Caleb Burdine

“Know then, that God no sooner finds us resolved to attain solid virtue than He sends us trials of the severest kind. Convinced of His immense love for us and His fatherly solicitude for our spiritual advancement, we ought with gratitude to drink to the dregs of the chalice that He is pleased to offer us, confident that its beneficial character will be in proportion to its bitterness.”
― Lorenzo Scupoli, The Spiritual Combat

“What we find, then, is that Dante’s musical program embodies theological realities. Infernal sinners remain willfully rebellious. In life they broke away from the human community to pursue some good in vicious competition with the rest of the human race. Now, as a community, they fail to achieve concord. Like musical notes that remain independent, their retained individuality is ugly and broken. Repentant sinners in purgatory, on the other hand, now willfully submit their individuality to the community. They learn now what it is like to live as members of a body. And thus they erase their tendencies to erratic individualism, forcing their voices into the unison of the simple plainchant. But with the polyphonic hymns of Paradiso, we have not only concord but also a simultaneous expression of individuality: Dante gives us a vision of heaven as a million-part motet.”
― Jason M. Baxter, A Beginner's Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

“According to the majority of the Fathers, “what” and “he” who restrains the “lawless one” (unanimously identified by the Fathers as the Antichrist of whom John speaks in 1 John 2:18–22 and 4:3) is the Roman empire and the Roman emperor.220 St Thomas considers in his commentary on this epistle how it could be that the Antichrist has not come by his own time when it would seem that the Roman empire has perished. “The Roman Empire has not perished,” he explains, “but passed from the temporal to the spiritual order.” The revolt of which St Paul speaks will be against the faith and government of the Holy Roman Church.221”
― Alan Fimister, The Iron Sceptre of the Son of Man : Romanitas As a Note of the Church

“I think that men need to be astonished in order to adore, to praise, to thank this God who is so good and so great. Wisdom begins with wonder, Socrates said. The inability to wonder is the sign of a civilization that is dying.”
― Robert Sarah, The Day Is Now Far Spent