“The family is a school where the soul and character are formed.”

Father LE FLOCH (1862-1950)
Holy Ghost Father

“Gentlemen, when I was young, we knew Latin. It is one way to learn [one’s own language] that has not yet been replaced. It is also a way to draw closer to the Church, to hear her prayers, her canticles, her theologians. Perhaps its close relationship to the Church is the unspoken cause of the condemnation of Latin in schools. Cicero, Virgil, Tacite have been accused of preparing generations who would be able to recite the Te Deum or the Dies Irae and follow the Mass in their Roman missal. Your mind is dispersed among a dozen subjects which are considered positive and which I believe are simply useless for your age and for the life that you lead. Recently, one of my son’s friends was refused his diploma because the poor boy confused the jawbone of a secondary bird called an ichtyornis with the jaw of a perornis. When I was young, it was not the animal’s mouth that we had to know, but the animal itself. I am glad to have been formed in this manner. You are scientific, it seems, and we were literary. That means that we were ignorant of certain things, and that you are ignorant of others. The collegiate has changed from ignorance in one domain to ignorance in another. It remains to be seen which is the least troublesome. However, I believe it more worthwhile to know fewer facts and to give oneself to developing ideas, to forming judgments, to absorbing the open air in such a way as to see the big picture before scrutinizing the details, to studying the most noble minds of antiquity and to knowing the origins of the language one speaks, which is the most innate skill and the first condition of true civilization.”

René BAZIN (1853-1932)
Writer