The Avignon papacy, which everyone agrees was an unmitigated disaster for the Church, lasted for seventy years and subsequently triggered a schism that lasted for forty years. Did the saints who lived during the Avignon papacy remain passive and resigned to the crisis out of a spirit of obedience to the Holy See? No. St Catherine of Siena pleaded with the popes to leave Avignon and derided those responsible for the pope's remaining in France as “incarnate demons." And she did so not out of rebelliousness but sincere devotion and faithfulness to the papacy and to the pope. We must do the same during the present crisis. To remain passive and to allow the Church and the papacy to be wounded by the crisis would be the very opposite of faithfulness.

Aristotle calls metaphysics the "supremely free and sovereign philosophy" because all other sciences are coordinated by it insofar as they presuppose its principles, while metaphysics itself neither presupposes the principles of other sciences nor is coordinated by them. Even theology, which is the queen of the sciences on account of the pre-eminence of its object, and, therefore, above metaphysics, presupposes metaphysical concepts about substance, hypostasis, relation, etc., without which revealed truth remains inexplicable.

St Augustine sums up the idea of life subsisting in God so eloquently and so beautifully in the Confessions: "You are the life of lives."

Here's something confusing: there are two Salmantine theologians with the same religious name, viz., Anthony of the Mother of God. The Anthony who wrote the first part of the Cursus Theologicus and philosophical course is not the same Anthony who wrote the (incomplete) course on exegesis. I didn't work this out for ages lol @FrDylanSchrader

A nice old man from my church very kindly gifted me a very battered 1928 Marietti edition of the ST and SCG, which he had inherited from a priest many years ago but has no use for. Very cool.

Rejection of the subordination of the temporal power to the spiritual power is literally the definition of the liberal Catholicism.

What is the root of all the confusion about the Church's traditional teaching on capital punishment? Personalism. Personalism is essentially the subordination of the common good to the individual good. The reason for this is the dignity of the person. This is easily refuted. The temporal common good is the highest of purely natural goods. Therefore, the subordination of the individual person to temporal society is not in tension with human dignity, but is concordant with human dignity since it is a subordination of the human person to the human person's highest natural good. Personalism is, at root, a form of liberal individualism because it elevates the individual good above the temporal common good. It also does profound damage to human dignity because the dignity of man cannot be fully realised without the proper ordering of the human person to the highest natural good: natural happiness, which is the common good.

No, the primary end of punishment is reparative; it is medicinal only in a secondary way. So recourse to capital punishment is licit and even morally necessary whenever the severity of the crime means that the social order cannot be restored without its use.

Québécois Thomist Fr Henri Grenier on the lawfulness of capital punishment: Proposition. — The civil authority has the right to inflict capital punishment on persons guilty of certain crimes. The civil authority has the right to inflict capital punishment on persons who are dangerous to the community in as much as they are a menace to the public peace. But persons guilty of certain crimes are dangerous to the community in as much as they are a menace to the public peace. Therefore, the civil authority has the right to inflict capital punishment on persons guilty of certain crimes. Major.— A person entrusted with the good of a whole has the right to cut off a part which is dangerous to the whole in as much as it is a menace to the common good: wherefore we observe that, if the health of the whole human body requires the excision of a member which is, for example, decayed, and infectious to others members, it will be praiseworthy and advantageous to bodily health to excise it. But, on the one hand, the civil authority is entrusted with the welfare of the whole community and the care of the public peace, which is formally the common good of civil society; and, on the other hand, the criminal, like any other individual person, is related to civil society as the part to the whole. Therefore. The minor is evident from examples: persons guilty of homicide or parricide are a menace to the order of the community, which is bound to protect individual persons; and they are, moreover, dangerous to the whole community.

Exactly. Whether or not the conditions necessary for the legitimate use of the death penalty have been fulfilled is a judgment proper to the temporal power and not the Church, since it is a question of particular social conditions and technical measures of which the Church has no special expertise.

I promise I'm not coping but this is a thousand times less problematic than his predecessor's formulation of his objection to capital punishment as "per se contrary to the Gospel." Rather, Leo says that the requirements of justice can be met by alternative means such that recourse to capital punishment is no longer, in his view, necessary or "admissible." He is quite clearly not saying that he thinks capital punishment is per se unlawful.