Legal Commentary

A brief passage from Pope Benedict XVI, again from is book God and the World. This one ought to warm the heart of my friend Kyle Kupp, a diagrammer of sentences from way back.

In discussing the contributions that the Benedictine monks made at Monte Cassino (where the interviews or the book took place), Pope Benedict contends that a love of grammar served God's purpose and, of course, man's.

     With all this, Monte Cassino brought an end to the culture of antiquity but, at the same time, rescued it. This is where manuscripts were copies; this is where the knowledge of languages was cultivated. The French monk Dom Leclerq once showed how love of grammar and love of God were inseparably united. Because they had to understand the sacred words, then the whole business of reading was so to say a ministry. That in turn conditioned the way in which, to take just one example, philology developed, and the Word was cultivated in every shape and form.

There you have it, boys and girls. Don't moan and groan and about having to take the first sentence of the preamble of the United States Constitution and do this with it:

You're doing God's work.