Bethune Catholic

John Senior (may his soul rest in peace) has been quoted here at Bethune Catholic before, and recently has been quoted frequently on Stoney Creek Digest and Catholic Restorationists. Mostly he is quoted from his classic "Restoration of Christian Culture." But he wrote another book, less popular, but so far in my reading (I have it on loan), just as quoteable: "The Death of Christian Culture"(1978). Here is a sample:

But the chilling truth is that industriaism brings on a paralyzing gluttonny and greed in which the qualifity of life is quantified. Paradoxically, you cannot afford children in the affluent society. The world has never been so rich and wretched as in these air-conditioned Edens where another child would sap the payments on a second car. There is no population bomb today. Quite the opposite: the question is whether industrialized society can reproduce itself at all.

Just a few pages later, Dr. Senior writes:

According to this view [Keynes], all men will be happy and good only when all men are rich..... Boethius, awaiting execution in a cell under orders from the barbarian dictator, Theodoric, reflected on the enormously gross product of his empire and concluded that the satisfaction of desire would better be achieved by wanting less.....Wars are caused not by poor nations but by rich ones; and the greatest crimes are not the consequence of slums but quite the reverse: slums are caused by the genteel criminality that lurks in country clubs and yahts.

More to come... Oremus pro invicem!