I think Margaret Thatcher started it, the greed thing, people just wanting more and more. And we’ve lost our morals to some extent. And the church has weakened. People don’t believe in anything apart from money and success.
Church Quotes
I have had great responsibilities in the Catholic Church. All the greater is my pain for the abuses and the errors that occurred in those different places during the time of my mandate.
It’s hard to embrace something that doesn’t embrace you.
He who is near the church is often far from God.
Where God has his church the Devil will have his chapel.
Discovering the Church is apt to be a slow procedure but it can take place if you have a free mind and no vested interest in disbelief.
Concentration of power in a political machine is bad; and an Established Church is only a political machine; it was invented for that; it is nursed, cradled, preserved for that; it is an enemy to human liberty, and does no good which it could not better do in a split-up and scattered condition.
The building of a “skyscraper church” would seem to be a move in the right direction.
The church doctrines of obedience to authority, repentance, fear of punishment, self-abnegation, acceptance of outer direction rather than inner assurance, elevation of faith over reason, and intolerance make institutionalized religion an ideal instrument of social constraint. In an unconstitutional partnership with the state, the church can impose the most irresistible, if covert, controls conceivable.
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.
