QUOTATION: Moral Relativism is a Threat to the Economy

A market economy enjoys real legitimacy if and only if it is set in the context of a vibrant moral culture that forms its people in the virtues of fairness, justice, respect for the integrity of the other, and religion. Indeed, what good are contracts—fundamental to the functioning of a market economy—if people are indifferent to justice? What good is private property if people don’t see that stealing is wicked? Won’t wealth destroy the rich man who doesn’t appreciate the value of generosity or fails to develop sensitivity to the suffering of the poor? Won’t the drive for profit lead to the destruction of nature unless people realize that the earth is a gift of a gracious God and is meant to be enjoyed by all? This is precisely why the moral relativism and indifferentism that holds sway in many parts of the West—fostered by the breakdown of the family and the attenuating of religious practice—poses such a threat to the economy.

--Bishop Robert Barron, Vibrant Paradoxes: The Both/And of Catholicism

QUOTATION: Relativism

The modern world will not distinguish between matters of opinion and matters of principle; and it ends by treating them all as matters of taste.

--G. K. Chesterton

QUOTATION: Freedom is Based On Truth

Freedom must be tethered to moral truth and ordered to human goodness if freedom is not to become self-cannibalizing.  If there is only "my" truth and "your" truth, but nothing that we both recognize as "the truth", then we have no basis on which to settle our differences other than pragmatic accommodation; then, when pragmatic accommodation fails (as it must when the issue is grave enough), either I will impose my power on you or you will impose your power on me. Truth and goodness shape the moral horizon against which the deliberations of free peoples can take place in an orderly and productive way.

--George Weigel, "The Free and Virtuous Society", in Against the Grain: Christianity and Democracy, War and Peace, 2008

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: Grey

Grey is the Devil's favourite colour.

--Peter Kreeft

QUOTATION: Relativism

Relativism is, oddly, absolutist and totalitarian. It does not allow anyone to stray from its own relativism. Basically, it means ‘shut up’ or ‘don't meddle.’

--Pope Francis

QUOTATION: Relativism is the Law of the Jungle

A spirit of license makes a man refuse to commit himself to any standards. The right time is the way he sets his watch. The yardstick has the number of inches that he wills it to have. Liberty becomes license, and unbounded license leads to unbounded tyranny. When society reaches this stage, and there is no standard of right and wrong outside of the individual himself, then the individual is defenseless against the onslaught of cruder and more violent men who proclaim their own subjective sense of values. Once my idea of morality is just as good as your idea of morality, then the morality that is going to prevail is the morality that is stronger.

--Archbishop Fulton Sheen, On Being Human

QUOTATION: Tolerance and Intolerance

America, it is said, is suffering from intolerance-it is not. It is suffering from tolerance. Tolerance of right and wrong, truth and error, virtue and evil, Christ and chaos. Our country is not nearly so overrun with the bigoted as it is overrun with the broadminded.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Relativism and the Abortion Debate

Contemporary relativism, however, tends to place light and darkness on an equal metaphysical footing. For example, strict relativists, who do not anchor their choices in the firm foundation of real being, regard choice to be self-justifying. That is, they affirm choice apart from any consideration as to whether it relates to the real world. The choice to abort, for relativists, proceeds independently of any knowledge of the nature of what one is doing or likely consequences that will follow. Thus, "pro-choice" advocates staunchly oppose any kind of illumination that would shed light on the nature of the fetus, the psychological or physical consequences of abortion, as well as the logical impact abortion has on marriage, the family, and society. As far as the "pro-choice" position is concerned, light and darkness are equally irrelevant.

--Donald DeMarco

QUOTATION: Dissent

As individuals, we can claim to believe whatever we want. We can posture, and rationalize our choices, and make alibis with each other all day long — but no excuse for our lack of honesty and zeal will work with the God who made us. God knows our hearts better than we do. If we don’t conform our hearts and actions to the faith we claim to believe, we’re only fooling ourselves.

--Archbishop Charles Chaput

QUOTATION: The "Open Mind"

The “open mind” does not want Truth for Truth implies obligation, which predicates responsibility, and responsibility is the only thing the “open mind” is most eager to avoid. In their cowardice, they keep their minds “open” so they will never have to close on anything that would entail responsibility, duty, moral correction or altered behavior.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Relativism

In recent years I find myself noting how the more relativism becomes the generally accepted way of thinking, the more it tends towards intolerance, thereby becoming a new dogmatism. Political correctness, […] seeks to establish the domain of a single way of thinking and speaking. Its relativism creates the illusion that it has reached greater heights than the loftiest philosophical achievements of the past. It prescribes itself as the only way to think and speak-- if, that is, one wishes to stay in fashion. Being faithful to traditional values and to the knowledge that upholds them is labeled intolerance, and relativism becomes the required norm. I think it is vital that we oppose this imposition of a new pseudo-enlightenment, which threatens freedom of thought as well as freedom of religion.

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Chistianity, Islam, 2004

QUOTATION: Relativism

If man can decide by himself, without God, what is good and what is bad, he can also determine that a group of people is to be annihilated.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005

QUOTATION: The Philosphical Legacy of Marxism

The essential problem of our times, for Europe and for the world, is that although the fallacy of the communist economy has been recognized-- so much so that former communists have unhesitatingly become economic liberals-- the moral and religious question that it used to address has been almost totally repressed. The unresolved issue of Marxism lives on: the crumbling of man’s original uncertainties about God, himself and the universe. The decline of a moral conscience grounded in absolute values is still our problem today. Left untreated, it could lead to the self-destruction of the European conscience, which we must begin to consider as a real danger […].

--Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, (Pope Benedict XVI), Without Roots: The West, Relativism, Chistianity, Islam, 2004

QUOTATION: Broad-Mindedness

Broad-mindedness, when it means an indifference to right and wrong, eventually ends in hatred of what is right.

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Practical Atheism

Again and again we encounter the signs of an alternative civilization to that built on Christ as “cornerstone”-- a civilization which, even if not explicitly atheist, is at least positivistic and agnostic, since it is built upon the principle of thinking and acting as if God did not exist. This approach can easily be recognized in the modern so-called scientific, or rather, scientist, mentality, and it can be recognized in literature, especially the mass media. To live as if God did not exist means to live outside the parameters of good and evil, outside the context of values derived from God. It is claimed that man himself can decide what it good or bad.

--Pope John Paul II, Memory and Identity, 2005

QUOTATION: Faith

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the Church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and ‘swept along by every wind of teaching,’ looks like the only attitude acceptable to today’s standards.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Orthodoxy Versus Relativism

Having a clear faith, based on the creed of the church, is often labeled today as a fundamentalism. ... Whereas relativism, which is letting oneself be tossed and 'swept along by every wind of teaching,' looks like the only attitude acceptable to today's standards.

--Pope Benedict XVI

QUOTATION: Subjectivism

One if the constant temptations in every age, even among Christians, is to make oneself the norm of truth. In an age of pervasive individualism, this temptation takes a variety of forms, but the mark of those who are in the truth is the ability to love humbly. This is what Jesus teaches us: Truth expressed in love.


--Pope John Paul II

QUOTATION: False Tolerance

These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except his own.

--G.K. Chesterton