Sobran

"Need" now means wanting someone else's money. "Greed" means wanting to keep your own. "Compassion" is when a politician arranges the transfer. 

Joseph Sobran, columnist.

The Church of Silence (A Classic Joseph Sobran piece)

May 18, 2000

by Joseph Sobran

Unlike most spiritual leaders and moral teachers, Jesus of Nazareth offered no formula for worldly happiness and social order. Just the opposite: he told his disciples to take up their crosses (an image he used well before the Crucifixion) and to expect suffering. He warned them that the world would hate them as it hated him: it was their destiny as Christians.

After the conversion of the Roman world under the Emperor Constantine, a Christian civilization arose and the age of martyrdom seemed to be over. Most Western Christians still think of that period as a thing of the past, a venerable but remote phase of their history.

But the most intense persecution of Christianity occurred not in the Roman Empire, but in the twentieth century, especially in the Communist world. A large part of this story, hidden and ignored, is told in a new book by Robert Royal, The Catholic Martyrs of the Twentieth Century (Crossroad Publishing).

It is hard to tabulate or even estimate the number of Catholics and other Christians murdered by modern tyrannies. The figure certainly runs into the tens of millions, though it isn’t always easy to distinguish between those killed specifically for their religion and those killed for other reasons, ethnic and social. But contrary to recent slanders, the Nazis as well as the Communists regarded the Catholic Church as their mortal enemy.

Read the rest at Lew Rockwell.....

Intervention

"If you want government to intervene domestically, you're a liberal. If you want government to intervene overseas, you're a conservative. If you want government to intervene everywhere, you're a moderate. If you don't want government to intervene anywhere, you're an extremist."

Joseph Sobran (1995)