Weekly Knox: Unity in the Risen Christ

"Destiny is always jumbling up the pattern of our lives like the patterns in a kaleidoscope. You can't avoid it, even by entering holy religion; you take a vow of stability, only to find that life is one long round of packing. The charmed circle is always being broken up; we are separated from the people we have grown accustomed to. But do let's get it clearly in our heads that there can be no real separation, in life or in death, as long as we stick to the Holy Mass. In Christ we are all one; the sacred Host is the focus in which all our rays meet, regardless of time and space. Only we must keep true to him; only we must all go on saying that prayer the priest says before his Communion, asking that though he is separated from everything else he may never be separated from our Blessed Lord; A te numquam, a te numquam, a te numquam separari permittas." 

-Msgr. Ronald Knox (The Mass in Slow Motion)

Weekly Knox: The Old Testament

"We mustn't think of the Old Testament as an awkward fact which we've got to get over somehow, hush it up if possible because it is so difficult to make propaganda out of it. It's the lock into which the key of the Incarnation fits, and if you begin the Bible with St Matthew, it makes a mutilated story." 
-The Messianic Hope (Sermon)

Weekly Knox: New Testament Issues

The New Testament writings come down to us from a time when the vocabulary of the Christian faith was in the making. Words like grace, faith, salvation and so on, have, for us, exact theological meaning. Then they were used with less precision; they were not yet technical terms. Consequently, the translator is always having to ask himself, "Should this word in this particular passage be interpreted strictly, in its defined theological sense? Or is it still being used in a loose, popular way?" 

We translate "Hail, thou that are full of grace," and in the next chapter "Jesus grew in favor with God and man"; but the word grace is the same as the word favor in the original. We translate "My faithful witness, Antipas," but ought we, perhaps, to translate "My faithful martyr"? By the time the Apocalypse was written, it may be that the term had already an official connotation. 

Sin was the word used by the Jews to mean any breach of the law, culpable or not; and they were apt to describe their Gentile neighbors as "sinners," meaning no more than that they were Gentiles. "The Son of Man shall be handed over to sinners" means, almost certainly, "The Son of Man shall be handed over to Gentile folk, the Romans." When our Lord ate "with publicans and sinners," were they people of notoriously evil life? Or were they merely Gentiles? "Tend the church of God, in which the holy Spirit has made you bishops" - should it be "bishops"? Or should it be just "overseers"? Constantly this comes up: Am I making the language of the New Testament too vague? Or am I making it too stereotyped? Am I reading too much into it, or too little? 

All this the translator must take into account if he is going to do justice to an individual phrase or sentence. But his duty does not end there; he must follow the thought of his original, and make it intelligible to the reader, bringing out the emphatic word or words in each sentence, indicating its logical connection with what goes before and after. He must make the whole paragraph hang together and convey a message. That duty was apt to be overlooked by the older translators, if only for this reason - that the Bible was printed in verses; and, by a trick of our natures, if a page of print is broken up for the eye, we do not expect it to convey any coherent impression to the mind. Any verse in the Bible was a "text," you preached from it, you quoted it in theological arguments; you did not look to see what the setting of it was, or how it fitted in. We are so used to this piece--meal way of approaching the Bible that hundreds of priests, well enough grounded in Latin, read the epistle for Christmas Eve without noticing that there is no main verb in it. -Trials of a Translator

Knox on the Old Testament

"We mustn't think of the Old Testament as an awkward fact which we've got to get over somehow, hush it up if possible because it is so difficult to make propaganda out of it.  It's the lock into which the key of the Incarnation fits, and if you begin the Bible with St. Matthew, it makes a mutilated story." -The Hidden Stream

Weekly Knox: Laughter

"Laughter and love are everywhere; in healthy people there is no war between them." -Literary Distractions

Weekly Knox: Christmas

"The child who was born in Bethlehem had, for nine months, been carried in the womb at Nazareth, just like any other child; this is our guarantee that, although God, he was truly man.  God did not deceive us by taking on the mere appearance of humanity...he became man; that was the leverage, if we may put it in very crude terms, through which the work of our redemption was effected.  And, very curiously, this is one of the lessons which the Church found in particularly hard to teach.  The early heretics were not people who denied out Lord's Godhead...they were people who denied his manhood." -The Pastoral Sermons

Weekly Knox: Warfare (Atomic)

"Atomic energy has been manifested to us, so far, only as an instrument of death; and the bomb (like all explosive weapons, but on a scale hitherto unimaginable) is a weapon in the hands of tyranny.  It is suited to the needs of a world in which you no longer count heads to save breaking them, but blow off heads to save the trouble of counting them." - God and the Atom

Weekly Knox: Humour

"For humour, frown upon it as you will, is nothing less than a fresh window of the soul.  Through that window we see, not indeed a different world, but the familiar world of our experience distorted as if by the magic of some tricksy sprite.  It is a plate-glass window, which turns all our earnest, toiling fellow-mortals into figures of fun." -Essays in Satire

Weekly Knox: Classic Quote on Translation

"The translator, let me suggest in passing, must never be frightened of the word 'paraphrase'; it is a bogey of the half-educated.  As I have already tried to point out, it is almost impossible to translate a sentence without paraphrasing; it is a paraphrase when you translate 'Comment vous portez-vous?' by 'How are you?'  But often enough it will be a single word that calls for paraphrase.  When St. Paul describes people as "wise according to the flesh', the translator is under an obligation to paraphrase.  In English speech, you might be called fat according to the flesh, or thin according to the flesh, but not wise or foolish.  The flesh here means natural, human standards of judging, and the translator has got to say so.  'Wise according to the flesh' is Hebrew in English dress; it is not English."  
--Englishing the Bible 8-9

Weekly Knox: The Devil

"It isn't true that there had to be a devil.  According to Catholic theology, the devils were created good and were meant by God to be good; only he determined to create them as beings having a moral power of choice; and it is not possible, not conceivable, I mean, to give a person the power of choice without making it possible for him to choose wrong.  God didn't create a "state of bad and good"; he created,...a possibility of bad and good, by placing some of his creatures, whether angels or men doesn't matter, in a condition in which they could choose for themselves.  There is a particular kind of thing, namely right-choosing, which God himself couldn't have put into the world he was creating without introducing the possibility of evil." -Off the Record

Weekly Knox: Children

"Our Lord warns us that we cannot enter the kingdom of heaven except as children.  What is the use of encouraging children to grow older, if the grand lesson of life is, after all, to learn to be as young as they?" -University and Anglican Sermons

Weekly Knox: Reality

"Always, it is the things which affect us outwardly and impress themselves on our senses that are the shams, the imaginaries; reality belongs to the things of the spirit." - Pastoral Sermons

Weekly Knox: Calvary

"Bethlehem means Christ born man, and man re-born in Christ.  Calvary means that mankind has died in the person of Christ, it means also that Christ has died in the name of mankind; not instead of us, as our substitute, but in our name as our representative." - Pastoral Sermons

Weekly Knox: Original Sin

"Original Sin is the only key which fits the whole puzzle of existence."
-Enthusiasm

Weekly Knox: Sanctity

"Sanctity is not a work done, it is a life lived."

- Occasional Sermons

Weekly Knox: The Rosary

"The reason why we get tired of saying the rosary so much, is because we think about it so little.  We don't treat it exactly as it if were a prayer-wheel, but we treat it very much as if it were a prayer wheel; we don't really want to say it, we want to get it said.  And of course that can't be the right was to go about it." - The Laymen and His Conscience

Weekly Knox: Divine Revelation

"Truth is something homelier and friendlier than bare intellectual conviction.  Revealed truth does not merely claim the homage of our intellects, it satisfies the aspirations of our hearts." -Occasional Sermons

Weekly Knox: Marriage

"Part of God's design for the sanctification of your soul is the influence which husband or wife is going to have on you." -The Hidden Stream

Weekly Knox: God's Judgment

"We can only suppose that God judges with infinite tenderness the opportunities, the temptations, the natural disadvantages, the motives, the struggles, of every soul that has ever lived." -Difficulties

Weekly Knox: God's Love

"The love of God, St. John tells us, resides not in our showing any love for God, but in his showing his love for us first, when he sent out his Son to be an atonement for our sins.  Forget that, and you have forgotten to be a Christian." -Pastoral Sermons