Catholic Women Quotes & Sayings

There is a wonderful simple human reality to Christ's hunger. The man is famished. He's missed meals for three days, He has a lot on his mind, He's on His way back to heaven, but before He goes He is itching for a nice piece of broiled fish and a little bread on the side with the men and women He loves. Do we not like Him the more for His prandial persistance? And think for a moment about the holiness of our own food, and the ways that cooking and sharing a meal can be forms of love and prayer. And realize again that the Eucharist at the heart of stubborn Catholicism is the breakfast that Christ prepares for Catholics, every morning, as we return from fishing in vast dreamy seas? — Brian Doyle

[Dan] Brown states that five million women were killed by the Church as witches. In fact, modern research has shown that the witch hunts began in the sixteenth century in Europe and that between 30,000 and 50,000 men and women were burned to death for the crime of witchcraft. However, 90 per cent of those trials took place before secular tribunals in countries such as Germany and France where by the 1500s the Church had lost most of its influence in judicial matters. Indeed, it was precisely in countries like Spain and Italy where the Catholic Church still had influence that there were almost no witchcraft trials. — Michael Coren

This Levantine spirit developed gradually in Beirut after the Industrial Revolution, as the burgeoning Lebanese silk trade and the invention of the steamboat combined to bring men and women of America and Western Europe in large numbers to the Levant. These settlers from the West were Catholic and Protestant missionaries, diplomats, and merchants, Jewish traders, travelers and physicians; and they brought with them Western commerce, manners, and ideas and, most of all, a certain genteel, open, tolerant attitude toward life and toward other cultures. Their mores and manners were gradually imitated by elite elements of the local native populations, who made a highly intelligent blend of these Western ideas with their own indigenous Arabic, Greek, and Turkish cultures, which had their own traditions of tolerance. "To be a Levantine," wrote Hourani, "is to live in two worlds or more at once, without belonging to either." In — Thomas L. Friedman

I don't understand, then, why, in the midst of all this, pregnant women - women trying to make rational decisions about their futures and, usually, that of their families, too - should be subject to more pressure about preserving life than, say, Vladimir Putin, the World Bank, or the Catholic Church. — Caitlin Moran

I feel very strongly about contraception even though I know people say that, as a good Catholic girl, I shouldn't. But I disagree because I think one of the keys to women's progression in the 20th century is being able to control their fertility. — Cherie Blair

The new Episcopalian and Catholic liturgies include a segment called "passing the peace." Many things can go wrong here. I know of one congregation in New York which fired its priest because he insisted on their passing the peace- which involves nothing more than shaking hands with your neighbors in the pew. The men and women of this small congregation had limits to their endurance; passing the peace was beyond their limits. They could not endure shaking hands with people to whom they bore lifelong grudges. They fired the priest and found a new one sympathetic to their needs" Anne Dillard- Teaching a Stone to Talk- An Expedition to the Pole — Anne Dillard

Secular journalists ... tend to accept uncritically the oft - repeated Evangelical Protestant and Conservative Roman Catholic definitions that the Bible is anti - gay. If these people were honest, they would have to admit that the Bible is also pro - slavery and anti - women. — John Shelby Spong

The Catholic men are more upset about women not being able to be priests than are Catholic women. — Andrew Greeley

In a land where there are no musicians; in a land where there are no storytellers, teachers, and poets; in a land where there are no men and women of vision and leadership; in a land where there are no legends, saints, and champions; in a land where there are no dreamers, the people will most certainly perish. But you and I, we are the music makers; we are the storytellers, teachers, and poets; we are the men and women of vision and leadership; we are the legends, the saints, and the champions; and we are the dreamers of the dreams. Let us sit with God for a few minutes each day and dream with him, and with the vision he places in our hearts, go out into the world with a contagious love that cannot be ignored.
Be bold. Be Catholic. When the Catholic faith is actually lived it is incredible potent. — Matthew Kelly

I think both Protestants and Catholics have killed the woman for the sake of the mother. (Rubem Alves, p. 201) — Mev Puleo

Marriage is the most basic expression of the vocation to love that all men and women have as persons made in God's image. — Christopher West

They were Catholic, my lovers,
All in an access of crossing themselves,
Particularly their fingers
Behind their suspendered backs
And that was the women. — Shay Caroline

A staff member tells me that one of the female picketers has come in when the men were not around, had an abortion, and gone back to picket the next day. This sounds surrealistic to me - but not to the staff member. She explains that women in such anti-abortion groups are more likely to be deprived of birth control and so to need an abortion. They then feel guilty - and picket even more. This restriction on birth control may also explain why studies have long shown that Catholic women in general are more likely to have an abortion than are their Protestant counterparts. — Gloria Steinem

Perhaps it is no wonder that the women were first at the Cradle and last at the Cross. They had never known a man like this Man - there never has been another. A prophet and teacher who never nagged at them, never flattered or coaxed or patronized; who never made arch jokes about them, never treated them as "The women, God help us!" or "The ladies, God bless them!"; who rebuked without querulousness and praised without condescension; who took their questions and arguments seriously; who never mapped out their sphere for them, never urged them to be feminine or jeered at them for being female; who had no axe to grind and no uneasy male dignity to defend; who took them as he found them and was completely unselfconscious. There is no act, no sermon, no parable in the whole Gospel that borrows its pungency from female perversity; nobody could guess from the words and deeds of Jesus that there was anything "funny" about woman's nature. Dorothy Day, Catholic social activist and journalist — Sarah Bessey

The Catholic Church has never really come to terms with women. What I object to is being treated either as Madonnas or Mary Magdalenes. — Shirley Williams

The Catholic Church holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons. These reasons include: the example recorded in the Sacred Scriptures of Christ choosing His apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only men; and her living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with God's plan for His Church. — Pope Paul VI

Protestant women may take the pill. Roman Catholic women must keep taking The Tablet. — Irene Thomas

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. — Andrew Greeley

I am a Catholic. I can't say that without pointing out that I oppose abortion with all my heart and soul. Bill Clinton wanted them safe and rare. Barack Obama is heartsick that so many people he knows have had abortions. But we're all pro-choice and believe in reproductive freedom and oppose the Republicans' War on Women. — Joe Biden

The 20th century was a turning point; it freed and emancipated women, broke the back of segregation, and began the struggle to give justice to gay and lesbian people. But the Christian church, in both Catholic and Protestant forms, resisted every one of those humanizing developments. The church was on the wrong side of all three of those fights. — John Shelby Spong

I am what is known as a benched Catholic and disillusioned by the church doctrine. I believe in things the Catholic Church does not believe in: divorce being one, and a women's right to choose being another. — Kitty Kelley

As many have pointed out, it has often seemed in the past half-century or so as if the institutional Church cared more for atheists, modernists, and every type of non-Catholic than for her own faithful children who want to believe what has always been believed and want to live as holy men and women have always strived to live, "in the world but not of it." One — Peter Kwasniewski

PRAISE FOR 'THE JOURNEY HOME'
Many saints are known and praised by all. We pray to them in litanies and celebrate their feast days. But the vast majority of holy men and women live heroic lives quietly before God.
Loyal to family, lovers of God, servants in the Church, these unsung saints live everyday life as an example for us. David Hanneman is one such man. His story is exemplary and should be told to the world. He not only lived a noble life, but also suffered with heroism and grace as he passed into glory.
This is a story to encourage and bless us all. We are thankful to Joseph Hanneman for sharing his father and making his story known to us who need such examples to encourage us as we face the difficulties and challenges of life. — Stephen K. Ray

I suppose she only wanted what she couldn't have. Well, people were that way. To hell with people. The Catholic Church had an awfully good way of handling all that. Good advice, anyways. Not to think about it. Oh, it was swell advice. Try and take it sometime. Try and take it. — Ernest Hemingway,

Why was Christ so compassionate towards sexual sinners, especially women? Think of the woman caught in adultery. Think of the prostitute who wept at his feet. Could it be because Christ knew that these women, who had been deceived by counterfeit loves, were actually looking for him, the true Bridegroom? — Christopher West

Ninety-eight percent of women in childbearing age who are Catholic use contraception. Ok, so in practice the church has not enforced this and now they want the federal government and private insurance to enforce it. It just isn't consistent to me. — Nancy Pelosi

Hungry Jack's real name was Charles R. Hoofard.
He was born in Indianapolis in 1950.
In 1950, Harry S. Truman was president of the United States.
Harry Truman, as far as I can tell, also never took a shit in his life.
In 1950, the same year that a boy named Charles R. Hoofard was born in Indianapolis, President Harry S. Truman sent military assistance to the French. They were trying to maintain their French Catholic colony in Vietnam. That military aid would grow and blossom to the point that a boy with wanderlust from Indiana named Charles R. Hoofard ultimately took time out from fucking whatever he wanted to fuck to participate in the killing of an entire village of women, elderly people, and children.
History is full of shit like that. — Andrew Smith

But it is strange and I think quite wrong that conservative Protestantism, which used to repudiate the tradition of celibacy, is now assuming that celibacy is the right way of life for a large number of men as a matter of course simply because they aren't 'heterosexual' - that is, because they lack the commitment-phobic lust that prompts other men towards all attractive women regardless of marriage covenants. Similarly, Roman Catholic authority, which used to teach that a special grace was required for a life of celibacy, now teaches that celibacy is the right way of life for such men as a matter of course, as though they were incapable of giving and receiving the love and friendship that many women seek from marriage far more than anything else — Jonathan Mills

The common man or women, whether they are Israeli or Palestinian, Protestant or Catholic or Iraqi or American, the common man just wants to live in peace and justice in a clean environment. When we look around the world and we see that is not the case, we know the will of the majority is not being listened to, that's the first sign that our system is broken. — Woody Harrelson

Have you not often met poor old women who are most faithful to the pious recitation of the Rosary? You also must do all that you can to recite it with fervour. Get right down, at the feet of Jesus: it is a good thing to make oneself small in the presence of so great a God. — Columba Marmion

Although every organized religion works overtime to contribute its own brand of misogyny to the myth of woman-hate, woman-fear, and woman-evil, the Roman Catholic church also carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion, and by its use of skillful and wealthy lobbies to prevent legislative change. It is an obscenity-an all-male hierarchy, celibate or not, that presumes to rule on the lives and bodies of millions of women. — Robin Morgan

I haven't lost my faith, but I've lost my religion. I still believe in something so deeply ... I've never really gotten past that quote from Anne Frank in her diary, where she says that people are really good at heart. But I feel like the Catholic Church - no - the Catholic hierarchy has been disinviting people like me, and especially women like me, for so many years that I finally took the hint. — Anna Quindlen

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. — Cherie Blair

Antisemitism is unique among religious hatreds. It is a racist conspiracy theory fashioned for the needs of messianic and brutal rulers, as dictators from the Tsars to the Islamists via the Nazis have shown. Many other alleged religious 'hatreds' are not hatreds in the true sense. If I criticise Islamic, Orthodox Jewish or Catholic attitudes towards women, for instance, and I'm accused of being a bigot, I shrug and say it is not bigoted to oppose bigotry. — Nick Cohen

If you listen to the Catholic bishops you would think that Catholics are against contraception and legal abortion, but if you ask actual Catholics, you discover that more than 90% of Catholic women use contraception and Catholic women seem to need and choose legal abortion at about the same rate as everybody else. The problem is that the backlash occupies positions of power, not that it represents the majority of people. — Gloria Steinem

The Roman Catholic church ... carries the immense power of very directly affecting women's lives everywhere by its stand against birth control and abortion. — Robin Morgan

The Vatican won't prosecute pedophile priests but I decide I'm not ready for motherhood and it's condemnation for me? These are the same people that won't support national condom distribution that PREVENTS teenage pregnancy. — Sonya Renee Taylor

The Pope, if nothing else, should be a Catholic. If he were to announce that women would make great priests, except it's a pity that more of them aren't gay, because of the greater compassion they could bring to the task, it might endear him to liberal Catholic commentators , but it would make him something other than a Catholic, in the true sense. — Declan Lynch

I began to meet young men and women who talked about having a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, and while I cherish my Catholic upbringing and the foundation that it poured in my faith, that had not been a part of my experience. — Mike Pence

In the middle-class United States, a veneer of "alternative lifestyles" disguises the reality that, here as everywhere, women's apparent "choices" whether or not to have children are still dependent on the far from neutral will of male legislators, jurists, a male medical and pharmaceutical profession, well-financed lobbies, including the prelates of the Catholic Church, and the political reality that women do not as yet have self-determination over our bodies and still live mostly in ignorance of our authentic physicality, our possible choices, our eroticism itself. — Adrienne Rich

If one's careful study of the facts shows that the Catholic Church is correct about Jesus-his life, teachings, death, and Resurrection-then why not give the Church the benefit of the doubt and carefully study her reasons for rejecting contraception, homosexual acts, and women's ordination? — Carl E. Olson

The problem is that we don't believe that we are much alike as we are. Whites and blacks, Catholic and Protestants, men and women. If we saw each other as more alike, we might be very eager to join in one human family in this world, and to care about that family the way we care about our own. — Mitch Albom

Learn what not to expect. Irish catholic they get sh**** little rings. Irish women get crappy rings. Baptist get the worst because they get the rings under water. When it comes up, it's garbage. Jewish, big rings. Episcopalian big rings. Italians-the best, because they get them off of dead people, and second wives get the biggest rings of all. — Joan Rivers

The Catholic community must offer support to those women who may find it difficult to accept a child, above all when they are isolated from their family and friends. Likewise, the community should be open to welcome back all who repent of having participated in the grave sin of abortion, and should guide them with pastoral charity to accept the grace of forgiveness, the need for penance, and the joy of entering once more into the new life of Christ. — Pope Benedict XVI

Over two hundred women, apparently at their own request, were sealed as wives to Joseph Smith after his death in special temple ceremonies. Moreover, a great many distinguished women in history, including several Catholic saints, were also sealed to Joseph Smith in Utah. I saw these astonishing lists in the Latter-day Saint Genealogical Archives in Salt Lake City in 1944. — Fawn M. Brodie

When, for example, in the name of non-discrimination, people try to force the Catholic Church to change her position on homosexuality or the ordination of women, then that means that she is no longer allowed to live out her own identity and that, instead, an abstract, negative religion is being made into a tyrannical standard that everyone must follow. That is then seemingly freedom - for the sole reason that it is liberation from the previous situation. — Pope Benedict XVI

The Church's war against women occurred not under Christ - who by all accounts held women as equals to men - but through the writings of St Irenaeus and Tertullian, and that most cruel woman-hater of them all, St Paul, whose hostile views on women were unfortunately included in the Bible. But let me be clear, it is not only a Catholic problem; it is a Christian one: Martin Luther, the scourge of the old Church, shares its views on women. He once wrote: "Girls begin to talk and to stand on their feet sooner than boys because weeds always grow up more quickly than good crops." Weeds! Weeds! — Matthew Reilly

Abortion is a denial of one of those powers which make women women. — Janet E. Smith

For many years, despite what I thought were really punitive decisions about women in the church, I stayed and stayed and stayed. I kept saying to myself, "The Catholic church is my church, and by God, I'm going to stay here, despite what the hierarchy does." — Anna Quindlen

I tell them I have worked 40 years to make the W.S. platform broad enough for Atheists and Agnostics to stand upon, and now if need be I will fight the next 40 to keep it Catholic enough to permit the straightest Orthodox religionist to speak or pray and count her beads upon. (on women's suffrage) — Susan B. Anthony

Just in relation to women, it's not that huge an imaginative leap to see the connection between the Taliban and the Catholic Church. — Peter Mullan

One thing is certain: When the time has come, nothing which is man made will subsist. One day, all human accomplishments will be reduced to a pile of ashes. But every single child to whom a woman has given birth will live forever, for he has been given an immortal soul made to God's image and likeness. In this light, the assertion of de Beauvoir that 'women produce nothing' becomes particularly ludicrous. — Alice Von Hildebrand

When we consider that so few generations had passed since the
church left off disemboweling innocent men before the eyes of their
families, burning old women alive in public squares, and torturing
scholars to the point of madness for merely speculating about the
nature of the stars, it is perhaps little wonder that it failed to think
anything had gone terribly amiss in Germany during the war years. — Sam Harris

I often went to Catholic mass or Eucharist at the Episcopal church, nourished by the symbol and power of this profound feeding ritual. It never occurred to me how odd it was that women, who have presided over the domain of food and feeding for thousands of years, were historically and routinely barred from presiding over it in a spiritual context. And when the priest held out the host and said, "This is my body, given for you," not once did I recognize that it is women in the act of breastfeeding who most truly embody those words and who are also most excluded from ritually saying them. — Sue Monk Kidd

All Jesus' pictures are falsifications; they cannot be about the real Jesus. This real man must have been totally different, because we know he enjoyed drinking - it is impossible to think of a person who enjoys drinking and not laughing. He enjoyed women - it is difficult to think of a man who enjoys women and not laughing. He was friendly, almost in love, with a prostitute, Mary Magdalene. It is difficult to move with a prostitute - he was not moving with a Catholic monk, not with a priest, not with the Pope ... with a prostitute! These were the condemnations against him. — Rajneesh

I dont like Jews. Or colored folk. Or natives, now that you mention it ... I bet you like Catholics. Cant stand them either. Nor women, Fabians, Socialists, homosexuals, Asians, or British. — Herbert

For a moment this day, for many moments this May, let us gape in awe at the strength of women, and look upon their sinewy courage with respect and humility, as the Lord looked on His Mother, and still does. Like Him we are of women born, and to women must pay our first respect, and owe our first love, for they are as strong as the very ribs of the earth. — Brian Doyle