Léon Bloy, despite his many impressive qualities..what a hater he was! - wild and implacable, and what power of abuse! Strange don't you think that E… - Ida Friederike Görres

Been reading Hardy's Return of the Native. Astonishing how moral standards have shifted over the past hundred years:shifted isn't the word - a landslide...Today the problems of these nineteenth-century novels strike us as exaggerated, as bathos, even comical - much ado about nothing. But for these people it really was a struggle with the gods, very real, menacing, dangerous gods.

There's no redder rag for our modern, progressive Catholics than a certain religious approach to sex and Eros ranging from suspicion to open condemnation and branded accordingly as Manichean, neo-Platonic, Puritan, etc. Quite unacceptable. And yet in these quite obviously heretical speculations there's a barb which, even at first encounter, penetrated to the depths of my mind as the startling confirmation of something always known, and this ferment keeps on working - all the time...the idea which one finds in so many apocryphal trends of thought, i.e. that there's definitely something wrong with sex in its present form, that is, during this terrestrial aeon - something that is not sex in itself, as a whole, but some trait or quality.. Something which does not belong to original human nature, but which owes its actual existence to The Fall; in the same sense unnatural as death is unnatural and yet taken for granted, an inevitable, undeniable factor - in this fallen world.

The sins of our educational system (Catholic): How we ourselves were wronged by it and how we wronged others in its name. What people call moral training is really a political activity - representing a particular community and its vested interests, which is why it is so liable to political sins and blunders.