Leo Tolstoy Quotes

The Roman Catholic Church is for saints and sinners alone - for respectable people, the Anglican Church will do.

If any one saith, that all Christians have power to administer the word, and all the sacraments; let him be anathema.

I think anarchy is natural to the Catholic. The Church is pretty anarchistic, you know. Who pays attention to the Pope or the Cardinals?

In the 17th and 18th centuries there was a kind of Protestantism that said, "If you could only get rid of the Bishop, then you'd be a true Christian".

The church's final word is not 'church' but the glory of the Father and the Son in the Spirit of liberty

The Christians were the first to make the existence of Satan a dogma of the church. What is the use in a Pope if there is no Devil ?

The Bible, as we know it today, was collated by the pagan Roman Emperor Constantine the Great

I attend Trinity United Church of Christ, and my pastor [was] Jeremiah Wright.

Nothing can ever pass away from the words of Christ, nor can anything be changed in the doctrine which the Catholic Church received from Christ to guard, protect, and preach.

It is manifest therefore that they who have sovereign power, are immediate rulers of the church under Christ, and all others but subordinate to them. If that were not, but kings should command one thing upon pain of death, and priests another upon pain of damnation, it would be impossible that peace and religion should stand together.

It saddens me that in many churches today, you hardly hear the name of Jesus being mentioned. Instead, you hear psychology being taught. You hear motivational teachings. You hear 'doing, doing, doing', 'vision, vision, vision' or 'calling, calling, calling'. You hear very little of Jesus Christ and His finished work being taught. Is this what Christianity is about? Your doing, your calling and your vision?

Everything we see in a Catholic church is there for a single purpose: to tell a love story.

Just as the superstar pastor model can have its problems once the superstar pastor gets old or has a scandal or something, the house church model... there's a reason that the house churches of the New Testament era grew up into a more institutional faith down the road.

If Jesus Christ was not perfect, then the religion bearing his name falls to the ground.

The great truths of Christianity do not belong to the professional theologians alone, but to every person who calls upon the name of Christ.

The Church is the body of Christ fashioned by baptism & the Eucharist.

The Church no longer contends that knowledge is in itself sinful, though it did so in its palmy days; but the acquisition of knowledge, even though not sinful, is dangerous, since it may lead to pride of intellect, and hence to a questioning of the Christian dogma.

Christ calls us to carry the Cross; churches call us to have fun in His name.

Hierarchy, as in the Catholic Church, has to do with power, and vertical attention has to do with longing.

For me it is the virgin birth, the Incarnation, the resurrection which are the true laws of the flesh and the physical. Death, decay, destruction are the suspension of these laws. I am always astonished at the emphasis the Church puts on the body. It is not the soul she says that will rise but the body, glorified.

The further one separates himself from the precepts of the Christian Church, the further one distances himself from the truth. Only God can create. I make music from music.

Contemporary Christianity, diverse and complex as we find it, actually may show more unanimity than the Christian churches of the first and second centuries. For nearly all Christians since that time, Catholics, Protestants, or Orthodox, have shared three basic premises. First, they accept the canon of the New Testament; second, they confess the apostolic creed; and third, they affirm specific forms of church institution. But every one of these - the canon of Scripture, the creed, and the institutional structure - emerged in its present form only toward the end of the second century.

Looking back to the earlier centuries of the church, most of the great teachers were also bishops and vice versa. It's only fairly recently that the church has had this great divide.

On a nationwide basis, I would guess that the various churches would have to pay annually an amount at least equal to the national debt. But it's impossible for me to make an exact estimate, because the churches hide their wealth in every way they can - deliberate falsification as to the value of property, registering it under phony names in order to obscure the fact that the Church owns the property.

Here we have bishops, priests, and deacons, a Censorship Board, vigilant librarians, confraternities and sodalities, Duce Maria, Legions of Mary, Knights of this Christian order and Knights of that one, all surrounding the sinner's free will in an embattled circle.