Important Ideas

The confusion of piety with theology.

During his remarks aboard the papal plane, Benedict delivered a meditation on what he called in Italian an "essentialized Christianity," meaning a Christianity focused on "the fundamental basis for living today amid all the problems of our time."

At the heart of that Christianity of the essentials, the pope argued, is the idea of a God who is small and close to each human person -- in addition to the "great and majestic" God, the sort of spiritual imagery long associated with a clericalist church.

• An adult human being is the end result of the continuous growth of the organism from conception.

• At no point, from conception to adulthood, is there a change in the essential nature of the fetus from non-person to person.

• Therefore, one is a person from the point of conception onward.

“… there were throughout antiquity modes of idolatry and imagery of which Christian men can hardly speak. … Men wallowed in the mere sexuality of a mythology of sex; they organized prostitution like a priesthood … they made pornography their only poetry … In one way all this ancient sin was infinitely superior, immeasurably superior, to the modern sin. All those who write of it at least agree on one fact; that it was the cult of Fruitfulness. … It was at least on the side of Life. It has been left to the first 'christians' fully committed to blasphemy and denying Christianity, to invent a new kind of worship of Sex … It has been left to the very latest Modernists to proclaim an erotic religion which at once exalts lust and forbids fertility.” – G. K. Chesterton, 1935

A genuine leader is not a seaker of consensus but a molder of consensus.

A unanimous resolution for a vegetarian diet by a flock of sheep is quite meaningless in the face of different intentions by a pack of wolves.