Ecclesiastical Reform 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.

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

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 men that call for Reformation, may pretend cause or colour of cause both in matters of doctrine & fact, why they may hate the Bishops, which in no sorte may bee applyed to hir Majestie.

If you say that the history of the Church is a long succession of scandals, you are telling the truth, though if that is all you say, you are distorting the truth.

Too often [the Church] is weighted down and burdened with the sins and failings of her children; too often she appears disfigured and discouraged.

No matter how corrupt the Church may become, it carries within it the seeds of its own regeneration.

I desire to learn what is this fashion of innovation in things concerning the Church, which allows anyone who likes, or the passerby,… to tear asunder the flock that has been well led, and to plunder it by larcenous attacks, or rather by piratical and fallacious teachings.

I think the strength of the Catholic church is that when it does finally identify a problem, it works to resolve it.

If Switzerland was not the real cradle of the Reformation, she soon became its home, at least for the French and Anglo-Saxon countries.

When I read the documents relative to the Modernism, as it was defined by Saint Pius X, and when I compare them to the documents of the II Vatican Council, I cannot help being bewildered. For what was condemned as heresy in 1906 was proclaimed as what is and should be from now on the doctrine and method of the Church. In other words, the modernists of 1906 were, somewhat, precursors to me. My masters were part of them. My parents taught me Modernism. How could Saint Pius X reject those that now seem to be my precursors?

The Divine Thing that made itself the foundation of the Church does not seem, to judge by his comments on the religious leadership of his day, to have hoped much from officers of a church.

A heresy and a new error sprang up in England, through pride, vainglory, avarice, and lust, and through many strange sciences so that the men of England went into opposition to the Pope and to Rome …. New laws and statutes were enacted … They destroyed the orders, namely the monks, canons, nuns …. The broke down the monasteries and sold the roofs and bells…. burned the images, shrines, and relics of the Saints … and burned the staff of Jesus, which was in Dublin, performing miracles since the time of Saint Patrick.

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

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.

The Reformers, therefore, as instruments in the hands of God, in delivering the Church from bondage to prelates, did not make it a tumultuous multitude, in which every man was a law to himself, free to believe, and free to do what he pleased.

I add, that those who are bent on restoring the whole church ought to be well instructed in the word, and to abstain from doing anything under the pretext of simplicity.

The priesthood is not dying, but the clerical state is dead. It needs to be buried, preferably with a Viking funeral in Boston Harbor so nobody can miss the spectacle of its passing.

The Roman Curia has its defects, but it seems to me that people often overemphasize its defects and talk too little about the health of the many religious and laypeople who work there.

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.