Roman Catholic Church Quotes

“On the conversion of the European tribes to Christianity the ancient pagan worship was by no means incontinently abandoned. So wholesale had been the conversion of many peoples, whose chiefs or rulers had accepted the new faith on their behalf in a summary manner, that it would be absurd to suppose that any, general acquiescence in the new gospel immediately took place. Indeed, the old beliefs lurked in many neighbourhoods, and even a renaissance of some of them occurred in more than one area. Little by little, however, the Church succeeded in rooting out the public worship of the old pagan deities, but it found it quite impossible to effect an entire reversion of pagan ways, and in the end compromised by exalting the ancient deities to the position of saints in its calendar, either officially, or by usage. In the popular mind, however, these remained as the fairies of woodland and stream, whose worship in a broken-down form still flourished at wayside wells and forest shrines. The Matres, or Mother gods, particularly those of Celtic France and Ireland, the former of which had come to be Romanized, became the bonnes dames of folklore, while the dusii and pilosi, or hairy house-sprites, were so commonly paid tribute that the Church introduced a special question concerning them into its catechism of persons suspected of pagan practice. Nevertheless, the Roman Church, at a somewhat later era, reversed its older and more catholic policy, and sternly set its face against the cultus of paganism in Europe, stigmatizing the several kinds of spirits and derelict gods who were the objects of its worship as demons and devils, whom mankind must eschew with the most pious care if it were to avoid damnation.”
― Lewis Spence, British Fairy Origins

“Envy and resentment are terribly corrosive passions. To suffer at the sight or even the thought of others' enjoyment of life makes one a committed enemy of human happiness. Such people end up being practically a curse upon the human race. They vandalize life, exerting themselves not in the pursuit of gain or pleasure, but to hinder others' enjoyment.”
― Robert Sheaffer, Making of the Messiah

“But we have no [Marian] apparitions cautioning the Church against, say, accepting the delusion of an Earth-centered Universe, or warning it of complicity with Nazi Germany — two matters of considerable moral as well as historical import....

Not a single saint criticized the practice of torturing and burning “witches” and heretics. Why not? Were they unaware of what was going on? Could they not grasp its evil? And why is [the Virgin] Mary always admonishing the poor peasant to inform the authorities? Why doesn’t she admonish the authorities herself? Or the King? Or the Pope?”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

“It is impossible to make peace with the Roman Catholic Church. It is one of the permanent enemies of all that is decent in human spirit.”
― Harold Laski

“What has officially been declared as the basis of theological studies in the Roman Catholic Church has been enormously influenced by Islam and Muslim beliefs.

Funny old world, isn’t it?”
― Karl Wiggins, Wrong Planet - Searching for your Tribe

“Let what I here set down meet with correction or applause, it shall be of equal welcome and utility to me [...]And yet, always submitting to the authority of their
censure, which has an absolute power over me, I thus rashly venture at everything.”
― Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Essays

“... Pope John Paul I had died and been succeeded by John Paul II, the first non-Italian pope for four hundred and fifty years: a Pole, a poet, a philosopher, a linguist, an athlete, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular - but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What will happen now? All bets are void, the future is uncertain, but it will be interesting to watch. Reader, farewell!”
― David Lodge, How Far Can You Go?

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

“All have suffered shipwreck. The Church, unbending in this matter, has remained upright and entire. She orders the body to be silent, and the soul to suffer, and contrary to all probability, humanity listens to her, and sweeps away like a dung-heap the seductive joys proposed to her.
Again, the vitality of the Church is decision, which preserves her in spite of the unfathomable stupidity of her sons. She has resisted the disquieting folly of the clergy, and has not even been broken up by the awkwardness and lack of ability in her defenders, a very strong point.”
― Joris-Karl Huysmans, En Route

“Much water has flown under Tiber's bridges, carrying away splendour and mystery from Rome, since the pontificate of Pius XII. The essentials, I know, remain firmly entrenched and I find the post-Conciliar Mass simpler and generally better than the Tridentine; but the banality and vulgarity of the translations which have ousted the sonorous Latin and little Greek are of a super-market quality which is quite unacceptable. Hand-shaking and embarrassed smiles or smirks have replaced the older courtesies; kneeling is out, queueing is in, and the general tone is rather like a BBC radio broadcast for tiny tots (so however will they learn to put away childish things?) The clouds of incense have dispersed, together with many hidebound, blinkered and repressive attitudes, and we are left with social messages of an almost over-whelming progressiveness. The Church has proved she is not moribund. ‘All shall be well,’ I feel, ‘and all manner of things shall be well,’ so long as the God who is worshipped is the God of all ages, past and to come, and not the idol of Modernity, so venerated by some of our bishops, priests and mini-skirted nuns.”
― Alec Guinness, Blessings in Disguise

“Popery is the gospel transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Paganism, under a few of the accidents of Christianity.”
― James Aitken Wylie, The Papacy: Its History, Dogmas, Genius, and Prospects

“Partition in 1947 left the Christian community financially poor and economically insecure, because many of their Hindu and Sikh landlords had fled the country. Severe floods devastated the Punjab(Pak) in 1950, 54, 55 and 59 destroying the homes of thousands of Christians. In order to be eligible to receive relief goods, thousands of nominal Protestants became members of the Roman Catholic Church.”
― Koenraad Elst, Decolonizing the Hindu mind: Ideological development of Hindu revivalism

“The Catholic Church is just another jerky Mafia organization set up to rob the ignorant poor. Fortunately, it's on its way out. One more generation and the Western world will ask: Catholic who? They have sold 62 churches in the past two years in the Boston Archdiocese, netting 90 million dollars just to pay for all the lawsuits against their childloving priests. I know the Catholic Church, I know its entire history. They are jerks whose scam is up.”
― Joseph Smalkowski (Copernicus)