Mike Scolare

We can walk as much we want, we can build many things, but if we do not confess Jesus Christ, nothing will avail. We will become a pitiful NGO, but not the Church, the Bride of Christ. When one does not walk, one stalls. When one does not built on solid rocks, what happens? What happens is what happens to children on the beach when they make sandcastles: everything collapses, it is without consistency.

The same man who tells you that he does not want to see the government interfere in business-and he means it, and has plenty of good reasons for saying so-is the first to go to Washington and ask the government for a prohibitory tariff on his product. When things get just bad enough-as they did two years ago-he will go with equal speed to the United States government and ask for a loan; and the Reconstruction Finance Corporation is the outcome of it. Each group has sought protection from the government for its own special interest, without realizing that the function of government must be to favor no small group at the expense of its duty to protect the rights of personal freedom and of private property of all its citizens.

It is impossible to enforce the holiness of the church by rejecting people who do not conform to certain moral canons. That has been tried often in the history of the church, most notably by the early Puritans. When one says that the church is meant to be holy and therefore we will exclude those who are not holy, the inevitable happens. You can turn out the fornicators, the murderers, and those who apostasize in times of persecution; you can turn out sinners of every kind, but you cannot turn out the sin of pride. This sin, the most deadly of all, is always present but not always easily identifiable.

Archbishop Michael Ramsey, The Anglican Spirit, p 108

There is little argument that unions were a key part of the formation of a middle class, strong economic growth and a strong country. They were needed at a time when workers were forced into 70+ hour weeks without overtime pay and few benefits,

In fact, the Vatican response Saturday cites a letter from the then-head of the Irish bishops’ conference saying the policy wasn’t even an official publication of the Irish bishops’ conference but rather a code of “recommended practice.