7 Quick Takes...Random Chesterton Quotes

--- 1 ---

--- 2 ---

“We have had no good comic operas of late, because the real world has been more comic than any possible opera.” – The Quotable Chesterton

--- 3 ---

“Do not enjoy yourself. Enjoy dances and theaters and joy-rides and champagne and oysters; enjoy jazz and cocktails and night-clubs if you can enjoy nothing better; enjoy bigamy and burglary and any crime in the calendar, in preference to the other alternative; but never learn to enjoy yourself.” – The Common Man

--- 4 ---

“Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes, our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to that arrogant oligarchy who merely happen to be walking around.” – Orthodoxy, 1908

--- 5 ---

“It is terrible to contemplete how few politicians are hanged.” – The Cleveland Press, 3/1/21

--- 6 ---

“The truth is, of course, that the curtness of the Ten Commandments is an evidence, not of the gloom and narrowness of a religion, but, on the contrary, of its liberality and humanity. It is shorter to state the things forbidden than the things permitted: precisely because most things are permitted, and only a few things are forbidden.” –Illustrated London News  1-3-20

--- 7 ---

“Our materialistic masters could, and probably will, put Birth Control into an immediate practical programme while we are all discussing the dreadful danger of somebody else putting it into a distant Utopia.” – GK’s Weekly, 1/17/31

For more Quick Takes, visit Conversion Diary!

With 35 Days to Go...A Chestertonian Perspective

Over at The American Chesterton Society website is a reprint of an editorial from the January/February 2012 Gilbert Magazine.  With the outcome of the election still uncertain, it behooves all of us to think about the issues from a perspective that is neither Left nor Right, but Catholic.  And how better than to look at issues the way Chesterton (one of the patrons of this blog) would.

The editorial's author, Sean P. Dailey, makes the following very cogent point in comparing the Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party movements:

They remain enemies because they are stuck in outmoded and counterproductive partisan divisions. Occupy Wall Street attacks Big Business, but remains blind to the fact that the Obama administration is stuffed with Wall Street fatcats who not only helped engineer the current recession, but made enormous profits doing so. The Tea Party attacks Big Government, yet ignores the fact that when a Republican administration once again occupies the White House, it too will be stuffed with those same Wall Street fatcats, as was the Bush administration.

And this willful ignorance will be aided and abetted by the great corporate ally of Big Business and Big Government, the Mainstream Media.

We deplore the negative elements in both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street, especially OWS’s alliances with abortionists and the Tea Party’s silence about abortion. But until both movements recognize they are fighting the same fight, neither will be an effective agent for real reform.

It is time for the good guys and the bad guys to stop shooting at each other and recognize their common enemy.

You can read the entire editorial here:  Good Guys, Bad Guys, and Hudge & Gudge.

For any pro-Obama readers who think that they are electing an Occupy Wall Street sympathizer, read the great article by Timothy Carney at the Washington Examiner exposing the President as a corporatist.

And ultimately, as Catholics we should be primarily concerned with the Holy Father's non-negotiables over economic issues--Life, Marriage, and Freedom.  Our Lord assures us that if we seek the Kingdom, all of our temporal needs will be taken care of.

"My Calling is Love": The Little Flower's Feast Day

Today is the feast of St. Therese of the Child Jesus, the little French Carmelite girl (she was only 24 when she died) whose Little Way has inspired both laity and Popes.  Because of her teaching that the way to holiness was through all things done out of love for Christ, Blessed John Paul II named her a Doctor of the Church--only the third woman so honored up to that time.

Here is a portion of her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, from today's Office of Readings; if you have not read it, I encourage you to do so.  You will also be captivated by the story of the little French girl who became a great saint.

From the autobiography of Saint Thérèse of the Child Jesus, virgin
(Manuscrit autobiographiques, Lisieux 1957, 227-229)

In the heart of the Church I will be love

Since my longing for martyrdom was powerful and unsettling, I turned to the epistles of Saint Paul in the hope of finally finding an answer. By chance the twelfth and thirteenth chapters of the first epistle to the Corinthians caught my attention, and in the first section I read that not everyone can be an apostle, prophet or teacher, that the Church is composed of a variety of members, and that the eye cannot be the hand. Even with such an answer revealed before me, I was not satisfied and did not find peace.

I persevered in the reading and did not let my mind wander until I found this encouraging theme: Set your desires on the greater gifts. And I will show you the way which surpasses all others. For the Apostle insists that the greater gifts are nothing at all without love and that this same love is surely the best path leading directly to God. At length I had found peace of mind.

When I had looked upon the mystical body of the Church, I recognized myself in none of the members which Saint Paul described, and what is more, I desired to distinguish myself more favorably within the whole body. Love appeared to me to be the hinge for my vocation. Indeed I knew that the Church had a body composed of various members, but in this body the necessary and more noble member was not lacking; I knew that the Church had a heart and that such a heart appeared to be aflame with love. I knew that one love drove the members of the Church to action, that if this love were extinguished, the apostles would have proclaimed the Gospel no longer, the martyrs would have shed their blood no more. I saw and realized that love sets off the bounds of all vocations, that love is everything, that this same love embraces every time and every place. In one word, that love is everlasting.

Then, nearly ecstatic with the supreme joy in my soul, I proclaimed: O Jesus, my love, at last I have found my calling: my call is love. Certainly I have found my place in the Church, and you gave me that very place, my God. In the heart of the Church, my mother, I will be love, and thus I will be all things, as my desire finds its direction.