"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."

"the absence of any separation in Christ between his decision and its realization"

"to the Father's decision to hand over his Son must correspond the Son's decision to hand himself over.  Where should we locate this decision in the life of Jesus?  At the very beginning:  the baptism in the river Jordan already signifies Jesus' free choice to be numbered among sinners and engulfed with them in the waters of death, in order to emerge into paschal life.  We could say the same about the prayer on the mountain of the Transfiguration.  The effect of this prayer of consent to the Father's will is the anticipated gift of the glory of the Resurrrection, which shines forth on the Lord's body.

     "The Son's entire life, then, is a ratification of the Father's plan.  And yet, nothing has been accomplished until the effects of this ratification are communicable to others.  For this, it is necessary for Christ to give to those who believe in him the grace of the possibility of sharing in his decision.  This is what takes place in the Eucharist.

     "The words pronounced during the Last Supper express a decision. . . .

     ". . . It is still only a decision, since the event to which it corresponds is yet to come.  Yet this decision is already efficacious, so that the disciples present at the last meal participate, by anticipation, in the reality that it announces.  How is this possible?  Quite simply, if we can put it thus, it is thanks to the absence of any separation in Christ between his decision and its realization.  This is so in spite of the temporal interval.

     "This clashes with our everyday experience.  There is not only a temporal gap between our decisions and their execution; the gap is above all qualitative.  The promises we make, even the most solemn, are more or less hypothetical, and if we do not end up entirely denying them, we never fully fulfill them.  It is completely different for Christ:  his decision is of such a nature that he can already, before the actual event, share in its fruits.  This is so in spite of the bitter agony of Gethsemane, which shows how much it cost him to go to the very end of his kenosis, without in any way questioning the decision itself, of which the kenosis is the fruit:  'No one takes my life from me, but I lay it down of my own accord.  I have power to lay it down, and I have power to take it up again' (Jn 10:17-18).

     "If Jesus has the power to give his life (no one takes it from him), it is not by virtue of some magical ability, but by virtue of his love for the Father and for his brothers, which brings his filial obedience to perfection.  And if he has the power to take it up again (that is, in the Resurrection), it is not by virtue of a Docetism that would have him appear dead when he is really not, but because the way in which he died was fatal to death.  If the Father resurrrected him, 'it is not his death that pleased the Father, but the will of the one who freely died' [(Bernard of Clairvaux, De erroribus Petri Abaelardi, 8, 21 (PL ;182, 1070)].

     "The disciple, in turn, by sharing sacramentally in Jesus' decision, can draw the necessary strength to live his own decision to the end. . . ."

     Jean-Pierre Batut, "The kenotic decision of the Son and the filial obedience of the Christian," trans. Annie Hounsokou, Communio:  international Catholic review 42, no. 3 (Fall 2015):  372-374 (363-380), underscoring mine.

"one big Wittenberg door with an ever-expanding target where a nail should be."

First things

"The religious right establishment is one big Wittenberg door with an ever-expanding target where a nail should be."

"the 2016 campaign did not provoke this crisis.  This was a pre-existing condition.  The religious right turns out to be the people the religious right warned us against."

     Russell D. Moore, "Can the religious right be saved?" (the 2016 Erasmus Lecture), First things no. 269 (January 2017):  36, 37 (33-42).  See also the video.  This lecture is loaded with zingers.

"our great pursuit, the great name we wanted"

"Our single object and ambition was virtue, and a life of hope in the blessings . . . to come [(Ἓν δ' ἀμφοτέροις ἔργον ἡ ἀρετή, καὶ τὸ ζῆν πρὸς τὰς μελλούσας ἐπίδας)]":

Different men have different names, which they owe to their parents, or to themselves, that is, to their own achievements.  But our great pursuit, the great name we wanted, was to be Christians, to be called Christians [(ἡμῖν δὲ τὸ μέγα πρᾶγμα καὶ ὄναμα χριστιανοὺς καὶ εἶναι καὶ ὀνομάζεσθαι)].

     Gregory of Nazianzus, Oratio 43, in laudem Basilii Magni 20 and 21, as translated in Liturgy of the hours 1, 1287.  SC 384 (1992), 168; ed. Boulenger (1908), 102; PG 36, col. 524.  FC 22, trans. Leo P. McCauley, S.J. (1968 [1953]), 45:

Different men have different names, derived from their ancestors or their own pursuits and deeds.  Our great concern, our great name, was to be Christians and be called Christians.

LNPNF 2, 402:

Different men have different names, derived from their fathers, their families, their pursuits, their exploits:  we had but one great business and name—to be and to be called Christians. . . .