Quotes about catholicism

Here is everything which can lay hold of the eye, ear and imagination -- everything which can charm and bewitch the simple and ignorant. I wonder how Luther ever broke the spell.

— John Adams

Our religion is itself profoundly sad -- a religion of universal anguish, and one which, because of its very catholicity, grants full liberty to the individual and asks no better than to be celebrated in each man's own language -- so long as he knows anguish and is a painter.

— Charles Baudelaire

Good strong thick stupefying incense-smoke!

— Robert Browning

The thing with Catholicism, the same as all religions, is that it teaches what should be, which seems rather incorrect. This is what should be. Now, if you're taught to live up to a what should be that never existed -- only an occult superstition, no proof of this should be -- then you can sit on a jury and indict easily, you can cast the first stone, you can burn Adolf Eichmann, like that!

— Lenny Bruce

Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual.

— Patrick Buchanan

All human life is here, but the Holy Ghost seems to be somewhere else.

— Anthony Burgess

It is by far the most elegant worship, hardly excepting the Greek mythology. What with incense, pictures, statues, altars, shrines, relics, and the real presence, confession, absolution, -- there is something sensible to grasp at. Besides, it leaves no possibility of doubt; for those who swallow their Deity, really and truly, in transubstantiation, can hardly find any thing else otherwise than easy of digestion.

— Lord Byron

Look through the whole history of countries professing the Romish religion, and you will uniformly find the leaven of this besetting and accursed principle of action -- that the end will sanction any means.

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Today's Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to remember the past.

— Matthew Fox

A little skill in antiquity inclines a man to Popery.

— Thomas Fuller

Catholics are necessarily at war with this age. That we are not more conscious of the fact, that we so often endeavor to make an impossible peace with it -- that is the tragedy. You cannot serve God and Mammon.

— Eric Gill

For support, I fall back on my heart. Has a man any fault a woman cannot weave with and try to change into something better, if the god her man prays to is a mother holding a baby?

— Haniel Long

She thoroughly understands what no other Church has ever understood, how to deal with enthusiasts.

— Thomas B. Macaulay

Catholicism is not a soothing religion. It's a painful religion. We're all gluttons for punishment.

— Madonna

You can't run the Church on Hail Marys.

— Archbishop Paul Marcinkus

To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.

— Mary Mccarthy

Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic Church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity -- an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women.

— Robin Morgan

One cannot really be a Catholic and grown up.

— George Orwell

It is the custom of the Roman Church which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.

— Pope Gregory VII

If you're going to do a thing, you should do it thoroughly. If you're going to be a Christian, you may as well be a Catholic.

— Muriel Spark

Coming to Rome, much labor and little profit! The King whom you seek here, unless you bring Him with you will not find Him.

— Source Unknown

She had once been a Catholic, but discovering that priests were infinitely more attentive when she was in process of losing or regaining faith in Mother Church, she maintained an enchantingly wavering attitude.

— Source Unknown

The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is being treated either as Madonna's or Mary Magdalene's.

— Shirley Williams

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him.

— Ludwig Wittgenstein

Perhaps you say, Why are the wicked joyous? Why do they live in luxury? Why do they not toil with me? It is because they who have not put down their names to strive for the crown are not bound to undergo the labors of the contest. They who have not gone down into the race-course do not annoint themselves with oil nor get covered with dust. For those whom glory awaits trouble is at hand. The perfumed spectators are wont to look on, not to join in the struggle, nor to endure the sun, the heat, the dust, and the showers ...

— Saint Ambrose of Milan