Nathan Ormond

“In the year of our Lord 1432, there arose a grievous quarrel among the brethren over the number of teeth in the mouth of a horse. For thirteen days the disputation raged without ceasing. All the ancient books and chronicles were fetched out, and wonderful and ponderous erudition such as was never before heard of in this region was made manifest. At the beginning of the fourteenth day, a youthful friar of goodly bearing asked his learned superiors for permission to add a word, and straightway, to the wonderment of the disputants, whose deep wisdom he sore vexed, he beseeched them to unbend in a manner coarse and unheard-of and to look in the open mouth of a horse and find answer to their questionings. At this, their dignity being grievously hurt, they waxed exceeding wroth; and, joining in a mighty uproar, they flew upon him and smote him, hip and thigh, and cast him out forthwith. For, said they, surely Satan hath tempted this bold neophyte to declare unholy and unheard-of ways of finding truth, contrary to all the teachings of the fathers. After many days more of grievous strife, the dove of peace sat on the assembly, and they as one man declaring the problem to be an everlasting mystery because of a grievous dearth of historical and theological evidence thereof, so ordered the same writ down.”
― Francis Bacon

“Human life is never a burden. It demands we make space for it, not cast it off. Of course the arrival of a new human life in need—whether the unborn child in the womb or the migrant at our border—challenges and changes our priorities. With abortion and closed borders we refuse that readjustment of our priorities, sacrificing human life to defend our economic security or to assuage our fear that parenthood will upend our lives. Abortion is a grave injustice. It can never be a legitimate expression of autonomy and power. If our autonomy demands the death of another, it is none other than an iron cage. I often ask myself these two questions: Is it right to eliminate a human life to resolve a problem? Is it right to hire an assassin to resolve a problem?”
― Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future

“I once criticized someone who said that he was interested in thinking about the word while I, like all these hermeneutic rascals, was content to think abou twords. The remarkable thing to me was that, after saying this, he continued to speak. To my astonishment, he continued to use more words, a flood of them, really, and sometimes - he is a fluent speaker and an eloquent writer - with dramatic emphasis on the word 'world'. The more he assured us that he was concerned with the world, not words, the more loudly he kept using the word 'world'.”
― John Caputo

“To recover the dignity of the people we need to go to the margins of our societies to meet all those who live there. Hidden there are ways of looking at the world that can give us all a fresh start. We cannot dream of the future while continuing to ignore the lives of practically a third of the world’s population rather than seeing them as a resource.

I mean those who lack regular work living on the margins of the market economy….Yet if we manage to come close and put aside our stereo-types we discover that many of them are far from being merely passive victims. Organized in a global archipelago of associations and movements, they represent the hope of solidarity in an age of exclusion and indifference. On the margins I have discovered so many social movements with roots in parishes or schools that bring people together to make them protagonists of their own histories, to set in motion dynamics that smacked of dignity. Taking life as it comes, they do not sit around resigned or complaining but come together to convert injustice into new possibilities. I call them ‘social poets.’ In mobilizing for change, in their search for dignity, I see a source of moral energy, a reserve of civic passion, capable of revitalizing our democracy and reorienting the economy.”
― Pope Francis, Let Us Dream: The Path to a Better Future