Luke Mohan > Recent Status Updates

These poor Mexicans, he reflected, we’re not the first to pour out their love [for Mary] in this simple fashion. Raphael and Titian had made costumes for her in their time, and the great masters had made music for her, and the great architects had built cathedrals for her.

Give people an outlet to express their love in an embodied way!

Old people, who have felt blows and toil and known the world’s hard hand, need, even more than children do, a woman’s tenderness.

The fickle Mexican population soon found as much diversion in being devout as they had once found in being scandalous.

If we are to save their souls, we must make it clear that we want no profit for ourselves…

Doctrine is well enough for the wise, Jean; but the miracle is something we can hold in our hands and love.

“…they [the French] are the best missionaries. Our Spanish fathers make good martyrs, but the French Jesuits accomplish more. They are the great organizers.”

The waters were darker than they now are when the Holy Ghost first moved upon them.

Clerical weakness we shall always have with us, like any other human infirmity, but if we do nothing about it, we can hardly wonder if our enemies say we do not care.

“He had known all along that to try to revive the dream of an heroic heritage in an unheroic age was an enterprise that would test everything that was within him.”

Referring to the medieval monks if Cluny compared to the modern ones (late 18th century)

“One thinks to do so much and he does so little, and that little so strangely compounded of blindness and good intent and much effort and much thwarting, and the end is a watch in the night,“ said Jacomo, suddenly feeling that all the world had melted away…

“But that’s a fool’s way to die, and not a gentleman’s…

So says a young man who would gladly go to war against an enemy but would not go with Jacomo to help the plague victims in Montefalco.

These things that have been are passed, and we are men who need not mind them.

He found himself giving thanks for all these things, not as something remembered wistfully in privation, but as something which he held forever in the keeping of God.

…desiring nothing but the good, one might yet through blindness do much evil, great evil. And for the consequences of that evil, blindness might be just as potent as ill-will..

…he thought on the long patience of God whom all men, Christian as well as heathen outraged time after time, and how seldom He struck the offender.

Suddenly, it came to Jacomo that here was the central action of all time, and that as the macrocosm is forever reflected in the microcosm, so the history of the race was re-enacted in each human history.

There is no wherewithal so potent as need.

…the destruction of the castle had drawn all those rowdies whom the wall of civilization even when strongest hold in check only with difficulty…

But wealth is the death of the Church, of religion, of all striving for brotherhood and for love.

“…It was in substance what we have all said, that if the Church is to bring men to Christ, she must show them Christ in every moment of her daily life…He made you feel that it could be done, that he was going to do it.”

Only he who has completely renounced the world and all its lusts and ambitions, can lead others from the world to God.

“My dear Bonaventura, I should trust you mystics more if you did not so often put the children of this world to shame.”

…success in that field [law] exacts some beginning of an understanding of the rudiments of statesmanship.

He’s a common enough type in any group, the self-centered star performer, gifted with real powers which he devotes to the insatiable appetites of his vanity.

“That is where you may climb up and down the stairs of the mighty until your breath fails and your heart breaks.”

- a bit cynical, but in those days, largely true

“By holy poverty what did Francis mean beyond the vow which all religious take? Did he mean beggary?”…This was the central issue.

This was the ultimate foe, this not caring, magnificent as it was in its inaccessibilities to the contagion of passion…

How those steps of Rome wore thin the flesh of those who climbed them!

“I don’t know which way of life our blessed Father Francis meant.”
The culmination of the last 100 pages. The life of a simple preaching hermit or life in a convent, which, while under obedience, is in many ways indistinguishable from that of the religious orders that had preceded Francis.