Tuesday, February 8, 2011

The Smartest Guy Ever To Graduate From Jesuit-run Xavier High

Antonin Scalia
It is a safe bet that the smartest guy ever to graduate from Jesuit-run Xavier High in Manhattan currently sits on the U.S. Supreme Court
Even as a student, his former classmates say, Antonin Scalia was scary-smart, first in the class of 1953. "I was never cool though," he once remarked. That seems plausible, especially when one considers how unpopular he continues to be, especially among the chattering political classes who live within a hundred miles of either ocean. 
To many liberal political activists, Scalia is a neo-Savanarola: a holier-than thou, unyielding social conservative, seeking to impose his narrow-minded morality on the rest of us. He wants "to turn back the clock," we are told, presumably to those definitely uncool years of stifling religious sensibility, "I like Ike", and Jim Crow politics. The problem with all that, of course, is that it just isn’t true.

Link (here) to America to read the full post by Matt Malone, S.J.

1 comment:

TonyD said...

Justice Scalia is correct when he says that interpreting the Constitution as originally understood is a “lesser evil”.

That is, we have created a world with this horrible “lesser evil” as our best option. We have failed to actively create better options for our community, our society, and the world.

And the Church has failed to properly teach God’s values. We cannot even live “love your neighbor” – the most basic of values – even within the Church community. Instead, we try to impose our interpretation of God’s values on other Catholics, other Christians, and those who allow us to freely practice Catholicism.

Not every story has a happy ending. The gate really is narrow.