Clergy From The United States

"Impartial observers of Indian affairs admit that the greatest good accomplished for the Indian has been through the agency of religious schools, and particularly of Catholic schools, and it is in this cause the Bureau has done its best work."

"No region has experienced so great changes within the last fifty years as has Western Pennsylvania."

"The early history of the diocese is intimately bound up with the truly heroic labours of Father O'Reilly, and foundations of many of the present parishes were the results of his missionary zeal."

"The links between faith, the inherent dignity and rights of human beings, and a fair and peaceful society, were also understood by the founding fathers of the United States and these basic moral principles have shaped, over thousand of years, civilization."

"There are some who confuse the phrase "official State religion" with the idea that "minorities do not belong here.""

"The Catholic Church is conspicuous in the United States. The number of her adherents, the wealth of her churches, the activity of her religious orders of men and women, her parochial schools, colleges, academies, and 'universities, her compact and widespread hierarchical organization, attract universal attention. Whether the observers be friends or foes, she cannot be and is not ignored. She is a huge fact in the life of the republic. Her present homogeneity is remarkable if we consider the various sources whence she sprang and the various elements of which she is composed."

"Join in prayer with the men and women who throughout history spread the Gospel and put into practice Christ's call to serve the last even in the toughest conditions."

"I feel like one who has charge of a vessel. There are numbers of men aboard who work, one for one purpose and another for another purpose. He who guides the vessel has the whole credit, and still he but represents the whole. And so it is with him at the head of the diocese. If I have done anything for which I should take credit to myself, it is, as I say, owing to my clergy, and also to the laity. I have simply to hold the rudder strongly, give the vessel the right direction, and the winds and waves will carry it where I wish it to go. They simply require a hand to guide them and to restrain them."

"Where love is absent there can be no feast."

"It is surprising (I would observe) to reflect how many forms of spirit and idol-worship are (to their degradation be it said) common with Malaysian and Caucasian. (See in our own periodicals, published presumably by bright-minded, clean-souled Christian philosophers, yes, see in these oracles of our fireside, advertisements of magicians, diviners, fortune-tellers, charm-workers, not to speak of other law breakers, whose mere self-interest seems to have dulled all true intellective sense.)"

"Economics, ethics, sociology, politics are drawn together by the complex problems of property and each has much to learn from the others."

"It is because their labors are undertaken in obedience to Divine inspiration that Religious Communities are able to render humanity a kind of service that is incomprehensible to unaided human reason. To fit themselves for such service men and women deliberately relinquish even the most legitimate pleasures of the human heart. They leave father and mother and kindred, they sacrifice the opportunity to make for themselves the home of their choice, that they may give their affection, their energy, their ability, their all, to God, in the person of His little ones, His sick, and His poor. They bind themselves by the three holy vows of Poverty, Chastity, and Obedience — and the world looks on and does not understand, for to the world the ascetic life is folly, even though it was by the practice of these virtues that Christ redeemed the world."

"The new prelate has evidently brought with him the same prudence, zeal, and administrative ability that marked his career as a priest, and his work thus far has already borne rich fruit."

"Under his guidance the diocese continues to grow steadily and healthily."

"Archbishop Spalding was a fine representative of the type of men who organized and developed the Church in the United States. To a strong faith he added sincere piety and tender devotion, to scholarship a high degree of administrative ability, and to his zeal for Catholicism a loyal interest in the welfare of his country."

"I'm a firm believer in giving people a message to take away that they can that they can work on for that day — that if you're trying to overload the message then you're going to lose people. I believe in precision — shooting one arrow, not 50."

"We are trying to preach an experience and relationship with Jesus above all else. Many people don't know Jesus or about the Church he founded. A good homily feeds the hunger they have to know Him, and prompts them to go and learn more. Whatever the priest says should flow from his relationship with Jesus."

"If we understand the Faith, then we can explain the Faith. And after nearly half a century of failed catechesis, our people are unable to do that, and they don't even remember what some of the answers are, or even that the Church has the answers. So the secret is not just preaching the Word, but preaching the Word to those who claim to be Catholics, and giving them adequate formation to share the Faith."

"A Franciscan, he reflected the deep faith and true Christian charity of St. Francis. We will all miss his kindness and support."

"Scripture is not seen as primarily a written norm, but rather a consecration of the History of Salvation under the species of the human word. The content and unity of Scripture does not refer to the books of the Scriptures themselves but to the reality to which these books give testimony and witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ."

"If you have understanding, then you can build trust. If you have trust, you can build community and have respect for people's dignity."

"The world is suffering. In large part, its misery comes from a lack of a sense of God. The role of the Pope is to point people towards God who is the source of love and truth. With openness to the Transcendent... public life can become active and fruitful, and society, even a global society, can be transformed for the good."

"It is of the very essence of true patriotism to be earnest and truthful, to scorn the flatterer’s tongue, and strive to keep its native land in harmony with the laws of national thrift and power. It will tell a land of its faults, as a friend will counsel a companion; it will speak as honestly as the physician advises a patient; and if occasion requires, an indignation will flame out of its love, like that which burst from the lips of Moses when he returned from the mountain, and found the people to whom he had revealed the holy and austere Jehovah, and for whom he would cheerfully have sacrificed his life, worshipping a calf."

"The great question which should determine the essential truth of any religion is the practical one, — What can it do for man? Does it provide for his weakness? does it meet his needs? does it educate and satisfy his spiritual nature? If it does all these perfectly, it must have been made for man, and it must be true, unless God is a deceiver, and the soul itself an organized cheat."

"[The] ark was to be the central sanctity in the ritual worship of the Hebrews, during their wanderings in the wilderness. You may ask, "What have we to do to-day with that structure designed for barbarous fugitives in the Arabian desert three thousand years ago? Why lead us back from the fresh light of this morning to the misty dawn of history for a theme of meditation?" We have this to do with it, — that your new pulpit is in the direct line of descent from the first mercy-seat that consecrated the Jewish tent near Horeb. Those ten commandments, which are at the basis of our modern religion, were folded up and deposited beneath the lids of the ark in the first tabernacle that was built after the revelation from Sinai, more than thirty centuries ago. The Jews are our religious grandfathers... The first Christian churches were modelled after the synagogues; still keeping their reading-desks for the Old Testament, and adding the manuscript biographies of Jesus and the fresh letters of the apostles. When the Roman Catholic form was perfected, the simple reading-desk was supplanted by the more stately and imposing altar for the celebration of the mass. But the Protestant Reformation, appealing more directly to the reason and conscience, made the pulpit most prominent in the furniture of the church, and restored the Old and New Testaments as the basis of instruction and the sole authority. Thus this pulpit, in a young Protestant church in Boston, is connected by subtle historic ties, that reach across the ocean from the New World to the Old."

"We could not keep in mind that it was celestial fire we were looking at, — fire cool as the water-drops out of which it was born, and on which it reclined. It lay apparently upon the trees, diffused itself among them, from the valley to the crown of the ridge, as gently as the glory in the bush upon Horeb, when "the angel of the Lord appeared unto Moses in a flame of fire, out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold the bush burned with fire, and the bush was not consumed.""

"I think questions should be welcome, because the only way that people will learn is asking questions. Now, there are two ways of asking questions: one is staking out a claim and another is genuinely seeking an answer."

"I would hope that people see me as a shepherd and that people will grow to trust me. Trust is important in our life together, and I want to do what I can to establish trust. As for how I would like people to understand me, I would appreciate people recognizing that my task is to establish, along with the clergy and lay faithful, a vision for our future in southern Illinois. A key responsibility I have is to foster and preserve unity among us as we move into the future."

"The last three decades have vindicated 20 centuries of Catholic teaching about marriage and the family like never before. It's great to belong to a Church that’s right when the world is wrong!"

"The unfashionable faith is the very one to attract worldly people on their first awakening to spiritual sensibility. The show of worldliness is then, to the worldly, particularly offensive. "The lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, the pride of life," delight in abasing themselves before rags and filth, wishing to reach the opposite extreme. The graces of the religious character, humility, meekness, self-accusation, contrition, find in associations with the coarse, the hard, the repulsive, their fittest expression. Hence it was that Judaism, heretofore the faith of the despised, became the faith of the despisers."

"If it be asked why Judaism, then, was not made the religion of the empire, instead of Christianity, which it hated with all the fervor of close relationship, the answer is at hand: Judaism laid no emphasis on its cosmopolitan features, and discouraged belief in the historical fulfilment of its own prophecy."

"Who in Kenya is desperate to kill Father Kaiser, and why now? They could only be powerful people who saw him as a moral thorn in their evil flesh."

"I want all to know that if I disappear from the scene, because the bush is vast and hyenas many, that I am not planning any accident, nor, God forbid, any self-destruction. Instead, I trust in a good guardian angel and in the action of grace."

"Healing and saving the creation is God's work, and he calls faithful persons to be co-creators with him."

"Mr. Truman excised the best of the Good Neighbor policy when he sent the very first civil rights message to the Congress of the United States and desegregated the Armed Forces. Folks, I think on this day in honoring Mr. Truman with that civil rights move, we need to all acknowledge the fact that we do have our prejudices, systemic prejudices, within each one of us. When we will honestly acknowledge those prejudices that we have, when we're in touch with those feelings, then it is that we can begin to discipline ourselves to love our neighbors with different pigments, and cultures, and races, and yes economics."

"If we love God, we can't help but love our neighbors because we're going to respect them as our brothers and sisters. In fact, folks, if you stop to think about it, the only way in this world any of us has of loving God is by loving our neighbors."

"Until we Christians see that the Gospel's good news of redemption applies to the earth, as well as the earthling, we will proliferate the sin of raping God's good earth. God's work of redemption in Jesus Christ encompasses the whole of creation and provides the grounds for restoring the brokenness in the relationship of humankind to creation, and the relationship of both to God."

"Only love for God and God's good earth will keep our attention and move us to commitment. Nature is rising up to judge us Nature is striking back to call us to repentance."

"We must reclaim a sense of reverence for the earth and a recognition of our essential relatedness to the earth."

"The deepest religious concern on this earth today is being a good neighbor. The most crucial political issue in the world today is learning how to do rightly neighbor-with-neighbor. The greatest social urgency is learning how to be a good neighbor to one another. And certainly the most crucial concern of our global economy, call it economic justice, is caring about our neighbors simply the same way we care about ourselves."

"The ruination of your environment respects no human-drawn borders nor any family's fenced in private property ... All of you, my citizens, are very interdependent. Each must learn to care for all, and all must learn to care for each. Not to love your neighbor as yourself is to surely perish."

"And who is it that always suffers from the affluent people's overkill and superfluity but the poor again. You are making a wider and wider gap on the earth between the rich and the poor. And that is always a far greater threat to our national and international security than any nuclear arms race."

"Unless you allow the world of nature to flourish, you will perish."

"You and I are destroying God's good earth that sustains us - biting the hand that feeds us. We are fighting God's natural systems in our determination to keep increasing our gross national product. In order to be comfortable, make as much money as we can, have it as easy as possible, and enjoy more pleasures now, we are leaving our children's children a wilderness that will not sustain them."

"You Christians ought to be most highly motivated to practice environmental stewardship. If you are accountable to God for every idle word you speak, do you think you are going to be held any less accountable for everything you waste and all that depletes God's good creation?"

"This is your Mother Earth speaking today on behalf of the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood-sisterhood of our common family. I am speaking to you Christian Americans in particular. You along with other citizens are raping me. There is not one among you who is altogether innocent, no not one. You have become so accustomed to abusing me for profit, jobs, luxuries, conveniences, and pleasures that it has become a natural way of life for you. It isn't that you intend to be malicious; it is only that you are thoughtless. But thoughtlessness doesn't clear you in a court of justice."

"You Christians are called upon to balance your quest for personal salvation with reverence for nature. Either you live for the common good of all, or you live for no good or God at all!"

"Crises get our attention, but only love for God and his earth will hold our attention and move us to saving action."

"Hear a statement by the founder of the Moral Majority, and now a new movement, the so-called Liberty Movement, the Reverend Mr. Jerry Falwell, "The idea that religion and politics don't mix was invented by the devil to keep Christians from running their own country." People, the very foundation and fabric of our nation is really being threatened more by these popular religious voices, mesmerizing millions by way of television, than any threat of communism has ever presented us."

"Aspiring to be President of the United States, televangelist Pat Robertson preaches, "The Constitution of the United States, for instance, is a marvelous document for self-government by the Christian people. But the minute you turn the document into the hands of non-Christian people and atheistic people they can use it to destroy the very foundation of our society. And that's what's been happening." If any statement is more anti-American and more contrary to the Christian gospel, I have yet to hear it."