#priests

Whatever flaws or personal failings afflict them, it remains the case that the overwhelming majority of priests and politicians are honourable and honest - seeking to live out their beliefs and serve society. ↗

— Keith O'Brien

#beliefs #case #failings #flaws #honest

In all the antique religions, mythology takes the place of dogma; that is, the sacred lore of priests and people... and these stories afford the only explanation that is offered of the precepts of religion and the prescribed rules of ritual. ↗

— William Robertson Smith

#antique #dogma #explanation #lore #mythology

The only other person attending who was close to her age was Father St. Laurent, a devastatingly good-looking Roman Catholic priest who made the RC's vows of celibacy seem like a crime against the human gene pool. ↗

— Julia Spencer-Fleming

#age

Don't you know, priests, why our sermons do not touch the people's heart? Because we do not preach to the eyes, only to the ears. ↗

— Antonio Vieira

#ears #eyes #heart #know #only

What, but the rapacity of the only men who exercised their reason, the priests, secured such vast property to the church, when a man gave his perishable substance to save himself from the dark torments of purgatory. ↗

— Mary Wollstonecraft

#dark #exercised #gave #himself #his

The Pope would have an easier job than the President of the United States in adopting a change of course. He has no Congress alongside him as a legislative body nor a Supreme Court as a judiciary. He is absolute head of government, legislator and supreme judge in the church. If he wanted to, he could authorize contraception over night, permit the marriage of priests, make possible the ordination of women and allow eucharistic fellowship with this Protestant churches. What would a Pope do who acted in the spirit of Obama? ↗

— Hans Küng

#celibacy #christianity #church #clergy #contraception

When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#beatification #canonisation #deacons #devil #devil-s-advocate

I don't flatter myself with much dependence upon the present disposition of the Eastern Indians, who are many ways liable to be drawn into a rupture with us by the artifices of the French, their own weakness and the influence which the French Missionary Priests have over them. ↗

— William Shirley

#dependence #disposition #drawn #eastern #flatter

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.) ↗

— Charles L. Bailey Jr.

#catholic #church #confronted #disbelief #evil

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