In my latest National Post column I lampoon self-centred objections to the Pope calling preferring pets to children selfish.
“he looked upon us as a sort of animals, to whose share, by what accident he could not conjecture, some small pittance of reason had fallen, whereof we made no other use, than by its assistance, to aggravate our natural corruptions, and to acquire new ones, which nature had not given us; that we …had been very successful in multiplying our original wants, and seemed to spend our whole lives in vain endeavours to supply them by our own inventions…”
The narrator’s account of his Houyhnhnm master’s judgement on humans, in Jonathan Swift Gulliver’s Travels
“For if there be a Faith, from of old, it is this, as we often repeat, that no Lie can live forever. The very Truth has to change its vesture, from time to time; and be born again. But all Lies have sentence of death written down against them, in Heaven’s Chancery itself…”
Thomas Carlyle The French Revolution
“I am not severe – I am sweet by nature. But I defend the rigidity principle. God is stronger than human weakness and deviations. God will always have the last word.”
Pope John Paul II, quoted in the Ottawa Citizen April 3, 2005
“If it is not right, do not do it. If it is not true, do not say it.”
Marcus Aurelius, quoted on Instagram by “dailystoic” September 15, 2021
“I will not shut me from my kind,/ And, lest I stiffen into stone,/ I will not eat my heart alone,/ Nor feed with sighs a passing wind:/”
Alfred Lord Tennyson “In Memoriam” CVIII
“Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”
Matthew 18:3 (KJV)
For the National Post’s “NP Platformed” I wrote about what politicians might contemplate in the light of the Star over Bethlehem… as might we all.