Timothy Gordon > Quotes

“Next up is the right to pursue happiness. Thomas Jefferson called this the third natural right in the Declaration. But as the reader may now see, the right to pursue happiness is actually the same thing as liberty. True happiness, as disclosed by Catholic Natural Law, means fulfilling human existence by freely choosing the moral good.39 This should strike the reader as nearly identical in meaning to the true definition of liberty: freedom to pursue the good. In both the ancient Greek and the Catholic sense,40 happiness and the good end up being the same thing. Man is truly happy when he acts as God intended him to act — morally. But in a failing or a failed republic, populated by immoral people, the pursuit of happiness is misunderstood as the immoral pursuit of pleasure. (Moral cultures, by definition, do not allow immoral government. Plato wrote that “the penalty that good men pay for their indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by wicked men”41 — the very men who create such misdefinitions.)”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“Whether it is popularly emphasized much or not, Catholic teaching in the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII tracks Thomas Aquinas’s quote above very closely: “Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary” (22). Immediately after this passage in Rerum, the famous encyclical repeats Thomas’s above words. Taken together, all this underscores the Catholic call to public aid, not by heavy taxation but by private charity instead. The same paragraph in Rerum Novarum refines this concept even further: “Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind [which cannot be taxed!], has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“The essence of a fallen world is that [in marriage] the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or by what is called “self-realization” (usually a nice name for self-indulgence . . .), but by denial, by suffering. Faithfulness in Christian marriages entails that: great mortification. For a Christian man, there is no escape. — J. R. R. Tolkien, letter to his son Michael Tolkien”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“caution of Boethius: “Man towers above the rest of Creation so long as he realizes his own [free, rational] nature, and when he forgets it, he sinks lower than the beasts. For other living things, to be ignorant of themselves is natural; but for man, it is a defect.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“America is wired Catholic, labeled Protestant, and currently functioning as secular.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“License, or “freedom for its own sake,” sounds much more like Justice Kennedy’s expression of American relativism. Commentators have long noted that this is just the difference between freedom directed (at a moral purpose) and freedom undirected — which more starkly shows the contrariety between the two terms. “Liberty” and “license” tend to sound more like synonyms. Once more, the universal recognition of the right to liberty is a necessary condition of the true republic.38 As stated in the introduction, republics are the one form of government rooted in Catholic Natural Law morality. When the true sense of liberty is absent, one should feel confident calling his country a republic in name only.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“Neither the English Whigs nor the American founders could have waged revolution in 1688 or 1776 without secretly plagiarizing Catholic ideas. And this means that the American founding was unequivocally Catholic. Now how simple is that?”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“All this motivates a new “backdoor apologetics”: instead of debating theology, backdoor apologetics wins converts through political science. Any secular or Protestant fan of limited government should be strongly persuaded by the requirements of republicanism to convert to the point of view that uniquely affirms it . . . or else to abandon the position of limited government. And this should happen automatically after he sees that a republic can function only upon the corpus of Catholic presuppositions about the universe! It is time that Catholics, Protestants, and secularists in America affirm how republics and natural rights (along with chapter 2’s subsidiarity, chapter 3’s popular morality, chapter 4’s humanism, chapter 5’s political economy, and chapter 6’s proper science) may only function from a certain point of view. And since proponents of limited government already embrace our conclusion, it is simply a matter of showing them that neither the post-Enlightenment nor the post-Reformation point of view can affirm these things with any internal consistency.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome

“Chapter 2 takes a look at the false, secular copy of subsidiarity operative in the U.S. Constitution, explaining why local rule eventually broke down in America. Prot-Enlight plagiarized and mongrelized this primary Catholic social principle; with it, Madison wound up establishing something opposite to liberty: license. The republican culture degenerates if it forgets the moral object of its freedom.”
― Timothy Gordon, Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome