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As for the seas, Man has conquered them, but men have not. That isn’t paradoxical, for while men have drowned and their ships sunk, Man continues to follow the ways of the sea.
“Just like Irenaeus appealed to Apostolic Succession to prove a Church teaching, later theologians would do the same throughout the centuries. The fact that some modern theologians are teaching doctrines that would’ve been foreign to the Apostles is enough to disregard them and stick to the Deposit of Faith. This appealing to the early Church is one of the things that most firmly set me on my path towards Catholicism, because when you read the early Church Fathers you can only come away with one conclusion; they were all Catholic.”
― The Beauty Of The Mass: Exploring The Central Act Of Catholic Worship
― The Beauty Of The Mass: Exploring The Central Act Of Catholic Worship
“Next up is the right to pursue happiness. Thomas Jefferson called this the third natural right in the Declaration. But as the reader may now see, the right to pursue happiness is actually the same thing as liberty. True happiness, as disclosed by Catholic Natural Law, means fulfilling human existence by freely choosing the moral good.39 This should strike the reader as nearly identical in meaning to the true definition of liberty: freedom to pursue the good. In both the ancient Greek and the Catholic sense,40 happiness and the good end up being the same thing. Man is truly happy when he acts as God intended him to act — morally. But in a failing or a failed republic, populated by immoral people, the pursuit of happiness is misunderstood as the immoral pursuit of pleasure. (Moral cultures, by definition, do not allow immoral government. Plato wrote that “the penalty that good men pay for their indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by wicked men”41 — the very men who create such misdefinitions.)”
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
“License, or “freedom for its own sake,” sounds much more like Justice Kennedy’s expression of American relativism. Commentators have long noted that this is just the difference between freedom directed (at a moral purpose) and freedom undirected — which more starkly shows the contrariety between the two terms. “Liberty” and “license” tend to sound more like synonyms. Once more, the universal recognition of the right to liberty is a necessary condition of the true republic.38 As stated in the introduction, republics are the one form of government rooted in Catholic Natural Law morality. When the true sense of liberty is absent, one should feel confident calling his country a republic in name only.”
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
“Chapter 2 takes a look at the false, secular copy of subsidiarity operative in the U.S. Constitution, explaining why local rule eventually broke down in America. Prot-Enlight plagiarized and mongrelized this primary Catholic social principle; with it, Madison wound up establishing something opposite to liberty: license. The republican culture degenerates if it forgets the moral object of its freedom.”
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
“All this motivates a new “backdoor apologetics”: instead of debating theology, backdoor apologetics wins converts through political science. Any secular or Protestant fan of limited government should be strongly persuaded by the requirements of republicanism to convert to the point of view that uniquely affirms it . . . or else to abandon the position of limited government. And this should happen automatically after he sees that a republic can function only upon the corpus of Catholic presuppositions about the universe! It is time that Catholics, Protestants, and secularists in America affirm how republics and natural rights (along with chapter 2’s subsidiarity, chapter 3’s popular morality, chapter 4’s humanism, chapter 5’s political economy, and chapter 6’s proper science) may only function from a certain point of view. And since proponents of limited government already embrace our conclusion, it is simply a matter of showing them that neither the post-Enlightenment nor the post-Reformation point of view can affirm these things with any internal consistency.”
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
― Catholic Republic: Why America Will Perish Without Rome
Brian’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Brian’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
226 books
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56 friends
215 books
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76 friends
727 books
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107 friends
152 books
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2 friends
164 books
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121 friends
153 books
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71 friends
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10 friends
243 books
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89 friends
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