Christian mothers, if only you knew the future of distress and peril, of shame ill-restrained, that you prepare for your sons and daughters in imprudently accustoming them to live hardly clothed and in making them lose the sense of modesty, you should be ashamed of yourselves and of the harm done the little ones whom heaven entrusted to your care, to be reared in Christian dignity and culture.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the responsibility of Christian mothers in raising their children with dignity and modesty.
Pope Pius XII's quote calls attention to the critical role that mothers play in shaping the future of their children. It warns that by neglecting to instill values of modesty and dignity, mothers risk preparing their children for a life filled with shame and distress. The quote serves as a reminder that the nurturing environment of a child significantly influences their moral and cultural development.
In practice
In a parenting seminar discussing the values of modesty.
If a worker is deprived of hope to acquire some personal property, what other natural stimulus can be offered him that will inspire him to hard work, labor, saving and sobriety today, when so many nations and men have lost everything and all they have left is their capacity for work?
To live without risk is to risk not living.
It might be said that society speaks through the clothing it wears. Through its clothing it reveals its secret aspirations and uses it, at least in part, to build or destroy its future.
The faith of the Church is this: That one and identical is the Word of God and the Son of Mary Who suffered on the Cross, Who is present in the Eucharist, and Who rules in Heaven
True science discovers God in an ever-increasing degree — as though God were waiting behind every door opened by science.
You lose nothing through peace. You can lose everything through war.
We don't yet know, above all, what the world might be like if children were to grow up without being subjected to humiliation, if parents would respect them and take them seriously as people.
You learn from a conglomeration of the incredible past - whatever experience gotten in any way whatsoever.
It was play rather than work which enabled man to evolve his higher faculties - everything we mean by the word 'culture'.
There is no reason why an American scholar cannot by himself or herself develop an adequate understanding of another culture. And I don't find any reason to suppose that the birth within a culture automatically confers understanding.
The adequate study of culture, our own and those on the opposite side of the globe, can press on to fulfillment only as we learn today from the humanities as well as from the scientists.
Literature is news that stays news.
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