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Pentimento

Brothers, love is a teacher, but a hard one to obtain: learning to love is hard and we pay dearly for it. It takes hard work and a long apprenticeship, for it is not just for a moment that we must learn to love, but forever. (Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov)

Wednesday, January 23, 2013

The Unfortunate and the Infamous


The post-abortive condition fits Victor Hugo’s description of the distressed and despairing, given in his explanation of  the title of his epic novel, Les Misérables:
"…There is a point where the unfortunate and the infamous unite and are confounded in a single word, a fatal word, the miserable; whose fault is this? And then should not the charity be all the more profound, in proportion as the fall is great?" (Vol. III, Book VIII, Ch. V)

-- Br. Humbert Kilanowski, O.P.


Posted by Pentimento at 7:45 PM
Labels: abortion, compassion, mercy, suffering world, Victor Hugo

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A special-needs mother, Catholic revert, transplanted New Yorker, and musician with a doctorate trying to make sense of how I got from there to here.
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