James Carroll > Quotes

“There are times when we stop, we sit still. We listen and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.”
― James Carroll

“The very act of story-telling, of arranging memory and invention according to the structure of the narrative, is by definition holy. We tell stories because we can't help it. We tell stories because we love to entertain and hope to edify. We tell stories because they fill the silence death imposes. We tell stories because they save us.”
― James Carroll

“We spend most of our time and energy in a kind of horizontal thinking. We move along the surface of things...but there are times when we stop. We sit still. We lose ourselves in a pile of leaves or its memory. We listen, and breezes from a whole other world begin to whisper.”
― James Carroll

“Memory is a political act. Forgetfulness is the handmaiden of tyranny.”
― James Carroll

“Homo sapiens is the species that invents symbols in which to invest passion and authority, then forgets that symbols are inventions. —Joyce Carol Oates”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary, it is one of the places where He is most fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Saint Paul lives in the Christian imagination as the chief sponsor of Christian contempt for Jews, the avatar of law versus grace, flesh versus spirit, works versus faith, Moses versus Jesus, the Old Covenant versus the New. This brutal dichotomizing was attributed to Paul most influentially by Martin Luther, who used a perceived Jewish legalism, materialism, and obsession with externals as stand-ins for the decadence of his nemesis, the pope. “Because the Papists, like the Jews,” he wrote, “insist that anyone wishing to be saved must observe their ceremonies, they will perish like the Jews.”39 After Luther, both Protestants and Catholics read Paul as the preeminent tribune of Jewish corruption—a misreading that had terrible consequences, especially in Luther’s Germany, where the Volk were defined in ontological opposition to Juden. Paul’s”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Real generosity toward the future,” as Camus famously put it, “lies in giving all to the present.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“The New Testament, that is, was made by the Church; the Church was not made by the New Testament. That is why, speaking generally, Catholics differ from Protestants in the importance given to the authority of the Bible on the one hand, and to the authority of the Church on the other. Therefore, Catholics more than Protestants would tend to say that the community has authority over its normative literature.”
― James Carroll, Constantine's Sword: The Church and the Jews

“There is no such thing as history undistorted. Decisive transformations of meaning occurred, and are occurring still.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“...she had discovered within herself the unlikely gift for functioning with equilibrium and efficiency inside a full-blown, unending nightmare. [A Red Cross worker during WWII in Italy]”
― James Carroll, Warburg in Rome

“The nub at the center of the notorious Roman Catholic sexual predation is an idolatry of the priest and of the priestly status that goes by the name of "clericalism." It is a malignity marked by a cult of secrecy; a high-flown theological misogyny that demeans all women and fosters an unbridled male supremacy; suppression of normal erotic desire; a hierarchical domination of priest over laypeople; and a basing of that power on threats of the doom-laden afterlife, drawn from a misreading of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The sexual abuse of children is an ancient and pervasive crime, one that is committed wherever adults have power over the young. Schoolteachers, scoutmasters, other clergy, family members, even fathers and mothers are known to physically exploit their vulnerable charges. The home can be the cockpit of abuse. Defenders of the clerical status quo insist on this broader context, as if predation in the sacristy is no big deal. Alas, as I noted earlier, Pope Francis himself displayed this impulse to relativize the priestly crime.

But the exploitation of children by Catholic priests stands apart — in its worldwide range, in the enabling complicity of church authorities, and in its deeper meaning a sacrilege — because of how God is so often invoked to seduce and coerce victims. The crime of sexual exploitation, especially of children, has shown itself to be endemic to the priesthood.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“What thwarted Pope John's reform was clericalism, the vesting of power in an all-male and celibate clergy. A foreseen change in the place of women in the church — foreseen in the nascent initiative John had taken in the direction of, yes, women's liberation — was what most powerfully ignited the clerical resistance.

To return to this book's central assertion, clericalism is both the root cause and the ongoing enabler of the present Catholic catastrophe. Clericalism epitomizes a woman-insulting patriarchy that cuts deeper into culture than other forms of male dominance because clericalism claims nothing less than divine authority for itself.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“Experience is a flow from event to consequence, with moral events defined by human choice.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Francis is at the mercy of an incoherent Catholic morality about all kinds of sexual expression, and he seems incapable of bringing the needed moral clarity and essential new structure of accountability. That incoherence in ethics and morality is itself essential to the malignant culture of clericalism that imprisons many, including the Pope.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The popes who succeeded John XXIII were in clericalism's grip, which is why the reforms of his council didn't have a chance.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“When Pope John's successors — Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI — adamantly refused to alter anything having to do with the patriarchal and deeply misogynistic structure of Catholic power, and when they shored up a broad Catholic suspicion of every erotic impulse, the Church sacrificed the ongoing project of a humanely reformed Catholicism. Even under Francis, the us-against-them bipolarity that John XXIII stood against remains firmly in place, and it is still epitomized by men against women.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The Pope's critics among his fellow prelates have engaged in entry, rumormongering, leaks, and open defiance — a desperate rearguard effort aimed at weakening a Pope deemed insufficiently committed to the protection of clerical power.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The sweep of the hierarchy’s betrayals, in scope and depth, is staggeringly new. And to gauge the likelihood of that hierarchy’s facing the truth of what it has done and what it has become, consider this: The two contemporary maestros of denial, Pope Paul VI and Pope John Paul II, have, in the very years of the scandal they enabled, been named as saints of the Catholic Church.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The absence of Jesus is the mode of his presence.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Although the ideal of celibacy was always put forward as a matter of high spirituality, the controlling motive for this purging of marriage from the priesthood [with the First Lateran Council, 1123] was economic. Through networks of monasteries and feudal fiefdoms, the Church was the largest landowner in Christendom — the territory described today as Western Europe. Celibate clergy, with no households to support, would lack the essential drive to accumulate wealth for themselves; nor would they produce legitimate heirs to lodge competing claims to the vast estates and treasures the medieval church was hell-bent on protecting and expanding.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“But inside the church, the fiercest opposition [to Pope Francis] has come from the defenders of clericalism — the spine of male power and the bulwark against any loosening of the sexual mores that protect it.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“But if instead this man [i.e., Pope Francis] turns out to be as gripped by institutional self-interest as any corporate leader, then reasonable expectations of creative solutions to problems as varied as climate change, nuclear proliferation, and mass migration are doubly dashed.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“Pope Francis routinely expresses his "shame and sorrow," but he instinctively defends the accused; he denounces the clerical culture in which abuse has found its hospitable niche, but he does nothing to dismantle it. Indeed, in his instinctive protective responses to the corruption of clericalism, he embodies that culture, even while seeming to criticize it.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“As became clear to me and many others during his tone-deaf visit to Ireland in 2018 and during the 2019 aftershocks of scandal that culminated in the failed ‘Protection of Minors’ meeting in Rome, the pope from Argentina remains blind to what much of the world sees quite clearly. If, owing to his own limits as a Catholic priest, he is unable, finally, to begin a radical transformation of the anti-female, anti sex clerical culture that is brought ruin to thousands, the precious and prophetic world invitation of Pope Francis will be firmly met by history’s No! His tiny opening will be slammed shut.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“God suffers with you!”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“The God who makes the promise keeps the promise.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“Sexual morality, according to the Catholic Church, is all about denial of male restlessness and control of female agency. There is simply no place in this schema for a woman's autonomy.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“A naive belief in supernatural powers has been dispelled,”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age