Roman Catholicism Quotes

“I'm always disappointed when I see the word "Puritan" tossed around as shorthand for a bunch of generic, boring, stupid, judgmental killjoys. Because to me, they are very specific, fascinating, sometimes brilliant, judgmental killjoys who rarely agreed on anything except that Catholics are going to hell.”
― Sarah Vowell, The Wordy Shipmates

“I had never met the Roman Catholuc Church outside of a history book. To come across it living, so to speak, was like finding a diplodocus.”
― William Golding, The Pyramid

“M'Lord, I know from history that once upon a time in a much earlier Church, a vocation to the priesthood meant a call from the bishop, not necessarily a call from God. And I heard the Bishop of Rome himself call you to be that which you have now become by ordination and consecration.”
― Walter M. Miller Jr., Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

“You know all about love, but that is not enough. You must also learn that hate comes from God as well, that it too is in the Lord's service. And in times like these, with the world fallen to the state it has, hate serves God more than love.”
― Nikos Kazantzakis, Saint Francis

“Luther and Calvin believed that both the Roman church on the right and the Zwinglian and Anabaptist churches on the left made the Lord's Supper too much a place WHERE BELIEVERS DID THINGS FOR GOD - either by offering Christ to God (Rome) or by offering their deep devotion to God (the Radical Protestants). The main direction of the Supper, in both of these views, was up.”
― Frederick Dale Bruner, Matthew: The Churchbook Matthew 13-28

“The apostle Paul often appears in Christian thought as the one chiefly responsible for the de-Judaization of the gospel and even for the transmutation of the person of Jesus from a rabbi in the Jewish sense to a divine being in the Greek sense. Such an interpretation of Paul became almost canonical in certain schools of biblical criticism during the nineteenth century, especially that of Ferdinand Christian Baur, who saw the controversy between Paul and Peter as a conflict between the party of Peter, with its 'Judaizing' distortion of the gospel into a new law, and the party of Paul, with its universal vision of the gospel as a message about Jesus for all humanity. Very often, of course, this description of the opposition between Peter and Paul and between law and gospel was cast in the language of the opposition between Roman Catholicism (which traced its succession to Peter as the first pope) and Protestantism (which arose from Luther's interpretation of the epistles of Paul). Luther's favorite among those epistles, the letter to the Romans, became the charter for this supposed declaration of independence from Judaism.”
― Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus Through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture

“What a prodigious conscience must that be that can be at quiet within itself whilst it harbors under the
same roof, with so agreeing and so calm a society, both the crime and the judge?”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“Once, during my Catholic days, I was complaining with a Catholic friend about how terrible the teaching was in parish life. A priest listening to us said that everything we griped about was true, but we didn't have to resign ourselves and our children to this fate.
'You could go online to Amazon.com tonight and have sent to you within a week a theological library that Aquinas would have envied,' he said. 'My parents raised me in the seventies, which was the beginning of the catechesis nightmare. They knew that if they were going to raise Catholic kids, they would have to do a lot of it themselves, and they did. So do you.”
― Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation

“If Roman Catholic Christianity has always struggled with the threat of works righteousness, Reformed Protestantism has always struggled with the threat of cheap grace. For many, if not the majority of Protestants, God's love and acceptance do not lead to personal transformation. Evangelical formation often involves seeking to reestablish a pattern of maturing behaviour that should be integral to one's conversion. So both traditions can be challenged on whether there is a genuinely helpful connection between conversion and transformation.”
― Gordon T. Smith, Beginning Well: Christian Conversion & Authentic Transformation

“The difference between us and the papists is that they do not think that the church can be 'the pillar of the truth' unless she presides over the word of God. We, on the other hand, assert that it is because she reverently subjects herself to the word of God that the truth is preserved by her and passed on to others by her hands.”
― John Calvin

“Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus.”
― Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism

“I remember that one Holy Week, the magazine I got every Thursday, Anteojito, came with a free poster depicting the Stations of the Cross. I burned the poster and flushed the ashes down the toilet to dispose of the evidence. The idea that I was supposed to pin this graphic depiction of torture and death on my wall seemed to me as obscene as if someone had suggested decorating my room with pictures of the inner workings of Auschwitz.”
― Marcelo Figueras, Kamchatka

“Closed systems that thrive on control that is managed with sticks and carrots can't help but fail the people they claim to protect.”
― Ed Cyzewski, Flee, Be Silent, Pray: An Anxious Evangelical Finds Peace with God through Contemplative Prayer

“Tell me, where are the lovers of the world?
Nothing remains of them but ashes and worms.”
― St. Alphonsus Liguori, Preparation for death: or, Considerations on the eternal maxims

“Discipline is given to restrain the excesses of
freedom”
― Saint Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions of Saint Augustine

“Although I had become disillusioned with certain aspects of Roman Catholicism, yet I was finding similarities between that religious system and my new-found philosophies. I sought to clear up my own confusions by developing an ecumenical reasoning, accommodating both Christian and Hindu schools of thought. This led to a sense of spiritual superiority for being 'tolerant' both of Eastern and Western religions. I welcomed the idea that all paths led to the same God and that all beliefs were equal.”
― Caryl Matrisciana, Out of India

“But I’m not such a good judge of monsters; I don’t know if the idea of a good death repels me now because it’s in itself repellent, or because I no longer have the courage to seek such a thing.”
― Tim Winton, The Shepherd's Hut

“Drug dealing worse than kiddy fiddling, is it? Stop that, now! There’s no need and you’ve no right. You think the Catholics care how they make their money? They bloody love gangsters, it’s their bread and butter. Good God, child, you wouldn’t know the half of it. You wouldn’t have the faintest notion.”
― Tim Winton, The Shepherd's Hut

“Theotokos is a courageous title. A woman is the Mother of God. One could say, ‘How is this possible? God is eternal, He is the Creator. We are creatures, we are in time. How could a human being be the Mother of God, of the Eternal One, since we are all in time, we are all creatures?’ … Aristotelian philosophy, as we well know, tells us that between God and man there is only a non-reciprocal relationship. Man refers to God, but God, the Eternal, is in Himself. He does not change; He cannot have this relationship today and another relationship tomorrow. He is within Himself, He does not have ad extra relations. It is a very logical term, but it is also a word that makes us despair: ‘So God himself has no relationship with me.’ With the Incarnation, with the event of the Theotokos, this radically changed, because God drew us into Himself – and God in Himself is the relationship and allows us to participate in His interior relationship. Thus we are in His being Father, Son and Holy Spirit; we are within His being in relationship, we are in relationship with Him and He truly created a relationship with us. At that moment, God wished to be born from woman and to remain Himself always: this is the great event.”
― Pope Benedict XVI

“And there may be some connection, too, with the Roman Catholic Church’s somewhat flexible attitude towards sin and thus, in general, towards wrongdoing. Otherwise, how to explain that 137 years after Italy became a modern nation-state, so many people still choose simply to ignore laws they don’t like. Maybe other nationalities would be the same if in their countries, too, law enforcement were considered an optional, even by the people charged with that task.”
― Sari Gilbert, My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City

“If [John] Piper's beliefs on authority clash with the doctrine of the Reformers as I argue, one would expect that Piper would have much less conflict with Roman Catholicism than the Reformers did. This is indeed the case. In fact, Piper's mystic hedonism is leading evangelicals on a fast trot back to Rome, where mystics have long nestled under its skirts.”
― Enoch Burke, The Hedonism and Homosexuality of John Piper and Sam Allberry: The Truth of Scripture

“Enslaved people began to flee harsh conditions in Virginia and South Carolina to Spanish Florida [in the 1680s]. If an enslaved person made it there and professed his belief that Roman Catholicism was "the True Faith," the Spanish colonists would set him free. As a result, the first Black town, St. Augustine, was founded by freedmen and -women in 1687.”
― Laurence Ralph, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019