Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
I went to an all-girls Catholic high school. The three things that they focused on were reading, writing, and arithmetic. My goodness, this is a novel idea in this modern society. I was really good at all three of these things. I was particularly good at math.
I grew up in a working-class Catholic family in south Louisiana. I went to a state university. I taught literature, wrote a novel that was the novel I wanted to write, and got a couple of good reviews but no real traction. I had no idea how to get a job in TV.
...The hagaddah came to Sarajevo for a reason. It was here to test us, to see if there were people who could see that what united us was more than what divided us. That to be a human being matters more than to be a Jew or a Muslim, Catholic or Orthodox. p. 361
A person like me who has grown up in a mixed culture ought to be spiritual. My mother is a Catholic, my father is a Muslim, and my wife is a Hindu. Personally, I feel spirituality is about being clear-hearted. It involves a sense of connection with the divine.
I read in the newspaper that the Catholic Church finally decided that it had been theologically improper to try to convert the Jews. Whoops! Sorry for all those inquisitions, crusades, and autos-da-fe. Previous popes were wrong - infallible, perhaps, but wrong.
I don't go to church any more, but I think that Catholicism is rather like the brand they use on cattle: I feel so formed in that Catholic mould that I don't think I could adopt any other form of spirituality. I still get feelings of consolation about churches.
I was raised in a deeply Catholic family. There was a sense that everything we were doing was to prepare ourselves for an afterlife in heaven. In my teenage years, that became less important to me. Eventually, that turned into agnosticism, which became atheism.
In Pope Francis's 'Amoris Laetitia' (The Joy of Love), an apostolic exhortation on Catholic family life, he does not make earth-shattering doctrinal changes with regards to divorced Catholics, same-sex married Catholics, or the church's stance on homosexuality.
Remarkable is the greater openness of the Catholic Church towards people of other religious traditions and persuasions. The development has not been without problems, since some people have resisted it and others have pushed openness beyond the desirable point.
I am so superstitious that I think even discussing this subject is dangerous and will probably bring me terrible luck. Having been raised a Catholic, superstition becomes almost part of your DNA. The challenge is to slowly rid yourself of these little delusions.
My grandmother and mother were from Italy, so I was raised Catholic. That kind of just meant going to church on Easter and Christmas. I saw a radical transformation in my family when they started going to a Christian church. I watched them fall in love with God.
I always know it's Sunday because I wake up feeling apologetic. That's one of the cool things about being a Catholic . . . it's a multifaceted experience. If you lose the faith, chances are you'll keep the guilt, so it isn't as if you've been skunked altogether.
I was raised Catholic primarily by my mom's side of the family. But at 18, I found out there was an adoption in the family, and that I was of Russian Jewish descent on my mom's side. After that, I started to look more into the philosophies and culture of Judaism.
If it is true that the great missionaries of the 16th century were convinced that one who was not baptized was lost - and that explains their missionary commitment - in the Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, that conviction was definitely abandoned.
How many Catholic schools do you think teach the students to question the authority of the Pope? Do you believe Christian schools teach students to question or challenge the authority of Jesus Christ? Do military schools teach the cadets to challenge the authority.
I think it is quite remarkable actually that Pope Benedict has a sense of the variety of ways in which it is possible to be a Catholic. I think he is more comfortable with a plurality of expressions of Catholicism in different rites, traditions than many of us are.
I'm a practicing Catholic. And faith is very, very important to me. It was pounded in my head as a kid, and I hated it. And I sort of lost my way in my 20s and part of my 30s and then found my way back. And I don't know what I'd do without it. It's huge in my life.
It didn't matter if it was the Catholic Church or Episcopal Church or Presbyterian Church and it still doesn't today. I just like the tradition of having a place to go and connect to a higher power and feel gratitude, and I think that's helpful however you find it.
I grew up in a French-dominated Catholic part of the country. I was an altar boy. I went to Catholic school. I have a cousin who is a priest - it's part of my DNA. It's kind of hard to separate me from the church, to try to say where one starts and the other stops.
Growing up in Asia in a particular time period - the '50s and '60s - I attended a Catholic missionary school where I was taught by nuns and where consciousness of the body was repressed. Yet at the same time, the female body was a highly visible and sensitive site.
I feel like if I am physically and emotionally able to be at the theater, I will be there. I don't like not being there - I don't like playing hooky. I am just one of those people who feels really, really guilty if I am not there - maybe it's part of being Catholic.
Gay marriage was a trick: it's a tool to tell people to bake cakes. Laws are based on morality, so if it's illegal for a Catholic to refuse a ceremony, you are saying that Catholicism is immoral, and that was really the goal of gay marriage - discredit Christianity.
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
Philip could not have wanted to annex England militarily, since this would have opened another costly occupation struggle, and brought France in against him. He might, however, neutralize Elizabth by supporting her internal Catholic enemies, even provoking civil war.
Since many of you do not belong to the Catholic Church and others are non-believers, from the bottom of my heart I give this silent blessing to each and every one of you, respecting the conscience of each one of you but knowing that each one of you is a child of God.
I remember one time when all the nuns in my Catholic grade school got around in a semicircle, me and Mom in the middle, and they said, 'Mrs. Farley, the children at school are laughing at Christopher, not with him.' I thought, 'Who cares? As long as they're laughing.'
My children have gone to Catholic school... Part of their whole education is talking about the inner life and looking at your life, even though you're only 15 or 16 - thinking about your mortality, thinking about the value of your life, thinking about your obligations.
We should not bear it with bad grace if the answer to our prayer is long delayed. Rather, let us, because of this, show great patience and resignation. For He delays for this reason: that we may offer Him a fitting occasion of honoring us through His divine providence.
I don't trust Catholics," I said, "because they take advantage of you." "And Protestants?" he asked with a laugh. "I loathe the way they fumble around with their consciences." "And atheists?" He was still laughing. "They bore me because all they ever talk about is God.
I grew up Catholic, so I have these defenses about listening to anything with too much religiosity; some of the lyrics didn't sit well in my mouth. One of my beefs is the patriarchal setup. Having the 'he, he, he, God, God, God, king, king, king' stuff was hard for me.
I'm a Roman Catholic. Or was. I was brought up that way and used to say my prayers every night, but I don't pray to God any more. I might use the usual phrases I picked up from my parents, 'Oh, if God spares me next year...' or 'Please God...' but they're only phrases.
I hope that by going to visit the pope I have enabled everybody to see that the words Catholic and Protestant, as ordinarily used, are completely out of date. They are almost always used now purely for propaganda purposes. That is why so much trouble is caused by them.
In temptations against chastity, the spiritual masters advise us, not so much to contend with the bad thought, as to turn the mind to some spiritual, or, at least, indifferent object. It is useful to combat other bad thoughts face to face, but not thoughts of impurity.
Having grown up Catholic, my prayers were scripted - memorized and deployed in church and before bed. As a young adult, I veered off script and talked to God more plainly. And by 'talked to,' I mean that I basically asked for things to turn out the way I wanted them to.
When I left my Catholic school, I was around 10 or 11 years old, and it started to unravel for me there. Kids pick up on things if you're interested and inquisitive. I was seeing things that were not in line with what I'd been taught about Jesus. It didn't jive with me.
Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.
I would say that normally it is the creative minorities that determine the future, and in this sense, the Catholic Church must understand itself as a creative minority that has a heritage of values that are not things of the past, but a very living and relevant reality.
Through his deferential yet decidedly determined demeanor, Pope Francis is not only setting a superior spiritual standard, but he is also leading a thorough transformation of the Catholic Church - rivaling any brand revitalization or corporate turnaround you could name.
I grew up Catholic. My mother is from El Salvador, so my family on her side is Roman Catholic. My father is Protestant, and while he was spiritual, he wasn't much of a churchgoing person. I think it's fairly common for families to be brought up in the mother's religion.
I always miss any kind of constant, especially now that I'm a film-maker who travels all the time. I'm always tempted to go to Catholic churches, although I despise the religion. But you want to go there just because it's the one thing in your life that's never changed.
I am a Catholic. As far as possible, I go to Mass every day. This is a rosary. As far as possible, I kneel down and tell these beads every day. If you reject me on account of my religion, I shall thank God that He has spared me the indignity of being your representative.
President Obama and his radical feminist enforcers have had it in for Catholic medical providers from the get-go. It's about time all people of faith fought back against this unprecedented encroachment on religious liberty. First, they came for the Catholics. Who's next?
I believe that Catholics involved in politics carry the values of their religion within them, but have the mature awareness and expertise to implement them. The Church will never go beyond its task of expressing and disseminating its values, at least as long as I'm here.
When I was fourteen, Mom and Dad sent me to St. Joseph High School, the Catholic school up the hill from our place, housed in a 1950s-era tan brick building sometimes confused for a light industrial structure due to the surprisingly high smokestack of its old incinerator.
My hope that the Church will emerge as a strong leader in society is just that a hope. What I described in The Catholic Moment is not a prophecy but the outline of a possibility. There are no guarantees that my hopes expressed in The Catholic Moment will ever be realised.
Whether, therefore, we receive what we ask for, or do not receive it, let us still continue steadfast in prayer. For to fail in obtaining the desires of our heart, when God so wills it, is not worse than to receive it; for we know not as He does, what is profitable to us.
Due to these various circumstances, when I entered the Catholic University of Louvain in 1934, I had already travelled in a number of European countries and spoke four languages fairly fluently. This turned out to be a valuable asset in my subsequent career as a scientist.
Have you not often met poor old women who are most faithful to the pious recitation of the Rosary? You also must do all that you can to recite it with fervour. Get right down, at the feet of Jesus: it is a good thing to make oneself small in the presence of so great a God.
It doesn't really matter how much of the rules or the dogma we accepted and lived by if we're not really living by the fundamental creed of the Catholic Church, which is service to others and finding God in ourselves and then seeing God in everyone - including our enemies.
But pure wit is akin to Puritanism; to the perfect and painful consciousness of the final fact in the universe. Very briefly, the man who sees the consistency in things is a wit - and a Calvinist. The man who sees the inconsistency in things is a humorist - and a Catholic.