Thursday Candid Quotes

You say that you are my judge; I do not know if you are; but take good heed not to judge me ill, because you would put yourself in great peril. - Saint Joan of Arc

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Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be "tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine", seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times. We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one's own ego and desires. We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism. An "adult" faith is not a faith that follows the trends of fashion and the latest novelty; a mature adult faith is deeply rooted in friendship with Christ. It is this friendship that opens us up to all that is good and gives us a criterion by which to distinguish the true from the false, and deceit from truth. We must develop this adult faith; we must guide the flock of Christ to this faith. And it is this faith - only faith - that creates unity and is fulfilled in love. On this theme, St Paul offers us as a fundamental formula for Christian existence some beautiful words, in contrast to the continual vicissitudes of those who, like children, are tossed about by the waves: make truth in love. Truth and love coincide in Christ. To the extent that we draw close to Christ, in our own lives too, truth and love are blended. Love without truth would be blind; truth without love would be like "a clanging cymbal" (I Cor 13: 1). - Homily of His Eminence Card. Joseph Ratzinger, Mass Pro Eligendo Romano Pontifice

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Without a clear moral vision, we devolve into moral relativism, and from there, into oblivion. - Ben Shapiro

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In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. - Theodore Dalrymple (Anthony Malcolm Daniels).

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Children are entitled to life. We conceive them and so we owe them our care and our protection. This may not be a dictate of law anymore, but it is a dictate of love. - Matt Walsh

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Once we remove the male and female distinction in human nature, we deny the vision that the human person is a fruit of God’s creative act. We then become an abstraction who chooses for ourselves what nature we want to be, said Pope Benedict XVI. The idea of man and woman are disputed, he says, and the family is not a place of reciprocity, where the spiritual, physical and generative gift of oneself takes place.

Without this understanding of human dignity and the generative self-gift of our human nature, we can fall into relativism that predicates a fragmented anthropology based on feelings and emotions. This is especially seen in young people who follow the transgender trend.

As Catholics, we must pray for and help those who may be struggling with gender dysphoria, especially young people. The Church calls us to compassionate care, while always affirming God’s creation as good. - Sister Nancy Usselmann, FSP

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The short version of my detransition story for those who want the bare details is that when I was fifteen, I was introduced to gender ideology on Tumblr and began to call myself nonbinary. Over the next few years, I would continue to go deeper and deeper down the trans identity rabbit hole, and by the time I was eighteen, I saw myself as a “trans man”, otherwise known as “FTM”. Shortly after my eighteenth birthday, I made an appointment at a Planned Parenthood to begin a testosterone regimen. At my first appointment, I was prescribed testosterone, and I would remain on this regimen for a year and a half. It had an extremely negative effect on my mental health, and I finally admitted what a disaster it had been when I was 19, sometime around February or March 2018. When the disillusionment fully set in, I stopped the testosterone treatment and began the process of getting my life back on track. It has not been easy, and the whole experience seriously derailed my life in ways I could never have foreseen when I was that fifteen-year-old kid playing with pronouns on Tumblr. - Helena Kerschner