Take my own case: from nursery days we were taught to believe the worst of people...We were drilled, in principle and emphatically, never to believe … - Ida Friederike Görres

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Take my own case: from nursery days we were taught to believe the worst of people...We were drilled, in principle and emphatically, never to believe anyone, never to trust anyone, all people are liars, people are always hypocrites, especially if they are nice to you, everyone can be bought, etc..Scandal was the sole topic of conversation in Stockau: 'Just to show you what the world is really like.'...I was fiercely determined to have no illusions, to confront even the ugliest reality face to face. I would smuggle The History of Prostitution and such-like books out of the library, disclosures of financial scandals I couldn't understand, books on the crimes of colonial government...And what was the result? I believed every word people told me, they could lie and swindle and make up whatever they liked...Could it be that my insatiable and often so incautious hunger for people who are good, pure, beautiful and holy is in fact the direct result of that early training to despise people?

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About Ida Friederike Görres

Ida Friederike Görres (born Elisabeth Friederike, Reichsgräfin Coudenhove-Kalergi; 2 December 1901, in Schloss Ronsperg, Bohemia – 15 May 1971, in Frankfurt am Main) was a Catholic writer. From the Coudenhove-Kalergi family, she was the daughter, one of seven children, of Count Heinrich von Coudenhove-Kalergi and his Japanese wife Mitsuko Aoyama.

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I'm reading a very quaint American book, The Power of Positive Thinking , written, I'd suppose, by a sectarian minister, presumably of Methodist dye. (Norman Vincent Peale)..He's full of stories of prayers heard - and extols the power of prayer.."Before leaving for an important business conference I brace myself with texts like 'If God be for us, who can be against us?'...Then I stalk into the conference room, sure of my victory, and carry off the most marvellous deal.." This, in essence is the burden of the whole book. That's what people call Christian optimism. But it's wasted on us - we've been spoilt for this sort of thing...But isn't it rather self suggestion than authentic religious impulse? It doesn't seem to have dawned on him that suffering, disappointment, defeat or loss might also have some point too, or that God's designs could sometimes be hidden...

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.

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Even read in such broken bits Origen is real food and drink. You can feel it being absorbed, right away, into your very blood. How terse, how compact he is! All this modern stuff is barley-water in comparison.

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