Clericalism Quotes & Sayings

I want to see the church get closer to the people. I want to get rid of clericalism, the mundane, this closing ourselves off within ourselves, in our parishes, schools or structures. Because these need to get out! — Pope Francis

I live to make you smile, Josephine. — J.L. Mac

The main factor for Craig was that he was being asked to move to a new position in the last year of his contract. We had empathy for that and we wanted to show what he has meant to the Astros over the years. — Gerry Hunsicker

It's queer how the thing what attracted you to someone is the same as what you come to despise about them — Lionel Shriver

We must not allow the academic prejudices bred by Hegelian ideology, anti-clericalism, anti-Semitism and nineteenth-century intellectual fashions to distort our view of these texts. All the internal evidence shows that those who set down and conflated these writings, and the scribes who copied them when the canon was assembled after the return from Exile, believed absolutely in the divine inspiration of the ancient texts and transcribed them with veneration and the highest possible standards of accuracy, including many passages which they manifestly did not understand. Indeed, the Pentateuch text twice gives solemn admonitions, from God himself, against tampering: 'Ye shall not add unto the word which I command you, neither shall you diminish aught from it.'25 — Paul Johnson

If freedom once required a secular critique of religion, it can also require a religious critique of the secular. — Harvey Cox

The only way to Cuba is with the CIA. — Phil Ochs

Should a woman keep her pants on in the streets or not? Shall she remove them, say, at the moment of going to church, for a more intimate reminder of her sexuality in relation to God? What difference does it make if that woman is a lemon vendor and sells you lemons in the streets without using underwear? Moreover, what difference would it make if she sits down to write theology without underwear? The Argentinian woman theologian and the lemon vendors may have some things in common and others not. In common, they have centuries of patriarchal oppression, in the Latin American mixture of clericalism, militarism and the authoritarianism of decency, that is, the sexual organisation of the public and private spaces of society. However, — Marcella Althaus-Reid

We have seen some gatekeeping or fencing-the-table language already beginning to rear its head in this context. One needed to be baptized to take the meal; one needed to repent to take the meal; one needed a bishop or his subordinate to serve the meal. This was to become especially problematic when the church began to suggest that grace was primarily, if not exclusively, available through the hands of the priest and by means of the sacrament. One wonders what Jesus, dining with sinners and tax collectors and then eating his modified Passover meal with disciples whom he knew were going to deny, desert, and betray him, would say about all this. There needs to be a balance between proper teaching so the sacrament is partaken of in a worthy manner and overly zealous policing of the table or clerical control of it. — Ben Witherington III

It also happens to me that when I meet a clericalist, I suddenly become anti-clerical. Clericalism should not have anything to do with Christianity. St. Paul, who was the first to speak to the Gentiles, the pagans, to believers in other religions, was the first to teach us that. — Pope Francis

The creative mind is intelligence in action in the world. — Andrea Dworkin

Here we come upon the old, old craze of the world, which has not yet learned to do without clericalism
that to live and work *for an idea*is man's calling, and according to the faithfulness its fulfilment his *human worth* is measured — Max Stirner

Clericalism: the habitual confusion between that which is of Caesar, and that of God. — Giulio Andreotti

Anti-clericalism and non-belief, have their bigots just as orthodoxy does. — Julien Green

When exactly did this all change, and what were the social and theological factors that led to the change? The answer seems to be in the second century and: (1) because of the consolidation of ecclesial power in the hands of monarchial bishops and others; (2) in response to the rise of heretical movements such as the Gnostics; (3) in regard to the social context of the Lord's Supper, namely, the agape, or thanksgiving, meal, due to the rise to prominence of asceticism in the church; and (4) because the increasingly Gentile majority in the church was to change how second-century Christian thinkers would reflect on the meal. Thus, issues of power and purity and even ethnicity were to change the views of the Lord's Supper and the way it would be practiced. — Ben Witherington III

There is a strain in Marx of the cleric, of the vulgar moralist. He paints the capitalist and the bourgeois as incarnations of evil; it is they who are responsible for the woes of mankind. The dismissal of the individual's responsibility for his own misery is the quintessence of clericalism. — John Carroll

Beautify your thoughts. Thoughts are the headwaters of action, life and manifestation. — David Wolfe