Friday, February 27, 2015

Episcopal Motto's Double Edge


Cooperatores Veritatis

Liberals tend to forget the second part,
Conservatives the first.

Do not let your zeal for "the truth" make you lose you head. Let God have something to say about it. Get along with the brothers (your bishop, brother priests, etc.). Everything, everything is negotiable except your soul! Do what you have to do to get along well, in your dedication to the truth. Christ became like us in all things but sin!

Irony. Christ never said anything about whether a Prince of the Church should or should not wear a cappa magna. But he did say that we should be generous with whomever should ask of us an alms. When was the last time you gave a dollar to a beggar on the street? (Those dressed according to their sacerdotal dignity will surely have more opportunities than those in mufti!)

N.B. Peter was "Satan" for opposing the will of the Father to defend the life of Our Blessed Lord! Get your head around that and you will have it all figured out, including The Great Abdication, which also comes from God. Thanks be to God! May it serve to help save our souls!

Virtue, according to Aristotle is doing what one ought when one ought and the way one ought. I would say that Christ is our first Master in doing that and the Saints were expert in it too. Married couples have to become proficient in it, and so do priests, at every level!

...[E]very state of soul has a nature relative to and concerned with the kind of things by which it tends to be made worse or better; but it is by reason of pleasures and pains that men become bad, by pursuing and avoiding these -- either the pleasures and pains they ought not or when they ought not or as they ought not, or by going wrong in one of the other similar ways that may be distinguished. Hence men even define the virtues as certain states of impassivity and rest; not well, however, because they speak absolutely, and do not say 'as one ought' and 'as one ought not' and 'when one ought or ought not', and the other things that may be added. We assume, then, that this kind of excellence tends to do what is best with regard to pleasures and pains, and vice does the contrary.
The following facts also may show us that virtue and vice are concerned with these same things. There being three objects of choice and three of avoidance, the noble, the advantageous, the pleasant, and their contraries, the base, the injurious, the painful, about all of these the good man tends to go right and the bad man to go wrong, and especially about pleasure; for this is common to the animals, and also it accompanies all objects of choice; for even the noble and the advantageous appear pleasant. Nicomachean Ethics Book II, Chapter 3