Catholic Church Quotes

1. "Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty"
Author: Albert Einstein

2. "For the humanists, whatever authority Scripture might possess derived from the original texts in their original languages, rather than from the Vulgate, which was increasingly recognized as unreliable and inaccurate. In that the catholic church continued to insist that the Vulgate was a doctrinally normative translation, a tension inevitably developed between humanist biblical scholarship and catholic theology...Through immediate access to the original text in the original language, the theologian could wrestle directly with the 'Word of God,' unhindered by 'filters' of glosses and commentaries that placed the views of previous interpreters between the exegete and the text. For the Reformers, 'sacred philology' provided the key by means of which the theologian could break free from the confines of medieval exegesis and return ad fontes to the title deeds of the Christian faith rather than their medieval expressions, to forge once more the authentic theology of the early church."
Author: Alister E. McGrath

3. "American circumstances and Chiese character. How could I know these two things do not mix?I taught her how American circumstances work. If you are born poor here, it's no lasting shame. You are first in line for a scholarship. If the roof crashes on your head, no need to cry over this bad luck. You can sue anybody, make the landlord fix it. You do not have to sit like a Buddha under a tree letting pigeons drop their dirty business on your head. You can buy an umbrella. Or go inside a Catholic church. In America, nobody says you have to keep the circumstances somebody else gives you. She learned thse things, but I couldn't teach her Chinses character. How to obey parents and listen to your mother's mind. How not to show your own thoughts, to put your feelings behind your face so you can take advantage of hidden opportunities. Why easy things are not worth pursuing. How to know your own worth and polish it, never flashing it around like a cheap ring. Why Chinese thinking is best."
Author: Amy Tan

4. "As a former Catholic, and as someone who even today is not opposed to being called a Christian, I felt I had every right to use the symbols of the Church and resented being told not to."
Author: Andres Serrano

5. "Some religions actually go so far as to label anyone who belongs to a religious sect other than their own a heretic, even though the overall doctrines and impressions of godliness are nearly the same. For example: The Catholics believe the Protestants are doomed to Hell simply because they do not belong to the Catholic Church. In the same way, many splinter groups of the Christian faith, such as the evangelical or revivalist churches, believe the Catholics worship graven images. (Christ is depicted in the image that is most physiologically akin to the individual worshipping him, and yet the Christians criticize "heathens" for the worship of graven images.) And the Jews have always been given the Devil's name."
Author: Anton Szandor LaVey

6. "Corruption,' Jordan Belfort believes, 'is endemic to human being. I mean, even men in monasteries - where enticement is hard to come by – even men in those circumstances have sex with other men and abuse children. Look at the Catholic Church! Man is an imperfect animal and he is corruptible, okay? And in finance, the liquid nature of the market makes corruption very easy. On Wall Street, this liquidity is so in your face -' he suddenly grits his teeth - 'that if you have even the slightest predisposition to the dark side, you become corrupted. In addition to which, those attracted to Wall Street have a predisposition to greed."
Author: Antonella Gambotto Burke

7. "Kinsey thought that Freud in his own way was as dangerous as the Catholic Church."
Author: Bill Condon

8. "The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period."(VOTF - Voice of the Faithful - a Catholic group that wants to change the Church, keep the faith.)"
Author: Charles L. Bailey Jr.

9. "The Church expected the Second Coming of Christ immediately. The converts had known a first coming. And then? And then! That was the trouble — the then. He had come, and they adored and believed, they communicated and practiced, and waited. The then lasted, and there seemed to be no farther equivalent Now. Time became the individual and catholic problem. The Church had to become as universal and as durable — as time."
Author: Charles Williams

10. "As for the depiction of the Catholic church, it's not meant to be a prediction."
Author: Dan Simmons

11. "Under the law, the government, whether it's state, local or federal, cannot give the Catholic Church or any religious institution money directly."
Author: Ed Rendell

12. "If she were Catholic, she could kneel, kneel and bow her head inside a church with brilliant stained-glass windows and streaks of golden light falling over her. Yes, oh yes, she would kneel and stretch out her arms, holding to her Amy and Dottie and Bev."
Author: Elizabeth Strout

13. "There are not one hundred people in the United States who hate The Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they wrongly perceive the Catholic Church to be."
Author: Fulton J. Sheen

14. "Martin Luther called the church building the "Mundhaus" (lit. "mouth house" or "speech house") because he believed that the Graeco-Roman "pagan lecture" of the sophist entertainers who took over the Catholic church should be the focus of "the service". Sermons might have been helpful in the later Middle Ages when even many Catholic priests couldn't read. However, modern research has repeatedly proven that lecturing is the worst possible way to educate others because it's so boring. Might traditional, so-called-inspired preaching still be the best way to communicate God's Word?" ~ © gfp '42™"
Author: Gary Patton

15. "Still stands the forest primeval; but far away from its shadow, Side by side, in their nameless graves, the lovers are sleeping.Under the humble walls of the little catholic churchyard,In the heart of the city, they lie, unknown and unnoticed;Daily the tides of life go ebbing and flowing beside them,Thousands of throbbing hearts, where theirs are at rest and forever,Thousands of aching brains, where theirs no longer are busy,Thousands of toiling hands, where theirs have ceased from their labors,Thousands of weary feet, where theirs have completed their journey!"
Author: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

16. "Life's going to change. You thought it already had? Not nearly as much as it's going to change now.Everything you disapprove of you'll call "aristocratic." This term can be applied to food, to books and plays, to modes of speech, to hairstyles and to such venerable institutions as prostitution and the Roman Catholic Church.If "Liberty" was the watchword of the first Revolution, "Equality" is that of the second. "Fraternity" is a less assertive quality, and must creep in where it may."
Author: Hilary Mantel

17. "Catholic Church, expelled all the Jews,"
Author: Howard Zinn

18. "This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries. It is also the military ethic … a blind faith in some higher and wiser "authority." The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister … all the way up to "God."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

19. "No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them. All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit. But their loss and failure is ours too. What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped create...a generation of permanent cripples failed seekers who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebodyor at least some force is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel. This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries."
Author: Hunter S. Thompson

20. "Theology is just not important in Judaism, or in any other religion, really. There's no orthodoxy, as you have it in the Catholic Church. No complicated creeds to which everybody must subscribe. No infallible pronouncements by a pope. Nobody can tell Jews what to believe. Within reason, you can believe what you like... We have orthopraxy instead of orthodoxy. Right practice rather then right belief. That's all. You Christians make such a fuss about theology, but it's not important in the way you think. It's just poetry, really, ways of talking about the inexpressible."
Author: Hyam Maccoby

21. "Christmas, as a practicing Catholic child, was seen as a reward for lots and lots and lots of church."
Author: Jenny Colgan

22. "Many trees have died so that the Catholic Church can preach against homosexuality."
Author: Jodi Picoult

23. "It is sufficient to say, what everybody knows to be true, that the Irish population is Catholic, and that the Protestants, whether of the Episcopalian or Presbyterian Church, or of both united, are a small minority of the Irish people."
Author: John Bright

24. "The Legislature of Lower Canada, consisting chiefly of Roman Catholics, could hardly be expected to support a church which they were taught to consider heretical, and in Upper Canada the scanty means at the disposal of the Government, precluded all hope."
Author: John Strachan

25. "We do hereby command the Leaders of the Hebrew, Catholic and Protestant Churches to sanctify and have us crowned Emperor of the United States and Protector of Mexico."
Author: Joshua A. Norton

26. "I am deeply Catholic and always will be, but I'm no longer a member of the church. I left in 2003 because of the sex abuse scandal."
Author: Julianna Baggott

27. "Presentation was the name of the Catholic church [my mother's family] attended, and this is what I love about the Irish: My mother became known as the second prettiest girl at Presentation parish. "Why was that okay?" I once asked her. "Oh, because everybody knew Mary Griffin was the most beautiful girl at Presentation," she replied. My mom was happy to be on the D-list! Just like I'm not trying to be Brooke Shields, she wasn't trying to be Mary Griffin."
Author: Kathy Griffin

28. "In Scotland, Catholics have raised their voices against sectarianism and intolerance directed against the Church. Clearly, these actions show that freedom of religious expression, a basic human right, is not upheld in our midst as widely and as completely as it should be."
Author: Keith O'Brien

29. "When we passed a Catholic church, I recalled, he said, "You think your dad's a good chemist? They're turning soda crackers into meat in there. Can your dad do that?"
Author: Kurt Vonnegut

30. "Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th."
Author: Lance Morrow

31. "For faithful Catholics, communion is not just a nice ritual: It is the body and blood of Jesus Christ, and the ultimate sign of our willingness to be incorporated into the church."
Author: Maggie Gallagher

32. "Yesterday I had a Shaker visitor, and today a Catholic; and the more I see and hear, the less do I care about church doctrines."
Author: Maria Mitchell

33. "Well, I think that Catholicism's basic foundation of faith is personal conscience. I think it's between you and God, not you and the Church."
Author: Martin Sheen

34. "The Church's war against women occurred not under Christ—who by all accounts held women as equals to men—but through the writings of St Irenaeus and Tertullian, and that most cruel woman-hater of them all, St Paul, whose hostile views on women were unfortunately included in the Bible. But let me be clear, it is not only a Catholic problem; it is a Christian one: Martin Luther, the scourge of the old Church, shares its views on women. He once wrote: "Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops." Weeds! Weeds!"
Author: Matthew Reilly

35. "We have to make a human pyramid displaying the foundations of the Catholic Church and the most frightening aspect, according to Brother Louis, is that Thomas Mackee is holding up the pyramid which makes the whole future of the church incredibly shaky."
Author: Melina Marchetta

36. "[Dan] Brown states that five million women were killed by the Church as witches. In fact, modern research has shown that the witch hunts began in the sixteenth century in Europe and that between 30,000 and 50,000 men and women were burned to death for the crime of witchcraft. However, 90 per cent of those trials took place before secular tribunals in countries such as Germany and France where by the 1500s the Church had lost most of its influence in judicial matters. Indeed, it was precisely in countries like Spain and Italy where the Catholic Church still had influence that there were almost no witchcraft trials."
Author: Michael Coren

37. "Nightclubs are the equivalent of a Catholic Church in a poor country. You hear a lot of stuff about churches filled with gold while the people are starving. But what elitists don't get is that for poor people, the church is their own mansion. Nightclubs fill the same function."
Author: Oscar Hijuelos

38. "I grew up in a very Catholic family. Up until puberty, I would go to a Catholic church every week."
Author: Park Chan Wook

39. "It is now for the Catholic Church to bend herself to her work with calmness and generosity. It is for you to observe her with renewed and friendly attention."
Author: Pope John XXIII

40. "I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world."
Author: Richard Dawkins

41. "Of all the institutions in their lives, only the Catholic Church has seemed aware of the fact that my mother and father are thinkers—persons aware of the experience of their lives. Other institutions—the nation's political parties, the industries of mass entertainment and communications, the companies that employed them—have all treated my parents with condescension."
Author: Richard Rodriguez

42. "I support non-discrimination for homosexuals, but I think, or at least I have the right to think - without saying whether I think it or not - I have the right to think, along with the catechism of the Catholic Church, that homosexuality is morally wrong."
Author: Rocco Buttiglione

43. "I found out that many of our Catholics simply don't know what the church teaches, and why, on a lot of issues, and therefore are saying things that they think are okay. They simply don't know."
Author: Roger Mahony

44. "John Milton has, since his own lifetime, always been one of the major figures in English literature, but his reputation has changed constantly. He has been seen as a political opportunist, an advocate of 'immorality' (he wrote in favour of divorce and married three times), an over-serious classicist, and an arrogant believer in his own greatness as a poet. He was all these things. But, above all, Milton's was the last great liberal intelligence of the English Renaissance. The values expressed in all his works are the values of tolerance, freedom and self-determination, expressed by Shakespeare, Hooker and Donne. The basis of his aesthetic studies was classical, but the modernity of his intellectual interests can be seen in the fact that he went to Italy (in the late 1630s) where he met the astronomer Galileo, who had been condemned as a heretic by the Catholic church for saying the earth moved around the sun."
Author: Ronald Carter

45. "The Catholic chruch as threatened your life - do you not want revenge? Have you not sold your hatred to the Pretestant cause to work against the church that has hunted you?""No," I said simply. "I hate no one. I want only to be left in peace to understand the mysteries of the universe in my own way.""God has already laid out for us the mysteries of the universe, or as much as He permits us to understand. You think your way is better?""Better than these wars of dogma that have led men to burn and fillet one another across Europe for fifty years? Yes, I do.""Then what is it you believe?"I looked at him. "I believe that, in the end, even the devils will be pardoned."
Author: S.J. Parris

46. "I wanted to ask my father about his regrets. I wanted to ask him what was the worst thing he'd ever done. His greatest sin. I wanted to ask him if there was any reason why the Catholic Church would consider him for sainthood. I wanted to open up his dictionary and find the definitions for faith, hope, goodness, sadness, tomato, son, mother, husband, virginity, Jesus, wood, sacrifice, pain, foot, wife, thumb, hand, bread, and sex. "Do you believe in God?" I asked my father."God has lots of potential," he said."When you pray," I asked him. "What do you pray about?""That's none of your business," he said. We laughed. We waited for hours for somebody to help us. What is an Indian? I lifted my father and carried him across every border."
Author: Sherman Alexie

47. "The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is being treated either as Madonnas or Mary Magdalenes."
Author: Shirley Williams

48. "It's the strangest thing about this church - it is obsessed with sex, absolutely obsessed. Now, they will say we, with our permissive society and rude jokes, are obsessed. No. We have a healthy attitude. We like it, it's fun, it's jolly; because it's a primary impulse it can be dangerous and dark and difficult. It's a bit like food in that respect, only even more exciting. The only people who are obsessed with food are anorexics and the morbidly obese, and that in erotic terms is the Catholic Church in a nutshell."
Author: Stephen Fry

49. "I'm back in the basement of the Ascension Catholic Church, Francisco. And Little Suzie is here. She's lying on an alter, and they're hurting her. The bastards. They're hurting her. There is blood all over the place. There are candles burning and people chanting." I could hardly believe what I was seeing and I cried out, "What is this? I don't understand. What the hell is this?""Ask your unconscious mind to tell you, Suzie," he responded, ever so gently. "Ask."I did ask. And the answer swept over me with a force so strong that I felt as if I had been knocked backward."Lord! Oh, Lord. This is satanic ritual abuse, Francisco. That's what this is! That's what this is!" I screamed. "Satanic ritual abuse. And they're using Little Suzie as part of their goddamned ritual.p150"
Author: Suzie Burke

50. "It's perfectly fair that you can't be a Roman Catholic priest unless you're a man. It seems right that the reach of anti-discriminatory law should stop at the door of the church or mosque."
Author: Trevor Phillips

Catholic Church Quotes Pictures