“If you want a church full of Catholics who know their faith, love their faith and practice their faith, give them a liturgy that is demanding, profound and rigourous. They will rise to the challenge.”
Source: Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church
“The ancient liturgy, with its poignant symbols and innumerable subtleties, is a prolonged courtship of the soul, enticing and drawing it onwards, leading it along a path to the mystical marriage, the wedding feast of heaven.”
Source: Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church
“Having the Mass in one's native language is no guarantee that a person will understand the mystery of the Mass. On the contrary, if the vesture of the ceremony is too familiar, the participants too easily thinks he has mastered what it's all about. The familiar becomes the routine, the routine becomes ignored. Our own language is a comfort zone that insulates us form the shock of the Gospel, the scandal of the Cross, the lure of the unknown. I would rather have a huge dose of foreignness, of music that is not current, words that are strange, language that is archaic, hieratic gestures that are grandly incongruous to a democratic society. A person thrown into this situation knows at least that he is dealing with something utterly different and possibly far deeper than his day-to-day occupations.”
Source: Resurgent in the Midst of Crisis: Sacred Liturgy, the Traditional Latin Mass, and Renewal in the Church
“Some dreams seem too big, but when you go after those dreams, you will succeed.”
Source: Exploring the Explosive Power of Big Dreams
“The spiritual muscles I hadn't used for decades began to acquire some tone, and since they were Catholic muscles too, it was natural to look for a church to work out in.
It was hard. Appalling though the predations exacted on the monastic liturgy were, they were nothing compared to the desecration exacted on the secular. Latin was gone entirely, replaced by dull, oppressive, anchorman English, slavishly translated from its sonorous source to be as plain and "direct" as possible. It didn't seem to have occurred to the well-meaning vandals who'd thrown out baby, bath, and bathwater that all ritual is a reaching out to the unknowable and can be accomplished only by the noncognitive: evocation, allusion, metaphor, incantation—the tools of the poet.”
Source: Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul
“The end justified the means, he told himself. The deceitful deeds left along the path leading to a clever man’s wealth were like a trail of bread crumbs. The crumbs would be quickly consumed by naïve birds and vermin, leaving the trail spotless, akin to a man grabbing abandoned, dirty money left on the street.”
Source: The Beasts of Success
“Knowing Tim was a sucker for logical deduction and facts, he would pursue that avenue to entice Tim to step into the realm of blurred ethical lines where right and wrong weren’t as apparent and defined, or didn’t even matter. Dale also knew that if he could convince Tim before he alighted at the subway’s terminus of his argument, Jeremy would assimilate to his ideology somewhere along the journey without any direct effort on his part.”
Source: The Beasts of Success
“Smart people, like himself, who had acquired money and power weren’t nice because they had learned that caring about and helping others made them exposed and vulnerable, which led to failure. One had to look out for number one to get “the money” and “the power” the cabbie spoke of. Dale knew that money and power were finite. They were limited resources you couldn’t simply spread around the world for everyone to enjoy. Crafty, competitive people knew this and fought hard to get their share of it. People like the cabbie were naïve enough to think everyone would be happy sharing an equal amount of the pie. They lived in a fantasy world that socialism and communism touted. If the pie had been equally divided to everyone in the world, each person would hold a tiny sliver after the distribution was complete. Then everyone would be miserable and all those naïve people who had fought to make it happen would finally learn what they already knew—life was miserable with only a sliver of the pie.
Of course the cabbie had suicidal thoughts and dreamed about shit towers piling high up into the sky; he was one of the caring people who had tried so hard to become another tile on the floor under the feet of cunning people, like himself, who were moving toward success by walking upon the altruistic pathway naïve people had constructed out of themselves. And that was more than fine with Dale. The greater number of people who thought like the cabbie the better, because it made it easier for people like himself to snatch up a bigger piece of the pie.”
Source: The Beasts of Success
“Already he [humanity] is physically antique in this robot world he has created. All that sustains him is that small globe of grey matter through which spin his ever-changing conceptions of the universe.”
Source: The Immense Journey
“Today, nearly every government in the world, rich and poor alike, is focused single-mindedly on GDP growth. This is no longer a matter of choice. In a globalised world where capital can move freely across borders at the click of a mouse, nations are forced to compete with one another to attract foreign investment. Governments find themselves under pressure to cut workers’ rights, slash environmental protections, open up public land to developers, privatise public services – whatever it takes to please the barons of international capital in what has become a global rush towards self-imposed structural adjustment. All of this is done in the name of growth.”
Source: Less Is More: How Degrowth Will Save the World