"'it's happening again'"

      "Judging by the historical record, when a psychic epidemic hits, doctors often feel moved to centre interventions on the female reproductive system.  Take the 'reflex doctrine' of the nineteenth century, which held that a disturbance in any part of the body could cause malfunction in any other, by a 'reflex action' of the nerves travelling via the spine.  Doctors regarded the female sex organs as particularly prone to exerting these malign influences, and removed them to treat an astonishing array of conditions:  paralysis, fits and ailments of the heart, thyroid, stomach, skin, ears and eyes.  When [Jungian therapist Lisa] Marchiano realised that girls who said they felt like boys were being given drugs and surgeries that would leave them sterile, at first she thought she must be misunderstanding something.  'And then I thought:  no, Lisa, this happens all the time, and it's happening again.'"

     Helen Joyce, Trans:  when ideology meets reality (London:  Oneworld, 2021), 107.  Joyce goes on to speak of the record on "multiple-personality disorder (MPD; now called dissociative identity disorder) and recovered-memory syndrome" (108 ff.).  Marchiano:  "'Jungians know that to concretise something symbolic is a very bad idea'" (106).  Unfortunately, Joyce doesn't cite anything by Marchiano, not even an interview.  (Also, she treats elsewhere the problems with the untransitioned sheer assertion now so characteristic of late "gender-identity ideology.")

May hope make its appeal to the promises of God

Instead, while the sun sheds [(conficit, produces) the light of] day, | may a profound faith be ignited [in us], | may hope make [its] appeal to the promises [of God], | may charity unite [us] in love [(conjugat)] with Christ.

Sed sol diem dum conficit,
fides profunda ferveat,
spes ad promissa provocet,
Christo coniungat caritas.

     Stanza 5 of Fulgentis auctor aetheris, an anonymous 5th- or 6th-century hymn, as reproduced (and dated) in Universalis.  "Instead, while the sun confects day".  I have not done any further research, but the translation in One hundred Latin hymns:  Ambrose to Aquinas (ed. and trans. Peter G. Walsh with Christopher Husch, Dumbarton Oaks medieval library (Cambridge:  Harvard University Press, 2012)), at least, seems wrong-footed in so many ways:

But when the sun shuts down the day,
Let our faith ferment deep within,
hope spur us to our promises,
and love unite us close to Christ.

"that we, who have not followed him in innocence, may imitate him in penance"

"O GOD, the dispenser of heavenly gifts, Who in the angelic youth Aloysius [Gonzaga] didst combine wonderful innocence of life with penance, grant by his merits and prayers that we, who have not followed him in innocence, may imitate him in penance. Through our Lord..."

"CŒLÉSTIUM donórum distribútor, Deus, qui in angélico júvene Aloísio miram vitæ innocéntiam pari cum pœniténtia sociásti: ejus méritis et précibus concéde; ut, innocéntem non secúti, pœniténtem imitémur. Per Dominum..."

     Hat tip Peter Kwasniewski.

"the desert of this world, parched by . . . ideological . . . systems"

"Like the manna for the people of Israel, for every Christian generation the Eucharist is the indispensable nourishment that sustains them as they cross the desert of this world, parched by the ideological and economic systems that do not promote life but rather humiliate it."

     Pope Benedict XVI, Corpus Christi homily, Square in front of the Basilica of Saint John Lateran, Rome, Thursday, 7 June 2007.

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?"