No "there" there

"Truth, we know, is so delicate that, if we make the slightest deviation from it, we fall into error; but this alleged error is so extremely finespun that, if we diverge from it in the slightest degree, we fall back upon the truth.  There is positively nothing between this obnoxious proposition and the truth but an imperceptible point.  The distance between them is so impalpable that I was in terror lest, from pure inability to perceive it, I might, in my over-anxiety to agree with the doctors of the Sorbonne, place myself in opposition to the doctors of the Church."

"La verité est si delicate, que si peu qu’on s’en retire, one tombe dans l’erreur:  mais cette erreur est si deliée, que sans mesme s’en éloigner, one se trouve dans la verité.  Il n’y a qu’un point imperceptible entre cette proposition et la foy.  La distance en est si insensible, que j’ay eü peur en ne la voyant pas, de me rendre contraire aux Docteurs de l’Eglise, pour me rendre trop conforme aux Docteurs de Sorbonne."

     Blaise Pascal, Provincial letters no. 3, trans. M'Crie (GBWW, 1st (1952) edition, vol. 33, p. 16).  =Brunschvicg Œuvres of 1904-1914, vol. 4, pp. 215-216.  It is a question here of "an imperceptible heresy" that none of "the Molinist doctors" so much as attempted to specify:

Such is the specimen of the way in which ['most people'] are giving vent to their feelings [of frustration].  But these are by far too deep-thinking people.  You and I, who make no pretension to such extraordinary penetration, may keep ourselves quite easy about the whole affair.  What!  would we be wiser than our masters?  No:  let us take example from them, and not undertake what they have not ventured upon.

He prayed as well as died for us

"magna Dei propter salutem nostram benignitas pariter et pietas, ut non contentus quod nos sanguine suo redimeret adhunc pro nobis amplius et rogaret."

     St. Cyprian, De dominica oratione 30.  Latin from CSEL 3.1, p. 289, ll. 3-5.  I was put onto this by the Office of readings for the Saturday of the 11th week in Ordinary time, Liturgy of the hours.  But there are several other translations, too, including the following:

"Great alike is God's kindness and compassion for our salvation, so that, not content with having redeemed us with His blood, he in addition also prayed for us" (trans. Deferrari, FC 36, 153).

"masters of the popular belief [(maistres de la creance des peuples)]"

"'Flatter not yourselves,' said [my companion] to the monk [(the Dominican or "New Thomist")], 'with having saved the truth; had she not found other defenders, in your feeble hands she must have perished.  By admitting into the Church the name of her enemy, you have admitted the enemy himself.  Names are inseparable from things.  If the term sufficient [(suffisante)] grace be once established, it will be vain for you to protest that you understand by it a grace which is not sufficient [(insuffisante)].  Your protest will be held inadmissible.  Your explanation would be scouted as odious in the world, where men speak more ingenuously about matters of infinitely less moment.  The Jesuits will gain a triumph—it will be their grace, which is sufficient in fact, and not yours, which is only so in name, that will pass as established, and the converse of your creed will become an article of faith."

     Blaise Pascal, Provincial letters no. 2, as translated by M'Crie, but with M'Crie's italics modified to match the French (GBWW, 1st (1952) ed., vol. 33, p. 12).  For the French, see vol. 4 pp. 171-172  of the standard 1904-1914 Brunschvicg edition of the Œuvres.  Headline from the previous paragraph.  According to Pascal, the Dominicans agreed with the Jansenists as to the substance of the matter, but insisted upon using the terminology of the Jesuits, and thus obscured the said concurrence.  From the first Provincial, "Have we not agreed not to explain that word, . . . but to use it . . . without saying what [exactly] it signifies?"

Philosophers and journalists have mostly turned tail

      "What first intrigued me about gender-identity ideology was the circularity of its core mantra, 'transwomen are women', which raises and leaves unanswered the question of what, then, the word 'woman' means. What led me to think further was the vilification of anyone who questioned it. Philosophers, who freely debate such thorny topics as whether it is moral to kill disabled babies or remove kidneys from unwilling people for donation, have, with few exceptions, been cowed into silence regarding the consequences of redefining 'man' and 'woman'. Journalists, who pride themselves on ferreting out the stories that someone, somewhere doesn't want them to print, have taken one look at paediatric transitioning, males winning women's sporting competitions and women being sacked for talking about the reality of biological sex—and, again with just a few exceptions, turned tail.
     "What finally pushed me to write this book, however, was meeting some of gender-identity ideology's most poignant victims. They are detransitioners: people who took hormonal and sometimes surgical steps towards transition, only to realize that they had made a catastrophic mistake."

     Helen Joyce, Trans:  when ideology meets reality (London:  OneWorld, 2021), 9.  On the other hand, "I will not seek to balance stories of those for whom transition has been a success, and those for whom it has been a failure.  Whether or not transition makes people happier is an important question for individuals and clinicians, especially when it involves irreversible hormonal or surgical interventions.  But it is irrelevant to evaluating the truth of gender-identity ideology, and to whether self-declared gender should replace sex across society" (5).

"the woman more than the man represents the character of creaturely being and activity in its full purity."

     "Here, then, is why the Church can never relinquish the image of Bridegroom and Bride as descriptive of the relation between Christ and the Church.  Here is why she must continue to limit the specialized (albeit indispensable) function of the ministerial priesthood to men.  Here, finally, is why she must continue to oppose the confusion of genders evident today in the description of homosexuality as an 'alternative lifestyle,' and in the dominant feminist drift toward androgyny.
     "In a word, what is finally at stake in the Church’s defense of her marian-feminine form, and of a (trinitarian) complementarity between genders, is her continuing ability to act on behalf of the future of human civilization."

     David L. Schindler, "Catholic theology, gender, and the future of Western civilization," Communio:  international Catholic review 20 (Summer 1993):  239 (200-239).  Cf. Scheeben.