Fr Tim, the preacher at our 150th Anniversary celebration Mass has put up his excellent sermon on his blog.
There is one disagreement I have with him or rather Archbishop Chaput, who said:
Heinrich Himmler, the chief of Adolph Hitler’s security services during the Nazi era in Germany, once threatened the Archbishop of Berlin, Cardinal Konrad Graf, with plans to crush the Catholic Church. Cardinal Graf listened politely and then responded: "Well, good luck. We’ve been trying to do that for 2,000 years, and [the Church is] still here."I have been telling people for years it was Cardinal Ercole Consalvi, Pius VII's clever and witty Secretary of State, who when Napoleon threatened to crush the Church, said, "But Imperial Majesty we clergy have been trying to do that for years!"
I would hate to disagree with people as learned as Fr Tim and Archbishop Chaput; maybe it is case of history repeating itself and both said it, perhaps Cardinal Graf knew of Consalvi's remark.
7 comments:
It certainly wasn't Cardinal Graf, because he never existed. The bishop of Berlin during that time was Konrad Graf (Count) von Preysing, a Bavarian prelate, that was made a cardinal in 1946. But I never heard of him having said that either...
Likewise, Fr.Tim's attribution of the comment "no purely human institution run with such knavish imbecility would last a fortnight" was also incorrect. It was not said by Evelyn Waugh but by one of Waugh's heroes Hilaire Belloc who is buried in Sussex at West Grinstead.
To support Sussex Catholic, the remark was made by Belloc after a particularly frustrating meeting to William Temple, who would go on to be (as his father had been) a most distinguished Archbishop of Canterbury. Also, Victor is absolutely right about the Bishop of Berlin.
Well our Holy Father has said repeatedly that the Church's problems are more often ad intra rather than ad extra...
By the way is anyone else having a problem deciphering the new verification words lately? I'm having a really hard time with some of them. I've seen medical prescriptions that were easier to decipher!
Here is a quote from Archbishop Chaput
in an insightful speech at the Cardinal O'Connor conference on Life in Washington on 22nd January this year.
“Evil talks about tolerance only when it's weak. When it gains the upper hand, its vanity always requires the destruction of the good and the innocent, because the example of good and innocent lives is an ongoing witness against it. So it always has been. So it always will be.”
H/T to Joanna Bogle
Sussex Catholic and Michael1:
Though the words may be Belloc's, the idea is much, much older. The most famous instance of it being Story 2 in Bocaccio's 14th Century Decameron, a story about a Parisian Jew thinking of converting to Christianity who, on seeing Papal Rome in all its splendid corruption concluded that if it were not the work of God it would have collapsed years ago.:
To the best of my judgment, your Pastor [the Pope], and by consequence all that are about him devote all their zeal and ingenuity and subtlety to devise how best and most speedily they may bring the Christian religion to nought and banish it from the world. And because I see that what they so zealously endeavour does not come to pass, but that on the contrary your religion continually grows, and shines more and more clear, therein I seem to discern a very evident token that it, rather than any other, as being more true and holy than any other, has the Holy Spirit for its foundation and support.
Bishop Chaput is the only Amchurch Bishop I know of that can give a speech before satan devil worshiping Americans and assorted heretic leaders of other 'faiths' and not mention the Holy Name once.
Not once.
He is amazing.
A true American.
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