Many years ago, G. K. Chesterton responded to an anti-Catholic critic who charged the Church with tolerating a vast horde of criminals, prostitutes, and other unsavory types who hang on to its fringes. That is a fact, said Chesterton. “They cannot get the Church’s sacraments or solid assurances, except by changing their whole way of life; but they do actually love the Faith that they cannot live by. If you explain it by supposing that the Church, though bound to refuse them absolution where there is not amendment, keeps in touch with them and treats their human dignity rather more sympathetically than does the world, Puritan or pagan, that also probably refers to a real fact. It is one of the facts that convince me most strongly that Catholicism is what it claims to be. After two thousand years of compromises and concordats, with every sort of social system, the Catholic Church has never yet become quite respectable. He still eats and drinks with publicans and sinners.”
- Fr Richard John Neuhaus, '"We Hold These Truths" - An Argument to be Engaged', First Things
- Fr Richard John Neuhaus, '"We Hold These Truths" - An Argument to be Engaged', First Things

0 comments:
Post a Comment