Popular quotes about Catholic! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 15
I'm an ex-Catholic priest. I have such a complex relationship to Catholicism. On the one hand, if I called myself a Catholic it would have to be a very unorthodox one, as I just don't believe all of the teachings of the Church. But on the other hand, I'm an educated man because the Catholic Church educated me. It gave me something that is really important to me. So I always think about my faith. I always have it, and sometimes I can't talk about it, and sometimes I can. I am like an adolescent in that way. Teens are asking questions: who is God and what does it mean to have faith?
Benjamin Alire SaenzI'm a lapsed Quaker. I don't go to meetings any more. But I'm very drawn to Catholicism - all that glitter. I'd love to be a Catholic. I think it would be fantastic - faith, forgiveness, absolution, extreme unction - all these wonderful words. I don't think anyone who was ever born a Catholic hasn't died a Catholic, no matter how lapsed they are.
Kate AtkinsonI was raised in a Catholic household and went to a Catholic school, and my childhood brain perceived medieval Catholicism as an action movie: There's this crazy omnipresent guy who can destroy you at any moment.
GrimesI believe that this Republic will endure for many centuries. If so there will doubtless be among its Presidents Protestants and Catholics, and very probably at some time, Jews. I have consistently tried while President to act in relation to my fellow Americans of Catholic faith as I hope that any future President who happens to be Catholic will act towards his fellow Americans of Protestant faith. Had I followed any other course I should have felt that I was unfit to represent the American people.
Theodore RooseveltI was raised Irish Catholic, but I don't consider myself Irish Catholic: I consider myself me, an American.
John CusackRegarding the accusations of sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests, deplorable and disgusting as those abuses are, they are not so harmful to the children as the grievous mental harm in bringing up the child Catholic in the first place.
Richard DawkinsI'm a writer of faith. I was raised Catholic, and I have a deeply Catholic imagination.
Julianna BaggottI was raised Irish Catholic and went to Holy Names Academy, an all-girl's private Catholic school. I loved the nuns there and I love them to this day.
Kitty KelleyI'm spiritual. I'm religious. I'm a strong Christian and I'm a Catholic but I go to a Presbyterian Church. Occasionally I go to the Catholic church too. I take communion. I haven't transferred my membership or anything.
Wesley ClarkBut because I am a Catholic, and no Catholic has ever been elected president, the real issues in this campaign have been obscured - perhaps deliberately, in some quarters less responsible than this. So it is apparently necessary for me to state once again not what kind of church I believe in - for that should be important only to me - but what kind of America I believe in.
John F. KennedyI have a lot of mental scars from being brought up Catholic and being sent to Catholic school for 13 years!
Mat McNerneyI do have some Catholic stuff that is done from the perspective of an ignorant Catholic. But other than that, topic-wise, there's nothing really filthy.
Jim GaffiganAs a non-Catholic, and since I was a child, I have been obsessed with the ritual and the beauty of Catholic art. I look at Renaissance art all the time.
Nan GoldinIn some states, it is illegal to turn down a same-sex couple when you're placing children for adoption. That's discrimination. But in the Catholic church, the sacrament of marriage is defined officially as the union of a man and a woman. So a Catholic adoption agency is torn between its faith doctrine and what it sees as a faith obligation to help orphans.
Tom GjeltenI grew up a Catholic and I dont want to talk badly about the Catholic Church but theres a lot of routine stuff going on. You say the same prayers, you sit, you kneel, whatever.
Bernhard LangerPart of Sykes's motive was rooted in religiosity. A devout Catholic, he regarded a return of the ancient tribe of Israel to the Holy Land as a way to correcta nearly two-thousand-year-old wrong. That view had taken on new passion andurgency with the massacres of the Armenians. To Sykes, in that ongoing atrocity, the Ottoman Empire had proven it could never again be trusted to protectits religious minority populations. At war's end, the Christian and Jewish HolyLand of Palestine would be taken from it, and the failure of the Crusades maderight.
Scott Anderson... the average Catholic perceives no connection between religion and morality, unless it is a question of someone else's morality.
Mary McCarthyGrowing up in a small town, in the Midwest, and Catholic: Those are sort of three layers of repression.
Paul RustWe have been mentored from the very beginning by Catholic folks who are invigorating the best of the monastic spirit.
Shane ClaiborneJack looked out the window as they passed the Mormon temple, just outside the beltway near Connecticut Avenue. A decidedly odd-looking building, it had grandeur with its marble columns and gilt spires. The beliefs represented by that impressive structure seemed curious to Ryan, a lifelong Catholic, but the people who held them were honest and hardworking, and fiercely loyal to their country, because they believed in what America stood for.
Tom ClancyI often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them.
Sue Monk KiddIt may very well be that people in San Francisco don't think we have any culture in Nebraska, but we have a different culture, and it's a very deep culture. We have these Czech immigrants, who are making this marvelous ethnic food and their Catholic lives and it's very fascinating stuff.
Ted KooserIn fact, there is only one true and holy religion, founded and instituted by Christ Our Lord. Mother and Nurse of the virtues, Destroyer of vice, Liberator of souls, Guide to true happiness, she is called Catholic, Apostolic, and Roman.
Pope Pius IXIt is admitted by everybody that rights and privileges enjoyed by the Roman Catholic minority in Manitoba down to 1890, were taken away by legislation of 1890.
Charles TupperI think I'm known as a liberal democrat and Hispanic and a practicing Catholic, but I never really went out of my way specifically to play a president or any kind of leader.
Martin SheenIt is interesting to note that the best periods of Italian Horror films came out of the Sixties, when Italy was enjoying a carnival period of phenomenal optimism, and the shadowy side surfaced with all of its attendant dark, beautiful, baroque, catholic symbolism.
Barbara Steele[Pope] Francis ought to be taken at his word when he says, as he has often done, that he is a son of the Church who believes and teaches what the Catholic Church believes and teaches.
George WeigelNinety-eight percent of women in childbearing age who are Catholic use contraception. Ok, so in practice the church has not enforced this and now they want the federal government and private insurance to enforce it. It just isn't consistent to me.
Nancy PelosiThe fact that a Jewish state needs to exist at all - and it does need to exist - is an indictment of all humanity, and especially the Catholic Church, whose centuries-long programme of aggressive Jew hatred has been ingrained right into the European psyche so that it takes almost nothing to bring it out.
Pat CondellI believe in an America that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant, or Jewish - where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.
John F. KennedyMany of my ardent admirers would be roundly shocked and disturbed if they realized that everything I believe is thoroughly moral, thoroughly Catholic, and that it is these beliefs that give my work its chief characteristics.
Flannery O'ConnorWhat we argue in the piece is that the headscarf has become a political symbol for an ideology of Islam that is exported to the world by the theocracies of the governments of Iran and Saudi Arabia. Just like the Catholic Church in the 17th century did religious propaganda to challenge the Protestant Reformation, these ideologies are trying to define the way Muslims express Islam in the world.
Asra NomaniMy mother converted when I was 16. She was the driving force behind religion in our family. So, I'm sure I was heavily influenced by that. But, I also was, and still am, convinced by the Catholic churches historical claims to represent the continuity with the early Church that other forms of Western Christianity lack.
Ross DouthatI think by all accounts in the same way we look back on the anti-Catholic and anti-Jewish sentiments of our history with shame and derision and with a healthy dose of mockery, that's how we will very likely look back on this sort of anti-Muslim sentiment as well in the next generation.
Reza AslanI happen to be catholic, and I heard that the pope was asking that we abolish the death penalty and I would have to respectfully disagree with him. As many murders as I've had to deal with in my career, watching and dealing with the victim's families throughout the beginning of the incident all the way until today. There are a lot of folks that feel that they didn't have the justice that was due to them.
John CabelloLike most Catholic boys, I wanted to be Jesus Christ. I could never get the turn-the-other-cheek thing down, though.
Jim CarreyI am deeply discouraged by Catholic Bishops who say Catholics cannot support same sex marriage in our secular culture.
Anne RiceCatholic school gave me the tools to reject the very religion they wanted me to have. They taught me how to think for myself and to be independent.
George CarlinCardinal Dolan, of course, has a very, very hard job: trying to hold up Catholic family values in sexually liberal New York City. I'm not saying New York is the Gay Mecca. But it's at least Gay-rusalem.
Stephen ColbertIn a real world, the one outside the rarified atmosphere where Popes meet Archbishops of Canterbury, people no longer care whether somebody is an Anglican or a Roman Catholic. They already take it for granted that being a "believer" is more important than having a denominational name-tag any day of the week.
Tom HarpurI have been judged vehemently suspect of heresy, that is, of having held and believed that the sun in the centre of the universe and immoveable, and that the earth is not at the center of same, and that it does move. Wishing however, to remove from the minds of your Eminences and all faithful Christians this vehement suspicion reasonably conceived against me, I abjure with a sincere heart and unfeigned faith, I curse and detest the said errors and heresies, and generally all and every error, heresy, and sect contrary to the Holy Catholic Church. (Quoted in Shea and Artigas 194)
Galileo Galilei