Honore de Balzac Quotes

I'd stand in line for Confession with old people and little kids, and as the line moved up, I knew when I got into the box that I would lie! Again!

I'm an Irish Catholic and I have a long iceberg of guilt.

As I told Piers Morgan, 'Catholics have confession, whereas Northern Irish Protestants only have interviews.'

It is by avoiding future sin that we retain a remission of the sins of the past.

For every sin there is forgiveness, and especially for the sins of youth.

And I'm a Catholic, from an Irish Catholic family, and we know plenty of stuff about guilt.

Judge the Catholic Church not by those who barely live by its spirit, but by the example of those who live closest to it.

You have to do your First Penance before your First Holy Communion. You're really young. What do you know? You've got nothing to confess. All I knew was that I was an evil human whose sins caused the death of our Lord.

The sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church is the result of what police call "noble cause corruption," the belief that because you are dedicated to doing good, you can do no wrong.

The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine - but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.

For years I had been disillusioned by the Church of England's compromising on everything. The Catholic Church doesn't care if something is unpopular.

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

I can definitely make an argument for atheism. I was very educated in scripture and dogma and the church, particularly the Catholic Church. I could not possibly know that I disagreed with religion unless I knew what I was disagreeing with.

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin.

Put your sins in the chalice for the precious blood to wash away. One drop is capable of washing away the sins of the world.

I think the Catholic and Protestant churches have become very stagnant.

Though it is true that the church must always dissociate itself from sin, it can never have any excuse for keeping any sinner at a distance.

The National Catholic Register's coverage of the Church universal, and the Church in our own country, is splendid.

The Catholic Church is a thousand times better than your Protestant Church upon that question [of damnation]. The Catholic Church believes in purgatory - that is, a place where a fellow can get a chance to make a motion for a new trial.

Because we lived in the presence of the church and the convent and the rectory and the school 24-7. And this was an enormous cornerstone in the lives of my entire family. They were all pretty serious Catholic churchgoers.

We don't have much wisdom about the second half when things really open up and end up looking a lot more progressive. In my own Catholic church, for example, we're sort of circling the wagons today by thinking that more moral strictures, more exclusionary rules on this or that, that that's going to do for the first half of life. I don't think it really does.

For myself I think that one wrong does not right the other, and forgiveness cannot be won with useless tears or alms to the Church.

Make tawba not just for sins you've committed, but also for obligations you haven't fulfilled.

The catholic church has a lot more money than any Colombian cartel and they leave a lot more bodies in their wake.

We are compelled, our faith urging us, to believe and to hold—and we do firmly believe and simply confess—that there is one holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, outside of which there is neither salvation nor remission of sins.