Catholicism Quotes

God's image is the married couple, a man and woman, together. Not just the man. Not just the woman. No, both of them. That's God's image.

The cardinalate is a service; it is not an award to be bragged about.

Cardinals are not NGO representatives, but servants of the Lord, inspired by the Holy Spirit, which is the one [that] is really able to differentiate charismas, unifying them in the Church. A cardinal must be able to differentiate between charismas and at the same time look toward unity, aware that the creator of difference and unity is the Holy Spirit itself. Cardinals who do not enter this frame of mind, in my view, are not cardinals in the way Benedict XVI would like them to be.

When one does not walk, one halts. When one does not build on stone, what happens? That happens which happens to children on the beach when they make sand castles: it all comes down; it is without substance.

To walk, to build, to confess. But the matter is not so easy, because in walking, in building, in confessing, at times there are shocks, there are movements that are not properly movements of the journey: they are movements that set us back.

Yes, hypothetically, western Catholicism could revise the theme of celibacy... . But for the moment, I am in favor of maintaining celibacy, with the pros and the cons it has, because we have ten centuries of more good experiences than bad ones.

It's true that the hedonistic, consumerist, narcissistic culture is infiltrating Catholicism. It's contaminating us... . In it rests the loss of the religious, which is what I fear most.

We should commit ourselves to "Eucharistic coherence"; that is, we should be conscious that people cannot receive Holy Communion and at the same time act or speak against the commandments, in particular when abortions, euthanasia, and other serious crimes against life and family are facilitated. This responsibility applies particularly to legislators, governors, and health professionals.

There was a time when [the Church wouldn't] do funerals for suicides, because [the person] didn't keep walking toward the goal; he put an end to the path when he felt like it. But this is a person who couldn't overcome the contradictions. I don't reject him. I leave it in God's hands.

suicide

The fact that a woman can't be a priest doesn't mean that she is less than a man.

priesthood women

Women's presence in the Church hasn't been emphasized much because the temptation of machismo didn't allow a space to make visible the place of women in the community.

women

If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.

Jesus

It is impossible to believe that the same God who permitted His own son to die a bachelor regards celibacy as an actual sin.

It is now quite lawful for a Catholic woman to avoid pregnancy by a resort to mathematics, though she is still forbidden to resort to physics or chemistry.