Clericalism Quotes

Practically every movie that shows the pope or even a bishop as a character, and in much of western literature of the last 300 or 400 years, these are portrayed as awful figures.

... the loathsome combination of church and state.

The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.

Germany has an established and well-furnished Catholicism, often with employed Catholics who handle the church like a labor union. For them, the church is simply the employer.

If you aim at a Scottish presbytery, it agrees as well with monarchy as God and the devil.

Religious power, which, as I have already said, frequently identifies itself with political power, has always been a protagonist of this bitter struggle, even when it seemingly was neutral.

As the French say, there are three sexes - men, women, and clergymen.

A civilian ruler dabbling in religion is as reprehensible as a clergyman dabbling in politics. Both render themselves odious as well as ridiculous.

He's a very political old monk shuffling around in Gucci shoes.

We need a pope to usher in a new era of inclusion, the end of a sinful clericalism, and a strong sense of duty to those on society's margins. The 1 billion faithful long for a leader who is fearless and driven - not by terror but by love.

No mention of God. They keep Him up their sleeves for as long as they can, vicars do. They know it puts people off.

Pope Francis has aimed a blow at what the whole hierarchical system is built on: a graded system with the higher clergy in the skyboxes, the devoted religious in festival seating, as they say of the crowds at rock concerts, and, on the bottom, the laity in standing room only.

In our ecclesiastical region there are priests who don't baptize the children of single mothers because they weren't conceived in the sanctity of marriage. These are today's hypocrites. Those who clericalize the church. Those who separate the people of God from salvation.

Even as a small child, I wondered why the Dominican nuns who educated me were subservient to the Jesuit priests who educated my brothers.

The ecclesiastical establishments of Europe which serve to support tyrannical governments are not the Christian religion but abuses and corruptions of it.

I think generally, Pope Benedict did a good job cleaning up the way the church handled abusive priests but didn't go far enough in how he handled bishops who enabled them.

Clericalism has rendered some of Ireland's brightest, most privileged and powerful men either unwilling or unable to address the horrors cited in the Ryan and Murphy Reports.

It is a thoroughly anti-christian doctrine that the Spirit of God, and therefore the life and governing power of the Church, resides in the ministry, to the exclusion of the people.

Then there is the worst part of Christianity, which is awful: power, corruption, manipulation... But then again, these feature are ever present in any organization.

At the end of the Middle Ages, nobody would ever have expected the monasteries to vanish from the scene within a generation - yet they did. Change does happen.

Clericalism contributed its full share to this downward progress [of Spain]. The intensity of the Spanish character, which can do nothing by halves, lent an enormous power for evil to the exaggerated religious ardor of the people. In the earlier Middle Ages no other European nation had been so tolerant as Spain in its dealings with the Jew and the infidel, but, under the careful stimulation of the Church, this tolerant spirit had passed away with the fourteenth century, and in its place there had gradually arisen a fierce and implacable hatred of all faiths outside of Catholicism. This fanaticism gave to the priesthood preponderating power, which it utilized for its own behalf, in disregard of the public welfare

I was raised as a Catholic, but I didn't like the Catholic Church at all. I thought the nuns were mean.

There has always been a certain proportion of people who leave the Church on issues of authority and sex. That hasn't changed since we started doing research on it back in the early 1960s.

The [American Catholic] Bishops have to understand that they are part of the problem.

There the union of Church and State tends strongly to paralyze some of the members of the body of Christ. Here there is no such influence to destroy spiritual life and power.