I think the real problem for American religion are those minority of fundamentalists who try to identify political policies with religion.
One cannot escape the harsh fact that as a ministerial profession, the priesthood has very serious problems. They are not new. They did not develop yesterday or last year.
Priest organizations around the country, both local and national, should realize that their membership has a serious image problem and undertake programs to improve it.
As the criminal, sinful war in Iraq enters its third year, the president goes to Europe to heal the wounds between the United States and its former allies, on his own terms of course.
It was generally believed that Catholics were not interested in arts and science graduate schools. They weren’t going to be intellectuals. And so I put the theses to the test. And they all collapsed.
Would it not be much better to have a president who deliberately lied to the people because he thought a war was essential than to have one who was so dumb as to be taken in by intelligence agencies, especially those who told him what he wanted to hear?
I write easily, let’s put it that way. And in a novel particularly, the characters take over. And they tell me what to say and they tell me what they’re doing. And I’m a third of the way into a novel and then I just let the characters finish it for me.
Search for the perfect church if you will; when you find it, join it, and realize that on that day it becomes something less than perfect.
It should be no surprise that when rich men take control of the government, they pass laws that are favorable to themselves. The surprise is that those who are not rich vote for such people, even though they should know from bitter experience that the rich will continue to rip off the rest of us.
Nobody puts constraints on God. She doesn’t like it.
Is the patience of the American people that long suffering? Is there no outrage left in the country?
We’re given second chances every day of our life. We don’t usually take them, but they’re there for the taking.
We are born with two incurable diseases, life, from which we die, and hope, which says maybe death isn’t the end.
In God, the characteristics of men and women that we admire in men and women are combined. That’s been a traditional Catholic teaching that God is the combination of opposites.
I wouldn’t say the world is my parish, but my readers are my parish. And especially the readers that write to me. They’re my parish. And it’s a responsibility that I enjoy.
The seminaries must face the fact that they are not turning out well-trained professional clergy. They must realize that preaching is creative work and that some element of creativity should be required as a condition for ordination.
The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women.
An adolescent is somebody who is in between things. A teenager is somebody who’s kind of permanently there. And so living with them through the various teenage hopes and sorrows and joys was curiously enough a maturing experience for me.
The men who were running the church in the late ’60s and ’70s panicked when they saw the chaos, which developed after the council. The relatively modest changes of those years thawed the ice in which Catholicism had been frozen since the French Revolution.
It’s a terrible mistake to let the perfect get in the way of the good. If you wait to publish until you have written a great book, you will never publish anything. Great books happen by chance, not by design. The wise writer writes the best he can and leaves it to posterity to decide about greatness.