#priest

When the late Pope John Paul II decided to place the woman so strangely known as “Mother” Teresa on the fast track for beatification, and thus to qualify her for eventual sainthood, the Vatican felt obliged to solicit my testimony and I thus spent several hours in a closed hearing room with a priest, a deacon, and a monsignor, no doubt making their day as I told off, as from a rosary, the frightful faults and crimes of the departed fanatic. In the course of this, I discovered that the pope during his tenure had surreptitiously abolished the famous office of “Devil’s Advocate,” in order to fast‐track still more of his many candidates for canonization. I can thus claim to be the only living person to have represented the Devil pro bono. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#beatification #canonisation #deacons #devil #devil-s-advocate

There is a kind of thinking in the Church that wants to reduce the priest to a mere functionary, a managing director, where administration rather than doctrine and worship are to determine the form of the Church. ↗

— Arthur Middleton

#church #determine #director #doctrine #form

The priests are debarred from female society, nor is any woman permitted to enter the religious houses. ↗

— Hernando Cortes

#debarred #enter #female #houses #nor

I don't flatter myself with much dependence upon the present disposition of the Eastern Indians, who are many ways liable to be drawn into a rupture with us by the artifices of the French, their own weakness and the influence which the French Missionary Priests have over them. ↗

— William Shirley

#dependence #disposition #drawn #eastern #flatter

The genuine priest always feels something higher than compassion. ↗

— Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel

#compassion #feels #genuine #higher #priest

The Incarnation is the medicine of the soul, undoing the Fall and bringing man to the Tree of Life, and the office of a priest is to administer this medicine in the sacraments. ↗

— Arthur Middleton

#bringing #fall #incarnation #life #man

The only other person attending who was close to her age was Father St. Laurent, a devastatingly good-looking Roman Catholic priest who made the RC's vows of celibacy seem like a crime against the human gene pool. ↗

— Julia Spencer-Fleming

#age

The Rochester group [of VOTF], however, was met with some concern as they found it hard to believe my account as it unfolded before them. I feel that some people have a hard time with the truths around us, not only the sexual abuse by priests, but all bad things. I call it chosen ignorance. This modified form of ignorance is found in people who, if confronted with certain truths realize that they have to accept them and thereby acknowledge evil, and that scares them. Opening up and letting the truth in might knock them off their perceived center. It is too hard, period." (VOTF - Voice of the Faithful - a Catholic group that wants to change the Church, keep the faith.) ↗

— Charles L. Bailey Jr.

#catholic #church #confronted #disbelief #evil

...yes, I am your priest, your magician, your lover - I make charms to incant your presence... ↗

— John Geddes

#love #lover #magician #poetry #priest

Sećam se da sam jedno jutro video ispred samoposluge nekog popa kako ljušti kikiriki, odmah mi je bilo jasno da neće biti mira na Balkanu. ↗

— Slobodan Tišma

#church #priest #religion #war #religion