"the classical metaphysics [practiced by Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas] need not blush at its fecund alliance with technology"

Source

     "Despite the rejoinders that it is possible to formulate in face of the accusation that metaphysics has bonds with artifaction [(la technique, technics, technology)], it therefore appears clearly that these bonds, if in fact real, can be understood much more positively than is suggested by the philosophy of Meßkirch [(i.e. Heidegger)].  Its critique here is finally fecund in this [respect], that it obliges one to bring to light the characteristics by which a classical metaphysics precisely escapes it.  It in fact obliges one to recognize the analogy of the causes and their non-reduction to the formal cause.  It forces a revalorization of the causes material, efficient, and final.  But more profoundly still, it obliges one to look more closely into [(à s’interroger sur)] the first efficient cause’s mode of action.  It underscores its bond with the wisdom that can also extend ultimately beyond all preoccupation with artifaction [(toute preoccupation technique)], because in the first cause resides an understanding [(connaissance)] of the causes, and because the [human] search for the causes [of a phenomenon] results in a partial accession to that ultimate understanding.  At the same time it puts a finger on the effect of this cause, namely the existence [(l’être, i.e. esse)] of the entity[, not to mention the very existence and operation of the causes].  [And] finally, it accomplishes in its own way the [very] program to which Heidegger at times (for example in the lecture 'Contribution to the question of Being') attaches himself, namely, a revivification or appropriation of metaphysics by the question of Being, because it [(the question of Being)] has been lost from view, and concerning which [program of revivification] one might ask oneself why Heidegger himself did not carry it through to success.

     . . . As distinguished from the transcendental metaphysics that developed out of the work of Scotus, "the classical metaphysics [practiced by Plato, Aristotle, and Aquinas] need not blush at its fecund alliance with artifaction [(la technique)].  It rediscovers, inasmuch as [it] is a form of wisdom [(selon ce qu’est la sagesse)], the reception of being through the causes, and [it] renews [its friendship] with the question of Being that lies at its root [(origine)], without having to pass first through negativity and anguish, but rather through astonishment and admiration."

     Michel Bastit, “Sagesse et technique,” Bulletin de littérature ecclésiastique 105, no. 3 (Jul-Sep 2004):  233-234 (217-234), italics mine.

"We ought to be as deeply pessimistic as is compatible with a belief in Divine Providence."

"As to whether we can even contrive a reopening of genuine public debate about rival conceptions of the good in contemporary America, let alone bring such a debate to an effective conclusion, the evidence, as I understand it, suggests that we ought to be as deeply pessimistic as is compatible with a belief in Divine Providence.  But as to the remaking of ourselves and our own local practices and institutions through a better understanding of what it is that, in an Aristotelian and Thomistic perspective, the unity of moral theory and practice now require of us, we have as much to hope for as we have to do, and not least within the community of this university."

     Alasdair MacIntyre, "The privatization of good," The review of politics 52, no. 3 (Summer 1990):  360-361 (344-361).

"When the Almighty himself condescends to address mankind in their own language, his meaning, luminous as it may be, is rendered dim and doubtful, by the cloudy medium through which it is communicated."

     [James Madison], The Federalist no. 37 (the Daily advertiser (New York), 11 January 1788, on "An abstract view of the subject"). 

"a proper distribution of the public burthens"

"Happy it is when the interest which the government has in the preservation of its own power, coincides with a proper distribution of the public burthens, and tends to guard the least wealthy part of the community from oppression!"

     [Alexander Hamilton], The Federalist no. 36 (the New-York packet, 8 January 1788, on "The representations of interests and federal taxation").  Hamilton is speaking here of "commercial imposts" imposed by federal rather than state regulation, and argues that "any real difficulty in the exercise of the power of internal taxation . . . must naturally tend to make it a fixed point of policy in the national administration to go as far as may be practicable in making the luxury of the rich tributary to the public treasury, in order to diminish the necessity of those impositions, which might create dissatisfaction in the poorer and most numerous classes of the society."

"Our transgressions, by which [our] adversaries" rule over us

Our transgressions, by which (the) adversaries rule, wipe away, O Lord, and in your compassion everywhere defend us.

"Delicta nostra, domine, quibus adversa dominantur, absterge, et tua nos ubique miseratione custodi."

     Opening 8th-century collect (Gelasian etc.) for the Twentieth Sunday after Pentecost later dropped from the Roman missal in favor of its contemporary, "Largire, quaesumus, domine, fidelibus tuis indulgentiam placatus et pacem", itself (I think) abandoned after Vatican II.  According to Corpus orationum no. 1062, the last occurrence of "Delicta nostra, domine" was in the mid-11th-century Udalricianus.

Is the Superior General Catholic?

Giuseppe Cardinal Pizzardo, prefect of the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities, "expressed his disdain for [college and university] administrators who were in constant communication with Jesuit authorities in Rome, but never with the Catholic authorities (the emphasis was his)."

     James Tunstead Burtchaell, The dying of the light:  the disengagement of colleges and universities from their Christian churches (Grand Rapids, MI:  Eerdmans, 1998), 588.  This was somewhere between 1949 and 1965.

Well, good for her. And count me among those who "seemed to be sure what was right and what was wrong."

"Gerty Pestalozzi and Eduard Thurneysen really tried to understand the different problems each of the three had and did not advise a certain direction.  But others seemed to be sure what was right and what was wrong. . . .  His mother very often expressed how little she agreed to what he was doing.  In 1933, when they consider the option of divorce, he tells his mother that he is tired of having to discuss all issues with her:  'Again:  I would be very happy if you could tell yourself that a man who is 47 years old should be able to know what he does when he comes to such a conclusion after a marriage of 20 years, and if you could trust this son of yours who after all is not unfamiliar to you that he does not want unscrupulously [(er nicht gewissenlos will)].'  His mother responds the following day harshly that God’s commandments are for all.  'What is the most brilliant theology good for, if it is to be shipwrecked in one’s own house [(Was hilft die scharfsinnigste Theologie, wenn sie im eigenen Hause Schiffbruch leidet)]?'"

     Christiane Tietz, "Karl Barth and Charlotte von Kirschbaum," Theology today 74, no. 2 (July 2017):  106-107 (86-111).  There are problems with this article:  the fact that the wife of Barth's youth gets only a few lines in a footnote by way of a biography, but Charlotte, nine short paragraphs in a eponymously entitled sub-section of the main body; the clumsy translations; Tietz' (starstruck?) refusal to cut bait (as exemplified by the condescension exhibited here towards those who "seemed to be sure what was right and what was wrong", as well as the word "harshly"); and so forth.  And then there are the serious problems with Barth as outlined by (but by no means condemned in) it:  the compromised life, the theology of personal "experience [(Erfahrung)]" (!) and feeling constructed to justify it, and the implications of the said theology of personal experience for the very great confusions our own time, despite Barth's purported "No!" to all of that (though of course I am by no means a Barth specialist).  If this makes me "'the legalist that under different circumstances [(i.e. without the persistent adultery) Barth] might have become'" (111), then so be it.  For "We reject the false doctrine that with human vainglory the Church could place the Word and work of the Lord in the service of self-chosen desires, purposes and plans" (The Barmen Declaration).
     See now also, presumably, Christiane Tietz, Karl Barth:  a life in conflict, trans. Victoria Barnett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021).