The man who predicted the resurgence of Islam

“The more important a book to our civilization, the quicker it disappears from the [library] shelves today. Recently, for instance, I discovered that the whole classics section (Greek and Roman) had been eliminated from Toronto’s Central Reference Library, on grounds of “no public interest.” And then that the classics sections in several college libraries had shrunk to the point where I now had more standard texts in my little apartment. . .

And no wonder, it seems to me, that we have ignorant mobs attacking relics of the past, such as public statuary. It becomes much easier to animate these mobs because, in the absence of materials unread and unrespected, they will believe anything about the past they are told.”

(By David Warren writing in The Catholic Thing, who was shocked to see that The Great Heresies by Hilaire Belloc had been reprinted.)

What Jesus never said

Although he was commenting on students’ relationships with town and university through the centuries beginning with St. Scholastica riots in 1355, David Warren adds something we all need to remember: 

“That Christ never preached “equality,” I note in passing. The poverty He exemplified had nothing to do with an economic doctrine, and He had nothing to say about the political order, besides: stay aloof from it. His message was to each embodied soul – to all sinners – and He addressed them with the authority of God. They might hear Him, or shut Him away.

It was enough that He nailed our sins with Himself to the Cross, resurrected Himself body and soul, ascended into Heaven, having plunged into Hell. But also He founded an unearthly institution, as we read in Acts – that “at the sixth hour” He let down a great sheet from Heaven to Earth, a figure of His Church, that we be received up into it.

And all the tribulation of the world will stand against it, will pull us down.” https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2017/05/12/end-of-term/