The best introduction to the spirit of St. Thomas is, to my mind, the small book by G. K. Chesterton, St. Thomas Aquinas. [10] This is not a scholarly work in the proper sense of the word; it might be called journalistic—for which reason I am somewhat chary about recommending it. Maisie Ward, co-owner of the British-American publishing firm which publishes the book, writes in her biography of Chesterton [11] that at the time her house published it, she was seized by a slight anxiety. However, she goes on to say, Étienne Gilson read it and commented: “Chesterton makes one despair. I have been studying St. Thomas all my life and I could never have written such a book.” Still troubled by the ambiguity of this comment, Maisie Ward asked Gilson once more for his verdict on the Chesterton book. This time he expressed himself in unmistakable terms: “I consider it as being, without possible comparison, the best book ever written on St. Thomas. . . . Everybody will no doubt admit that it is a ‘clever’ book, but the few readers who have spent twenty or thirty years in studying St. Thomas Aquinas, and who, perhaps, have themselves published two or three volumes on the subject, cannot fail to perceive that the so-called ‘wit’ of Chesterton has put their scholarship to shame. . . . He has said all that which they were more or less clumsily attempting to express in academic formulas.” Thus Gilson. I think this praise somewhat exaggerated; but at any rate I need feel no great embarrassment about recommending an “unscholarly” book.

(source: St. Thomas Aquinas and the Thirteenth Century | Josef Pieper)

The defense of bad Christian artists is usually along the lines of, “they were trying to do a good thing. They entrust their work to the Holy Ghost. Imagine if it touched even one heart!” Consider what life would be like if this was how we judged other professions. Imagine if a bad trauma surgeon was defended with this excuse, after he’d punctured somebody’s heart. Imagine a second grade teacher who was illiterate but tried very hard, for Jesus. Imagine if Michellin-starred chefs suddenly started serving beanie weenies and trusting the Holy Ghost to move their patrons anywhere but the toilet– not the toilet-shaped chapel but the real one. This would be blasphemy. Yet artists somehow get a pass.

(source: I Am Very, Very Ashamed: The Problem With Bad Christian Art)

The way April describes it, she and her older sister had a warm, playful relationship with its healthy give and take just as the Irving Berlin song describes. But then came school. Her sister was almost three years older. The elementary school put a three-year chasm between them as absolute as the one between Lazarus and the Rich Man in the afterlife. The lower and upper grades rarely mixed, and when they did, her sister treated April exactly the way she treated every other person in her grade: she ignored her. What had happened? School had happened.

(source: Why We (Still) Home School – Education – Aleteia.org – Worldwide Catholic Network Sharing Faith Resources for those seeking Truth – Aleteia.org)

(source: Passion for Truth: The Life of John Henry Newman – Rev. Fr. Juan R. Velez – Google Books)

Let it be granted, then, as indisputable, that there are no two opinions so contrary to each other, but some form of words may be found vague enough to comprehend them both. The Pantheist will admit that there is a God, and the Humanitarian that Christ is God, if they are suffered to say so without explanation. But if this be so, it becomes the duty, as well as the evident policy of the Church, to interrogate them, before admitting them to her fellowship. If the Church be the pillar and ground of the truth, and bound to contend for the preservation of the faith once delivered to it; if we are answerable as ministers of Christ for the formation of one, and one only, character in the heart of man; and if the Scriptures are given us, as a means indeed towards that end, but inadequate to the office of interpreting themselves, except to such as live under the same Divine Influence which inspired them, and which is expressly sent down upon us that we may interpret them,—then, it is evidently our duty piously and cautiously to collect the sense of Scripture, and solemnly to promulgate it in such a form as is best suited, as far as it goes, to exclude the pride and unbelief of the world.

(source: Newman Reader – Arians of the 4th Century – Chapter 2-1)

Chesterton manages at once the proper relation of “God so loved the world” to “if any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him” and a refutation of the perverse doctrine and myth of Progress:

What is right with the world is the world. In fact, nearly everything else is wrong with it. This is that great truth in the tremendous tale of Creation, a truth that our people must remember or perish. It is at the beginning that things are good, and not (as the more pallid progressives say) only at the end. The primordial things — existence, energy, fruition — are good so far as they go. You cannot have evil life, though you can have notorious evil livers. Manhood and womanhood are good things, though men and women are often perfectly pestilent. You can use poppies to drug people, or birch trees to beat them, stone to make an idol, or corn to make a corner; but it remains true that, in the abstract, before you have done anything, each of these four things is in strict truth a glory, a beneficent speciality and variety. We do praise the Lord that there are birch trees growing amongst the rocks and poppies amongst the corn; we do praise the Lord, even if we do not believe in Him. We do admire and applaud the project of a world, just as if we had been called to council in the primal darkness and seen the first starry plan of the skies. We are, as a matter of fact, far more certain that this life of ours is a magnificent and amazing enterprise than we are that it will succeed.

(source: What is Right With the World)

For more on this see Couenhoven’s excellent article on forgiveness. This is from the introductory essay of a special issue on the subject:

attempts to strip forgiveness-talk of cultic particularity have obscured the ways in which the purportedly secular talk of forgiveness that plays a significant role in our culture remains indebted to Christian thought.

As an example of an interesting admixture of both trends at once, consider the briefly popular recent news story about Lucy Mangum, a six-year-old girl who, after undergoing surgery to repair a leg severely bitten by a blacktip shark, told reporters that she forgave the shark because she believed it had not meant to harm her (Fox News 2011). I do not mean to chide Lucy for applying the idea of forgiveness to a creature that lacks the agential credentials I consider necessary for forgiveness; she is a guide. The “folk” concept of forgiveness on which she drew involves the idea that forgiving is not being angry at, or visiting retribution on, something that has caused you trouble. This approach does not tie forgiveness to repentance; indeed, Lucy rightly perceived that forgiveness is now commonly justified on the basis that the perpetrator is not really to blame.

It seems to me that this way of thinking—popularized in best-selling books that tout the benefits of forgiving everything from God to the weather—drains the idea of forgiveness of its significance, undermines the sense of meaning and inspiration the term still widely stirs, and avoids the profound questions about grace in the midst of fault that it has traditionally evoked. If this is all that one means by forgiveness we might as well use less freighted terms, such as “overlooking” or “getting over it,” which would seem to serve just as well.

(source: The Possibilities of Forgiveness)

Put not your trust in princes,
in a son of man, in whom there is no help.
When his breath departs he returns to his earth;
on that very day his plans perish.
…………
The Lord sets the prisoners free;
the Lord opens the eyes of the blind.
The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down;
the Lord loves the righteous.
The Lord watches over the sojourners,
he upholds the widow and the fatherless;
but the way of the wicked he brings to ruin.

(source: Psalm 146 RSVCE – Praise for God’s Help – Praise the – Bible Gateway)

We are sometimes far too easily confused about what it means to practice charity.  A refresher:

It is an outstanding manifestation of charity toward souls to omit nothing from the saving doctrine of Christ

(source: Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968) | Paul VI)

In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that she is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. She urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way she defends the dignity of husband and wife. This course of action shows that the Church, loyal to the example and teaching of the divine Savior, is sincere and unselfish in her regard for men whom she strives to help even now during this earthly pilgrimage “to share God’s life as sons of the living God, the Father of all men.”

(source: Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968) | Paul VI)

And don’t miss the specific portions most applicable to our contemporary situation:

Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary.

Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means.

Neither is it valid to argue, as a justification for sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive, that a lesser evil is to be preferred to a greater one, or that such intercourse would merge with procreative acts of past and future to form a single entity, and so be qualified by exactly the same moral goodness as these. Though it is true that sometimes it is lawful to tolerate a lesser moral evil in order to avoid a greater evil or in order to promote a greater good,” it is never lawful, even for the gravest reasons, to do evil that good may come of it–in other words, to intend directly something which of its very nature contradicts the moral order, and which must therefore be judged unworthy of man, even though the intention is to protect or promote the welfare of an individual, of a family or of society in general. Consequently, it is a serious error to think that a whole married life of otherwise normal relations can justify sexual intercourse which is deliberately contraceptive and so intrinsically wrong.

(source: Humanae Vitae (July 25, 1968) | Paul VI, emphasis added)

The new and alarming element in today’s clash of cultures is first the blurring of the distinction between our identity and our actions, and then the demand that Catholic teaching fall in line with the new politically correct standard. But the church does not change her received and revealed teaching just because it is culturally unpopular. It is important to affirm that other groups no matter how much popular support and media attention they receive, have no right to force their values, morality or lifestyle on others simply by leveling the charge of “discrimination.”

(source: Cardinal Wuerl reflects)