Lance Morrow Quotes

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

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.

I was raised Catholic at a time when Vatican II was just taking hold.

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

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.

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 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.

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.

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

As a Catholic, I am proud of the social mission of the church and its concerns for the poor and dispossessed, but I still personally would support women priests.

In the John Paul II days, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger had the advantage of staying in his cupboard - the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith - exchanging views only with the Pope, and speaking publicly only through carefully written missives on doctrinal issues.

Though I do regard the Inquisition in general and the burning of Giordano Bruno in particular as blots on the history of the Roman Catholic Church, I am far from being actuated by hatred of that church, and in fact cannot imagine that European civilization would have developed or survived without it.

There was a time when papal encyclicals were treated as virtual pronouncements of papal infallibility. There are still a small minority of Catholics who cite Pope Paul VI's 1968 document Humanae Vitae - which outlawed artificial birth control - as the word of God.

All Europe, including Erasmus, has followed Luther.

BC is not going to replace the hierarchy, and BC is not going to lead some major reform in the Catholic Church - that's got to come out of the whole Catholic community.

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.

I do believe in the infallibility of the Pope, because I think we have to believe in something.

'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 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.

If I should say anything that is not in conformity with what is held by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, it will be through ignorance and not through malice. This may be taken as certain, and also that, through God's goodness, I am, and shall always be, as I always have been, subject to her.

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

It is the custom of the Roman Church which I unworthily serve with the help of God, to tolerate some things, to turn a blind eye to some, following the spirit of discretion rather than the rigid letter of the law.

I cannot however say that in European countries the control by the Roman Catholic Church of great areas of land has always led to happiness for the people of those countries.

The Roman Church has never erred, nor can it err until the end of time.

The Popes of Rome engrossing what they pleased of political rule into their own hands, extended their dominion over men's eyes, as they had before over their judgments, burning and prohibiting to be read, what they fancied not;