Richard Montanari Quotes

The Roman Catholic Church isn't going to change its theologies.

I can't speak to the differences within the Catholic Church.

Becoming Catholic involves entering into a relationship with the Catholic Church.

My family is Catholic. I went to a Catholic school, that kind of thing, so that was my childhood for sure.

There was only one decline in church attendance, and that was in the late 1960s when the Vatican said it was not a sin to miss Mass. They said Catholics could act like Protestants, and so they did.

Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th.

Vatican II declares the Church... as necessary for salvation.

It was in that bubble after Vatican II when it seemed like the best time ever to grow up Catholic. It was a time when the church was so connected to the world.

'The Fifth Gospel' is set entirely inside the Vatican and told from the perspective of a Catholic priest. I'm not Catholic myself, yet authenticity and factual accuracy are very important to me, so the novel required an enormous amount of research.

The Roman Catholic Church and its rituals were so much part of life that, although my parents would often question a small matter of dogma and none of us seemed more religious than anyone else, no one ever questioned the rituals or the basic tenets of belief.

The Catholic Church is an innately conservative rock - they call themselves the 'rock of Peter' - and its resistance to change is, ironically, what has kept it constant throughout the ages.

When I was a young priest in the 1960s and 1970s, there was much experimentation and confusion in the Church. Teachers and clergy were encouraged to communicate an experience of God's love, but to do it without reference to the Creed, the sacraments, or the tradition.

We need a pope to oversee not simply a modernization of the church but its total transformation.

I didn't really start writing about the church in earnest until the mid-2000s, so I wasn't present for or a participant in a lot of the John Paul II-era debates about papal authority.

To be Catholic is the only way of being fully and utterly Christian.

The church needs a pope who can call us to conversion and lead us to take seriously what Jesus did.

I was brought up a Catholic and was an altar boy.

I'm theologically in line with the Roman Catholic Church. I believe in the authority of the church, but I also have tremendous respect for my brothers and sisters in other Christian faiths.

The things of Catholic life are never boring because we have such a rich tradition and so many stories to tell.

Father Coughlin has succeeded in persuading his hearers, or at least a large proportion of them, not only that his money theories and remedies are supported by the papal encyclicals, but that his economic teachings in general are on a level with the infallible pronouncements of the Church.

The trouble with [President William Howard] Taft is that if he were Pope he would think it necessary to appoint a few Protestant cardinals.

The Romanists have, with great adroitness, drawn three walls round themselves, with which they have hitherto protected themselves, so that no one could reform them, whereby all Christendom has fallen terribly. Firstly, if pressed by the temporal power, they have affirmed and maintained that the temporal power has no jurisdiction over them, but, on the contrary, that the spiritual power is above the temporal. Secondly, if it were proposed to admonish them with the Scriptures, they objected that no one may interpret the Scriptures but the Pope. Thirdly, if they are threatened with a council, they pretend that no one may call a council but the Pope.

I never heard of these bulls and encyclicals and books.

It seems to me that the Pope's son, the Cardinal, is not in a condition for me to give him my daughter to wife. Make a cardinal who can marry and take off the hat, and then I will give him my daughter.

The Roman Catholic influence did not lend itself to activism in terms of social change.