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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
“Neither the English Whigs nor the American founders could have waged revolution in 1688 or 1776 without secretly plagiarizing Catholic ideas. And this means that the American founding was unequivocally Catholic. Now how simple is that?”
― 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
“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
“Whether it is popularly emphasized much or not, Catholic teaching in the famous encyclical Rerum Novarum by Pope Leo XIII tracks Thomas Aquinas’s quote above very closely: “Private ownership, as we have seen, is the natural right of man, and to exercise that right, especially as members of society, is not only lawful, but absolutely necessary” (22). Immediately after this passage in Rerum, the famous encyclical repeats Thomas’s above words. Taken together, all this underscores the Catholic call to public aid, not by heavy taxation but by private charity instead. The same paragraph in Rerum Novarum refines this concept even further: “Whoever has received from the divine bounty a large share of temporal blessings, whether they be external and material, or gifts of the mind [which cannot be taxed!], has received them for the purpose of using them for the perfecting of his own nature, and at the same time, that he may employ them, as the steward of God’s providence, for the benefit of others.”
― 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
214 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
49 books
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10 friends
243 books
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89 friends
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