Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
2005 Annual Dinner highlights
2005 Annual Dinner highlights
Dec 8, 2025 3:13 AM
piled a short list of quotations taken from the remarks made by Rev. Robert Sirico and former president of El Salvador, Francisco Flores. Both speeches are available online

Francisco Flores – Speech highlights:

“Responsibility and freedom are two sides of the same coin.”“A free man is a responsible man.”“Opportunity is choice, and choice is freedom.”

Robert Sirico – Speech Highlights:

“If you’re not a socialist when you’re young, you have no heart. But if you remain a socialist when you’re old, you have no brains.”“A priest that believes in the free market? Well lets give it a try!”“The elevator was a metaphor of the ineptitute of socialism as a whole; that it couldn’t get you from one floor to another.”“I saw what freedom did. It wasn’t perfect, it plete, but the people were vibrant; the stores were full.”“This delicate balance between having an institutional separation of church and state on the one hand, but not prohibiting the moral and religious influence that can extend throughout a society on the other hand, and that is a neccessary part of that society. How risky it is to get that balance wrong.”“When we witness even good and decent people who see the state as the resource of first resort, as the mediator in all social disputes, as the chief enforcer of morality; when we see this, we know that our mission is as essential now as it was fifteen years ago.”

On a related note, the Acton podcast will supply your MP3 player or Podcast aggregator with audio content from the Acton Institute.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Judge-ing Sullivan
Anyone familiar with the history of conservative thought and politics in the United States knows that there have always been tensions among various strains of the “movement,” not least that between traditional Christians and secular libertarians. See, for example, George Nash’s The Conservative Intellectual Movement in America. (To simplify severely, the Acton Institute can be seen as straddling this tension, often taking up policy positions that are shared by libertarians but hewing to Christian tradition with respect to the existence...
Saturday Morning Fun (still), Sunday Morning Values (not so much)
Michelle Malkin has a report up at HotAir on how God’s been edited out of our favorite cartoon veggies. Mostly a poke at NBC, but apparently Big Idea is running out of big ideas too. Is it time for a write-in campaign from all you Christian vegetarians out there? Here’s Big Idea’s explanation for the whole thing: Recognizing that we are making a difference to Saturday morning TV by bringing programming that is “absent of bad and has a presence of good”...
How Long Will Our Prosperity Cycle Last?
Mark Whitehouse reported in the September 25th issue of the Wall Street Journal that the living standards of average Americans will have to be adjusted downward ing years because a larger share of our national debt is going to debt-service. He writes, That means Americans will have to work harder to maintain the same living standards—or cut back sharply to pay down the debt.” Catherine Mann, a senior fellow at the Institute for International Economics notes, “Our net international obligations...
Political Season
Ah, Autumn in an even year. The crisp smell of approaching winter, the exploding color on the trees, and the sound of the desperate mad dash for votes. As I was travelling a couple of weeks ago, I picked up a copy of T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral, a play Flannery O’Connor claimed was “good if you don’t know it, better if you do.” It is the story of the martyrdom of St. Thomas Becket, the Archbishop of...
Do You See More than Just a ‘Carbon Footprint’?
Call it something like an anthropological Rorschach test. What do you see when you look at the picture above? Do you see more than just a ‘carbon footprint’? It’s a fair question to ask, I think, of those who are a part of the radical environmentalist/population control political lobby. It’s also a note of caution to fellow Christians who want to build bridges with those folks…there is plex of interrelated policies that are logically consistent once you assume the tenets...
Sirico and Sider on Poverty Tonight
Today’s Grand Rapids Press has an article with some background on tonight’s debate between Ron Sider and Rev. Robert A. Sirico. More details are below. If you live in the West Michigan area or are in town tonight, please stop by. Wealth and Poverty in Light of the Gospel: How Can Christians Work Together if We Disagree? Mon — October 2, 2006 Grand Rapids, MI Calvin Theological Seminary Auditorium 7:30 pm – 9:00 pm Ronald J. Sider, professor of theology...
Is Democracy a Universal Human Desire?
I am presently reading Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq (New York: Penguin Press, 2006), by Pulitzer Prize winning author Thomas E. Ricks. Any one who knows of a critical review of this best-selling book would help me by suggesting where I can find said review. The book is, to my mind at this moment, a powerful and fair-minded critique of much that has gone wrong in our Iraq military adventure. According to Ricks blame for our multiple failures,...
Be Careful What You Wish For
Reading through the narrative of king Saul in 1 Samuel, it occurs to me that it is in part an object lesson of Lord Acton’s dictum about the corrupting influence of power, in this case political. The story begins in 1 Samuel 8, when Israel asks for a king. When Samuel was old and had passed on his rulership of Israel to his sons, who did “not walk” in Samuel’s faithful ways, the people of Israel clamor for a king....
Hollywood’s Faith in the Family
S.T. Karnick, who also blogs at The Reform Club, has some pretty solid and informative musings on popular culture. One of his most recent es along with the news that Fox has created a new religion and family friendly division for its movie studios, named FoxFaith. It also looks like Disney is phasing out its plans to make R-rated movies. As Karnick writes, “The best way for Christians to affect Hollywood is not to protest but to go to more...
Honor Roll Reactions Streaming In
Just one week after the public release of the Catholic High School Honor Roll, positive reactions are streaming in. Many schools have let us know that they have observed a noticeable change because they were named to the Honor Roll. Other schools have used already used this occasion to jump start their advancement engines. Rev. Ronald Schwenzer, President of St. Thomas High School in Houston, TX, observed the usefulness of the Honor Roll. “Last year we had an inquiry from...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved