Today's Catholic church seems to reward authoritarian personalities who are clearly ill, violent, sexually obsessed and unable to ...remember the past.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Looked upon with historical objectivity, the Catholic Church as a religion has far better prospects. Consider its unified, world-w...ide papal leadership, the methods of Catholic ecclesiastic thought, and the life-pervading sanctification of existence, both in everyday life and at great moments; add the present glory of a thousand years of art, the multitude of religious activities, the impressive power of priests and religious, spiritually rooted celibates whose existence the faith consumes; top it off with Catholic piety, based on the Church but far from its violence and political cunning, and even spreading a touch of philosophy among the populace--compared with all this, Protestantism seems poor. Yet Protestantism, whatever may be held against it, has one virtue that outweighs all flaws. It is the principle of its birth: the chance of breaking through every religious phenomenon to a new original realization. In Catholic eyes, Protestantism is purely negative. It gives up tenet after tenet, ending in what must seem to a Catholic the total disappearance of all religious essentials--the God-man, the Resurrection, the personal God, the sacraments--and it pulverizes itself by endless internal schisms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of th...e Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Although every organized patriarchal religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of mysogyny to the myth of woman-hate, wo...man-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.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
Whether considered as a doctrine, or as an historical fact, or as a movemement, socialism, if it really remains socialism, cannot ...be brought into harmony with the dogmas of the Catholic church.... Religious socialism, Christian socialism, are expressions implying a contradiction in terms.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In fact what America expects of its citizens and what the Catholic Church expects of the faithful are sometimes so different that ...they lead to an enormous ker-KLUNK between democracy and theology.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's ap...parent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
To impose celibacy on such a large body as the clergy of the Catholic Church is not to forbid it to have wives but to order it to ...be content with the wives of others.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »