Vatican Two Quotes & Sayings

It rarely snows because Antarctica is a desert. An iceberg means it's tens of millions of years old and has calved from a glacier. (This is why you must love life: one day you're offering up your social security number to the Russia Mafia; two weeks later you're using the word calve as a verb.) I saw hundreds of them, cathedrals of ice, rubbed like salt licks; shipwrecks, polished from wear like marble steps at the Vatican; Lincoln Centers capsized and pockmarked; airplane hangars carved by Louise Nevelson; thirty-story buildings, impossibly arched like out of a world's fair; white, yes, but blue, too, every blue on the color wheel, deep like a navy blazer, incandescent like a neon sign, royal like a Frenchman's shirt, powder like Peter Rabbit's cloth coat, these icy monsters roaming the forbidding black. — Maria Semple

One day the Pope is having a quiet conversation with a German theologian in one of the rooms of the Vatican. Suddenly two French archaeologists burst in, very agitated and nervous, and they tell the Holy Father they have just got back from Israel with some very good news and some rather bad news. The Pope beseeches them to come out with it, and not to leave him in suspense. Talking over each other, the Frenchmen say the good news is they have discovered the Holy Sepulchre. The Holy Sepulchre? says the Pope. The Holy Sepulchre. Not a shadow of a doubt. The Pope is moved to tears. What's the bad news? he asks, drying his eyes. Well, inside the Holy Sepulchre we found the body of Christ. The Pope passes out. The Frenchmen rush to his side and fan his face. The only one who's calm is the German theologian, and he says: Ah, so Jesus really existed? — Roberto Bolano

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

I'll even give you two moments, seeing as how I'm feeling generous." "Thank you ever so much. I'll contact the Vatican straight away to extoll your virtues and petition for sainthood. — Ben Reeder

A defeat for humanity would be the failure to recognise the rights of two people who love each other.

A defeat for humanity is that people accept such hatred and discrimination into their hearts.

A defeat for humanity would be the failure of the church to recognise that nobody can control who a person loves.

A victory for humanity would be the dissolution of a theocratic dystopia that promotes anti-equality (aka "the Vatican") which has no place in a modern society. — Scott A. Butler

How many migrants, how many immigrants, how many migrants and refugees fleeing war-torn areas in the Middle East are permitted into the Vatican? I'm not kidding. I think I saw a story where they're going to take ... two. It's obviously symbolic. They will take two at the Vatican, thereby setting an example and showing how it's done. — Rush Limbaugh

Do we talk about feeling neglected and rejected by the Church? Yes. Do we bash a bishop or two, talk a little trash about the Vatican, moan about a priest who said something dumb about women or gays or both? Sure. But mostly we talk about what faith does for us, how it moves us through life with an awareness of other people's suffering, and drives us to do something about that suffering. It reminds me of a conversation I had with Father Mellow, way back on the first night I spoke to him. "The Church is both sinner and holy," he said. "So are all of us. — Kaya Oakes