Great Catholic Quotes

#1. Smugness is the Great Catholic Sin.

Flannery O'Connor

#2. The reason I say I'm a horrible person is I don't want myself to be presented as somebody who's a great Catholic.

Jim Gaffigan

#3. We should not bear it with bad grace if the answer to our prayer is long delayed. Rather, let us, because of this, show great patience and resignation. For He delays for this reason: that we may offer Him a fitting occasion of honoring us through His divine providence.

Saint John Chrysostom

#4. Only the Catholic Church protested against the Hitlerian onslaught on liberty. Up till then I had not been interested in the Church, but today I feel a great admiration for the Church, which alone has had the courage to struggle for spiritual truth and moral liberty

Albert Einstein

#5. The great argument used now against any theological proposition is not, that it is untrue, or unthinkable, or unedifying, or unscriptural, or unorthodox, but simply, that the modern mind cannot accept it.

Ronald Knox

#6. Both need each other: The agnostic cannot be content to not know, but must be in search of the great truth of faith; the Catholic cannot be content to have faith, but must be in search of God all the time, and in the dialogue with others, a Catholic can learn more about God in a deeper fashion.

Pope Benedict XVI

#7. It is a great advantage for us to be able to consult someone who knows us, so that we may learn to know ourselves.

Teresa Of Avila

#8. America is the first great experiment in Protestant social formation. Protestantism in Europe always assumed and depended on the cultural habits that had been created by Catholic Christianity.

Stanley Hauerwas

#9. The tropical night has the companionability of a Roman Catholic Cathedral compared to the Protestant Churches of the North, which let you in on business only. Here in the great room everybody comes and goes, this is the place where things are going on.

Isak Dinesen

#10. I have great respect for Catholic traditions; my family is Catholic, and it's part of my life.

Juanes

#11. When the truth is that there would be no great Western music, and certainly no decent choral repertoire, without the Catholic faith.

Richard Morris

#12. 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

#13. Not being like everyone else is a great thing, but when you're in elementary school, you want people to like you, and kids that age can be so closed-minded. I mean, I went to a little Catholic school in the San Fernando Valley! My life was so different from the other kids'.

Katy Rose

#14. It is a great privilege to meet inspiring leaders from different parts of the church - Catholic, Baptist, Salvation Army, Pentecostal, Lutheran, Methodist, and so many more - and discover that what unites us is infinitely greater than what divides us.

Nicky Gumbel

#15. This is the same notion - Catholic exorcism, psychotherapy, shamanistic practices - getting to the moment when whatever it was gained access. And also to the name of the spirit. Just to know that it's the Ugly Spirit. That's a great step. Because the spirit doesn't want its name to be known.

Allen Ginsberg

#16. The great thing is to become Saints.

Philip Neri

#17. I am really glad I was raised Catholic. I like the fundamental aspects of that religion. I think they give you great grounding in terms of having a moral code. But I do not subscribe to any religion specifically now.

Frances O'Connor

#18. The great achievement of the Catholic Church lay in harmonizing, civilizing the deepest impulses of ordinary, ignorant people.

Kenneth Clark

#19. We must be pure. I do not speak merely of the purity of the senses. We must observe great purity in our will, in our intentions, in all our actions.

Peter Julian Eymard

#20. It's great to be recognized when I'm looking for a table at a crowded restaurant, but I still don't put it to best use. I'm such a lump. I won't cut the line. It's my Catholic guilt. I gotta get used to it.

Christopher Meloni

#21. If you do not regard the great confessions and catechisms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as being biblical in their teaching on justification, then you should probably do the decent thing and become a Catholic.

Anonymous

#22. When a person eats shortly before going to bed, digestion accompanies sleep. The two great physiological functions are completed together, leaving the maximum of freedom to the mind during the day.

Adalbert De Vogue

#23. I'm a great fan of Chesterton, you know. He once said that he became a Catholic because we're the only religion that sees no contradiction between a pint, a pipe, and a cross.

Michael D. O'Brien

#24. I held the Host with two fingers and thought: How small Jesus made Himself, in order to show us that He doesn't expect great things of us, but rather little things with great love.

Mother Teresa

#25. Catholic schools carry out a great mission, to serve God by building knowledge and character ... By teaching the word of God, you prepare your students to follow a path of virtue.

George W. Bush

#26. I'm not Catholic, I'm not Orthodox and I wouldn't even say Rastafarian, that still divides people, I don't want to divide people so anything that I say is something that must be so big and great that it did encompass everyone and it's love.

Ziggy Marley

#27. I don't know, maybe it's because I was raised Catholic. Confession has always held a great appeal for me.

Alison Bechdel

#28. 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

#29. Someone once told the Catholic writer Flannery O'Connor that it is more open-minded to think that the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar is a great, wonderful, powerful symbol.
Her response was, If it's only a symbol, to hell with it.

Flannery O'Connor

#30. Without transformation, you can assume you're at a high moral, spiritual level just because you call yourself Lutheran or Methodist or Catholic. I think my great disappointment as a priest has been to see how little actual spiritual curiosity there is in so many people.

Richard Rohr

#31. What's really great about Buddhism is its rational, informal quality. Coming from my experience of growing up a Catholic, I found Buddhism to be refreshingly easygoing and forgiving.

Matt Dillon

#32. To be Catholic puts a lot of fear in you. It's a great religion, but also one that can limit your experience. You fear experience because everything is a sin.

Donatella Versace

#33. Love actually is a great act of the will. It's when I say, "I desire your good, not for my sake but for yours". To love is to break out of the black hole of the ego and say, "My life is about you".

Bishop Robert Barron

#34. 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

#35. I'm really happy I went to a Catholic school because a lot of the repressive tactics they use make for great senses of humor.

Denis Leary

#36. Just as truly as the Confessions are the autobiography of St. Augustine, The City of God is the autobiography of the Church written by the most Catholic of her great saints.

Augustine Of Hippo

#37. When I say I must write, I don't mean I must publish. There is a great difference. the important thing is the chaotic form given to my chaotic experience, which is, as it was for James Joyce, my kind of religion, and necessary for me...as the confession and absolution for a Catholic in church.

Sylvia Plath

#38. When you get to know a lot of people, you make a great discovery. You find that no one group has a monopoly on looks, brains, goodness or anything else. It takes all the people - black and white, Catholic, Jewish and Protestant, recent immigrants and Mayflower descendants - to make up America.

Judy Garland

#39. I gotta say, the Catholic Church has churned out a lot of great artists and directors and actors, so if that's all they do, that's fine by me. If they're good at churning out tortured artists, that's great!

Paul Rust

#40. I'm not Catholic, but I have a great deal of respect for Pope John Paul. I think that he has stood firm on the moral issues, and I admire him greatly.

James Dobson

#41. I was born into an Irish Catholic family in the New York area in this great, wonderful, and safe country, but the Holocaust has always haunted me, and it has long stood as a stumbling block to faith. How could such a thing be? How is that consistent with the concept of a loving God?

James Comey

#42. And I myself a Catholic will be,
So far at least, great saint, to pray to thee.
Hail, Bard triumphant! and some care bestow
On us, the Poets militant below.

Abraham Cowley

#43. I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament ...

J.R.R. Tolkien

#44. There is no point when all the material benefits of the world add up to a general state of happiness. It is the Great Misconception.

Tarek Saab

#45. I attended Catholic school. We received a great education from the nuns ... Also, guilt. Guilt and a feeling of never being satisfied with what you've done. And a sense that you are inadequate and a big phony. All useful for a writer. I'm always being edited by my inner nun.

George Saunders