Pondering Tidbits of Truth - November 8, 2013

Photography©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.

Archbishop Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.

"Catholics have a duty to work tirelessly for human dignity at every stage of life, and to demand the same of their lawmakers. But some issues are jugular. Some issues take priority. Abortion, immigration law, international trade policy, the death penalty and housing for the poor are all vitally important issues. But no amount of calculating can make them equal in gravity. The right to life comes first. It precedes and undergirds every other social issue or group of issues. This is why Blessed John XXIII listed it as the first human right in his great encyclical on world peace, Pacem in Terris and as the U.S. bishops stressed in their 1998 pastoral letter, Living the Gospel of Life, the right to life is the foundation of every other right."

 

(How to Tell a Duck From a Fox)

Vatican Council II

"Christ did not bequeath to the Church a mission in the political, economic or social order: the purpose He assigned to it was a religious one."

(Gaudium et Spes)

 

 

Frank Moriss

"The Church is often condemned by the world, ridiculed by it, called old-fashioned, stubborn, implacable, unyielding, rigid. But that is because she refuses to surrender one shred, one comma or punctuation mark, of the message. The world approves of practices that Christ condemned, it seeks its own way, when Christ points to another. It sets its own standards, apart from the ones Christ taught. It calls lust self-interest and natural; it thinks dishonesty is clever; it demands that self comes first; its wise man is Polonius, who considered the only evil getting caught, the only folly not being true to one's self first of all.

The Church will not take that path, for it has word of another way, it had possession of news from on high which rejects the world's values as being hollow and deceptive. She will preach that news until the world's end - preach it faithfully, patiently, stubbornly, no matter how many or how few care to listen."