Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Though it is perhaps expected for the bishop of Rome to warn against the idolatry of money, what is striking is how Francis suggests that not only God but also secular politics must outrank economic imperatives.
Whatever controls us is our lord. The person who seeks power is controlled by power. The person who seeks acceptance is controlled by acceptance. We do not control ourselves. We are controlled by the lord of our lives.
Culture's essential service to a religion is to destroy intellectual idolatry, the recurrent tendency in religion to replace the object of its worship with its present understanding and forms of approach to that object.
What we need to affirm is that Jesus is neither a Democrat nor a Republican. Whenever we marry Jesus to a political party, we are committing the sin of idolatry. We are making Jesus into the image of our political party.
I have no interest in being known as a celebrity; 'celebrity' is a pretty disgusting word. It's part of the brainwashing of the culture, part of the false idolatry of those that are only human, and I don't want to participate in that.
Keynesianism, if you add its flexible, muscular form during the Depression to its more rigid postwar version, lasted forty-five years. Our own Globalization, with its technocratic and technological determinism and market idolatry, had thirty years. And now it, too, is dead.
I used to make fun of those actors who talked about the theater as their temple and their place of worship. I'm not to that degree of zealotry or idolatry of theater as this holy place. But it's a place where I get together with people who do what I do, and we understand each other in that respect.
And that's really what's happening in this country is a violation of the First Commandment. We have become a country entrenched in idolatry, and that idolatry is the dependency upon our government. We're supposed to depend upon God for our protection and our provision and for our daily bread, not for our government.
