Quotes for a Weekend

There should be no unity with iniquity. ... Yes, we should strive for unity, but our unity should be based on the truths of our faith as found in Sacred Scripture and the constant Tradition of the Church. No one should want to be united on the path to perdition. - Bishop Thomas Paprocki

(T)o consent to the conception of a new being, through one’s own actions, is to make oneself responsible for an undertaking of nurturing and educating that child, which reaches at least 20 years into the future.  Since we cannot know the future, such an undertaking is reasonable only if it is regarded as a joint undertaking with someone who does know that future, that is, if we regard it as done with the approval and blessing of God in his providence. That is to say, for a father to conceive a child in openness to life, is for him to place himself under God: he recognizes himself as a subsidiary source of life and, therefore, since he has become a subsidiary agent, he enjoys a subsidiary authority. - Michael Pakaluk

And he who is not sufficiently courageous to defend his soul — don’t let him be proud of his ‘progressive’ views, and don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a distinguished figure or a general. Let him say to himself: I am a part of the herd and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and kept warm. - Aleksander Solzhenitsyn, Live Not By Lies

Courage is what it takes to stand up and speak; courage is also what it takes to sit down and listen. - Winston Churchill

Everything smaller than Heaven bores us because only Heaven is bigger than our hearts. - Peter Kreeft, Jesus-Shock

In our wanting to hallow the Father’s name, the Holy Spirit, the Spirit we received at our baptism, leads us to do the Father’s will. The doing of the Father’s will often, as followers of Jesus, leads us to take up our own individual crosses. Our crosses, as with Jesus, often fill us with dread – our anxieties over our marriages, families, work, health, the Church, and the world. Thus, doing the Father’s will leads us into temptation – fear of the evils that might befall us and those we love. When we pray “lead us not into temptation,” then, we are asking the Father to free us from the tempting foreboding that doing his will entails, and petitioning that he do so by delivering us from the evil that doing his will portends.  Moreover, we make this petition believing that, even if evil does befall us in this world, we are assured that the reward of doing the Father’s will leads, as in the case of Jesus, to our glory, a present glory, though one rejected by this sinful world, and the eternal fullness of glory that Jesus will bestow upon us at the end of time. This deeper Christocentric understanding of the petition “lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil” undercuts, I believe, the more simplistic and ill-founded interpretations that call for a change in the Our Father, a change that would be pastorally disastrous. This Christic interpretation is more in accord with our lived experience and truer to the Gospel that we strive to follow. - Fr. Thomas G. Weinandy, OFM, Cap.

Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions. - G.K. Chesterton