Jean Guitton Quotes

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.

The only way you can separate yourself from the [Roman Catholic] church is by knowingly and deliberately denying a dogma of faith. Abortion is not a dogma.

I hear around me reformers who want to dismantle the Holy Sanctuary, destroy the universal flame of the Church, to discard all her adornments, and smite her with remorse for her historic past.

If anyone says that it is possible that at some time, given the advancement of knowledge, a sense may be assigned to the dogmas propounded by the Church which is different from that which the Church has understood and understands: let him be anathema.

Neither was there any heresy, or diversity of opinion, or disputing about the matter, till the pope had gathered a council to confirm this transubstantiation: wherefore it is most likely that this opinion came up by them of latter days.

What can the Church do? If she stands by her moral teaching, then she will be seen as standing in judgement over a vast percentage of Europeans.

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

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.

The Church ... has always reproved the doctrines and condemned the men that rebel against the legitimate [secular] authority.

I would beg the wise and learned fathers (of the church) to consider with all diligence the difference which exists between matters of mere opinion and matters of demonstration. ... [I]t is not in the power of professors of the demonstrative sciences to alter their opinions at will, so as to be now of one way of thinking and now of another. ... Demonstrated conclusions about things in nature of the heavens, do not admit of being altered with the same ease as opinions to what is permissible or not, under a contract, mortgage, or bill of exchange.

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

But I make a distinction between the doctrines of the Church, which matter, and the structure invented by half a dozen Italians who got to be pope and which is of very little use to anybody.

Neither the true faith nor eternal salvation is to be found outside the Holy Catholic Church.

Before everything else, fidelity to the Church: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic. Jesus did not found several churches, but one single Church.

On the ordination of women, the church has spoken and said no. John Paul II, in a definitive formulation said that door is closed.

New revelations regarding faith or morals ... have always been abhorred and challenged in the Church ... Hence, the Sovereign Pontiffs, the Councils, and the Fathers have been most careful to reject all novelties or new doctrines on matters of faith which differed from those already received.

That the Jews were unholy was a belief so ingrained by the Church [by the 14th century] that the most devout persons were the harshest in their antipathy, none more so than St. Louis.

Theology, not morality, is the first business on the church's agenda of reform, and the church, not society, is the first target of divine criticism.

We must put aside all judgment of our own, and keep the mind ever ready and prompt to obey in all things the true Spouse of Christ our Lord, our holy Mother, the hierarchical Church.

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

The church is so subnormal that if it ever got back to the New Testament normal it would seem to people to be abnormal.

Everyone agrees the celibacy rule is just a Church law dating from the 11th century, not a divine command.

It was a very stupid mistake to think you could deal with heresy by burning heretics. It's the very same mistake that modernist Catholics are making today in reverse. They think you can love heretics by loving heresies.

Archbishop Romero of El Salvador was a member of the Salvadoran aristocracy. He could not have risen to the top of the church hierarchy otherwise. But after he began voicing critical remarks about the war and concerned comments about the poor, he was assassinated.

The desire for legitimate offspring is, in fact, according to the Catholic Church, the only motive which can justify sexual intercourse.