Today's quote: Nov. 15, 2006

"[T]he political experience of modernity has essentially consisted in an effort to find and install in the world a secular substitute for all that the Christian tradition has meant by the phrase, the "freedom of the Church."

John Courtney Murray, "We Hold These Truths"

"Two there are, august Emperor, by which this world is ruled on title of original and sovereign right--the consecrated authority of the priesthood and the royal power."

Gelasius I to the Byzantine Emperor Anastasius I, in 494
Quoted in Murray, above


Yes, I know the notion of a quote of the day implies every day. But I have been so deeply engaged by Murray that I could not come up for air.

Here's the short version: Murray's reputation is as a modernist who tried to reconcile Catholics to pluralism. This is an insupportable reading. What he in fact did was claim pluralism--very convincingly--as an outgrowth of Catholic Christendom and natural law translated to the infant circumstances of the U.S. And he showed how secularists would necessarily be anti-pluralist and their predominance would see the restoration of a society consumed by the unitary state including a secular state religion universally imposed.

Not bad as prophecies go.