Spiritual Quote of the Day (John Courtney Murray, on ‘The Erroneous Conscience,’ Freedom, and Tolerance)

"The erroneous conscience is endowed with internal personal freedom. It has the right not to be forced to abandon its religious convictions and practices and not to be coerced into acceptance of the true religious faith, against its own subjectively sincere mandate. It also has a right to reverence and respect on the part of others, and others have the duty of paying it reverence and respect. The respect, however, is not owed to the erroneous conscience as erroneous, since no respect is due to error, but to the man in error who is still endowed with that measure of human dignity which is synonymous with internal personal freedom. The duty here is therefore of the order of charity; its proper name is tolerance.”—American Jesuit theologian John Courtney Murray (1904-1967), The Problem of Religious Freedom (1965)

Quote of the Day (Dean Acheson on the U.S., Land of ‘No Orthodoxy, No Worship of Authority’)

“In order to love our own country we do not have to hate anyone. There is enough to inspire love here….Who are these people, the Americans? They are a people who, as we have said, hold sacred the Word of God. They are a people molded by the dangers and the beauty and the open bounty of this continent....Out of many, they are one. Theirs is a unity based upon the brotherhood of man under the Fatherhood of God; theirs, too, the great and vigorous diversity based on respect for man, the individual. Here is no orthodoxy, no worship of authority. ... We are too proud, too stubborn, too cussedly independent for the bridle. And this, indeed, is the secret of our strength, and of the lasting-power of our society.”—Dean Acheson (1893-1971), Secretary of State, from a speech delivered before a meeting sponsored jointly by the National Council of Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. and the Washington Federation of Churches at the National Guard Armory, Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C. Sept. 29, 1952, and reprinted as “Religious Faith in American Life,” Foreign Service Journal, December 1952