Last night I watched some of Father Corapi on EWTN, a good way to wind down the night after a hectic weekend (which included harrasment by pro-abortionists at a prayer vigil in front of an abortion center). At Mass that morning, the celebrant gave an uncompromising homily on life, the unborn and marriage. Refreshing stuff for the soul and Father Corapi was a great bookend to the day.
At one point in his homily, he offered a well known quote by G.K. Chesterton (see The American Chesterton), the great and prolific English writer who converted to Catholicism in the early 20th century. It deserves repeating in this age of rationalization and the dictatorship of relativism. It’s something that would stupify the pro-abortionists who mocked those at the pray vigil.
The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.
As with most things worthy of a life well lived, of giving more than receiving, of a live above self, it is not easy. That’s why, as a deacon told me recently, we have a narrow gate. Others may have a wide gate. Who wants to find where Jesus taught the path to Heavenly Salvation was one traversed with ease and without care?
As Chesterton wrote in “Why I Am A Catholic:”
In short, I would say chiefly of the Catholic Church that it is catholic. I would rather try to suggest that it is not only larger than me, but larger than anything in the world; that it is indeed larger than the world. But since in this short space I can only take a section, I will consider it in its capacity of a guardian of the truth. …
There is no end to the dissolution of ideas, the destruction of all tests of truth, that has become possible since men abandoned the attempt to keep a central and civilized Truth, to contain all truths and trace out and refute all errors. Since then, each group has taken one truth at a time and spent the time in turning it into a falsehood. We have had nothing but movements; or in other words, monomanias. But the Church is not a movement but a meeting-place; the trysting-place of all the truths in the world.
