"A Church with little attention to doctrine is not a more pastoral Church, but . . . a more ignorant Church."

"Una Chiesa con poca attenzione alla dottrina non è una Chiesa più pastorale, ma è una Chiesa più ignorante."

     Cardinal Caffara to Matteo Matzuzzi.  "'Solo un cieco può negare che nella Chiesa ci sia grande confusione'. Intervista al cardinale Caffarra," Il Foglio, 14 January 2016.  I was put onto this by (and am primarily indebted to) Crux.  But I took the Italian from Il Sismografo.

"There is no time for thought, we think only of outcomes."

     Philip Terry, Du Bellay:  Like Cataln Anarchy, Crater 33 (London:  Crater Press, August 2015) as quoted by Jeremy Noel-Tod, in "Books of the year 2016," Times literary supplement no. 5930 (November 25, 2016), 13 (12-13).  "Philip Terry's Dante's Inferno (2014) was an inspired translation of Hell to the University of Essex.  Anyone working in higher education at the moment will find Du Bellay, his new pamphlet of campus verse from Oystercatcher Press, a bitter tonic. . . ."
     From the Crater Press website, above:  "Crater 33: August 2015. Philip Terry’s Du Bellay - Like Catalan Anarchy, with a lino-cut by Tim Atkins. Letterpressed broadside, three colours (run of 60). Out of print."

"Preaching is a kind of instrument by which the Church of God is constructed."

"Praedicatio is quoddam instrumentum, quo Ecclesia Dei fabricata est."

     Paris, Bibl. Nat. Cod. lat. 455, as quoted by Zoltan Alszeghy, S.J., "Die Theologie des Wortes Gottes bei den mittelalterlichen Theologen," Gregorianum 39 (1958):  689 (685-705), quoting Jean Leclercq, "Le magistère du prédicateur," Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 21 (1946):  113 (105-147).

Harder boundaries appeal to sharper minds

Department of History,
Princeton University

"Alas, harder boundaries appealed to sharper minds."

     Peter Brown, "Recapturing Jerusalem at the Met," The New York review of books 63, no. 19 (December 8, 2016):  13 (10-14).  "But the problem of violence remains.  Creativity led to greater confidence in one's own views and to increased impatience with the compromises and ambiguities on which real tolerance had depended.  Alas, harder boundaries appealed to sharper minds.  We need only look at the pileup of splendid texts and maps related to Jerusalem produced in the universities, monasteries, and courts of Christian Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to realize that we are witnessing the emergence of a learned intolerance that cut deeper, in some ways, into the texture of the Middle East than did the swords of the Crusaders."  Quoting Christopher MacEvitt, The crusades and the Christian world of the East:  rough tolerance (2008):  "the first Crusaders in the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem practiced a 'rough tolerance' in relation to the non-Catholic Christian populations who had survived in large numbers throughout Syria and Palestine.  Adventurers in an age of flux, the Franks took things as they came.  They did not ask too many questions about the confessional loyalties of the local Christians.  Potentially irresoluble conflicts of belief between the groups of Christians in the Holy Land were finessed through 'the dark and quiet way of rough tolerance.'  It was 'an era of unspoken compromise and unacknowledged ecumenism.'"  But "This moment passed.  By the end of the Middle Ages, even the most open-hearted Western pilgrims to Jerusalem carried with them a carapace of notions about the Middle East that already bore an uncomfortable resemblance to our own stereotypes of the region."