Heroism and Genius Quotes

“Medieval man’s mind was far-embracing, encompassing the natural and the supernatural. It was piercing because he was tirelessly curious about nature and God. It was precise and utterly rational as shown in the age’s invention of the Scholastic method. Medieval man lived, so to speak, outside himself—in the open air amid field, stream, and mountain; under the sun, rain, and storms, never ceasing to marvel at the countless stars of the night sky. He stayed close to both his newborn infant and his dying parent. He raised his heart spontaneously in prayer. And so he knew that God was real, that life was flawed beauty, ever so lovely yet ever so fragile; and that immortality with unchanging happiness or despair was on the other side of the thin membrane of time.”
― William J Slattery, Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build -and Can Help Rebuild - Western Civilization

“Hilaire Belloc’s provocative utterance, “In such a crux there remains the historical truth: that this our European structure, built upon the noble foundations of classical antiquity, was formed through, exists by, is consonant to, and will stand only in the mold of the Catholic Church. Europe will return to the Faith, or she will perish. The Faith is Europe. And Europe is the Faith.” 117 Belloc later clarified: “I have never said that the Church was necessarily European. The Church will last forever on this earth until the end of the world; and our remote descendants may find its chief membership to have passed to Africans or Asiatics in some civilization yet unborn. What I have said is that the European thing is essentially a Catholic thing, and that European values would disappear with the disappearance of Catholicism.”
― William J Slattery, Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build -and Can Help Rebuild - Western Civilization

“The Roman Catholic Church was then, as it is now, a great democracy. There was no peasant so humble that he might not become a priest, and no priest so obscure that he might not become Pope of Christendom. . . . What kept government alive in the Middle Ages was this constant rise of the sap from the bottom, from the rank and file of the great body of the people through the open channels of the priesthood. —President Woodrow Wilson, The New Freedom, 1913”
― William J Slattery, Heroism and Genius: How Catholic Priests Helped Build -and Can Help Rebuild - Western Civilization