Christopher Pokorny > Recent Status Updates

“One’s God implies one’s good. To ask people who worship Mammon to live lives of sacrifice, to expect devotees of Venus to be chaste, to hope that people whose real God is comfort at any price will suffer gladly for truth, is grotesque. Let him conform to the customs of the nation, unless he also becomes and remains a citizen of that higher nation which is the Church.”

“If the undergraduate can get it through his head that Christian ethics and natural ethics are two different things, get it out of his head that Christian ethics are merely old fashioned while natural ethics are new-fashioned, get it into his head that the Church’s ethics are for Christians and for nobody else, a vast confusion would immediately be resolved.”

“It is lovers for whom the world is hungry. Men have lost their senses; and the sense they have most tragically is the sense of high romance. We, too, have lost it. We kneel before the Incarnate Love. The. Why are our hearts so cold, our greed so great, our minds so insulated in pride? Chris, burn away, in the blaze of thy great passion, those bonds wherewith we do constrain thee from our brethren.”

Quoting Jacques Maritain, “Cultivating a field means inciting nature to produce fruits where nature left to itself would have been incapable of producing, for what nature left to itself produces is wild vegetation. Similarly, human culture is not natural, in the sense that it is supplied ready-made by nature; it is an addition to what nature produces by itself alone.”

“Joy is the expression of that happiness which knows quite well that life is hard, but has found the hidden meaning of the hardness.”

“...the will of God is the determinant of princes and their policies; that peace is more wise than conflict; that war and international intrigue are silly games; that justice and brotherhood are stronger than chicanery and exploitation; that, whether kings or peoples or social orders come or stay or go, God changes not not abdicates. Unwavering, Isaiah proclaimed it.”

“Yes, the ministers of Christ know well enough what is the cause of world distress. The cause of world distress is greed...But what if you end me, individually? Have we learned and faced the truth about our civilization, and ourselves within it? Or are we, like the great majority, content to drift along the greed-way with a decaying civilization until it, and we, are overwhelmed with catastrophe?”