Karl Keating > Quotes

“Are you saved?” asks the fundamentalist. “I am redeemed,” answers the Catholic, “and like the apostle Paul I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling, with hopeful confidence—but not with a false assurance—and I do all this as the Church has taught, unchanged, from the time of Christ.”
― Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on 'Romanism' by 'Bible Christians'

“More was condemned to the chopping block. His execution took place in 1535 at Tower Hill. His last words, as he stood on the scaffold, were “I die the king’s good servant but God’s first.” These words became so famous that they were made into a movie more than four centuries later. To this day no one can remember the last words of Henry VIII, and deservedly so.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“It’s unfortunate in that it’s only a step away from mere name-calling,”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“papal tyrant the like of whom has not been seen for many centuries.”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“On his accession to the Throne of Peter, Pius declined to make his impoverished sisters papal countesses. This shocked Roman High Society, and just as well, since High Societies regularly need shocking.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“Rhetoric uses syllogisms and other suasions to bring about a change of heart and of mind.”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“What really stopped me was that there was no way to try out for Mensa without looking conceited.”
― Karl Keating, No Apology

“Augustine was the greatest theologian of antiquity. His mother was named Monica. She is famous for having prayed unceasingly that he would straighten out his life and become a Christian. Eventually he did so, but only after his mother became thoroughly exasperated with him, which is distressingly common when mothers have sons.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“For centuries, opponents of the Church have claimed that the Galileo Case shows that the Church has been hostile to science. Interestingly (but not to these opponents, it seems), it is the only case ever cited that purports to show the alleged hostility, because in every other interaction between the Church and science the two have been shown to be friends.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“Not long after Montanus passed from the scene, the bishop of Rome, Pope Victor I, declared that a different heretic, called Polycrates of Ephesus, had earned excommunication for being a public nuisance. This was the earliest recorded occasion of a pope issuing a disciplinary ruling regarding someone living far from Rome. It would not be the last occasion. It might not even have been the first, since most early records of such things don’t seem to have been recorded, but Victor gets the credit. Such are the breaks of history, as every historian knows.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“In 1917 three peasant children in the small town of Fatima, Portugal, claimed to have seen an apparition of the Virgin Mary. Clever people thought the children were just being clever and amusing and so didn’t believe them, but people who didn’t consider themselves to be clever did believe the children.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“for the most part we can say that the disputes are about him yet don’t involve him. He has shown a singular capacity to plant seeds that others nurture into disputes. (That is one complaint about him: his imprecisions invite others to reach conflicting interpretations of papal statements.)”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“Rerum Novarum appeared in English under various titles, such as On the Condition of Labor. The encyclical was prompted by the sorrier aspects of the Industrial Revolution, and Leo was eager to affirm the rights and duties both of laborers and employers. This was welcomed by all laborers and by two or three employers.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“Leo affirmed that the state had an important role to play in society, but his words disappointed most legislators, given their impressions of how important they themselves were.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“We once enjoyed fairly high rhetoric in America, most notably in our politics, but few today will have images of the Roman Senate brought to mind when they read of the goings on in the United States Senate.”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“Sometimes, where there’s smoke, there’s only smoke.)”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“Arianism, as the heresy was known, took on a life of its own. Even many bishops and priests subscribed to it because it was easier to think of Christ as having one nature rather than two, inasmuch as everyone in everyone’s neighborhood had only one nature. Arianism lasted for centuries, and in practice, even if not with that title, it is held by many today. They believe that Jesus was the Best Man Ever, but that’s it.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“Baltimore Catechism No. 1 was for first communicants through fifth graders. Baltimore Catechism No. 2 was for sixth graders through ninth graders and for those preparing for confirmation. Baltimore Catechism No. 3 was for those already confirmed and for high schoolers. That’s as far as the catechisms went, because it was expected that by the end of high school a young person would know everything about the faith, which nearly was true, at least compared to today, when Catholic students finishing even Catholic high schools generally know less than was contained in Baltimore Catechism No. 1, further proof of the decline of education even within the Church.”
― Karl Keating, 1054 and All That: A Lighthearted History of the Catholic Church

“pope has little use for established procedures, precedents, even legal structures within the Church.”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“Francis because it has not had the key to him: he is Juan Perón in ecclesiastical translation.”
― Karl Keating, The Francis Feud: Why and How Conservative Catholics Squabble about Pope Francis

“Here is how Arnold Lunn put it in a 1932 letter to C. E. M. Joad: We now approach the Bible, and approach it in the same spirit as that in which we should approach any other human document. We do not believe the Bible merely because it is the Bible, but because we are convinced of its veracity by rational inferences similar in kind to those which convince us of other historical facts. We do not, for instance, accept the fact that Christ rose from the dead merely because we find the Resurrection recorded in the Gospels; we accept the Resurrection because, of all theories which have been put forward to explain the origin of Christianity, the only theory which fits all the facts is the theory that Jesus of Nazareth claimed to be God and proved his claim by rising from the dead. . . . The Roman Catholic, then, claims to prove from the Bible, which he is still treating as a purely human document, that Christ intended to found an infallible Church. Where, then, is this Church? The Roman Catholic Church alone possesses, so the Catholic believes, all the “notes” which enable us to distinguish between the Church which Christ founded and its heretical rivals. The Catholic claims to prove by pure reason that Christ was God, that Christ founded an infallible Church, and that the Roman Catholic Church is the church in question. Having travelled thus far by reason unaided by authority, it is not irrational to trust the authority, whose credentials have been proved by reason, to interpret difficult passages in the Bible.”
― Karl Keating, Catholicism and Fundamentalism: The Attack on 'Romanism' by 'Bible Christians'