King Edward the Confessor] enshrined in himself and exhibited to the world the two essential elements of right authority—the truths that all authority descends ultimately from God; and that all government exists for the wellbeing of the governed, not of itself. Christianity commits the Christian to no form of government as essentially better than any other . . . the Christian, objecting as indeed he must to anarchy, demands government, but not (save by reason of purely personal preference) this sort or that. On the other hand, he knows that political life, like social, artistic, moral, familiar—every kind or department of life—has to recognize God as sole ultimate source of Power, and the Christian must be able to be obeying God when obeying the mandates of his prince. To fail to remember this is to begin to offer to Caesar what belongs to God, and to worship the Beast and his Image, to adore what is fain to set itself up (as the Scriptures so often say) in the Holy Place itself above all that can deserve the Name of God. No State, no Government, is Absolute over Conscience.

—C. C. Martindale, S.J.
from a homily on St. Edward published in Saints Are Not Sad, Frank J. Sheed, ed. (1949)

—Jean Vianney
—From a sermon by St. Jean Vianney in Secrets of the Saints by Henri Gheon (1954)

Had I believed that certain death would have been the consequences to myself and the whole family of taking Johnny Stall and Ed Fisher into the house, it would have been my duty to have done it. Neither of them had any other home, for Mr. Stall (where Fisher lodged) had fled into the country, and had I shut my doors upon them, they must have perished in the streets. Remember, my dear creature, the difference between the law [of Moses] and the gospel. The former only commands us “to love our neighbors as ourselves,” but the latter bids us to love them better than ourselves. “A new commandment I give unto you, that ye love one another as I have loved you.” Had I not believed in the full import of that divine and sublime text of Scripture, I could not have exposed myself with so little concern, nay, with so much pleasure, for five weeks past to the contagion of the prevailing fever. I did not dare to desert my post, and I believed fear even for a moment to be an act of disobedience to the gospel of Jesus Christ.

—Benjamin Rush
explaining in a letter to his absent wife why he took in two homeless men during a yellow fever epidemic (1793)

—Pope John Paul II
Familiaris Consortio (1981)

In the past, manliness was characteristic of men, and not all men, but only a portion of them: the manly men. Manly men ruled, but they did not rule absolutely; they were kept in check by the unmanly, particularly by women and philosophers. Mothers, wives, sisters, and daughters let their sons, husbands, brothers, and fathers know when the courage and protective manliness on which women depended had crossed the line into rashness or tyranny or male bull-headed idiocy. Whereas a woman spoke (or, more accurately, complained) only to the men in her domestic circle, the philosophers (being men themselves) abstracted from the personalism of women and generalized the critique. Socrates and Plato challenged Homer and the Homeric heroes; Aristotle sought to tame the militaristic manliness of the Greeks by pointing out that war should be pursued for the sake of peace. Both women and philosophers have traditionally been critics of manliness, but appreciative critics.

—Diana Schaub
in a review of Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness, in the Claremont Review of Books (2006)