Catholic Church's External

A Handbook of Catholic Usage by Rt. Rev. Msgr. John F Sullivan, D.D. Completely Revised by Rev. John C. O’Leary, Ph.D.

Nihil obstat: John M.A Fearns, S.T.D., Censor Librorum, Imprimatur: Francis Cardina Spellman Archbishop of New York, Copyright 1951 by P.J Kennedy and Sons, New York, USA.

p.226

It’s interesting to note how often our church has availed herself of practices which were I common use among pagans, and which owed their origin to their appropriateness expressing something spiritual by material means. The Church and her clergy are ‘all things to all men, that they may gain Christ,’ and she has often found that it was well to take what was praiseworthy in other forms of worship and adapt it to her own purpose, for the sanctification of her children.

“Thus it is true, in a certain sense, that some Catholic Rites and ceremonies are a reproduction of those pagan creeds; but they are taking of what was the best part from paganism, the keeping of symbolical practices which express the religious instinct that is common to all races and times.”

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