it’s not really that hard to stay Catholic, even at a secular university — that is, if you are committed to your faith going into college.
.. I think it would be difficult to become Catholic at a place like Harvard.
.. On the other hand, if you come to campus knowing that there are going to be certain challenges and opportunities .. then you can take advantage of the rich resources at your disposal as a Catholic at a place like Harvard
.. I only really stopped and thought about the fact that I had written a book when I had to go through the painful and repetitious process of editing.
.. Lord willing, I would be able to write a different, wiser version of the book every year for the rest of my life.
friendships of utility (classmates), friendships of pleasure (“party friends”),
.. true friendships, which inspire both people to greater virtue.
.. you will his good precisely because it is good for him, not because you gain from it in any way. I’ve had maybe ten of these friends in my life, and I think that’s more than many people ever get. I should add that a couple of them are not Christian.
.. there would come a day when I had to choose between what I most wanted and Christ. Whether that was being popular, or getting some promotion, or whatever I really wanted, one day I would be tested to see if I loved something else more than God.
.. For me, that day came when I was interviewing for the Rhodes Scholarship, and the interview committee asked me whether I would support embryonic-stem-cell research
The Vatican’s Latinist
“Sacred language?” he said when asked about Latin as the “sacred language” of the church. “In the first century every prostitute in Rome spoke it fluently—and much better than most people in the Roman Curia.”
.. The Minnesota Star Tribunequoted him as saying “I like to say mass in the nude,”
.. He appeared in Bill Maher’s movie Religulous, which featured him agreeing with the proposition that the Vatican itself was at odds with the message of Jesus, that the pope should not be living in a palace, and that hell and “that Old Catholic stuff” was “finished” and “gone.”
.. “The most influential Latin teacher in the last half-century is Reggie Foster,” says Dr. Nancy Llewellyn, professor of Latin at Wyoming Catholic College. “That’s not just my opinion—that’s a fact. For decades, he had the power to change lives like no other teacher in our field. I saw him for an hour in Rome in 1985 and that one hour completely changed my life. His approach was completely different from every other Latin teacher out there, and it was totally transformative.”
.. . “I don’t care about your garbage literary theory!” he barked at his students one day. “I can tell in about ten seconds if you know the Latin or if you are making it all up.”
.. “Latin is the best thing that ever happened to humanity. It leaves you zero room for nonsense. You don’t have to be a genius. But it requires laser-sharp concentration and total maturity. If you don’t know what time of day it is, or what your name is, or where you are, don’t try Latin because it will smear you on the wall like an oil spot.”
.. He said he wanted only three things in life: to be a priest, to be a Carmelite, and to do Latin.
.. His cell had no mattress: he slept on the tile floor with a thin blanket. His clothes were notorious in Rome: believing that the religious habit no longer reflected the simple garb of the people as it once had, he gave up his cassock and bought his clothes at Sears: blue pants and a blue shirt, with brandless black sneakers. When it was cold he added a zip-up blue polyester jacket. The Vatican’s Swiss guards called him “il benzinaio,” the gas-station attendant.
.. he developed a reputation for being one of the greatest masters of the Latin language since the Renaissance.”
.. “Paul VI’s writing was very concrete, and avoided jargon. John Paul II—not so much. So how are we going to say ‘the economic consequences of globalization’ in Latin?
.. “In those days they would play games where one bishop would recite a line of Vergil and the next guy had to give the next line and on they would go, until someone couldn’t remember a line. That’s all gone now.”
.. During that time he may well have undertaken the most strenuous teaching schedule ever attempted by a university professor. Rising every day at 3:58 A.M., he said mass in Latin, graded papers, and then headed to his full-time job as papal Latin secretary. By 2:oo P.M. he would complete his day’s work at the Vatican and be ready to teach. Every year he taught ten semester-long courses at the Gregorian, from Latin rudiments to the most difficult authors.
.. he hired space at his own expense, and taught six to eight hours every day, seven days a week for eight consecutive weeks. Sundays were not off days but day-long excursions into the countryside with twenty-page packets of Latin texts: to Cicero’s birthplace, Tiberius’s cave at Sperlonga, Horace’s villa in the Sabine mountains, and many other locations.
.. What is most exciting about these developments is these programs are generating the same kind of enthusiasm as the Foster classes that inspired them: “I’ve not looked at Latin the same way since.” “An initiation.” “Without a doubt the most valuable course I have ever attended in my academic career.” “Transformative.” “Mindbending.” “All people that want the classical languages to survive should really be doing these courses.”
.. Paideia last year used six teachers to cover what Reginaldus would do alone
.. “And because of that, things are much better off for Church Latin than they were forty years ago.” Foster confirms this: “I don’t keep up on what’s going on all over the world, but I can go through almost every episcopal see in the Midwest and the bishop now is a former student of mine.”
.. Foster’s method was primarily to be present in the room when exposing students to real Latin. He would settle on one particular thing he wanted students to look for, cold-call, and then correct mistakes publicly. About this method he said, “You don’t need a hydrology course to learn to swim. You don’t point at the water and say, ‘This is water, this is how water works.’ you just throw the babies in.”
.. Foster’s method put back together what language courses generally separate: the experience of learning a language and the cultural value of knowing it.
Church As Institutional Failure
In short, except for a VERY small core of Catholics I know who are able to separate the men from the institution, none of them are at all willing to believe anymore that the Roman Catholic Church is in any way a special institution with a particular right to dictate morality.
.. I live now in a very Catholic area (Wisconsin) with Catholic family. And the abuse scandals simply undid their faith in the church as an authority.
.. That said, hardly any of people who send their kids to school at our parish go to mass regularly. I’m in my early 30s and so are the other parents in my kids’ classes. It is nothing like I remember being in Catholic school in the 90s, when you saw everybody at mass on Sunday. If anyone does go, it is the mothers and kids. Fathers rarely go to mass.
.. it’s because it is easier (and more entertaining) to avoid Church and a religious life. I love the Catholic mass. It is beautiful, and a representation of Heaven on Earth. But it is not entertaining. It is not ESPN on Sunday morning; it is not a fantasy football app. It is not even a Megachurch with Starbucks and bagels in the lobby. For the poorly formed Catholic, the Mass is boring and repetitive.
.. I am happy my kids’ school focuses on faith formation. There is a whole generation of people who were not properly formed as Catholics (1960s-1990s). They simply do not know about their faith and don’t care.
.. And unlike in Catholicism, those who actively and publicly disagree with LDS teachings often leave the Mormon faith.
Why? Because Mormonism is not a comfortable environment for those who publicly flout its teachings. The same can’t be said in most case for Catholicism.
.. I was communicating with a Catholic parochial school teacher, a theological conservative who is also a father of young children. He is extremely fed up with the indifference and even hostility of Catholic parents. But he is especially fed up with the bishops. He told me that his local bishop is a time-server and bench-warmer who is presiding over the decline of the diocese’s Catholic schools into mediocrity.
.. No, the thing is this: that I cannot bring myself to believe that as a general matter, the hierarchy can be trusted to do the right thing consistently.
.. For us non-monastics, this community increasingly violates old confessional boundaries, discarding barriers sustained by removed intellectual extrapolation in favor of the experiential knowledge born out of praxis.
.. The rise of the Internet, however, has posed serious problems for this model. Increasingly, the person in the pew is receiving their theological and biblical understanding independent of pastoral oversight and guidance, often through a sort of personal ‘research’ akin to that of the Googling anti-vaxxer.
.. Congregants are following people on Twitter and Facebook, reading various blogs, listening to podcasts, watching Christian videos on Youtube, participating in online forums and communities, reading a far wider range of books than they probably would have done in the past, watching Christian TV shows, listening to Christian radio stations, etc., etc.
.. The result has often been a situation—similar to that faced by vaccination programmes—in which pastors and church leaders urgently have to protect the spiritual health of their congregations against false teachings that untrained people have adopted through their independent ‘research’. In such a situation, few things are more important than a strong bond of trust between lay people and those in authority over them, who are responsible for their well-being.
.. Pastors, prominent Christian leaders, and teachers may commonly presume that authority is something that comes with the job position. However, this election is just going to provide further evidence of how profoundly mistaken this assumption actually is. Especially among the up-and-coming generations, the older generation of prominent evangelical leaders has less and less influence. Their widespread support of Trump will just be the final nail in the coffin of their credibility for a large number of younger people. ‘Authority’ counts for little where trust no longer exists. Not only will this mean that their future statements won’t carry weight: they will be actively distrusted. Once again, there is a dangerous situation of unattached trust, ripe for the establishment of counter-communities.
Many people now privilege online bloggers, speakers, and writers over the pastors that have been given particular responsibility for the well-being of their souls. The result is growing competition among Christian gatekeepers, which increasingly positions the individual Christian, less as one fed by particular appointed and spiritually mature local fathers and mothers in the faith, and more as an independent religious consumer, free to pick and choose the voices that they find most agreeable. Sheep with a multitude of competing shepherds aren’t much better off than sheep with no shepherds whatsoever.
.. Everyone appears to be a peer online, which dulls our awareness of the fact that some people have authority over us and others have other forms of authority resulting from privileged knowledge, training, or experience. Everyone is expected to make up their own opinion in such a world, but very few people have the means to make up their minds well.
..
Trump’s argument against vaccines works because people no longer trust the authorities—the governments, the scientists, the medical professionals, etc.—who tell them that they are safe. The biased mainstream media, the liberal elite, lying politicians, activist judges, crony capitalists, politically correct academics, the conspiring government, scientists bought off by big business, hypocritical religious leaders: all are radically corrupt, motivated by self-interest, and radically untrustworthy. In such a situation, people’s realm of trust can become more tribal in character, focusing upon people of their own class, background, friendship groups, family, locality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc. and deeply suspicious of and antagonistic towards people who do not belong to those groups. This collapse of trust hasn’t occurred because the general public has suddenly become expert in the science behind vaccinations and discovered the authorities’ claims concerning vaccines to be scientifically inaccurate. The trust that has been lost was never directed primarily at such scientific claims. Rather, it was a trust in the persons and agencies that presented us with them.
.. We have entered a period of radical distrust, and if anybody tells you they know for sure where it’s going, don’t trust them.
For Melinda Gates, Birth Control Is Women’s Way Out of Poverty
we not only believe in, we use in the United States — more than 93 percent of married Catholic women report using contraceptives
.. What would be the payoff if you can get to 120 million women?
You’d start to break the cycle of poverty. Women in the United States, when we were finally able to really use contraceptives, look what it did to women going into the work force. All over Africa, young girls getting pregnant early when they don’t want to keeps them out of school. So you’d keep more girls in school, and then you’d have educated girls who would go into the work force.
And we know that when a girl or woman has economic means in her own hands, it shifts the whole power dynamic in the family, whether it’s with her mother-in-law or her husband. It’s the beginning thing that unlocks a woman’s potential.