting dogma bit by bit, the final result will be the repudiation of it altogether." 

(From Narrations, 23)

St. John Paul II

"Open the gates wide to Christ! Have confidence in Him. Take the risk of following Him. Obviously this demands that you should come out of yourselves, or our own way of reasoning, or your prudence. It demands that you leave behind your indifference, your self-sufficiency, those un-Christian habits that you have perhaps acquired. Yes, that demands renunciation, a conversion, which first of all you must want to want; want to pray for in your prayer, and want to put into practice. Let Christ be for you the way, the truth and the life. Let Him be your salvation and your happiness. Let Him take over the whole of your life so that with Him you can live it in all its dimensions. Let all your relationships, activities, feelings, thoughts, be integrated in Him, or, so to speak, "Christified'. I wish that with Christ you may come to recognize God as the beginning and end of your existence."

(June 1, 1980, Parc des Princes)