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

“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

“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

“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

“...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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

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

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

“Communion over loneliness. Death not an end, but a beginning. At home in the absolute—and absolutely unknown—future.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“As the human species flirts with its own self-extinction, whether through weapons of mass destruction or environmental degradation, the world urgently needs this global institution to be rational, historically minded, pluralistically respectful, committed to peace, a tribune of justice, and a champion of the equality of women. That Vatican II occurred at all is enough to validate, if not in belief in the Holy Spirit, the hope that this great institution can survive the temporary moral collapse of its leadership.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“In the age of the Me Too movement, at last the Roman Catholic priesthood — considered as a whole — must be understood, quite simply, as a male supremacist institution.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The debasement of Catholic morality when it comes to women, power, and sex is perfectly captured in the fact that the Church’s Canon law provides for the ex post facto excommunication of a woman who attempts to say mass. There is no such penalty for a pedophile priest.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

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

“The massive sexual dysfunction of the contemporary Catholic Church began with Augustine.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The theological denigration of women was a major revision of the assumptions that had informed the Christian movement from the gospels forward. Jesus himself modeled an egalitarian respect toward women: In Christ, ‘there is neither male nor female.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“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 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 second story tells of how the malignity of that clericalism has been laid bare in recent years by the scandal of priests sexually abusing children, while bishops have protected the predators instead of their victims—a deviance so deeply driven into the Catholic culture that not even the brave and charismatic Pope Francis has been able or willing to uproot it. And the third story is my own—how Jimmy, how I, became a priest; then a writer, and an op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe, even as that paper’s Spotlight team broke the Church’s sexual abuse scandal; and, finally, a shattered believer forced to confront the corruption at the heart of my faith.”
― James Carroll, The Truth at the Heart of the Lie: How the Catholic Church Lost Its Soul

“The I AM of God, of Jesus, is the “I am” of every person, and it consists in every person being aware of herself or himself.”
― James Carroll, Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

“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