“People are not being reached in the context of the body of Christ--they re like newborn babies being left on a doorstep somewhere to feed and care for themselves.”
“Yesterday is the last day of the past. Tomorrow is brimming with hope, so today is meant to lived large. Enjoy your moments!”
“We seek compensation, true, but we also seek to prevent future abhorrent conduct by this or any other priest. We seek to punish a vicious predator of children and the religious institution that stands idly by and watches while a whole generation of God’s precious children are physically and psychologically raped of their childhood, their faith, and their trust in role models. This is about a hierarchy whose solution to the problem is to send the offending priest packing, quietly pay off victims, and actively cover up crimes. The cover-up is responsible for a vicious cycle of crime upon crime. This lawsuit says we will not go quietly like those who came before us. The vicious cycle stops here and now.”
“It is often said, inside the Church and out of it, that there is something grotesque about lectures on the sexual life when delivered by those who have shunned it. Given the way that the Church forbids women to preach, this point is usually made about men. But given how much this Church allows the fanatical Mother Teresa to preach, it might be added that the call to go forth and multiply, and to take no thought for the morrow, sounds grotesque when uttered by an elderly virgin whose chief claim to reverence is that she ministers to the inevitable losers in this very lottery.”
“If Christianity was only about finding a group of people to live life with who shared openly their search for God and allowed anyone regardless of behavior to seek too and who collectively lived by faith to make the world a little more like Heaven would you be interested ’ ‘Hell yes ’ was his reply. He continued ‘Are there churches like that”
“I do not like a high-organized church. I think that as soon as the congregation reaches a level of one hundred or so people, it is time to build a new church. As soon as the congregation gets to the point where you are not on fairly intimate terms with every other person in that church, then you have become a theater where people can attend services. I do not think you can attend a church service. Service is not something which is there to be viewed as if it were a play or a movie.”
“There is no use trying to do Church work without love. A doctor, a lawyer, may do good work without love, but God s work cannot be done without love.”
“the church was an international institution long before globalization.”
“Those who find no humor in faith are probably those who find the church a refuge for their own black way of looking at life, although I think many of us find the church a refuge for a lot of our personality faults. Those of us, for example, who never learned to dance feel that the church is an ideal place for us if we can find a church that doesn t believe in dancing. Then we can get away with never having learned how to dance. You can carry this in all sorts of directions and see that the church is a refuge for what is really a flaw in your own makeup.”
“She’ll be angry,” Kenny argued. “She’ll be mad at me for not protecting Jake. That’s my job.” Tough job for someone so young . . .”
“Because for her, money isn’t the issue. This is about revenge, payback, even worse, justice.”
“In post-Christendom, the church is that community of people who look to discover what God is actively doing in the world around them and then join themselves to that work. The church is that community of people gathered around Jesus Christ in order to participate in his life and incarnate it into the context where he has placed them.”
“I cannot think why we should be astonished at all the evils which exist in the Church, when those who ought to be models on which all may pattern their virtues are annulling the work wrought in the religious Orders by the spirit of the saints of old.”
“The church is like Noah s ark. It stinks, but if you get out of it, you ll drown.”
“The Lord doesn t want anybody in His house who has to be dragged there.”
“Grace has a face. It is Jesus Christ.”
“The press was ruthless, but then so was the church. Flavia de Luce”