Thanks be to God for cranky saints

Giving the Trads hope of heaven.

Benedict XV, the pope of peace, wrote about Jerome, who I think should be the patron saint of late-starting autodidacts. He describes my feelings about learning to draw quite precisely:

What a toil it was! How difficult I found it! How often I was on the point of giving it up in despair, and yet in my eagerness to learn took it up again! Myself can bear witness of this, and so, too, can those who had lived with me at the time. Yet I thank God for the fruit I won from that bitter seed.

The Greatest of Doctors teaches us also how to approach heretics and it is interesting to note that he says nothing whatever about "finding common ground".

"I have never spared heretics, and have always striven to regard the Church's enemies as my own."

"There is one point in which I cannot agree with you: you ask me to spare heretics - or, in other words - not to prove myself a Catholic."

Pope Benedict says that Catholics must follow Jerome's teaching and his example.

they must be ready to combat not only those who deny the existence of the Supernatural Order altogether, and are thus led to deny the existence of any divine revelation or inspiration, but those, too, who - through an itching desire for novelty - venture to interpret the sacred books as though they were of purely human origin; Those, too, who scoff at opinions held of old in the Church, or who, through contempt of its teaching office, either reck little of, or silently disregard, or at least obstinately endeavor to adapt to their own views, the Constitutions of the Apostolic See or the decisions of the Pontifical Biblical Commission.

Would that all Catholics would cling to St. Jerome's golden rule and obediently listen to their Mother's words, so as modestly to keep within the bounds marked out by the Fathers and ratified by the Church.

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