In Union with God, in a paragraph introducing other instruction, this remarkable insight:
Piety without the spirit of sacrifice. . . is like an organism without a backbone.
--Blessed Columba Marmion
Now, I, for one, am very fond of organisms lacking backbones; however, I do not read this to be a slam of the invertebrate world, but rather the statement that such a situation is akin to a vertebrate lacking a backbone--and that observation is very sobering indeed.
Note: When I first typed and published this entry, I discovered that in the course of typing the quotation above, I had misspelled sacrifice as sacrafice. As anyone can tell, this is an obviously Freudian reference to the sacrum, an important part of any spine.