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(Photo©Michael Seagriff)
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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)
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