I cannot retain true Childhood unless I am continually putting away childish things. —Robert Hugh Benson, The Friendship of Christ, 1912, p. 5
@LeoWong There is no obstinacy like religious obstinacy; for the spiritual man encourages himself in his wrong course, by a conviction that he is following Divine guidance. He is not, to his own knowledge, wilful or perverse: on the contrary, he is persuaded that he is an obedient follower of a Divine interior monitor. There is no fanatic so extravagant as a religious fanatic. ibid., p. 56
@LeoWong A Catholic soul must aim at an instinctive attitude; an intuitive atmosphere — such as we see again in simple and faithful Catholics, usually uneducated, who, while knowing little or nothing of exact dogmatic or moral theology, yet detect with an almost miraculous swiftness heretical tendencies or dangerous teaching, which perhaps not even a trained theologian could analyse at once. Ibid. p. 63
[This the Church once provided and Pope Francis lacks.]
@LeoWong It is the priest's supreme privilege, as well as his terrifying responsibility, to be, in those moments [of the Mass and iConfession] during which he exercises his ministry, in a sense Christ Himself. He says not, "May Christ absolve thee"; but "I absolve thee"; not, "This is the Body of Christ"; but, "This is My Body." Ibid., p. 72
[If this is true, how can a priest leave the priesthood?]
@LeoWong Every Catholic knows perfectly well that all the worship and honour given to Mary are given with the sole object of uniting the worshipper with that "blessed fruit of her womb," whom she extends to us in every image, whether as the Child of Joy or as the Man of Sorrows. It is only those who are doubtful, or at least doctrinally vague, as to the absolute Deity of Christ, who can conceive it even as possible for an intelligent Christian to confound Christ with His Mother, or to imagine the Creator and the Creature as standing even in the remotest competition one with the other. Ibid., p. 78
[No need to always bring up latria and hyperdulia.]
@LeoWong Christ is in the saints as a flame is in a lantern; their lives are not mere imitations or reflections of His, but actually manifestations of it. The graces that they display are actually the same graces as those with which this Sacred Humanity was saturated; their horror of sin is His; the powers which they exercise are His. Ibid., p. 81
@LeoWong The crucifix and the Sinner are profoundly, and not merely superficially, alike in this — that both are what the rebellious self-will of man has made of the Image of God; and therefore should be the object of the deepest devotion of all who desire to see that Image restored again to glory. Ibid., p. 91
@LeoWong "I thirst." It is Jesus Himself who so cries; and when He uttered His petition, by the side of Jacob's well, and on the Cross of Calvary — even the Samaritan woman, the alien from Good's commonwealth, even the soldiers of an Empire that was at war with God's kingdom, had mercy upon Him, and gave Him to drink. Ibid., p. 143