Eugene Kennedy Quotes

#1. We not only romanticize the future; we have also made it into a growth industry, a parlor game and a disaster movie all at the same time.

Eugene Kennedy

#2. We encounter and enter our richest, most humanly defining experiences by way of a tear in the fabric of things, because we are running late, or because we recognize, across a crowded room, a face whose lack of perfection allows a unique light to shine through and to stir us with uncommon wonder.

Eugene Kennedy

#3. There would be no need for love if perfection were possible. Love arises from our imperfection, from our being different and always in need of the forgiveness, encouragement and that missing half of ourselves that we are searching for, as the Greek myth tells us, in order to complete ourselves.

Eugene Kennedy

#4. The priesthood is not dying, but the clerical state is dead. It needs to be buried, preferably with a Viking funeral in Boston Harbor so nobody can miss the spectacle of its passing.

Eugene Kennedy

#5. If you ask people what attracted them to the person they love, they never tell you of some perfect feature that focused them on sheer surfaces but rather an imperfection that allowed them to see into their uncharted depths.

Eugene Kennedy

#6. Bishops may often feel but cannot express the sting and throb of submitting themselves to Roman commands because the latter are always presented as tests of their loyalty to the Pope and of their absolute acceptance of his teaching authority, or Magisterium.

Eugene Kennedy

#7. Our human experience, like the World War II Ultra code-breaking machine, catches the heavy traffic of messages about what we really do and what is done to us every day.

Eugene Kennedy

#8. The seminary of the future must relate itself to flesh-and-blood men, or it provides a framework that only talks about the people of God but never really shares life with them.

Eugene Kennedy

#9. As dutiful bishops soon discover, authoritarianism, or control from the top down, characterizes the hierarchical tradition.

Eugene Kennedy

#10. Human experience resembles the battered moon that tracks us in cycles of light and darkness, of life and death, now seeking out and now stealing away from the sun that gives it light and symbolizes eternity.

Eugene Kennedy

#11. 9/11 revealed that those about to die do not seem afraid or plead for forgiveness for their sins, if they think about them at all. They all have one thing in mind - those they love - and they all do the same thing: They call them up - spouses, family or friends - to tell them they love them.

Eugene Kennedy

#12. Is childhood ever long enough, or a happy time, or even a beautiful summer day? All of these carry the seeds of the same fierce mystery that we call death.

Eugene Kennedy

#13. Death is by no means separate from life ... We all interact with death every day, tasting it as we might a wine, feeling its keen edge even in trifling losses and disappointments, holding it by the hand, as a dancer might a partner, in every separation.

Eugene Kennedy

#14. Benedict's spending down his energy was a function of his fighting against the Space/Information Age's relentless pressure on the concept of hierarchy, the restoration of which he had, following John Paul II, made a central part of the program that has come to be known as the reform of the reform.

Eugene Kennedy

#15. Good priests never look for awards and, perversely enough in the clerical culture universe, do not receive many. Like the aged nuns who taught selflessly and nearly anonymously all their lives, these servants of the People of God only get into the papers when their obituaries are printed.

Eugene Kennedy

#16. The perception of the horizon is an earthbound event; all horizons disappear in space, and we are left shorn of the sweet roots that have held us to the earth, challenged to imagine what is truly present just before us, a unified and seemingly limitless universe.

Eugene Kennedy

#17. We may thank God that we can feel pain and know sadness, for these are the human sentiments that constitute our glory as well as our grief.

Eugene Kennedy

#18. Catholicism actually resembles a family that survives because even as it aspires to holiness, it understands and can live with sin and imperfection.

Eugene Kennedy

#19. The moment an individual can accept and forgive him or herself, even a little, is the moment in which he or she becomes to some degree lovable.

Eugene Kennedy

#20. Most ecclesiastical relics are fixed in time at the moment of their manufacture. That is why they are offered for veneration in casings that resemble pocket watches. They have lost their claim to mystery because they are so clearly the products of time.

Eugene Kennedy

#21. From his first hours as pope, Francis has re-enacted or spoken of the great pastoral transformation of Vatican II as his own agenda.

Eugene Kennedy

#22. Mercy is a source of life because we breathe our own spirits through it into the lives of others.

Eugene Kennedy

#23. The future is religion and commerce, aphrodisiac and Benzedrine, a mother of mysterious comfort and a mistress of familiar ravishments ever on the verge of embracing or destroying us.

Eugene Kennedy

#24. Facebook may not only propagate cyber-loneliness but exacerbate the pain of loss that estranged family members feel when they hear only indirectly, through a third-party posting, news of a child or parent with whom they have not spoken in years.

Eugene Kennedy

#25. The world, more suffering than sinning, turns toward Pope Francis as in a conversation people turn to the person who is making sense of things.

Eugene Kennedy

#26. The object of religion is the imagination, that deep and inexhaustible font of our understanding and symbolizing our deepest possibilities.

Eugene Kennedy

#27. There are times when silence is the most sacred of responses.

Eugene Kennedy

#28. Vatican II and the Space/Information Age began in the same eye blink of history, with John XXIII's opening speech of Vatican II on Oct. 11, 1962, following John F. Kennedy's call for a round trip to the moon a month earlier.

Eugene Kennedy

#29. Friendship is something whose depth fits human aspirations and fulfills human possibilities. It has heft to it, as a gold-piece does and a gambling chip does not.

Eugene Kennedy

#30. Countless human beings wear masks which they hope will cover up what they dislike about themselves.

Eugene Kennedy

#31. Pope Francis reminds us of Pope John XXIII because both men share the same lack of self-consciousness, and neither needs to keep his guard up through the use of psychological defenses such as rationalization, projection or intellectualization.

Eugene Kennedy

#32. Pope Francis has aimed a blow at what the whole hierarchical system is built on: a graded system with the higher clergy in the skyboxes, the devoted religious in festival seating, as they say of the crowds at rock concerts, and, on the bottom, the laity in standing room only.

Eugene Kennedy

#33. The real test of friendship is: can you literally do nothing with the other person? Can you enjoy those moments of life that are utterly simple?

Eugene Kennedy

#34. Wherever you find 'men together' - writing the rules, as at exclusive golf or other men's clubs, businesses, and lodges where they wear elaborate robes and funny hats - women are kept completely outside if possible and, when grudgingly admitted, to highly restricted areas or token status.

Eugene Kennedy

#35. Life does not hurt nearly as much if we have learned to listen to ourselves and to recognize how fully and richly we are trying to tell ourselves the truth.

Eugene Kennedy

#36. As in the Divine Right of Kings, hierarchies invest those who preside at the top of their pyramidal structure with absolute power to rule over the lesser ranks that spread down like a marble staircase to the broad foundation stones of those with no power at all.

Eugene Kennedy