"No better time to be a Catholic"

"At various times in the John Paul II era there would be complaints from conservative Catholics, asking why, if liberals believe so intensely in moral and doctrinal transformation, if they are so committed to having (for instance) married or female clergy, intercommunion with other Christian churches, acceptance of homosexuality and contraception and even perhaps abortion, they don’t join one of the numerous Christian bodies where those transformations have taken place? Why be a dissenting and disgruntled Roman Catholic when you can just be a faithful Episcopalian or Congregationalist?

"The answer, surely, is that the religious-liberal project believes itself to be God’s project, that its tireless advocates believe themselves to be doing the Holy Spirit’s work, and it proves very little about God’s ultimate intentions if a few modestly sized bodies in the firmament of mainline Protestantism embrace the sexual revolution. You will only know and prove that God wants liberalization when liberalization comes to the church of Rome and its billion-odd Catholics. You can’t be fully vindicated, fully assured of Providence’s favor, unless you change that church.

"A similar logic applies to conservative Catholics [under Pope Francis and Fiducia supplicans] today."

     Ross Douthat, "No better time to be a Catholic:  Catholicism's problems are the problems of the world," Opinion, The New York times, 22 December 2023, underscoring mine.

Fiat of God, fiat of Mary

"In the days of the creation of the world, when God was uttering His living and mighty 'Let there be', the word of the Creator brought creatures into the world.  But on that day, unexampled in the life of the world, when Divine Miriam uttered Her brief and obedient 'So be it', I hardly dare to say what happened then—the word of the creature brought the Creator down into the world."

     Philaret (LC:  Filaret) Drozdov, Metropolitan of Moscow (1782-1867), Sermon 23 on the Annunciation (1823), as quoted by Leonid Ouspensky on p. 172 of Leonid Ouspensky and Vladimir Lossky, The meaning of icons, trans. G. E. H. Palmer & E. Kadloubovsky (Crestwood, NY:  St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1982).  Fiat is the term in the Vulgate of Gen 1 (cf. Γενηθήτω), just as in the Vulgate of Lk 1:38 (cf. γένοιτό).  Since I don't have ready access to a modern printed edition of the Слова и речи (Slova i rechi), and haven't yet located it in the 19th-century printings that have been scanned into repositories like the Hathi Trust Digital Library, I'll have to trust for now the text of this sermon available here, and hope I've selected the right words exactly:

Во дни творения мира, когда Бог изрекал Свое живое и мощное: «да будет», слово Творца производило в мир твари: но в сей безпримерный в бытии мира день, когда Божественная Мариам изрекла свое кроткое и послушное «буди», – едва дерзаю выговорить, что тогда соделалось, – слово твари низводит в мир Творца.

     My thanks to Dr. Richard B. Steele for quoting this in English originally.

"it takes only one undeniable fact to topple the carefully constructed denial of the existence of such facts"

"Historians have on occasion been reprimanded for believing in the existence of facts. . . . [But] in the end, it takes only one undeniable fact to topple the carefully constructed denial of the existence of such facts."

     David C. Steinmetz, "Doing history as theologians," Calvin theological journal 50, no. 2 (November 2015):  175-176 (174-180).