#catholicism

The Virgin Mary is called the [Greek words] (the "book of the Word of life") by the Greek Church. The book of the Gospel, the book of Christ's origins and life, can be written and proclaimed because God has first written his living Word in the living book of the Virgin's being, which she has offered to her Lord in all its purity and humility—the whiteness of a chaste, empty page. If the name of Mary does not often appear in the pages of the Gospel as evident participant in the action, it is because she is the human ground of humility and obedience upon which every letter of Christ's life is written. She is the Theotokos, too, in the sense that she is the book that bears, and is inscribed with, the Word of God. She keeps her silence that he might resonate the more plainly within her. ↗

— Erasmo Leiva Merikakis

#gospel-of-matthew #mary #meditations #catholicism

Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command. ↗

— Hans Küng

#celibacy #christianity #church #priesthood #priests

What the Father gives is the capacity to be a self, freedom, and thus autonomy, but an autonomy which can be understood only as a surrender of self to the other. ↗

— Hans Urs von Balthasar

#christ #christianity #christology #god #god-father

1883. ...The teaching of the Church has elaborated the principle of subsidiarity, according to which "a community of a higher order should not interfere in the internal life of a community of a lower order, depriving the latter of its functions, but rather should support it in case of need and help to co-ordinate its activity with the activities of the rest of society, always with a view to the common good. ↗

— The Catholic Church

#freedom #seperation-of-church-and-state #freedom

The Catholic Church sees voluntary vampirism as a kind of suicide. I tend to agree. Though the Pope also excommunicated all animators, unless we ceased raising the dead. Fine; I became Episcopalian. ↗

— Laurell K. Hamilton

#episcopalians #vampires #catholicism

...all that is carried along by the stream's silvery cascade, rhythmically falling from the mountain, carried by its own current-- carried where? ↗

— John Paul II

#christianity #catholicism

Protestantism and Catholicism must not be compared to Sunnism and Shi'ism in the Islamic context as has been done by certain scholars. Sunnism and Shi'ism both go back to the origins of Islam and the very beginning of Islamic history whereas Protestantism is a later protest against the existing Catholic Church and came into being some fifteen hundred years after the foundation of Christianity. ↗

— Seyyed Hossein Nasr

#protestantism #shi-ism #sunnism #catholicism

I suppose you could sum up the religious aspects of my boyhood by saying it was a time of life when I was taught the difference between right and wrong as it specifically applied to Catholicism. ↗

— Robert Vaughn

#aspects #between #boyhood #catholicism #could

Organized religion is the school of hate, and never more exultant in its righteous indignation than when it talks about gay and lesbian. In America the unholy alliance between the know-nothing fundamentalists and the Catholic hierarchy keeps the faithful whipped up to a frenzy of witch-hunting and fag-bashing. ↗

— Paul Monette

#glbt #hate #homophobia #religion #faith

When she was younger, my mother was quite committed to Roman Catholicism. But she got disillusioned with it and moved closer to something like Buddhist beliefs near the end of her life. ↗

— Ralph Fiennes

#buddhist #catholicism #closer #committed #disillusioned