"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).

"is the light of our own reality still faintly reaching us only from the death of our own star, far back in time?"

Berkley Center for Religion, Peace & World Affairs

"Liberalism seeks to sustain history beyond its 'end,' beyond the collapse of a civilization, such that all the imperial voyaging of the West has been but the voyaging of a specter, of a Flying Dutchman always uneasily aware that its mariners have shot the symbolic albatross, to mix my allegories.  The upshot of this voyaging has been the pillaging and destroying of all other histories, with the consequence that the liberal ending of history has now indeed been universalized.  Yet this liberal ending seems to be now itself threatened with extinction, even if what could come next remains wholly obscure.  Or in other terms, the reality that, back in port, Latin civilization ended several hundred years ago returns to haunt what could now be our universal voyage to literal extinction.
     "So is the light of our own reality still faintly reaching us only from the death of our own star, far back in time?  One could argue so."

     John Milbank, "Beyond progressivism:  toward a personalist metaphysics of history," The hedgehog review:  critical reflections on contemporary culture 25, no. 2 (Summer 2023):  54-55 (46-61).  Nietzsche might say, Yes, the death of God; Milbank might say, Yes, the loss of an adequate metaphysics of history.

Throw by all the libraries in the world

      "As was true of most Methodist leaders of the time, including Bishop Asbury, Cartwright was opposed not to higher education but, rather, to the use of theological schools for the designing of 'man-made' ministers.  Nevertheless, the Methodists were in no hurry to found colleges.  Between 1780 and 1829, forty colleges and universities were successfully founded in the United States.  Of these, 13 were Presbyterian, 1 was Catholic, 1 was German Reformed, 1 was a joint effort by the Congregationalists and Presbyterians, and 11 were public (W. W. Sweet, 1964b).  None was Methodist.  Indeed, just prior to the founding of Indiana Asbury University in 1837, a committee of the Indiana Conference gave reassurance that it would never be a 'manufactory in which preachers are to be made.'  Thus the founders kept faith with the bishop’s memory as well as with the spirit of American Methodism as expressed in the Discipline of 1784, which advised preachers never to let study interfere with soul-saving:  'If you can do but one, let your studies alone.  We would throw by all the libraries in the world rather than be guilty of the loss of one soul.'"

     Roger Finke and Rodney Stark, The churching of America, 1776-2005:  winners and losers in our religious economy, 2nd ed. (Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 77.  As that last contextualizing link shows, this is John Wesley at least as far back as 1766, if not further (and was very widely reprinted; follow up on this sometime).

May the true faith he taught so well be always our light and our strength

"Lord, may the prayers of Saint John Damascene help us, and may the true faith he taught so well always be our light and our strength.  We ask this through".

My translation:  Grant us [the boon] of being helped by the prayers of St. John the priest, so that the true faith, which he taught so exceptionally well, may be always our light and our strength.  Through.

"Praesta nobis, quaesumus, Domine, sancti Ioannis, presbyteri, precibus adiuvari, ut vera fides, quam ille excellenter docuit, sit semper lux et fortitudo nostra.  Per".

     Oratio for the Feast of St. John of Damascus (660-c. 750), 4 December, Liturgia horarum.  I have yet to find the one for the former feast of 27 December.  The prologue to the De fide orthodoxa included in the Liturgy of the hours is beautiful, too.

The womb of Mary encloses

Whom [dry] land, [deep] sea, [and bright] sky | cherish, adore, [and] proclaim, | he [all the while] governing th[at] tripartite machina [of the world], | the [virginal] close of Mary bears.

Quem terra, pontus, aethera
colunt, adorant, praedicant
trinam regentem machinam,
claustrum Mariae baiulat.

     Pseudo-Venantius Fortunatus, "Quem terra."  See "Carminvm spvriorvm Appendix" viii, MGH Auct. ant. 4.1 (1881), p. 385.  I have not found it in the three-volume edition of the Poèmes ed. Reydellet, Collection des Universités de France (Paris:  Les Belles Lettres, 1994-2004).