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Quote by Matthew Bunson

“Pope Benedict XVI on Pope St Paul VI: Let us pay homage to the spirit of evangelical wisdom with which my beloved predecessor was able to guide the Church during and after the Second Vatican Council. With prophetic intuition he perceived the hopes and anxieties or the people at that time; he strove to make the most of the positive experiences, seeking to illuminate them with the light of truth and the love of Christ.”

Quote by Matthew Bunson

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Matthew Bunson

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“One imagines that similar scenes of joy erupted throughout the world wherever two or three faithful Catholics gathered together. In contrast, the election of Ratzinger was greeted with grief and horror by those heretical theologians and cafeteria Catholics whose heresies and backsliding equivocations had been condemned by the new Pope during his many years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As usual, these wolves in sheep’s clothing howled in unison with the wolves in the secular media, uniting themselves with the avowed enemies of the Church in their hatred of the hero of orthodoxy who had forced them into retreat during his years as John Paul II’s faithful and fearless servant. In the war of words that followed the Pope’s election, the enemies of orthodoxy decried the new German shepherd as “God’s Rottweiler.” Although the gentle and saintly Ratzinger did not deserve such an epithet, it is ironically apt that the wolves who would devour the flock should hate the Rottweiler who had courageously stopped them from doing so!”

“It had been a simpler time, when she could run carefree around the bailey, pretending to slay dragons and capture magical wisps. A time when she did not have to worry about betrothals, peace alliances, or any of the other duties she was now being forced to contend with as princess. But she would not have to worry about these duties for long. After Merida taught her how to survive the journey to Northumbria, she would have the freedom to study the region's fascinating artwork and listen to the poets who recited sonnets day in and day out. The freedom to spend her mornings tending to lost or injured animals, and her evenings singing folk songs with all the like-minded new friends she would meet.”

“I know of no part of Scotland so much and so visibly improved within thirty years as Aberdeenshire. At the beginning of that time the country between Keith and Stonehaven was little else than a hopeless region of stones and moss. There were pieces of many miles where literally there was nothing but large white stones, of from half a ton to ten tons weight, to be seen. A stranger to the character of the people would have supposed that despair would have held back their hands from even attempting to remove them. However, they began, and year after year have been going on, making dykes and drains, and filling up holes with these materials till at last they have created a country which, when the rain happens to cease and the sun shines, is really very endurable.”

“In nineteenth century Aberdeenshire farm service was not a career in itself, but a stage in a career that began for almost all in family farming, and would end there for a proportion of servants. Even in the middle of the century enough folk rode what Leslie Mitchell later would call the 'strange, antique whirlimagig of the Scottish peasantry' to ensure that the machine kept spinning. William Alexander called his essay on farm service "The Peasantry of North-East Scotland" because in his time English hired farm workers were conventionally - though incorrectly - described as peasants. But the error conceals a deeper truth. Aberdeenshire farm-servants, crofters, and small farmers were three fragments of a single peasant class.”

“Nineteenth-century Aberdeenshire was seething with land hunger and social strife. The interests of the landowners and muckle farmers were at odds with the democratic ideal enshrined in the concept of 'The Poor Man's County', which proclaimed the value of a finely graded rural economy with the emphasis on smaller farms and crofts as the continuing guarantee of economic opportunity and ultimately, therefore, of social justice. But the cottar class was disappearing as landlords evaded Poor Law assessment by demolishing cottages for married workers. Traditional farm touns and hamlets were being destroyed. As leases expired, holdings were thrown together into bigger units yielding high returns on the kind of investment only great capitalists could contemplate. As entry levels into farming climbed, the land was monopolised in fewer and fewer hands.”

“In the agrarian economy of Aberdeenshire, the crofter, or improving smallholder generally, has filled a most useful part in the past. To them it is due that many hundreds of acres of barren moor have been brought under the plough within the last fifty or sixty years; and from his class, trained up in habits of industry, thrift, and self-reliance, there have continued to go forth into various walks of life men and women fitted to act well their part under any circumstances; the main cause of regret without doubt being that in such limited proportion of numbers have these men and women been retained in connection with the soil as settled labourers, cottars, crofters, and farmers, from the smallest tenant upward. But while it will be readily admitted that the existence of crofts in a county like Aberdeen - and indeed any agricultural county - is in the highest degree desirable; and while one may assert, without much fear of contradiction, that a judicious blending of farm and croft is greatly preferable to either a community of crofers apart from farms, or a collection of farms without a mixture of the crofter element, we are not blind to the difficulties that attend the perpetuation of the crofting system, as we have been wont to view it, under the changed conditions that now obtain.”

“But at the end of February, out of a cold black north a dozen meandering snowflakes fell. They drifted about the air like thrums - blown from the raw edges of the coming storm. Next morning, colour had gone from the world. Shapes, sounds, the energies and acuteness of life, were muffled in the dull white that covered both earth and sky. No sun came through. The weeks dragged on with no lifting of the pallor. The snow melted a little and froze again with smears of dirt marbelling its surfaces. To the northward of the dykes it was lumped in obstinate seams, at the cottage doors trodden and caked, matted with refuse, straws and stones and clots of dung carried in about on clorted boots. The ploughs lay idle, gaunt, like half-sunk among the furrows.”

“So that was Chris and her reading and schooling, two Chrisses there were that fought for her heart and tormented her. You hated the land and the coarse speak of the folk and learning was brave and fine one day; and the next you'd waken with the peewits crying across the hills, deep and deep, crying in the heart of you and the smell of the earth in your face, almost you'd cry for that, the beauty of it and the sweetness of the Scottish land and skies.”