Infallible Ignorance

There is the famous question whether St. John sets the Crucifixion on the day of the Passover, the day on which the lambs are killed, and not on the day following, as the Synoptists appear to do. The question has been fought between Easterns and Westerns—for the Easterns use leavened bread for the Holy Eucharist, and wish to show that the Last Supper was just before the days of unleavened bread—and between Catholics and Catholics, and between critics and critics. That most brilliant and most fervent defender of the Church, the late Monsignor Duchesne, used to say that when he was a young man he imagined, like many young scholars, that he had discovered an infallible way of reconciling St. John here with the Synoptists, but that in later years he had realised that we are too ignorant of the customs of those days to assert any of the many solutions to be decisive! —Dom John Chapman, The Four Gospels [1927] (New York: Sheed & Ward, 1944), pp. 61–62.

Adapted from St. Seraphim of Sarov

Verbs have the same meanings in religion and society.

Funny Typo

Chapman's bloomers are as big as his insights. — Sebastian Moore OSB, Introduction to Abbot Chapman, Spiritual Letters [1935], London, 2003, p. vii.

NOTE 12/19/14. It was not a typo, just an Englishism:

They saw Ronnie that evening. He merely burst into laughter. It's all my fault, entirely my fault! You see, one gets so used to Roman ways that one forgets to warn people. I ought to have primed you to tell Testastorta that you had come to Rome on purpose to inform the Holy Father of the enthusiastic reception among English Catholics of the decrees on the mass media, the reform of the liturgy and above all Lumen Gentium. You would then have had a pucka private audience in which you could have said what you liked. My dear, innocent cousins, what a bloomer! Thank God I'm not a Papist or I should have had to resign my post as being tarred with the integriste brush. As a respectable Protestant I am fortunately above suspicion…
— Bryan Houghton, Judith's Marriage, 1987, p. 170.