The church that is married to the spirit of this age, becomes a widow in the next.
In the church we have to deliberately let ourselves be transparent and accountable to others. We're a family.
The State which would provide everything, absorbing everything into itself, would ultimately become a mere bureaucracy incapable of guaranteeing the very thing which the suffering person—every person—needs: namely, loving personal concern. We do not need a State which regulates and controls everything, but a State which, in accordance with the principle of subsidiarity, generously acknowledges and supports initiatives arising from the different social forces and combines spontaneity with closeness to those in need. The Church is one of those living forces.
I believe every church is either supernatural or superficial. I don't believe there's any middle ground.
Those who are the most devout, outstanding Unification Church members are they the most beautiful people externally or just so-so? Very often, those who have the features of an Idaho potato are the most loyal members of the Unification Church.
As a body without breath is a corpse, so the church without the Spirit is dead.
The utter folly of our time is lamentable, that men should think to assist God with human help and to protect the Church of Christ by worldly ambition.
The beginning of knowledge is to know thyself a sinner.
I think 75% of the population of Great Britain are probably still de-churched. It's the younger end, the 25%, the merging generation, who have no church background at all.
It's all that pretending to be perfect that breeds inauthenticity in the church.
We feel the need to emphasize with greater clarity the obligation for members of the Church to become more independent and self reliant.
It never frightened a Puritan when you bade him stand still and listen to the speech of God. His closet and his church were full of the reverberations of the awful, gracious, beautiful voice for which he listened.
No member of the faithful could possibly deny that the Church is competent in her magisterium to interpret the natural moral law.
The man who mobilizes the Christian church to pray will make the greatest contribution to world evangelization in history.
Missionary work is but home teaching to those who are not now members of the Church, and home teaching is nothing more or less than missionary work to Church members
I don't believe less in American government because of a bad politician. I don't believe less in the Catholic Church because of a criminal priest but I wish we were doing more - and had done more in the past especially - to do something about these things. It doesn't harm my faith but it gets me just mad that these things have existed.
This Christianity is not a cultural thing. It is not something that should be just a small part of your life; it is not something that you do on Sunday. . . Christianity is not about you being just like the world all the time and then coming to church on Sunday. If that is your Christianity. . . you are not Christian.
The Catholic Church is an institution I am bound to hold divine but for unbelievers a proof of its divinity might be found in the fact that no merely human institution conducted with such knavish imbecility would have lasted a fortnight.
Some people think they are too good to walk the same earth as the rest of us, let alone attend the same church.
Sodomy is in the Bible, to be read in churches. I wouldn't rule it out of Mr. Bruce's act if he cares to comment on it