QUOTATION: Acting Morally

The first step to be taken by everyone who wishes to act morally is to decide not to act according to the general customs and doings of his fellow-men.

--Jacques Maritain, Range of Reason

QUOTATION: Bad Hermeneutics

But as men are prone to estimate sins, not by reference to their inherent sinfulness, but rather by reference to their own customs, it frequently happens that a man will think nothing blameable except what the men of his own country and time are accustomed to condemn, and nothing worthy of praise or approval except what is sanctioned by the custom of his companions; and thus it comes to pass, that if Scripture either enjoins what is opposed to the customs of the hearers, or condemns what is not so opposed, and if at the same time the authority of the word has a hold upon their minds, they think that the expression is figurative.

--St. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, Book III, Chapter 10

QUOTATION: Society Cannot Exist Without God

If God exists, and deserves the name, He is to every human good what electricity is to an appliance, and religion is the plug. The decline in happiness, in morality, and in longevity is inevitable: religious death, or supernatural death, or spiritual death always leads to some kind of natural or cultural death. No nonreligious, anti-religious society has ever existed. One reason is that religion has always been the strongest ground for morality and no society can survive without morality, in fact without some kind of natural law morality, since the prevailing morality of our experts is not morality at all, only psychology.

--Peter Kreeft, quoted in "What I shall do with atheism is to refute it” California Catholic Daily, August 4, 2016

QUOTATION: Christophobia

A strange fanaticism fills our time: the fanatical hatred of morality, especially of Christian morality.

--G.K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Excluding God

The greatest deception, and the deepest source of unhappiness, is the illusion of finding life by excluding God, of finding freedom by excluding moral truths and personal responsibility.

--Pope St. John Paul II, World Youth Day Homily, July 28, 2002

QUOTATION: Sexual Morality

All questions of sexual morality come down to one basic question: Is this act an authentic sign of God’s free, total faithful, fruitful love or is it not? Is it is not, then it is a counterfeit to the love we really desire. We must be courageous enough not to settle for counterfeit loves.

--Christopher West,  An Introduction to the Theology of the Body

QUOTATION: Morality

The ethical path, which forms part of the human being, is pre-religious.  No person, be they a believer,  an agnostic or an atheist, can avoid the demands of what is ethical, which range from the most general principles-- the most basic of all: "Do good and avoid evil"-- to the most specific.

--Pope Francis, Pope Francis: His Life in His Own Words

QUOTATION: Morality

The peaceful soul does not seek, now, to live morally, but to live for God; morality is only a by-product of the union with Him.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Peace of Soul, 1949

QUOTATION: The Ten Commandments

God wrote on the tables of the Law what men did not read on their hearts.

--St. Augustine

QUOTATION: Today's Moralism

It is indeed true that a new moralism exists today. Its key words are justice, peace, and the conservation of creation, and these are words that recall essential moral values, of which we genuinely stand in need. But this moralism remains vague and almost inevitably remains confined to the sphere of party politics, where it is primarily a claim addressed to others, rather than a personal duty in our own daily life.

--Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI)

QUOTATION: Morality

Unless we have a moral principle about such delicate matters as marriage and murder, the whole world will become a welter of exceptions with no rules. There will be so many hard cases that everything will go soft.

--G.K. Chesterton, “The New Immoral Philosophy,” Sept. 21, 1929.

QUOTATION: Corruption

The first sign of corruption in a society that is still alive is that the end justifies the means.

--Georges Bernanos

QUOTATION: No New Morality

Really great moral teachers never do introduce new moralities: it is quacks and cranks who do that. 

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Modern Morality

But though we are not weaker in morality, we are weaker in the knowledge of morality. We are stronger in the knowledge of nature, but weaker in the knowledge of goodness. We know more about what is less than ourselves but less about what is more than ourselves. When we act morally, we are better than our philosophy. Our ancestors were worse than theirs. Their problem was not living up to their principles. Ours is not having any.

--Peter Kreeft, “Back to Virtue”

QUOTATION: Our Loss of Moral Compass

Arguably the most pressing issue of our time is the question of the sanctity of human life from conception to natural death. While you are reading this book, several thousand preborn babies, ranging in age from first trimester to full term, are going to be safely, cleanly and legally suctioned, burnt, dismembered or decapitated by skilled professionals who collect large paychecks, walk their dogs, drink soda pop, and appear to the naked eye as ordinary human beings. As this evil occurs, a bewildered modern society, long ago cut adrift from its Christian roots, will not recoil in horror but will instead flop its hands passively in its lap, register a fuddled shrug of discomfort, and continue lacking the capacity to tell whether or not this is bad. Occasionally, when it is in the mood for righteous indignation, it will watch a Holocaust documentary on cable TV and shake its head at how the people of Germany could have permitted such things.

--Mark Shea

QUOTATION: Contraception -- The Ends Do Not Justify the Means

Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good, it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it — in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

--Pope Paul VI

QUOTATION: Knowing What Sin Is

There is always hope for the man who knows that he is doing wrong; but there is no hope for the man who is doing wrong and calls the wrong right. The Catholic gets off the road like anyone else, but he never throws away the map.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, Wartime Prayer Book

QUOTATION: The Flesh Versus The Spirit

Those who live "by the flesh" experience God's law as a burden, and indeed as a denial or at least a restriction on their own freedom. On the other hand, those who are impelled by love and "walk by the Spirit", and who desire to serve others, find in God's Law the fundamental and necessary way in which to practice love as something freely chosen and freely lived out. Indeed, they feel an interior urge- a genuine "necessity" and no longer a form of coercion- not to stop at the minimum demands of the Law, but to live them in their "fullness." This is a still uncertain and fragile journey as we are on earth, but it is one made possible by grace, which enables us to possess the full freedom of the children of God and thus to live our moral life in a way worthy of our sublime vocation as "sons in the Son.

--Pope John Paul II, Veritatis Splendor

QUOTATION: The Consequences of Sin

Anyone is free to deny morality, but he is not free to escape the effects of its violation. Sin is written on faces, in the brain, it is seen in the shifting eyes and the hidden fears of night.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Law and Morality

It is certainly true that institutions have disappeared from the greater part of the world, it would seem permanently, whose disappearance every Christian must welcome. (Whether the non-Christian welcomes it equally, depends upon his point of view.) Formal slavery has disappeared, and physical torture used for judicial purposes, and the exposure of children, and the amphitheatre, and the duel, and child labour, and the grosser forms of purposeless cruelty towards animals. But these are not vices personal to the individual; they are vicious systems, against which the conscience of individuals long protested, before the community took any steps. The progressive enlightenment of the public conscience is fortunately a fact; though it is not certain what guarantee we have against retrogression. But the fact that the public obeys its own conscience is due, if we will be honest with ourselves, very largely to the policeman. The really salient fact about the modern age, from the Wars of the Roses onwards, is the growing effectiveness of centralised government, ultimately traceable to the influence of explosives. Not only have we better laws, but our laws are better kept. Where morality involves justice towards your neighbour, there is less temptation to do wrong now than formerly; indeed, there is every
temptation to do right. But does all this mean that, given the free opportunity, the average man to-day resists his temptations, such as they are, better than he did in the Dark Ages?

--Msgr Ronald Knox, The Belief of Catholics, 1927