QUOTATION: Sex

God, and not a boundless search for ‘pleasure,’ should always be king of the bedroom.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: No Compromise on Freedom

Better to be a beggar in freedom than to be forced into compromises against my conscience.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: Open-Mindedness

It must be said once and for all: it is self-contradictory to be open-minded to error. It is like praising a susceptibility for disease as a particular sign of health. No, only the truth makes us free and lets us participate in real universality. It is a special sign of this freedom and universality, and of open-mindedness, to be immune to error, especially to philosophical and metaphysical error, and pre-eminently to heresy, to any teaching incompatible with the divine Revelation of Christ.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: Conditional Obedience to Christ

There are many religious Catholics whose readiness to change is merely a conditional one. They exert themselves to keep the commandments and to get rid of such qualities as they have recognized to be sinful. But they lack the will and the readiness to become new men all in all, to break with all purely natural standards, to view all things in a supernatural light.

They prefer to evade the act of metanoia: a true conversion of heart. Hence with an undisturbed conscience they cling to all that appears to them legitimate by natural standards. Their conscience permits them to remain entrenched in their self-assertion. For example, they do not feel the obligation of loving their enemies; they let their pride have its way within certain limits; they insist on the right of giving play to their natural reactions in answer to any humiliation.

They maintain as self-evident their claim to the world’s respect, they dread being looked upon as ‘fools of Christ’; they accord a certain role to human respect, and are anxious to stand justified in the eyes of the world also. They are not ready for a total breach with the world and its standards; they are swayed by certain conventional considerations; nor do they refrain from ‘letting themselves go’ within certain limits. There are various types and degrees of this reserved form of the readiness to change; but common to them all is the characteristic of a merely conditional obedience to the Call and an ultimate abiding by one’s natural self.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand, Transformation in Christ

QUOTATION: The Liberal Double Standard

The drivel of heretics, both priests and laymen, is tolerated; the bishops tacitly acquiesce to the poisoning of the faithful. But they want to silence the faithful believers who take up the cause of orthodoxy.

--Dietrich von Hildebrand

QUOTATION: Assent of Faith

Our belief in the teachings of the Church de fide must be an absolute and unconditional one, but we should not imagine that our fidelity to the Church's theoretical authority is satisfied merely by acceptance of ex cathedra pronouncements. We must also adhere wholeheartedly to teachings of the Church in matters of morality, even if they are not defined ex cathedra. The teachings of the encyclical Humanae Vitae, for example, is binding because its content had always been part of the teaching of the Church; in it we are confronted with the theoretical authority of the Church embodied in the tradition of the ordinary Magisterium. It is not a mere practical commandment of the Church, like the commandment to go to church on Sunday.

--Dietrich Von Hildebrand