An interesting quote from the captain of the Titanic - five years earlier

This is from the weekly email column of Fr. George Rutler, pastor of The Church of our Saviour in Manhattan and a well-known author. I've highlighted the quote: 

... This Sunday also is engraved in memory as the one-hundredth anniversary of the Titanic tragedy. In 1907, Captain Edward J. Smith, then captain of the Adriatic,  and felicitously unaware that five years later he would command the largest moving object in the world,  told a newspaper reporter:  

   “When anyone asks me how I can best describe my experience in nearly forty years at sea, I merely say, uneventful. Of course there have been winter gales, and storms and fog and the like. But in all my experience, I have never been in any accident of any sort worth speaking about. I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck and never have been wrecked nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort.”

   While there have been disasters on an even greater scale, the sinking of the Titanic has become a symbol of human triumph and failure, engineered strength against the greater forces of nature, and the perils of self-confidence. Honest pride in human achievement is a form of thanks to the Creator who has made man capable of procreating, but sinful pride is the origin of all other sins when it becomes a mantle of arrogance, turning Te Deum into Te Meum. Cardinal Newman warned: “Quarry the granite rock with razors, or moor the vessel with a thread of silk; then may you hope with such keen and delicate instruments as human knowledge and human reason to contend against those giants, the passion and the pride of man.

Comments

[Ellen Mullin]

Tom, your quote concerning the mantle of arrogance hit the mark right on. God bless you.

Ellen M.

[tom faranda]

Yes, Fr. Rutler is frequently very quotable.