The Catholic Book Club discussion

Share your favorite quotes here. Feel free to share why a particular quote had meaning for you.

It's a very interesting book for me overall, learning new facts and making connections with other events past and current, but so far, two quotes are to be highlighted for me personally.


The first quote is from the PROLOGUE: AN APOLOGY

One imagines that similar scenes of joy erupted throughout the world wherever two or three faithful Catholics gathered together. In contrast, the election of Ratzinger was greeted with grief and horror by those heretical theologians and cafeteria Catholics whose heresies and backsliding equivocations had been condemned by the new Pope during his many years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As usual, these wolves in sheep’s clothing howled in unison with the wolves in the secular media, uniting themselves with the avowed enemies of the Church in their hatred of the hero of orthodoxy who had forced them into retreat during his years as John Paul II’s faithful and fearless servant. In the war of words that followed the Pope’s election, the enemies of orthodoxy decried the new German shepherd as “God’s Rottweiler.” Although the gentle and saintly Ratzinger did not deserve such an epithet, it is ironically apt that the wolves who would devour the flock should hate the Rottweiler who had courageously stopped them from doing so!

The other is the epigraph of Chapter 5: BEING HUMAN (which, according to the footnote, is taken from: Ratzinger, “In the Beginning. .p. 56)

What is the human being? This question is posed to every generation and to each individual human being, for in contrast to the animals our life is not simply laid out for us in advance. What it means for us to be human beings is for each one of us a task and an appeal to our freedom. We must each search into our human-beingness afresh and decide who or what we want to be as humans. In our own lives each one of us must answer, whether he or she wants to or not, the question about being human.

A quote from chapter 1 (Living with Big Brother):

One wonders whether any teacher in a public school in the United States today would risk losing his job by instructing his students to cross out phrases promoting sexual immorality, the killing of unborn children, or radical relativism.

I don't know about today, but the novel Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor describes precisely such a teacher in the U.S., not today, but in the nineteen thirties.

Well Pearce is a person with a lot of readings. It is posible that he knew the book that you mentioned, Professor 🤔.

I am almost 1/3 through this book. I'm enjoying it very much, and next I want to read Ratzinger's In The Beginning. The quotes are all excellent, but this one especially struck me:

The human being is relational, and he possesses his life -- himself -- only by way of relationship. I alone am not myself, but only in and with you am I myself. To be truly a human being means to be related in love, to be of and for. But sin means the damaging or the destruction of relationality. Sin is a rejection of relationality because it wants to make the human being a god. Sin is loss of relationship, disturbance of relationship, and therefore it is not restricted to the individual. Etc.

(From the end of Ch. 5)

Kristi wrote: "I am almost 1/3 through this book. I'm enjoying it very much, and next I want to read Ratzinger's In The Beginning."

I, too, intend to read Ratzinger's book!

You can find it here: https://netcatholic.org/documents/201...

Rinstinkt wrote: "It's a very interesting book for me overall, learning new facts and making connections with other events past and current, but so far, two quotes are to be highlighted for me personally.


The first quote is from the PROLOGUE: AN APOLOGY

One imagines that similar scenes of joy erupted throughout the world wherever two or three faithful Catholics gathered together. In contrast, the election of Ratzinger was greeted with grief and horror by those heretical theologians and cafeteria Catholics whose heresies and backsliding equivocations had been condemned by the new Pope during his many years as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. As usual, these wolves in sheep’s clothing howled in unison with the wolves in the secular media, uniting themselves with the avowed enemies of the Church in their hatred of the hero of orthodoxy who had forced them into retreat during his years as John Paul II’s faithful and fearless servant. In the war of words that followed the Pope’s election, the enemies of orthodoxy decried the new German shepherd as “God’s Rottweiler.” Although the gentle and saintly Ratzinger did not deserve such an epithet, it is ironically apt that the wolves who would devour the flock should hate the Rottweiler who had courageously stopped them from doing so!."

I also loved this quote. At a family gathering, an aunt, who had left the Church years before and eventually became an ordained UU minister, gave me as a recent revert a some grief about the new Pope being "God's Rottweiler." I responded that it was an unfair critique generally made by people who didn't like following rules, a sin as old as the Garden of Eden, but for myself I loved my German Shepherd. [I knew that she, my father, and their brother had grown up with a series of beloved German Shepherds.]

She smiled, then laughed and yielded the point, but also didn't raise any more theological issues during the long weekend.

Chapter 2, Heilige Geist or Zeitgeist.

[T]he hypocrisy with which some still passed themselves off as believers when this was useful, in order not to jeopardize the instruments that were to serve their own private ends . . . .

This put me in mind of a comment made during the Pachamama scandal of a German Bishop who had been assigned to a diocese in Brazil decades ago. He bragged (and bragged is the right word) that he had not baptized a single person during his entire time as Bishop in Brazil.

From chapter 6:

In contrast to the optimistic realism of the Christian, the optimistic naiveté of the progressive is rooted in the credulous belief that things are always getting better and that the future will always be better than the past.

And later in the same chapter, quoting Ratzinger:

One is Church and one is a member thereof, not through a sociological adherence, but precisely through the incorporation in this body of the Lord through Baptism and the Eucharist.

I remember at the time of the election of John Paul II, the "progressive" in a parish in our Archipriestacy defended that the concept of "the Body of Christ" was obsolete. I had to prepare a strong answer to their document on behalf of my parish priest.

From chapter 7, quoting Ratzinger:

Western culture is hellish when it persuades men that the sole aim of life is pleasure and self-interest.

With this, we have seven quotes, three of which are Pearce's and four Ratzinger's. In this type of book, this is normal.

"Sin means the damaging or destruction of relationality." quoted in chapter 5, from Ratzinger's In the Beginning...