Roman Catholic Quotes & Sayings

Danny Dietz died right there in my arms. I don't know how quickly hearts break, but that nearly broke mine ... I had to leave him or else die out here with him. But I knew one thing was certain. I still had my rifle and I was not alone, and neither was Danny, a devout Roman Catholic. I left him with God. — Marcus Luttrell

What are other terms used to describe the Islamic goal of world domination? Other terms used to describe the Islamic goal of world domination are biological jihad or demographic jihad, which describe the nonviolent strategy of Muslims moving into Europe and the West and having more babies than their hosts. Within several generations they hope to repopulate traditionally Christian cultures with their own people, and they are certainly on track to reach that goal. According to a Vatican report issued recently, the Roman Catholic Church understands this: "For the first time in history, we are no longer at the top: Muslims have overtaken us."20 — David Jeremiah

As local priests came to dine at the Walsh manor, Tyndale witnessed firsthand the appalling biblical ignorance of the Roman church. During one meal, he found himself in a heated debate with a Catholic clergyman. The priest asserted, "We had better be without God's law than the pope's."15 Tyndale boldly responded, "I defy the pope and all his laws." He then added that "if God spared him life, ere many years he would cause a boy that drives the plough to know more of the Scripture than he does."16 — Steven J. Lawson

The seed of error that took root during the fourth and fifth centuries blossomed into the Roman Catholic Church - a perversion of biblical Christianity. — David A. Fisher

But for us this also means that in place of the spread of our Orthodox, Roman Catholic or Protestant churches we have to put a passion for the kingdom of God. Mission doesn't mean 'compelling them to come in'! It is the invitation to God's future and to hope for the new creation of all things: 'Behold, I am making all things new' - and you are invited to this divine future for the world! — Jurgen Moltmann

Everything in New Orleans is a good idea. Bijou temple-type cottages and lyric cathedrals side by side. Houses and mansions, structures of wild grace. Italianate, Gothic, Romanesque, Greek Revival standing in a long line in the rain. Roman Catholic art. Sweeping front porches, turrets, cast-iron balconies, colonnades- 30-foot columns, gloriously beautiful- double pitched roofs, all the architecture of the whole wide world and it doesn't move. — Bob Dylan

In the summer of 2007, I was sitting in a studio in Dublin, debating with a lay spokesman of the Roman Catholic Church who turned out to be the only believing Christian on a discussion panel of five people. He was a perfectly nice and rather modest logic-chopping polemicist, happy enough to go for a glass of refreshment after the program, and I suddenly felt a piercing stab of pity for him. A generation ago in Ireland, the Church did not have to lower itself in this way. It raised its voice only slightly, and was instantly obeyed by the Parliament, the schools, and the media. It could and did forbid divorce, contraception, the publication of certain books, and the utterance of certain opinions. Now it is discredited and in decline. Its once-absolute doctrines appear ridiculous: — Christopher Hitchens

The most evil institution in the world is the Roman Catholic Church. — H.G.Wells

It is a dogma of the Roman Church that the existence of God can be proved by natural reason. Now this dogma would make it impossible for me to be a Roman Catholic. If I thought of God as another being like myself, outside myself, only infinitely more powerful, then I would regard it as my duty to defy him. — Ludwig Wittgenstein

I was raised in a nominal Roman Catholic home, but without any really strong faith there. — Frederica Mathewes-Green

You can count on one hand the number of Novus Ordo churches in this country that feature a fully Catholic music program of any quality, consistent with the Roman rite tradition. — Richard Morris

MAILMAN CAUGHT DRINKING THE BLOOD OF GOD AND TAKING A SHOWER, NAKED, IN ROMAN CATHOLIC CHURCH. — Charles Bukowski

People came into the Church in the Roman Empire because the Church was so good-Catholics were so good to one another, and they were so good to pagans, too. High-pressure evangelization strikes me as an attempt to deprive people of their freedom of choice. — Andrew Greeley

If Roman Catholic Christianity has always struggled with the threat of works righteousness, Reformed Protestantism has always struggled with the threat of cheap grace. For many, if not the majority of Protestants, God's love and acceptance do not lead to personal transformation. Evangelical formation often involves seeking to reestablish a pattern of maturing behaviour that should be integral to one's conversion. So both traditions can be challenged on whether there is a genuinely helpful connection between conversion and transformation. — Gordon T. Smith

Although it is a bit of a caricature, I think that there is some truth in the generalizations I'm about to make. The tendency in Roman Catholic theology is to view the kingdom of Christ as a cosmic ladder or tower, leading from the lowest strata to the hierarchy led by the pope. Anabaptists have tended to see the kingdom more as a monastery, a community of true saints called out of the world and a worldly church. Lutheran and Reformed churches tend sometimes to see the kingdom as a school, while evangelicals (at least in the United States) lean more toward seeing it as a market. — Michael S. Horton

Everywhere in the world there are ignorance and prejudice, but the greatest complex of these, with the most extensive prestige and the most intimate entanglement with traditional institutions, is the Roman Catholic Church. — H.G.Wells

It was the Roman Catholic Church that first articulated the witch theory of causality in medieval Europe with the Papal Bull of Innocent VIII in 1484, Summis Desiderantes Affectibus (Desiring with Supreme Ardor), followed two years later with the Catholic clergyman Heinrich Kramer's Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of the Witch). The latter was a how-to manual on finding and prosecuting witches, who, it alleged, were able to copulate with the devil, steal men's penises, wreck ships, ruin crops, eat babies, turn men into frogs, shed no tears, cast no shadow in the sun, have hair that could not be cut, and pretty much anything considered to be "devilish" and "wicked. — Michael Shermer

I grew up in a very old-fashioned Roman Catholic, Italian-Irish family in Philly. — Bradley Cooper

Envy and resentment are terribly corrosive passions. To suffer at the sight or even the thought of others' enjoyment of life makes one a committed enemy of human happiness. Such people end up being practically a curse upon the human race. They vandalize life, exerting themselves not in the pursuit of gain or pleasure, but to hinder others' enjoyment. — Robert Sheaffer

Widely distributed reports have noted in January 1968, Obama was registered as a Muslim at Jakarta's Roman Catholic Franciscus Assisi Primary School under the name Barry Soetoro. — Aaron Klein

The Imitation of Christ is a cherished treasure of the Christian world. This great book was written by a Roman Catholic monk. "Written", perhaps, is not the proper word. It would be more appropriate to say that each letter of the book is marked deep with the heart's blood of the great soul who had renounced all for his love of Christ. — Swami Vivekananda

Roman Catholicism is a broken and utterly desperate thing, capable only of malignant mischief in our awakening world. — H.G.Wells

From the period of development to the present, Reformed theologians have debated the finer points (particularly the relation of the Sinai covenant to the covenant of grace). Nevertheless, a consensus emerged (evident, for example, in the Westminster Confession) affirming the three covenants I have mentioned: the eternal covenant of redemption; the covenant of works; and the covenant of grace. With these last two covenants, Reformed theology affirmed (with Lutheranism) the crucial distinction between law and gospel, but within a more concrete biblical-historical framework ... Ironically, just at the moment when so much Protestant biblical scholarship is rejecting a sharp distinction between law and gospel, Ancient Near Eastern scholars from Jewish and Roman Catholic traditions have demonstrated the accuracy of that seminal distinction between covenant of law and covenants of promise. P.13 — Michael S. Horton

I was steeped in the understanding that if 'something is Roman [Catholic], it must be wrong. — Scott Hahn

In the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic papacy developed into an abusive, corrupt, autocratic, totalitarian system by claiming apostolic authority through a supposed line of succession back to Peter. — John F. MacArthur Jr.

Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval scholar whose ideas became the semi-official philosophy of the Roman Catholic church, wrote that whatever we have in "superabundance" - that is, above and beyond what will reasonably satisfy our own needs and those of our family, for the present and the foreseeable future - "is owed, of natural right, to the poor for their sustenance. — Peter Singer

During a frustrating argument with a Roman Catholic cardinal, Napoleon Bonaparte supposedly burst out: Your eminence, are you not aware that I have the power to destroy the Catholic Church? The cardinal, the anecdote goes, responded ruefully: Your majesty, we, the Catholic clergy, have done our best to destroy the church for the last 1,800 years. We have not succeeded, and neither will you. — Ross Douthat

It's perfectly fair that you can't be a Roman Catholic priest unless you're a man. It seems right that the reach of anti-discriminatory law should stop at the door of the church or mosque. — Trevor Phillips

My career still strikes me as miraculous. That a boy raised on Marine bases in the South, taught by Roman Catholic nuns in backwater Southern towns that loathed Catholics, and completed his education with an immersion into The Citadel - the whole story sounds fabricated, impossible even to me. Maybe especially to me. — Pat Conroy

One of the distinctive differences between historic, orthodox Protestants and the Roman Catholic Church has been that Protestants base doctrine on "Scripture alone" (once again, the Latin phrase commonly used for this is sola Scriptura), while Roman Catholics base doctrine on Scripture plus the authoritative teaching of the church through history.18 — Wayne A. Grudem

I'm a pro-life Roman Catholic conservative, always have been. — Michael Steele

Our Catholic church here split into three pieces: (1) the American Catholic Church whose new Rome is Cicero, Illinois; (2) the Dutch schismatics who believe in relevance but not God; (3) the Roman Catholic remnant, a tiny scattered flock with no place to go. The American Catholic Church, which emphasizes property rights and the integrity of neighborhoods, retained the Latin mass and plays The Star-Spangled Banner at the elevation. — Walker Percy

We are not only interested in those aspects of the mystery of the Roman Catholic Church which set her apart from the other Christian communities, but also to show how often they are central beliefs by describing what is specifically Catholic in such a way that the partner in dialogue can see, even from his own standpoint, the inner consistency. — Hans Urs Von Balthasar

Can a free government possibly exist with the Roman Catholic religion?

{Letter to Thomas Jefferson, May 19, 1821} — John Adams

Roman Catholics don't like when their religion is mocked. Christians don't like it. Jews don't like it. But this is what it takes to live in a pluralistic society. You have the right to offend and be offended. — Pamela Geller

Monumental Hypocrisy The Roman Catholic Church has been the greatest persecutor of both Jews and Christians the world has ever seen, and has martyred far more Christians than even pagan Rome or Islam. She has been exceeded only by Mao and Stalin, but they hardly claimed to be acting in Christ's name. Catholic Rome has no rival among religious institutions in qualifying as the woman who is "drunk with the blood of the saints and the martyrs of Jesus. — Dave Hunt

I grew up in a pretty religious house. My family was Roman Catholic, and I couldn't wait to get away from that. But that doesn't mean I'm not a spiritual person. — Jeff Lemire

If the churches ever did reunite, it would have to be into something that was as sacramental and liturgical and authoritative as the Roman Catholic Church and as protesting against abuses and as much focused on the individual in his direct relationship with Christ as the Evangelicals, as charismatic as the Pentecostals, as missionary-minded as the old mainline denominations, as focused on holiness as the Methodists or the Quakers, as committed to the social aspects of the Gospel as the social activists, as Biblical as fundamentalists, and as mystical as the Eastern Orthodox. — Peter Kreeft

Wee do freely profess that our Lord the King hath no more power over their Roman Catholics' coonsciences than over ours, and that is none at all ... let people be heretikes, Turks, Jews, or whatsoever, it apperteynes not to the earthly power to punish them in the least measure. — Thomas Helwys

It is admitted by everybody that rights and privileges enjoyed by the Roman Catholic minority in Manitoba down to 1890, were taken away by legislation of 1890. — Charles Tupper

I do think the Roman Catholic religion is a disease of the mind which has a particular epidemiology similar to that of a virus ... Religion is a terrific meme. That's right. But that doesn't make it true and I care about what's true. Smallpox virus is a terrific virus. It does its job magnificently well. That doesn't mean that it's a good thing. It doesn't mean that I don't want to see it stamped out. — Richard Dawkins

No one can have God for his Father, who has not the Church for his mother. — Cyprian

Over the years, my church gave me passage into a menagerie of exotic words unknown in the South: "introit," "offertory," "liturgy," "movable feast," "the minor elevation," "the lavabo," "the apparition of Lourdes," and hundreds more. Latin deposited the dark minerals of its rhythms on the shelves of my spoken language. You may find the harmonics of the Common of the Mass in every book I've ever written. Because I was raised Roman Catholic, I never feared taking any unchaperoned walks through the fields of language. Words lifted me up and filled me with pleasure. — Pat Conroy

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

Am I religious? I practice a disorganized religion. I belong to an unholy disorder. We call ourselves "Our Lady of Perpetual Consternation." We are as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy. — Kurt Vonnegut

Those who dared criticize Serra and his Franciscans for their treatment of the Native Americans risked being crushed by the power of the Roman Catholic Church, with its power of excommunication, or being literally torn to pieces by the Inquisition, which could conduct an investigation using horrendous means of torture against anyone who dared challenge the church or its hierarchy. — Elias Castillo

Even Martin Luther and John Calvin believed that the Roman Catholic church, up to the Council of Trent, was basically orthodox - a true church with sound fundamental doctrines as well as significant error. — Norman Geisler

The form of religion was always a trivial matter to me ... The pageantry of the Roman Church that first mothered and nurtured me touches me to this day. I love the Protestant prayers of the English Church. And I love the stern and knotty argument, the sermon with heads and sequences, of the New England Congregationalist. For this catholicity Catholics have upbraided me, churchmen rebuked me, and dissenters denied that I had any religion at all. — Mary Catherwood

If I were a Roman Catholic, I should turn a heretic, in sheer desperation, because I would rather go to heaven than go to purgatory. — Charles Spurgeon

The Roman Catholic Church has the unique power of keeping remote control over human souls which have once been part of her. G.K. Chesterton has compared this to the fisherman's line, which allows the fish the illusion of free play in the water and yet has him by the hook; in his own time the fisherman by a 'twitch upon the thread' draws the fish to land. — Evelyn Waugh

There are three bodies no sensible man directly challenges: the Roman Catholic Church, the Brigade of Guards and the National Union of Mineworkers — Harold Macmillan

I'm theologically in line with the Roman Catholic Church. I believe in the authority of the church, but I also have tremendous respect for my brothers and sisters in other Christian faiths. — Marco Rubio

O Mary Mother of Mercy and Refuge of Sinners! We beseech thee to look with pitying eyes on poor heretics and schismatics. Do thou, who art the Seat of Wisdom, enlighten the minds wretchedly enfolded in the darkness of ignorance and sin, that they may clearly recognize the Holy, Catholic, Roman Church to be the only true Church of Jesus Christ, outside of which neither sanctity nor salvation can be found. — Pope Pius XII

The usual marriage in traditional cultures was arranged for by the families. It wasn't a person-to-person decision at all ... In the Middle Ages, that was the kind of marriage that was sanctified by the Church. And so the troubadour idea of real person-to-person Amor was very dangerous ... It is in direct contradiction to the way of the Church. The word AMOR spelt backwards is ROMA, the Roman Catholic Church, which was justifying marriages that were simply political and social in their character. And so came this movement validating individual choice, what I call following your bliss. — Joseph Campbell

I want to see religious instruction and sermons held in German in the mosques. The ideal, in my view, would be for imams to be trained in Germany and to speak our language, just as the Roman Catholic Church now holds mass in German and gave up Latin long ago. — Wolfgang Schauble

REGINALD BURNABY THE GREAT (variously identified as a defrocked Roman Catholic priest from Galway, an ex-convict from Liverpool, if not an escaped convict from that seaport city) — Joyce Carol Oates

Dialogue with Catholics and other nonevangelical Christians offered some correction to the Church Growth movement's fixation on cultural accommodation and baptism rates. However - save for those few who converted - evangelicals attracted to other Christian traditions have made those traditions their own. They assemble do-it-yourself liturgies from a hodgepodge of monastic prayers and mystics' visions. They lionize medieval dissenters - Celtic monks, or renegade Franciscans - but don't understand their broader Catholic context. Without quite realizing what they have done, evangelicals often use these ancient teachings and practices to confirm, rather than challenge, their own assumptions. History becomes a sidekick to one's twenty-first-century journey with Jesus. — Molly Worthen

I need to learn not to bend over backwards to be nice to faith-heads. Give these people an inch and they take a league. I think, as I did when I wrote The God Delusion, that the Roman Catholic Church is a disgusting institution, the second most evil religion in the world. — Richard Dawkins

The differing opinions regarding the gospel are often categorized as different variations of the same truth, or coming at the same truth from different angles, or even emphasizing different aspects of the same truth. This fails to recognize that the different 'variations' are often altogether different gospels. The Reformed gospel is completely different from the Roman Catholic gospel; a faith-based gospel is in direct contradiction to a works-based gospel; a truly evangelical gospel stands in contrast to an ultracharismatic gospel. — Paul Washer

Roman Catholics utter their Papal edicts, Protestants quote their Bible, Fundamentalists declare their orthodox theological dogmas, and we are all expected to renounce private reflection and peacefully acquiesce to these pronouncements. And the result is that the dignity of the person is violated by such oppressive, intelligence-smothering forms of communication. — Robert H. Schuller

Galileo got into trouble because he maintained that since the new discoveries seemed to contradict scripture, those passages of scripture should be reinterpreted in a metaphorical way. He did not seek to oppose the Church nor to doubt the inspiration of scripture. The problem is that he abandoned science and started talking theology and so attracted the notice of the Roman Inquisition. If he had left theology out of his writings and discussions he would probably never have had problems. And he remained a faithful and devout Catholic to the end of his life. — Michael Coren

Vatican II was a force that seized the mind of the Roman Catholic Church and carried it across centuries from the 13th to the 20th. — Lance Morrow

I'm a Roman Catholic. Or was. I was brought up that way and used to say my prayers every night, but I don't pray to God any more. I might use the usual phrases I picked up from my parents, 'Oh, if God spares me next year ... ' or 'Please God ... ' but they're only phrases. — Cilla Black

Basically, the two churches are bound together much more intimately than most Christians think. Should the Roman Church fall, the Protestant churches won't rush in and fill the void. They will fall soon afterward. The Catholic express and the Protestant choo-choo are rolling on the same rails, and if the bridge washes out, both are destined for the gulch. In the long run, Protestants stand to lose as much from the mortality of Jesus as do the Catholics. We can't expect any support from them. Except maybe the Unitarians. They'll embrace any heresy, I understand. — Tom Robbins

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

Far more serious still is the division between the Church of Rome and evangelical Protestantism in all its forms. Yet how great is the common heritage which unites the Roman Catholic Church, with its maintenance of the authority of Holy Scripture and with its acceptance of the great early creeds, to devout Protestants today!
We would not indeed obscure the difference which divides us from Rome. The gulf is indeed profound. But profound as it is, it seems almost trifling compared to the abyss which stands between us and many ministers of our own Church. The Church of Rome may represent a perversion of the Christian religion; but naturalistic liberalism is not Christianity at all. — J. Gresham Machen

Pop was a devout Roman Catholic; I'm a lapsed Catholic. I'm not the village atheist, but I exert my right not to believe, and I doubt I would have been very public about that were he still alive, simply just so as not to hurt his feelings. — Christopher Buckley

At Vatican Council II, one dissenting Roman Catholic theologian declared: "Yes, the Bible says "Be fruitful and multiply," but that was when the population was two per square world. — Israel Shenker

If they're beautiful I don't much mind if they're not true. It's asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as to your sense of the aesthetic. I wanted Betty to become a Roman Catholic, I should have liked to see her converted in a crown of paper flowers, but she's hopelessly Protestant. Besides, religion is a matter of temperament; you will believe anything if you have the religious turn of mind, and if you haven't it doesn't matter what beliefs were instilled into you, you will grow out of them. Perhaps religion is the best school of morality. It is like one of those drugs you gentlemen use in medicine which carries another in solution: it is of no efficacy in itself, but enables the other to be absorbed. You take your morality because it is combined with religion; you lose the religion and the morality stays behind. A man is more likely to be a good man if he has learned goodness through the love of God than through a perusal of Herbert Spencer." This — William Somerset Maugham

The right-to-life movement and the Roman Catholic Church are saying that it is better to destroy these embryos, or preferably have them adopted - which is not going to happen - than to use them for research. — Mort Kondracke

This informal "pre-exclusion" is probably the more powerful and widely exerted form in many churches. It is in my denomination. As the divorced and remarried don't seek communion at a Roman Catholic parish, gays and lesbians don't seek to participate in most evangelical churches. — Ken Wilson

I do not want "Mormonism" to become popular; I would not, if I could, make it as popular as the Roman Catholic Church is in Italy, or as the Church of England is in England, because the wicked and ungodly would crowd into it in their sins. — Brigham Young

The interesting thing was that the Roman Catholic monks and the Buddhist monks had no trouble understanding each other. Each of them was seeking the same experience and knew that the experience was incommunicable. The communication is only an effort to bring the hearer to the edge of the abyss; it is a signpost, not the thing itself. But the secular clergy reads the communication and gets stuck with the letter, and that's where you have the conflict. — Joseph Campbell

Catholics speak, like baseball players, in the coded language of gesture. Sure, the Roman Catholic Church is an abomination to man and a disgrace to God, but it comes with a highly structured Mass, several sacred pilgrimages, the oldest songs, the most impressive architecture, and a whole bunch of things to do whenever you enter the church. Taken all together, they make you one with your brother. — Joshua Ferris

The Lord is much like the air around us. The air is all around us, it is everywhere. Even though we can't see it, it is there, we know it is there, because we are breathing. The Lord is everywhere too, you can't see Him, but He is there, we know He is there, because we are breathing. (Page 183) — Raymond D. Reifinger III

Raised Roman Catholic up until 11 or 12, didn't stick. Went out into the world and did my own thing. — Stephen Baldwin

The Church of the Holy Sepulcher is located within the Christian Quarter of the Old City adjacent to the maze of streets of the ancient Muristan district. Erected over the site many believed to be the true biblical Golgotha, the church in modern times is administered jointly by the Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Apostolic Churches, and Neti had been able to secure nocturnal visitation rights for scientific study from the triumvirate. — Glenn Cooper

It is time that the Protestant Church, the Church of the Son, should be one again with the Roman Catholic Church, the Church of the Father. It is time that man shall cease, first to live in the flesh, with joy, and then, unsatisfied, to renounce and to mortify the flesh. — D.H. Lawrence

Popery is the gospel transubstantiated into the flesh and blood of Paganism, under a few of the accidents of Christianity. — James Aitken Wylie

The more we study the early Church, the more we realize that it was a society of ministers. About the only similarity between the Church at Corinth and a contemporary congregation, either Roman Catholic or Protestant, is that both are marked, to a great degree, by the presence of sinners. — D. Elton Trueblood

The Crusades, waged intermittently from 1095 to 1291, but which continued in waves for centuries after that, were military campaigns sanctioned principally by the Roman Catholic Church to reclaim the Holy Land. American students barely learn about the Crusades, but they are essential to understanding the wars of the last decade. — Richard Engel

I was raised a Roman Catholic and had to go to the eight o'clock Mass every morning and have communion and wear a tie, kind of like a restricted life style. Then in the '60s, we got wild and let it go and started looking in other places to see where God really was, and I came back to the Christian thing. — Roger McGuinn

Protestant churches everywhere are gravitating toward union with the Roman Catholic Church. These religious movements are speeding the fulfillment of the prophecies of the resurrected Roman Empire. For 30 years I have been proclaiming this tremendous event over the air and in print, — Herbert W. Armstrong

If I should say anything that is not in conformity with what is held by the Holy Roman Catholic Church, it will be through ignorance and not through malice. This may be taken as certain, and also that, through God's goodness, I am, and shall always be, as I always have been, subject to her. — Saint Teresa Of Avila

In the Judaeo-Christian tradition all this is well known, and incorporated into the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church as well as the rituals and liturgy of Yom Kippur. — Roger Scruton

Were I a Roman Catholic, perhaps I should on this occasion vow to build a chapel to some saint, but as I am not, if I were to vow at all, it should be to build a light-house.
[Letter to his wife, 17 July 1757, after narrowly avoiding a shipwreck; often misquoted as "Lighthouses are more helpful than churches."] — Benjamin Franklin

If we look back into history for the character of present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have not in their turns been persecutors, and complainers of persecution. The primitive Christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the Pagans, but practised it on one another. The first Protestants of the Church of England, blamed persecution in the Roman church, but practised it against the Puritans: these found it wrong in the Bishops, but fell into the same practice themselves both here and in New England.
[Letter to the London Packet, 3 June 1772] — Benjamin Franklin

The fashion just now is a Roman Catholic frame of mind with an Agnostic conscience; you get the mediaeval picturesqueness of the one with the modern conveniences of the other — Hector Hugh Munro

To a born-again atheist like myself, it is clear that each of us has multiple selves, talents, perceptions. But to the Roman Catholic, unity is all. — Gore Vidal

The Hindus have worshipped from ancient times the baby Krishna in the arms of Virgin Devaki just as the Roman catholics [sic] worship Madona [sic] with baby Christ. — Swami Abhedananda

Roman Catholics have always been able to appeal to the traditions of holy Mother the Church. But the Church of England, as such, has nothing to appeal to. How can we [Anglicans] pretend to appeal to Church traditions, when we have cut ourselves off from the main stream of it and any exposition of it must needs be a raking up of old dead documents, instead of obedience to a living voice? And how can we pretend to appeal to the Bible, when the Bible is for everyman's private interpretation, and not expounded by authority? — Ronald Knox

For the majority of English people there are only two religions, Roman Catholic, which is wrong, and the rest, which don't matter. — Duff Cooper

My own experience of growing up as a Roman Catholic in Scotland has led me to fear independence in Scotland. The possibility of Scotland being a kind of Stormont is a real one. I wrote a book recently about Neil Lennon's year of living dangerously and in the course of it I had to revisit some of my own experiences. Of course, most Scottish people are not swivel-eyed, loyalist sectarians but there are a large number of them. A large six-figure number, and if I were living in Scotland as a Roman Catholic I would be worried about that. — George Galloway

I wanted to confront her, to make her see the folly of her religion, to change her diet, to help her spend less on makeup and other nonessentials, to make her worship every biological moment she was offered instead of some badly punctured deity. I also wanted to kiss her for some reason, feel the life pulsing in those big Catholic lips, remind myself of the primacy of the living animal, of my time amongst the Romans. — Gary Shteyngart

In the agreement to rescue Rome [i.e., the Roman Catholic Church's hierarchy] from the predicament of losing its world control to Protestantism, and to preserve the spiritual and temporal supremacy which the popes [had] 'usurped' during the Middle Ages, Rome now 'sold' the [Roman Catholic] Church to the Society of Jesus [i.e., the Jesuits]; in essence the popes surrendered themselves into their hands. — John Daniel

The Roman Catholic Index of Prohibited Books, a list that came to include almost every significant work of post-medieval Western philosophy. — David Hume

The Roman Catholic portrait at the reception of the Indian YMCA displayed the generic Christ, the timorous, blonde-haired, blue-eyed face upturned to the heavens, a lost middle-class student searching for guidance in an inhospitable world. — Amit Chaudhuri

For, from the time that the Bishop of Rome had gotten to be acknowledged for bishop universal, by pretence of succession to St. Peter, their whole hierarchy, or kingdom of darkness, may be compared not unfitly to the kingdom of fairies; that is, to the old wives' fables in England concerning ghosts and spirits, and the feats they play in the night. And if a man consider the original of this great ecclesiastical dominion, he will easily perceive that the papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire, sitting crowned upon the grave thereof: for so did the papacy start up on a sudden out of the ruins of that heathen power. — Thomas Hobbes

I'm an agnostic in the truest sense of the word. I think about these things - I grew up Roman Catholic, I've been interested in Hinduism, in Eastern religions, but I'm not dedicated to anything - I go through periods where I think maybe it's all nonsense; maybe it's 'The Matrix ... ' I'm open to various ideas. — Ronald D. Moore

You give Italy Jesus Christ and you get the Roman Catholic Church. — Indro Montanelli